I’ve seen a number of people asking about emulating the card game’s Nemesis mechanics in the RPG, so here’s a post with some house rule suggestions that ought to do the job. They’re a bit wordy in order to (hopefully) cover every question that might come up, but the core mechanic is very simple and shouldn’t complicate play much. Have fun building your own Rogues’ Gallery.
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Cool. It’s definitely a simple and elegant rule. I, too, have thought about this topic, although only in the context of utilising existing rules, not house rules. The two systems could certainly be used together, for maximum mutual destruction.
I think that I’d allow a character to apply their Nemesis Bonus to a Defend against their Nemesis, as it makes sense to me that someone can be extra motivated to protect themself or others from a foe that they have personal history with.
Also, I almost wonder if allowing +5 bonuses might be too much? I mean, standard Boost actions can only generate +4s—Hero Points can be used to create a +5 bonus, but that’s single-use, while Nemesis Bonuses are usable every turn. I think I’d limit to them a max. of +3, myself—and/or maybe limit the number of times per scene (issue?). E.g., once in the Green Zone, twice in the Yellow, and thrice in Red.
And, as you mention, the best way to be Nemeses is just to roleplay it. Spout those quippy one-liners and rush straight to your foe once combat brakes out.
Thought about that, and of course you could do it (either on actions or a reaction) but it’s pretty much the opposite of how nemeses work in the card game. Over there nemeses only increase damage dealt to each other, resulting in faster KOs - but adding Hinder to the RPG options felt appropriate.
Might be, but you could adjust to taste. It would take at least five sessions (including the one where the relationship starts) worth of confrontations to reach that level of mutual hate, which is a lot of return appearances for a single villain. Alternately, you could go for a slower burn and only increase nemesis bonuses when they’ve shown up at some point in a collection rather than a session. At that point you wouldn’t hit +5 until at least 24 more sessions have gone by with the relevant villain showing up in at least four of them. That’s a pretty big chunk of a hero’s career, and they’ll have a bunch of collections to reduce the relative impact of the nemesis bonuses.
But really, it’s all about the opportunity to ham it up some, on both sides of the table.
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After weeks of struggling with the worst seasonal allergies I’ve ever had I managed to pull it together enough to actually update the blog with a new villain. The Maiden In the Mystery Mirror is an experimental villain whose own upgrade may be the real threat to reality - or perhaps they’re simply facets of the same unnatural entity. She’s a lot harder to take down than her terrible health pool as a Creator/Fragile villain makes her look, and her minion and upgrade synergies make handling all of them at once a tricky scene.
Also one of my rare dips into the metatextual “these are the product of a fictional comic book company” motif canon Sentinels likes so much. Easily ignored if you prefer - just skip the first few paragraphs, the villain isn’t dependent on any of that backstory.
Cool. One neat thing about the SCRPG is that you can engage in the meta-comic-book-publishing-company angle or not (or do so selectively), and it works either way.
The Maiden and the Mirror really reminded me of SC’s Oracle of Discord; were you aware of the latter when you created the former?
Also, now I’m just thinking about a team-up betwixt the Maiden and Glamour, for no other reason than them both being mirror-themed. : )
The combination of the Maiden’s Devour Fragments Reaction and the Terrifying Reflections’ Unnatural Demise Ability makes me think that the best way to deal with her might just be to have some of the Heroes Hinder the minions rather than Attack them, while the rest focus on Attacking the Maiden and/or the Mirror. The Heroes could also try Overcoming to isolate the Minions, or take them out of the picture without destroying them somehow, if the GM allows it.
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Hmmm. I thought I knew the Oracle of Discord, but I was remembering them as a bunch of mysterious hooded weirdos standing around a “Well of Mimir” style hole in the Realm of Discord. Had completely forgotten the crystal pillars and that it was a cracked mirror sort of thing instead. Apparently I should re-listen to some of the podcast episodes, eh? 
I will admit I took some inspiration for the Maiden’s metatextual backstory from the Teller of Tales (a fellow repurposed horror host) from episode 243, although other than that they’re pretty distinct. She’s also got a touch of the Bloody Mary urban myth about her, mostly because I was going to name her Mary In the Mirror until I did some googling and realized why that sounded so familiar. I haven’t been a squealing 10 year old in decades, who remembers that kind of guff? It’s not like Candlejack from Freakazoid.
She’s definitely not too hard to defeat (and even easier to drive off - she’ll usually dip out via Escape Plan ASAP), but still pretty durable for her relatively low health. If you can smash the Mirror itself the whole scene gets much easier, but d12 lieutenants are often pretty hard to finish off. Same goes for the minions, if you can keep scrubbing them off before they get to act there goes most of the support and damage output all at once - but you probably need two multi-target specialists to even have a chance to do it, since whoever takes out the first batch will be buried under penalties on their next action.
Still, as a collective whole she’s “worth” a difficult scene element, I think. Did okay in her one outing to date.
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New villain on the blog today, a thematic pushback against the miserably wet and cold weather we’ve been suffering through the last few days. Warm up already, it’s spring. Tired of this nonsense.
King Blaze, Pyromaniacal Lunatic
As a Creator/Formidable villain he comes with his own custom minions and lieutenants - and as a fire-themed baddie I bet you can guess what his weaknesses are for figuring his status die.
A team-up betwixt King Blaze, Redd Hott, and Infernovox would certainly be interesting. Also, I imagine that adding an instance of the Quell the Flames challenge could be added to the options for environment twists—or just twists in general—for scenes with him present.
