The Alternates - The Rest of the Recaps

Games Sentinel Comics RPG
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Hi folks! I haven’t read this forum since March 2022. And that is probably disappointing to some of you. Or maybe none of you! But if you clicked on this and you were reading the Alternates Recaps 4+ years ago… I’m sorry! But please read on! (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just skip me!)

I can’t entirely explain why I just stopped posting Alternate Recaps. It’s complicated, probably, and has a lot to do with lifelong anxiety issues that manifest in a weird way - the further I get into some creative endeavor, the more anxious I get about it. :sweat_smile: And I get anxious about starting things too. So I’ve been working on that (with the help of professionals) since a panic attack I had in 2020. Why do I say all this? Because take care of your brain, that’s why! Ain’t no shame in the mental health game.

ANYWAY. I was pretty bummed by everything that happened to GTG and Sentinel comics over the past few years. But now Christopher and Adam are back, and honestly, it’s one of the most inspiring things that has ever happened, in my opinion. C&A aren’t personal friends of mine, and they maybe don’t even know who I am (even though they sang the X-Men theme song for my birthday one time). However, to see good people come together to bring a wonderful property and product back from the brink of non-existence, to me, shows the good in people in a world where we are increasingly convinced everyone is nasty. So I’m inspired to try to get back to the very positive experience I had in this forum, sharing our game recaps.

Back to the Alternates. The last recap I posted was Episode #44. The series (and the Sentinels RPG campaign) went all the way to Episode #66. I have all the game notes - unfortunately, some of them are things like, “Jersey Devil and the cotton candy,” and I don’t remember what that means. Luckily, I still have access to all the players to ask for their memories.

So… do you want recaps of Episodes #45 through #66? Because, if you do, it’s writing practice for me, and I’m prepping to write a new novel, so why not try to practice pleasing people with words? :smile:

Let me know in the comments. Even if it’s 3 of you, that’s probably enough!

And not to be a big tease, but in these episodes we get Aegis, zombies in Paris, the superhero Hummus, the new Alternates members Dead Guy and Flambino, a trip to space where the Alternates meet Casa-Nova and his musical space supergroup, and the series of “Final Bosses” in the last few episodes! And I finally bring in my favorite hero, The Scholar!

PLUS, MORE STARSHADOW! I haven’t written anything about Starshadow in a few years! Except I did make a Sentinels deck for him. It needs some tweaks for Definitive Edition, so I should get back to that.

So let me know. Sorry for disappearing. I hope you all had a great few years since then!

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Welcome back!

If it’s not too chaotic, I’d be happy to see more recaps. I’d almost forgotten about the Alternates, and it’s a good reason to delve back into the archives and remind myself. :slight_smile:

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Umm…what he said (meaning FrivYeti). Not much to add after that.

Don’t knock yourself out, but I’ve always enjoyed reading/listening to what happens in other folks’ SCRPG games and how they handle the rampant chaos that usually ensues.

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Feel free to count me amongst those who’d enjoy seeing The Return of the Alternates! I enjoyed reading your recaps before, and I’m sure I would again.

(Also, I still headcannon your sasquatch gene-bound humans as what humans would be like when gene-bound.)

(Also also, I find it mildly amusing that both you and FivYeti made a hero called Starshadow.)

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~GASP!!~ TWO Starshadows? My friends barely have the patience for one!

When we started a D&D (Spelljammer) game after Sentinels, I made a Starshadow for that game, too - Captain Blackmoore, whose spelljammer is named Starshadow. My players aren’t as annoyed with him - they are much more annoyed by a wizard named Czakalyzhinir, especially because they had a very hard time remembering how to say his name.

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Spelljammer mentioned! Woo! If/when I ever return to D&D in any form, that setting’s definitely gonna be what I use.

I presume that that Capt. Blackmoore is an allusion to the original D&D setting?

I myself made a sorta Spelljammer-inspired pirate captain villain for the SCRPG a good while ago.

