Campaign 2 has been all about telling one city-level superhero story, but where do you start when you want to build an entire intersecting universe of superhero stories? We talk to Christopher Badell and Adam Rebottaro, the creators of Sentinels of the Multiverse, a cooperative card game rooted in a comic book tradition of a fictional comic book publisher.
You can pre-order Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition and grab the Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG book, and follow Chris and Adam on Twitter.
The Punchbowl is our interview segment about playing TTRPGs in 2021 and beyond. Catch up on past interviews on our website!
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- Dungeon Master & Producer: Eric Silver
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About Us
Join the Party is a collaborative storytelling and roleplaying podcast, powered by the rules of Dungeons and Dragons. That means a group of friends create a story together, chapter by chapter, that takes us beyond the tabletop to parts unknown. In the first campaign, we explored fantasy adventure, intrigue, magic, and drama. In the newest story, we tackle science, superpowers, a better future, and the responsibility to help others.
Every month, we sit down for the Afterparty, where we break down our game and answer your questions about how to play D&D and other roleplaying games at home. We also have segments at the beginning of each campaign to teach people how to play the game themselves. It’s a party, and you’re invited! Find out more at jointhepartypod.com.
Transcript
Join the Party, Punchbowl – Sentinels of the Multiverse
Eric: Hey, this is Eric your DM, and welcome back to the Punchbowl, our interview segment on Join the Party. Even on our off weeks, I'm thinking about superheroes. Like, you really need to pair of the Flying ability with another power, or you're just like a person with wings—which doesn't really help when you're fighting crime, you know. So, I figured I'd put that to good use, and talk to those people who are pushing the medium forward. People who have listened to Punchbowls before might have noticed that I switched up the intro here from D&D to superheroes, because I'm also always thinking about superheroes and Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not as much as a Marvel or DC person—and like, the movies are fine—but I love how you can play with the tropes and archetypes of superhero-dom, and create things that are outside of that comic spectrum. Like, I think about it as, like, mythology. I think about it like it's a Jewish mythology, because it was created by, like, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and all those guys were, you know, Jews living in the middle of America in the 1950s. So, for books, I love, The Regional Office is Under Attack by Emmanuel Gonzales, or soon, I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. But my first love, the thing that combined my love for games and superheroes together in the most interesting way, was Sentinels Of The Multiverse, published by Greater Than Games. Sentinels, as I'll probably end up referring to it for the rest of this episode, is a cooperative superhero themed card game, where you use premade decks themed around the heroes who are fighting a particular villain in a particular place, and the villain and the place have their own decks that work against you. But the thing that drew me in was that Greater Than Games didn't just make up the game. They also made up a rich history of superheroes as well. Get this—the heroes in the game are from Sentinel comics, a third major publisher that stood next to Marvel and DC in, like, the universe of the game. That means the characters at the table are derived from an incredibly deep—and incredibly fictional—series of comics. So, I'm incredibly obsessed, and now I want to know how you build an entire tradition of superhero comics from scratch. And, as the definitive edition of Sentinels of the Multiverse has raised over $500,000 on Kickstarter—and pre orders are still available, you should go check that out—I reached out to Chris, editor in chief of greater than games, and Adam, our Director of greater than games on how they built their super world.
[transition music]
Eric: Well, first things first, I know who you guys are, and I am so happy to be talking to you, the creators of Sentinels of the Multiverse. Will you please introduce yourselves and what you do at Greater Than Games—the best board game company in the St. Louis area?
Chris: There's a lot of board game companies in the St. Louis area. So—
Eric: Oh, [laughs] I thought it was safe to say
[Everyone laughs]
Chris: Yeah, there's a few. There's a few big ones and then a bunch of smaller ones, but—
Amanda: If we’re your favorite, then you're safe.
[Chris Laughs]
Chris: We're amongst the best, out of all of them that are equally good. Hi, my name is Christopher Badell. And I am the editor in chief of Greater Than Games, and also one of the co-owners. And, we make a bunch of great games, and I am fortunate to be the writer and designer of many of them, but not all of them, and the editor of all of them. And I am also the co-creator and storyteller of—and writer—of Sentinel comics, which is my life's crowning achievement.
