The History of Venture Comics, Pt. 2: Places to Go, Supervillains To See

Games Sentinel Comics RPG
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Greetings and salutations, comics fans!

This is the second thread of my increasingly convoluted and wild project, The History of Venture Comics! About two and a half years ago, I started designing an entire fictional publishing company set in the world of the Sentinel Comics RPG, Venture Comics. For those who aren’t aware of it, SCRPG is a fast-paced, action-oriented superhero RPG that uses the setting of the card game “Sentinels of the Multiverse”, which has been dormant for the past few years but might be spooling up again in the near future. Fingers crossed.

Using a series of randomizers and a lot of work, I put together a timeline of the comics running from the Golden Age of Comics all the way through to 2019, through the creation of the setting’s biggest heroes and villains.

Then I added a bunch of D-Listers to fill the series out. Then I went back and added even more heroes and villains, along with a number of key supporting characters and minor lieutenants.

Now I’m moving into the second phase of the project. Over the next two and a half years, I’m putting together three more supplements for Venture Comics: a large collection of environments, fleshed-out information on various supervillain teams and organizations, and finally a supplement fleshing out the mid-tier characters and events of the setting.

(Some people will note that I had mentioned a possible Diamond Age mini-supplement in the past; it’s been absorbed into the other projects in order to let them be a bit more fleshed out.)

But first, I wanted to make sure that people coming to this massive project now can still parse what the hell is going on.

If you want to skip over all of the lengthy development, you can go to my Itch page and find four PDFs, each of which has ninety characters for SCRPG and the finalized timelines of the various ages of Venture Comics. These books are all available as free downloads:

  1. Venture Comics: The Classic Years (1939 - 1969)

  2. Venture Comics: The Dark Ages (1970 - 2001)

  3. Venture Comics: The Digital Revolution (2002 - 2022)

  4. Venture Comics: Deep Cuts

If you want to follow along and see the whole development process, the first thread of Venture Comics is still live! You can find various key points as follows:

  1. The start of the thread here.
  2. The Golden Age
  3. The Silver Age
  4. The Bronze Age
  5. The Iron Age
  6. The Plutonium Age
  7. The Diamond Age
  8. D-Listers
  9. Problems and Retcons
  10. Extra Characters
  11. Lieutenants
  12. Deep Cuts

And if you’d like to see the other site,
here is a link to the same thread on rpgnet, with different comics!

Whew! And that takes us up to the present. The next post will unveil the setup for On Location…

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Alright, here we go!

Starting on Monday, we’re going to work our way chronologically through a whopping fifty-four environments, eight to ten for each age ranging from 1940 to 2026, because that’s the sort of person that I am. I’m once again using a homemade randomizer, although I reserve the right to put my finger on the scales whenever there’s a particular Venture Comics event I want to run.

My randomizer uses a set of rolls of d8s, d10s, d12s, and d20s, in three stages.

First, roll 2d8 and 2d10 to determine the environment’s Type and Power. Choose whichever combination of results is most interesting; if you roll doubles, choose either that number or the next highest one on the list. . The options are as follows:

Type

  1. Heroic Location
  2. Standard Location
  3. Strange Location
  4. Dangerous Location
  5. Standard Event
  6. Quirky Event
  7. Dangerous Event
  8. Something Unique

Power

  1. d8 + d8 + d6
  2. d8 + d8 + d8
  3. d10 + d8 + d6
  4. d10 + d8 + d8
  5. d10 + d8 + d8
  6. d10 + d10 + d6
  7. d10 + d10 + d8
  8. d12 + d8 + d6
  9. d12 + d8 + d8
  10. d12 + d10 + d8

In general, I will tend to attach higher Powers to the more dangerous locations, so that I can generally divide environments into Standard or Hostile.