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Add one to the Starshadow count, FWIW. One of the PC heroes in the penultimate game I ran was a Starshadow as well, although I don’t recall her specifics well enough at this point to do a proper writeup. Spawned out of a cosmic accident (so many Major Twists right before we needed a new player) something something initially a sort of Bizarro version of another PC called Starlight and grew from there. The two players involved had a lot of fun with it, kind of an Odd Couple relationship. Fortunately the rest of the group also had some strong concepts (and personalities) or it might have turned into a duet spotlight hogging situation, but as it was things stayed cool.

TSR flavored SJ or the WotC version? I ran the original for years back in the 90s, easily the most successful “nautical adventures” campaign I ever had in any system. Flying ships are still ships, and a lot of the same Horatio Hornblower tropes worked even better there than in Traveller or Star Trek or even Privateers & Gentleman and Flashing Blades.

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No! But yes, I am aware of the connection. Starshadow’s (Well, Sentinels Earth-113 Starshadow…) name is Beverly Blackmoore, but “Blackmoore” is a name I’ve used and re-used since the 90s.

Long nerdy story - Originally, “Blackmoore” was something I came up with because I played black decks in Magic: The Gathering a lot in high school, so I combined “Black” with “Moor” (as in swamp) and added an “e” to the end. The first Blackmoore was a weird old sorcerer who lived in a little hut in a D&D campaign I was running. (He was also inspired by the “Uncle Istvan” card from M:tG.) At about that time, I realized it was seredipitiously also the surname of Ritchie Blackmoore, guitarist for Deep Purple and Rainbow. It would be years before I learned about the Blackmoor campaign setting - in the early 90s, information like that was much harder to come by. :rofl:

So “Captain Blackmoore” is Baelok Blackmoore, an incarnation (not in-universe, but in-real-world) of Beverly Blackmoore, who is Starshadow, whose name is just the latest in a long line of Blackmoores I’ve created to annoy PCs. :laughing: Also, my Spelljammer campaign is called “Space Truckin’,” which is a Deep Purple song, which gets you right back to Ritchie Blackmoore, even though I never intended “Blackmoore” to refer to Ritchie or the Blackmoor campaign setting! Time is a flat circle - or rather, the universe is a holographic projection of a two-dimensional information sequence… at least, that’s what Starshadow would tell you. :grin:

I only go into detail about this because I really think spooling out these long threads that weave into and out of real-world references to music and fiction and history and everything else is the way you really make stories and campaigns engaging and long-lasting. So… yeah, I encourage everyone to make more nonsense.

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Just a note on this - I have to say Spelljammer is giving me headaches because the possibilities are almost too endless. I have too many ideas, too many inspirations, and too many options for this campaign! And the story I’m telling, I worry, is almost too terrestrial. So I’m struggling to balance a story about the strangeness of the one star system the game takes place in with classic dungeon-crawling but also somehow add starship encounters that are thrilling (and I am really flopping on the last part).

(To be somewhat fair to myself, I have been under a lot of stress due to near-daily nonsense in my job since January of 2025 [BORING REAL WORLD STUFF]. So it’s been hard to finish all the ideas I had when the campaign started.)

If you’re curious the (still unfinished) setting document for my Spelljammer game is here.

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Man, now I feel like I’m missing out, being the only one without a Starshadow. : ( Maybe I should contrivedly shoehorn one into my game.

The only SJ product I own is the 5th Edition boxed set,* though I have looked into and learned about some of the elements from the original AD&D version that weren’t carried over into the 5e portrayal, and I would very likely incorporate elements from both versions in any game I were to run. I do have a desire to run the adventure in the 5e box set (or at least an adaptation of it in some form, likely in another system), though I also think that a couple of the old AD&D modules look cool.

*I’m well aware that The Internet seems to have decided that this is one of the worst D&D products ever; I don’t share that view, but then again I am on average, I think, not particularly critical of things in general.

Oh yeah, I’d forgotten this, but now I think I’m remembering that you’ve explained this before.