[Everyone laughs]
Adam: I am Adam Rebottaro. I am also a co-owner, my official title is the “Lord of Illustration—”
Chris: And that changes every other year, so— [laughs]
Adam: It does change—it changes a lot. I’m just like, I want something new on my business cards once—
Chris: Sure.
Adam: Yeah. And, co-creator of the Sentinel Comics line of things. Christopher and I have been friends since forever, since we were children. And we—we make make superheroes together, and I draw them so…
Eric: Yes, incredible. I mean, you can see automatically why I want you here, and what I want to talk to you. But, I think it's important for us to set up what exactly Sentinels of the Multiverse, Sentinel Comics is. Now, you might have heard before that I said that you were a board game company, and you're saying that you're publishing comics here. So, can we talk a little quickly? Can you set the stage of what Sentinel Comics is, the game, and what Sentinels Comics is, the cinematic universe? [laughs]
Chris: Sure, so Sentinel Comics is a series of lies that Adam and I tell, across a variety of media—
[Eric laughs]
Chris: The lie is that there are comics from a publisher called Sentinel Comics that have existed since May of 1940. Running through decades and decades of comic book stories, heroes, villains, big exciting events. And, none of that is true.
Adam: We started with Sentinels of the Multiverse, which is our card game. We said we just want to make a comic book/superhero card game, that's we want to do. And inadvertly created a metafiction around it, that was the publishing history for these comics for the last—since 1940.
Chris: Yeah, Adam and I have played games and created things that–we've got a significant number of creative endeavors over the decades of our friendship. One of the things we wanted to make was a game in which you felt like you were playing these characters of a comic book and the pages of a comic book. And, we hadn't found that in other games. And so we kind of on a lark made this game sentinels—that became Sentinels of the Multiverse. And in doing so, if we were making that game with another property of heroes that were well known in public, you would have pages and pages and years and years of comic book history. And, we wanted to make sure that the game that we were making felt like a drew on that. And so, the easiest way to do that—easiest is maybe the wrong word—the way to do that was to create decades and decades of comic book history. So, we did and based that game and a series of other games on that, so…
Adam: Yeah, I know that like there's—there's a lot of properties sometimes that will just follow the serial numbers off of big heroes, recolor them, release them like that—and it feels very fake. It feels it feels very shallow. And, we wanted that—we wanted that depth of history and character interaction that that we ended up getting.
Chris: Yeah.
Adam: I'm pretty pleased with it.
Eric: Yeah, let's—let's freakin’ talk about it.
[Adam laughs]
Eric: Because, I find it so interesting as a creative device. And, Sentinel Comics is the board game, is now the RPG, and it is also everything you talked about on your podcast, The Letters Page, where you all get super, super into the canon of what is in Sentinel Comics. So, just as a creative device, how has making a fake third publisher been, like, as a driving engine for what you're doing?
Chris: So good.
Adam: So, so good.
[Eric laughs]
Chris: So good. Like, the games that we—this is—I'm going to tell you something that we would not that—we would admit to publicly, with frequency, but we don't say it a lot publicly. The games that we make are great. We really like the games we make. We like—Sentinels of the Multiverse, Adam and I love playing Sentinels of the Multiverse, as do lots of people. The RPG is fantastic. We love playing the RPG. Adam, I think this is your favorite RPG, now. Right?
Adam: Yes.
Chris: It just like straight up your favorite system.
Adam: Yeah, I almost want to play nothing else ever.
Chris: Right. But, the making the comics, the fake comics, and all of the lore and all the world building of Sentinel Comics, we like so much more than any games we've ever created, like, put together. The thing that we make that matters the least, in terms of the world and the company and all that, which is Sentinel Comics, we like more than any of the things that we make that matters far more than that.
[Eric]
Chris: But yeah, no making—I mean, Adam, and I've talked about this before. If this company died in a fire, and nobody was a fan of the stuff that we made anymore, it would not prevent us from continuing to do it. We do it because we love it. And because we have infinite stories to tell, and we are telling the stories all the time. And we both had times in which we, like, sit down to record, and one of us isn't—or both of us aren't feeling it—and we're like, “Ugh, I don't really know if I have it in me today. Well, let's get run and let's do the intro to the podcast and then just start.” And it was like, Oh no, sorry—even in my, like, darkest days, I still have infinite stories. And, we both have like so much to run with. And it's—it's what we want to do. It's what we are built to do. And so yeah, we'd like to keep making fake comic books for the rest of our lives.
