Just wanted to provide a link to Villainy Unpublished, my dedicated SRPG resource blog. It’s been up and down for a few months while I argued with the formatting but I think it’s stable and serviceable at this point. There are a few general musings posts but most of the current content are homebrew villains from various games, along with associated minions, lieutenants and environments. I strongly recommend using the labels on each post to navigate around, as there are about 50 individual posts at the moment.
My current absurd project (which will probably never actually be finished) is to do one of every possible villain approach-archetype combination, mostly as a creative exercise. With today’s posts I’m about a third of the way done; only about 164 to go if I’ve counted correctly.
There will also be some hero writeups, rules variants and other maunderings as the mood takes me, but they’re probably less useful to other people than more bad guys. One of these days I’ll get the villain index updated properly as well.
Feel free to comment on posts over there, although I do have moderation turned on so it may take a while to show up.
Hope you get some use out of this stuff. I’d have linked to it over here ages ago but I had some issues getting registered.
Finished up a proper index post, which I’ll be updating as new stuff gets posted. The formatting is a bit erratic owing to the vagaries of Blogger, but it looks like the links all work correctly. I hope.
It was only half done. Pulled it while I work on writing up the other part and fix some formatting mistakes. Probably get it back up in a week or so.
Going by the view count you’re one of about five people outside of my local group who even looked at it. RPG dot net posts weren’t reaching whatever SCRPG community there is online worth squat, and it took me ages to get registered over here.
Don’t let that discourage you!
I’ve found SCRPG folks are notoriously hard to pinpoint.
These forums, while being in the authors’ own front yard, lack from reach and activity. The die-hard Sentinels fans are here obviously, but that’s it. And since the typical advantage of the authors chiming in every now and then obviously isn’t a priority, and also considering that there is very little, if any, extra resources to be found here, I don’t think the community will grow much.
The podcast, while entertaining, mostly ignores the rpg. Even if it didn’t, skimming thousands of hours of audio for an extra bit of info that may or may not be in there is a major turn-off if you are basically interested in the rpg.
There have been a few in-depth discussions on RPG.net, but personally I have lost track among all the other topics situated there… so, maybe not the best spot for a new, niche rpg to thrive.
Then there’s rpggeek/boardgamegeek. There’s a few posts there, and even less active play-by-forum…
So bottom line, the fans exist, but they have yet to find a place to form a vivid and resourceful community. Who knows, maybe your blog is going to be that place one day, much like Spiff for Sentinels?
Oh, I’m not discouraged, just surprised that someone who’d actually noticed that I’d taken that adventure post down for editing. As you said, there’s a community for the game, but it’s not all that large and scattered all over the place to boot.
Really have not reached many people beyond my own tables with the blog, which is okay since it’s partly an online reference source for me and my players. Any mileage others get out of it is just a bonus from my POV.
Added my first “organization” tagged post, that being SEVER, a mostly covert extremist group opposed to existence of super-beings of all stripes - and hypocritically, led by a supervillain.
No, none of my GMs has run their games in the Sentinels setting and I haven’t run into anything even conceptually similar to Akash’Bhuta in the three outings this character has had so far. Really only been using him for one-shots, but I like the way he plays. Started out purely as a hero design exercise to see what a form-changer could do. I suspect she’d think I was lowering myself dealing with humans so much, and I might have a few things to say in return about her soft spot for dinosaurs.
Did help fend off something fairly close to xxtzHulissh last session, though. One Cthulhu is much like another, although the Sentinels version is more unpronounceable than average. Spent most of the big fight Overcoming the Titan and environmental challenges, it had that one ability where rolling doubles on an Attack removed a success so FourEver kept having to re-draw the binding runes and pull victims off sacrificial altars. Thankfully I was rolling hot and got more 8+ results than I’ve ever managed in a session before.
Midas looks like a nifty character. Just judging by the name, at first I guessed that it would be a standard turning-stuff-into-gold type person, but a rogue nanobot swarm haunted by ghosts is much more original.
I was briefly tempted to name him Oscar after the statuette he resembles, but it didn’t seem quite super enough to me. Although I suppose it’s a decent name for a bunch of nanites originally designed to essentially collect environmental waste, in a Muppet-ish sort of way. If I ever do get around to doing a stereotypical gold-transmuter super (probably a villain ala Marvel’s occasional Iron Man foe) maybe I’ll give them the Midas moniker and switch to Oscar for my haunted nanoswarm hero.
“Big Red Cheese” is my favorite. Sivana’s just so random sometimes. d12 in Science, d4 in Banter.
I wouldn’t want to be the guy who gets in a diss contest with a AI that not only has access to the entirety of the internet for comebacks in every human language, there’s also all those unquiet spirits (some of them decidedly non-human) whispering further suggestions to him. Guy’s got a lot of ammunition to work with.
Well, he could still use that as a “civilian” name if he ever needed to give a normal name to someone. I’m not sure what circumstance would necessitate a golden swarm of robots to use a human name, but I’m sure there could be some reason. His full name could be Oscar Goldman, perhaps. (Wait, no, the original 1940’s Absolute Zero was named Henry Goldman, so that might not work.)
Don’t forget the Little Red Cheese and the Little Blue Cheese. : )
Oh, that’s perfect. Given that Midas/Oscar/Whoever gets a lot of its cues about human behavior from the internet, drawing a civilian ID from nostalgic retro-pop culture seems perfectly plausible. My setting’s governments issue IDs for “cooperative” (read: law-abiding) AIs anyway, and quite a few of them have chosen fictional character names for dealing with entities that don’t communicate in binary. Plus it makes the monitoring agencies more comfortable. Much less likely to worry about the AI named “John Doe” than the one who insisted on “Eli Whitney’s Flesh-Eating Robot” you know.
The original “Midas” came from corporate marketing. The (supposedly) non-sentient environmental cleanup nanobots were intended to be making “gold” - revitalized farmland out of poisoned wastelands, and they thought “Project Midas” would attract investors.