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Oh sure. You could sub them in to the Battleground of Fools environment that’s already up on the Infernovox post. That one would work for any fire villain if you just alter the twist wording that specifically calls back to Infernovox and its Infernoid minions.
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Still too cold for Spring, so here’s more fire themed villainy:
This one’s a father-daughter crime duo, because villains deserve sidekicks too. At least this one isn’t some poor adopted orphan trying to deal with the trauma of their parent’s death.
Ya know, I don’t think I’ve ever thought of using the Villainous Vehicle upgrade to represent a sidekick, but it seems fairly obvious in hindsight.
Also, good job with Torch-Girl, as Sentinels doesn’t have enough characters with Something Person names.
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I mean, the upgrade is ultimately just a lieutenant with a predefined menu of ability options and the implied ability to carry the villain and possibly others around. I figure Firebug’s extra health from the upgrade comes from being on his A Game while Jeanette is watching. Prefer sidekicks as lieutenants to the alt hero point award that treats them as a minion, which is awfully fragile unless you really want a Disposable Boy.
I look forward to watching some hero Hinder him by egregiously flirting with his daughter. Or vice versa.
Sentinels is a bit light on Legion of Superhero names, yeah. Never really noticed that before.
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Just got done building sub-index pages for each of the categories listed on the comprehensive Blog Content Index page, which are linked directly from the category headers there or can found by navigating with tags. The Index tag will pull up all of them.
Hopefully this makes things a bit more accessible. The main index was getting a bit unwieldy as it expanded.
And a new villain on the blog, if “new” means anything when talking about an entity that exists in non-linear time and claims to be an infinite being.
As an Ancient/Domain villain this is a really complex writeup, and the associated Impossible Pyramid environment doubles as the interior of the Evermind’s mobile lair. Really played around with the twists and scene locations on this one, including an experiment on reflecting the flexible nature of time in the place by including ways to reset or extend the scene tracker, giving the PCs more time to deal with a very tough villain and all the other stuff going on. There’s also minions and lieutenants that could be reskinned for use in a confused free-for-all battle, riot, or outbreak of murderous insanity.
So yeah, it’s a big one, this blog post.
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Neat!
Its motivations are poorly understood at best and its scientific and technological skills are so advanced as to seem magical
A bit of Clarke’s Third Law here, eh?
The mad mega-genius Mordecai Mentallax claims that the Evermind is actually a future version of himself from an alternate timeline that he hasn’t yet brought into being. Mister Incredible is arrogant enough to make the same claim about himself, a source of contention between the two villainous inventors. The cosmic being itself remains conspicuously silent on the subject.
This is great. : D
Also, I really like what you did with the Impossible Pyramid’s locations; the Sentinels RPG doesn’t emphasise locations and movement much, but its rules can handle them, and you did an excellent job here doing so in an interesting way. Giving each location its own unique effect is an especially good idea, and one I hadn’t thought of before.
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Definitely. I’d keep the interior descriptions vague and let the players’ imagination fill things in. Kirbytech seen through a funhouse mirror, weird lattices of light in colors that shouldn’t exist, readouts that produce synesthetic effects, and all of it in a space where things like gravity and distance and the passage of time seem to shift when you’re not focused on them.
And of course there’s the added confusion of being attacked by hordes of murderously paranoid killers collected from warzones across infinity while you’re trying to figure out what you’re even looking at.
I was trying to hint at Kang the Conquerer’s real identity nonsense, but do it better than Marvel has.
I’ve done it in more limited fashion with previous scenes, but they don’t really fit in my normal post format so you just haven’t seen much of them. I always try to include enough locations to make movement and mobility/speed/repositioning powers meaningful, unless there’s a very good reason not to do so. Somewhere around H-2 and H+2 different locations seems about right for my groups. Less than that and the scene’s so cramped positioning doesn’t matter much mechanically, and more than that leaves too many locations for the heroes to visit them all.
Not every location needs something mechanical to engage with, but a clever Overcome can usually find something to do - pulling down power lines to heal with inverted Electricity damage is a common one, and King Blaze’s debut was at a gas station heist. The Impossible Pyramid was already such a weird place I figured I better offer something specific to do since obvious stuff like “break the fire hydrant to douse the fire villain” doesn’t work so well when you can’t identify what half the weird gadgetry is in the first place.
I should really do a post about scene construction and locations, now that I think about it.
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I started seeing Villainous Vehicle as a possible sidekick after seeing the Mirror Maiden write up.
Remember the new Terrorform adventure they made on the create a thing is supposed to have more suggestions on LOCATION as part of a scene.
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The other approach is to do them as a regular lieutenant (or even minion, for a true Expendable Lad), which leaves your upgrade open for other uses. And of course you could do the sidekick as a full villain, either using one of the weaker approach/archetype combinations and leaving them without an upgrade while their mentor gets one or flip it and make kid a prodigy who’s actually more powerful than the “main” villain. The “reverse villain sidekick” idea works for either a young, naive sidekick who’s eventually going to realize who the real power is, or an older but none-to-bright mentor who’s being used by their smarter “sidekick” as a distraction.
Of my other villains, Kid Coppertop is a kind-of-sidekick (or at least a fanboy) to Shootout , and Kid Pistol is a nearly-equal “sidekick” to Triggerman who might actually be using his older partner as an ally of convenience.
Just a matter of how you want to approach it in any given case.
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New villain on the blog today, this time a Focused approach one that isn’t an Energy/Element manipulator for a change. He’s also the cousin of previous supervillain Miniac, because ill-advised self-experimentation apparently runs in their family. He might also be reasonably mistaken for being a small army of high-tech agents if you don’t notice they all look identical to one another.