Adam: In terms of the metafiction as a storytelling device—
Eric: Mhm.
Adam: —it makes things so much easier to get started. Because, a lot of times they'll be like, “Well, we don't really know what we're doing. We know it has to involve these characters, and it has to be in this era.” And that will—like, just knowing that will tell us a degree about the tone and the content, and like it will—it will inform a lot of the storytelling, it will do a lot of the work for us ahead of the time. And then, we just have to slot those characters in and really like figure out the circumstances around that. But, um—
Chris: Yeah.
Adam: —it's, it's very good at giving you a starting point. It's like, it's like an infinite series of writing prompts.
Chris: Right, and this is the thing, that writing prompts starting points for both storytelling, but also game design. I was recently talking to some game designers about this, about how actually like, designing with restrictions is—is awesome, it's what gets you going it's because it's like—okay, you can design anything in the world. Ahh, no! That's too much, anything in the world!
[Eric laughs]
Chris: But it's like, “Oh, you need to design a card game that costs under $20 and is for two to four players and plays under half an hour.” Great. I can immediately throw out tons of things, I can—I can chop the tons of things off the list. And so like, what Adam was talking about with the—the meta-publishing nature of Sentinel Comics—when we're writing something for the game, we know right off the bat, okay, well, this, this character comes out of the 70s. So, here's a list of things they can be and a list of things that can't be this character. Lots of times when we're looking for inspiration for our character, we look at “Okay, this character is, is probably going to come out of this decade—what are some real-world things are happening in this decade?” And really, one of the things that happened like five-ish years before this character came out, because comics tend to be about that far behind the times, two to five years behind the times of things that come out and inspire some writer and then some writer finally sits down and does it and makes it thing. Okay, great. And so, using those—those touch points of inspiration, as inspiration for ourselves, is really helpful.
Eric: Yeah, I mean, this goes right in the next question I wanted to talk about is talking about the genres and tropes of superheroes and comics in which we're working with.
Chris: Mhm.
Eric: I just want to give some examples because I own literally every single expansion, [laughs] and maybe random decks, of Sentinel Comics—
Chris: Great!
Eric: So what—what, Adam, you just said about filing the barcodes of superheroes—
Adam: Yep.
Eric: What you're doing is, is an amalgam of a few like Legacy, for example, has the Americana of Captain America, but the clean-cutness of Superman and some other ideas of what America means thrown together. Wraith is very much the Batman, living in a different city than Legacy does, but also with some Jessica Jones thrown in as well. And also like, bunker being the like the military stuff, plus Iron Man and all that stuff mixed together, and a lot of other things that we're you're experimenting with.
Adam: Mhm.
Eric: So, what genre and tropes, I think, are you trying to mix together? What—what makes the perfect mix of things that actually happened in comics and things that you are tweaking slightly to make interesting characters as well?
Adam: Well, we—like, when we first started, we—we started from tropes. When we first, first started. And we said, “okay, we need—we need a flying super strength leader type.” And the task for that was, how are we not just making Superman?
Eric: Right, yeah.
Adam: How are we—how are we not just making a Captain America? What's—
Chris: Yeah.
Adam: —what are the aspects that we like about those characters? And, how do we make that our own?
Chris: And, make it not feel like just the serial numbers filed off.
Adam: Right, yeah. And, part of that was going like full into the history, and tying the character into, like, to actual American history, going back to the revolution—
Chris: And, tying the characters in a way to—to the events of the pages of Sentinel Comics. So it's like, you know, Batman, and Superman and Captain America and Iron Man don't exist outside of the continuum of Marvel. And the—the thing that was successful with the MCU movies was, they didn't just create these characters, but also created the world around them so that the characters had a place to live. And, that's a big thing that we did in Sentinel Comics—we create Legacy, but we create Legacy’s, whole storyline and the way that he relates to other characters within the multiverse.
Adam: Yeah, and kind of contrast that with the way that DC did their movies, that, like, doesn't have a lot of context. They maybe take some more risks, but it doesn't feel as grounded as the as the Marvel ones, you don't feel as attached to the characters.
Eric: Are there specific examples that you are all super excited about? Because I mean, I have my favorites. And the way that I always talk about it, I'm just like, “No, no, this guy is kind of like Deadpool, but he's not. And he’s like—” [laughs] Who do you think is kind of the best riffs on these, or the—what I think is really interesting is the combination of Marvel and DC stuff—
Chris: Sure.