I wonder, if you’d played other colours, would we be here talking about Bluetide, Redhill, Greentree, or Whiteplains? : )

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I’ve only played the TSR version of SJ, and am generally not a 5e player, but I suspect the supposed awfulness of 5e SJ is overstated while the, ah, less attractive parts of the original are downplayed. Much as I enjoyed the original SJ it was not without its flaws, and was certainly gonzo enough at times it was very hard to take it seriously (eg two pages of miniature giant space hamster variants was a joke overstaying its welcome IMO). I remember trimming rather a lot out of the official material for my group back in the day, but a fair amount of the wacky stuff still made it in.

Glad I’ve still got the big map of the Rock the core box came with. That things has come in handy in countless systems over the years, including the SCRPG (where “gonzo” feels more at home than many settings).

You have any particular old modules you’re interested in? I might be able to recall my opinion of them back in the day, although I didn’t play all of them.

I spent most of Alpha trying my best to “roleplay” the planeswalker behind each of my decks. Never worked terribly well and most folks just found it annoying, so I pretty much gave up when the price guides started to appear and playing for ante faded away. But still, fonder memories of those days than anything Magic has been since then.

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It feels kind of inevitable that when one of your PCs is named Starlight, a Starshadow (or something very like it) is going to appear eventually, whether as an NPC or another PC.

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I don’t debate the merits of editions of D&D because it is always a matter of taste, and there is no accounting for taste. :grin:

But I would love a set of tactical hex-based ship combat rules, which 5e sadly lacks. For good reason - again, it’s a matter of taste, and I think “hex-based ship combat” isn’t going to score high with D&D fans. :laughing: So that part, I have to make up for myself, and “REAL LIFE BADNESS” has eaten up too much of my brain space, so I still haven’t done it.

Yeah, I definitely had a Planeswalker persona, but I (unfortunately?) never took it all the way to LARPing. I really should have. I never did tournaments or anything, but if I could have come into a convention hall in robes and a hat and a fake beard and declared myself “Difvedivinochs the Planeswalker!”, I could’ve gotten into losing at tournaments. “Blackmoore” was only ever a D&D NPC whose name was inspired by MtG. :smile:

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I have zero problems with it. There is no accounting for taste, and the internet represents only the most vocal, terminally online movements of the hobby (and all other hobbys - if the internet was always right, then Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines wouldn’t keep outselling all the other factions).

It doesn’t have all the stuff I would want, which is why I wrote my own supplement to it. I also had a certain setting in mind - for instance, I wanted my players to be “stuck” in one solar system - so I always knew going in that my campaign wouldn’t match the setting.

(Edit) I also “ruin” every other game I play. My Forgotten Realms campaigns noticeably diverge from canon, my Star Wars campaign had its own “certain point of view” of how the Force works and the canon, and when we played Blades in the Dark, I had to completely turn it upside down because I wanted it to be in a subtly supernatural 1890s Pittsburgh with, of course, cosmic horror elements.

(My players seem to think “cosmic horror elements” should be on my GM business card. It’s fair - except I see it as “cosmic comedy/horror elements” because what is the insignificance of our existence in the cosmos if not hilarious?)

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I refuse to believe that you can’t find multiple third-party attempts at such rules in DTRPG already if you hunt around for them - or go ask on EnWorld or rpgdotnet. There’s simply be too many people milking 5e for too long for it to have been done and redone by now. Probably ones that do fairly historical wet-navy stuff, high fantasy rules that would have fit in even the most exotic of the old Man o’War ships, and Spelljammer knock-offs to boot.

Yeah, that won’t work for everyone. Some folks really take their cosmic horror seriously, and any hint of humor, satire, or parody turns them right off. I don’t get it personally, but that kind of clash in tastes can ruin a table.

That said, are you familiar with the works of Nick Pollotta? A lot of his material (under his own name, and various pen names) definitely followed the “sure it’s horrible, but we don’t have to take it serious” path. Particularly recommend the Bureau 13 novels (based on the RPG of the same name) and That Darn Squid God, which mercilessly lampoons Lovecraft’s Mythos material in a way rivalled only by Mark E. Rogers’ Samurai Cat books. Not exactly subtle, but perhaps worth a read if you haven’t encountered them already.