Next, running through Green, Yellow, and Red zones in order, roll 3d20 and 2d12, assigning two d20s to Minor Twists and one d12 to a Major Twist. The minor Twists are:

d20 Green Minor Yellow Minor Red Minor
1 Attack Mid Attack Max Attack Max+Min
2 Attack Mid Hinder Max Hinder Max+Min
3 Hinder Mid Boost Max Boost Max+Min
4 Hinder Mid Defend Max Area Attack Max
5 Boost Mid Area Attack Mid Area Hinder Max
6 Boost Mid Area Hinder Mid Area Boost Max
7 Defend Mid Area Boost Mid Area Defend Max
8 Area Attack Min PE Hinder Mid (Two Actions) Mid & Mid
9 Area Hinder Min PE Boost Mid (Two Actions) Max & Min
10 Area Boost Min (Two Actions) Mid & Min (Two Actions) PE Mid & Min
11 Area Defend Min (Two Targets) Mid & Mid Action Max + Area Mid
12 Create (Min) minions Create (Mid) minions Create (Max) minions
13 Create (Min) minions Create (Mid) minions Create (Max) minions
14 Create big minion Create (Min) big minions Create (Mid) big minions
15 Create big minion Create d8 lieutenant Create strong lieutenant
16 Challenge with penalty Challenge with deadline Two-step challenge
17 Challenge with benefit Challenge with deadline Two-step challenge
18 Challenge with deadline Two-step challenge Challenge with big penalty
19 Challenge with deadline Two-step challenge Challenge with big penalty
20 Unique Minor Action Unique Moderate Action Unique Dangerous Action

And the Major Twists are:

d12 Green Major Yellow Major Red Major
1 Attack Max [Action] Mid+Min Area [Action] Mid+Min
2 Boost or Hinder Max Area [Action] Max Two Area [Actions] Max + Min
3 Two [Actions] Mid & Min (Two Actions) Mid + Mid Area [Two Actions] Mid
4 Two [Actions] Mid & Min (Two Targets) Max + Mid [Action] Max + Area [Action] Max
5 Area Attack Mid Two Area [Actions] Mid & Min Area [Two Actions] Mid PE & Min
6 Area [Action] Mid PE [Hinder or Boost] Max Major Recover Action
7 Create (Mid) minions Create (Mid) big minions Create (Max) big minions
8 Create (Min) big minions Recover Action Create (Mid) big minions + [Action] Max
9 Create Lieutenant Create Lieutenant + [Action] Mid Create Strong Lieutenant + [Action] Mid
10 Two minor effects Challenge + [Action] Mid Dangerous Challenge + [Action] Max
11 Advance Scene Tracker Advance Scene Tracker Advance Scene Tracker
12 Unique Moderate Action Unique Dangerous Action Unique Devastating Action

Our environments will be set up with eighteen environments each for the Golden/Silver Ages, the Bronze/Iron Age, and the Plutonium/Diamond Ages. Within each section, I can choose a given Type up to three times, and a given Power, Minor Twist, or Major Twist up to twice. If I roll a result that’s no longer available, I take the next one down the list.

This is a refined version of the randomizer I built back in the day, and I think it’ll create some interesting concepts. Tune in Monday to see how it begins…

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(nitpick: dormant for one year exactly)

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Huh? A “d20”? What’s that?

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Ehn, that depends on your definition of “dormant”.

The last sourcebook released in 2022, which is where I’m counting from. I know that two one-shots were released after that, but I consider the line as a whole pretty dormant during that time.

The most recent one-shot released in August 2024, which is almost two years ago.

The company was shut down about a year ago, and revived a few weeks ago.

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Suggestion: Interested folks might want to bookmark the url at that link, which connects to the start of the parallel rpg.net thread that this one mirrors. It’s a little older than the thread here, has very different comments from the readers over there, and just having it saved will give you a handy backup to the original thread if something untoward should happen to this thread (or the whole GTG forum) - something that isn’t beyond the realm of possibility even now.

Well, you take a d10, then you flip a coin and if it’s heads, you add ten to the die roll for a result of 11-20. Otherwise you just use the roll as-is for a 1-10.

If you don’t have a coin I feel bad for your financial situation and/or lack of pockets, but you could just roll another die of any size (or even the same d10 you just rolled, if you trust yourself to remember what that first roll was) and on even results you add ten to the original d10 result, while on odds you add nothing.

I hear they actually sell twenty-sided dice, but of course that’s just corporate trickery. Biggest scam in gaming, the d20. :slight_smile:

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Oops.

This is the endless pitfall of posting to two sites, that was actually supposed to link to the GTG thread. I have now edited the list to include links to both sites for the curious.

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The other thread started out a little earlier - October 20th, 2023, whereas the one here launched sometime in November. All of the content posts are duplicated between both sites so you don’t get anything new out of reading their twins, but of course the comments (and FrivYeti’s responses to them) are quite different. They’re intersting to compare and contrast, and you don’t have to register or log in to read there.

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Fair, I was thinking of the whole company, not the RPG line, that’s my bad.