Eric: —smooshing them together, taking the best of the two.
Chris: So, I would say that none of our characters are overtly or intentionally an amalgam of any other two characters put together anything like that—
Eric: Sure.
Chris: —but rather more of a, like, we're making—we're building the archetypes. Comic superhero archetypes—people say, “Oh, you know, this hero is like that hero, that hero’s like that hero.” That's because comic books are built around the concept of archetypes, and archetypes are great. So, our myths and legends and, and mythology, and everything is all archetypal, and that's super important. And, we build those archetypes so that a character is immediately recognizable, so that somebody sits down and goes, “Who is this guy? Oh!” And when somebody says, “Ah, this person must be just, like, Captain America and Superman!” The answer is like, “Ah, this person has the same archetype as Captain American and Superman, but is their own person.” And a big thing, like Adam said, is when we are building towards a certain archetype, every so often we'll kind of like pull our heads out of the creative hole and go “Oh, just so we are aware, we aren't far from this thing in real world comics, so let's make sure we don't tread on that ground how is this different.” And, there's been—there's been characters we've started making before that we're like, “Ah, this isn't different! So scrap, or at least tear apart for pieces and rebuild into something else.”
Adam: Right, to like use your example, Guise, there's a lot of times—nearly every card with Guise was, how is this not just Deadpool? Let's—let's make sure that we're getting away from that. Because Deadpool is like the main cultural touchstone of that, that type of character, we wanted to make sure that he wasn't that character at all. And he's very, very different. Like, the only similarity, really, is like, he has kind of a similar mask.
Chris: Similar mask, breaks the fourth wall, does jokes—
Adam: Yep.
Chris: But, like not a Dead—not, not—the sort of stories that Deadpool is in are not the sort of stories that Guise is in. And, the type of humor they both engage in is different.
Eric: Yeah.
Chris: Guise has a lot more in common with…Morph from Marvel, but specifically the—Morph from the Exiles run that does those kind of gags. But, Morph from the Exiles run isn't doing the fourth wall thing. We talked about Morph, we talked about Ambush Bug—and all those characters are characters that certainly inspired Guise, but Guise is his own thing.
Adam: She-Hulk, a little bit.
Chris: She-Hulk, for sure. Yeah, yeah.
Eric: Right.
Chris: So, to get back to the actual question—do we have, ah, one of our favorite examples of a character that was inspired—the thing is—and like, not really, because that's not the direction we come at them. It's more like we are aware that those things exist. And we are very, very aware that we're not treading on those toes. But we're not—that's not the jumping off point, I guess.
Eric: No, I totally understand. I just love being able to point to specific characters and decks in Sentinels?
Chris: Yeah.
Eric: And I'm just like, no, you have to understand they're—they're working with what we already understand about these characters—
Chris: Mhm.
Eric: —and going backwards. So, Guise, when we're talking about it—which is very funny that we're talking about this, like, humor deck that I bought on Amazon that was never like, attached to any of the, any of the actual boxes that we bought—Guise is interesting, because it is like the idea of Deadpool, because he just like was a regular dude, and then got hit with cosmic powers. So it’s like, the idea that he was a regular person—and kind of an asshole—is like, what we under now understand Deadpool to be—
Chris: Mhm.
Eric: —and I just love that reverse engineering of the archetype. And then going forward from there.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Eric: Do you have any examples, I guess, that you're excited about, or you think was a really interesting shaking up of that archetype? Because, I feel like the genres and the rigidity of comics, regardless of what timeframe we're talking about—
Chris: Right.
Eric: —like, is there something that you think worked really well that you really loved?
Chris: Yeah, I think a character that we do that—that people try to point to various other like heroes rather things like, “Oh, this is like this, but the archetype is wrong, or this is, the archetype is right, but the character is wrong,” is Argent Adept.
Eric: Yep.
Chris: People are like, “Oh, Argent Adept, is it like a Doctor Strange-thing?” Like, if Dr. Strange was really into music, maybe?
[Eric laughs]
Chris: Like, Argent Adept is a really different take on—
Adam: Yeah…
Chris: —the, “Master of Magic” sort of character. But, it's also really a different take on like a bard sort of character—
Eric: Yep.
Chris: —like he's—he's his own thing, but also, his architectural touchstones are, are very different than other more straightforward characters.
Adam: I'm actually a huge fan of all of our magic branch of stuff—
Chris: Yeah.
Adam: —of how like, we have very specific different ways in which magic will work. So like, there's the natural magic, there's the blood magic, there's void magic, there's all these different types that we've—we've structured, that I just really liked the—really like the setup of that.
Chris: They have their own mechanical flavor. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we've got—‘cause we have—from Argent Adept, who’s music and magic; we have Nightmist, who is cursed and magic; and we have The Scholar, who is like his own sort of internal alchemy with the Philosopher's Stone; Lifeline who does blood magic later—
Eric: Mhm. Right.
Chris: —and naturalist, who is like self-transformative, because of Earth and natural things.
Adam: I think, like, I'm—at the end of the day, I'm kind of an X-Men guy, like, that's—
Eric: Yeah, sure.
Adam: —like that's my bread and butter. But, I really like—if I, if you were to take away X-Men, what would I read? Like, I like Doctor Strange, I like Ghost Rider, I like all the, like, weird stuff. So, I like the opportunity—once we were done with the core set, basically, to go into the weird, and like really, really to do some esoteric stuff?
Eric: No, I think that's awesome. And I also like all of those people as well. What I think is really fun—going back to what we were talking about, if we do imagine that Sentinel comics was actually publishing this thing, is that like, you need to make a character that is able to sustain a comic—
Adam: Mhm.
Eric: —or, needs to, like, actually be able to function in stories. Like Argent Adept going out and solving all the stuff in the multiverse, and playing their loot and their liar, and saving all that stuff. And also, like, The Scholar, for example—I really like this is someone who loves Ley Lines and believes in Ley Lines. Also, he’s like The Dude, in so many ways? Like, yeah, this guy drinking White Russians or wearing a sweater—
[Adam laughs]
Eric: —would definitely be like, “Yeah, Ley Lines are real man, I can—I can use them using my, using my stone.”
[Adam laughs]
Eric: Like, I love how, again, the engine of the story makes the character feel actually real because, you're going from archetype and working backwards.
Adam: Mhm.
Eric: I really like this game. I don't know if you guys know that, I really like it.
[Adam and Chris laugh]
Chris: Should we?
Adam: [laughing] I can tell, thank you.
Eric: [laughs] Absolutely. So, this is a—we're doing, we're doing a dungeon dragons show based off of superheroes and comics and all those genres, as well. And, it's really interesting, creating something that feels like canon in our own game, but not necessarily canon in everyone else's world. Like, if someone was playing their own game, and their own stories and whatever choices they're making at their own table, it’s not even necessarily the same as what we're doing at our own table as people listen to the podcast. And, I really want to know how that—how you're tackling that, going into the RPG, because, like, the way that you framed it is that every single story exists in a different multiverse.
Adam: Mhm.
So, all of the Sentinel Comics are happening at the same time. So, what is it like actually putting down on quote-unquote, “paper,” this cannon, that you're now letting people, like, run around with in the RPG.
Chris: Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that we always said from—from Day Zero with the card game, like you said, is that every game has canon. With the RPG, because we're releasing specific stories that you can play through, the stories imply that the—that like, the world has gotten to a specific point.
Eric: Yep.
Chris: And so, we always say, you know, the canon of the Sentinel Comics role playing game that you're playing is the canon of the game that you're playing at your table. Like, you do whatever you want at your table. Like, if we really something, and say this character is this way, and they do this; and you're like, “Nope, in my home game is different.” 100%, You are correct, that is true in your home game, and you're welcome to do whatever you want to with the canon. We're gonna keep putting stuff out, and we're gonna keep following a series of storylines that we've created. But, we're gonna give people options on that. And, there's future stuff we want to do with that, too, that let's—let's bring people in more, but, one thing at a time.
Adam: It is a good bit different.
Chris: Yeah, it has to be, by the nature of the long form stories that we're doing. Because, a lot of the stuff we do in the card game is—ah, the storytelling that we do is emergent, rather than prescriptive.
Eric: Right.
Chris: You play the game, you pick this hero, this villain, this other hero, this other hero, this environment—and, you tell the story that's happening at the tables. Like, yes, some story, like, that happened somewhere in the multiverse, no doubt. Whereas in the RPG, like you tell the story—can we say yes, every story happened somewhere in the multiverse? Ahh… every story happened somewhere in some multiverse, yes. So…
Eric: Sure. I what I think is really interesting now is that, on your podcast, the letters page is that you have question and answer sections every single time.
Chris: Mhm.
Eric: And people love writing in and asking you very, very specific things about the canon of Sentinels—
Adam: [laughing] Yes.
Chris: It’s true.
Eric: Like—what I do as a dungeon master, I'm just like, who can say whatever it is, we'll figure it out as we play. But, you are—also, both Chris literally writing this stuff, and Adam, as you've turned it into the art of this—you know the very specific details, and you're willing to give those details to them.
Chris: Yeah.
Eric: Do you feel, like, put on the spot to give every single detail of this, so that people can like—I have the sense that like, they want to run the perfect game—
Chris: Yeah.
Eric: —but at the same time, like there's no such thing as the perfect game.
Adam: Mhm.
Chris: So like, yes, we're put on the spot. But, it's a spot we asked to be put on, it's a spot that we want to be put on. And, it's a spot that either we have all of the answers for, or somebody asked a question like—there's, there's three categories: there's, somebody asked a question like, “Oh, yes, we know all that. It's right here already in our spreadsheet. Here's the answer.” Sometimes people ask question like, “Oo, that's a good point! Something like that definitely did happen, hold on, it happened here, and here's how it went—” and we expand. And, we do that frequently on the show, where we will expand and create that answer right then and there on the air and make it part of canon. And, sometimes people ask a question like, “But, which hero is allergic to avocados?” And we go, “You know, not only have we never thought about that, it's not ever added in canon.”
Eric: Sure.
Chris: And, I thing we talked about too, is within the pages of Sentinel Comics, there's lots of different writers, and there's lots of different creators, and the editorial staff changes over the decades, of course. And so, sometimes there's some character who's got like, who's really into this one type of thing on their—in their, in their side stories, and their home life, there’s one character who's like, really into Creedence Clearwater Revival for three years, because some writer decides to make that canon for the character.
[Eric laughs]
Chris: And then, 10 years later, some other writers like, “Eh, I just don't care about that,” or “I didn't—I didn't know about that. I didn't read that run, I just—meh.” And so, the various foibles and personality quirks enter and exit character stories over the decades. And, so like, yeah, and we, every so often, we tell stories about, like, here's, here's a writer that took a character in a wrong direction, and some other writer had to come back and course correct. Or, there was a retcon later that, “Oh, that wasn’t that character all along, that was an evil clone of that character!” Which is a story that we did in the 90s, with Tempest—
[Adam laughs]
Eric: Right.
Chris: So like, yeah, we like being put on that spot. We want to be put on that spot. Because, being able to answer all those questions—with the exception of the subcategory of, who is allergic to avocados— like, those super minor questions that just like don't impact thing. And sometimes—I say that, sometimes there's tiny things that, that we say like offhandedly, “Oh, yeah, this thing is true.” And they're like, “no, that is true, and in fact, has a bigger story ramifications.”
Adam: Mhm.
Chris: But, yeah, we relish the opportunity.
Adam: I also think that we've gotten, since the beginning, a lot better about admitting that we're not omniscient.
Chris: Yeah.
Adam: When we first started the first—and the first, probably six years, five or six years—we were very cagey about all of the information. And, we pretended we had a lot more information than we did. [laughs]
Eric: Yeah.
Adam: And, I think we're better at admitting what we know, and what we don't know and saying, like, well, we haven't thought about this story. But you know—
Chris: But, we will!
Adam: —like, we're going to crap that in front of you and think that people enjoy that, so.
Chris: Yeah, the trick is that, like, we have a ton of answers. We don't have all the answers, but any answer we don't have, we can craft. The trick is—and once we've crafted the thing, and then put it into writing in some form, be it in a card game or the RPG or some other things we publish somewhere—then that now becomes part of the canon. So, we're constantly adding to the canon. And, we have—if somebody were to sit down and actually craft all the comic books that we've—not even all the ones that we've like indicated exists on a spreadsheet, but actually, all the ones we've plotted out and giving you stories of in writers room type episodes, but in other episodes as well, you would be making hundreds of comics. And there are thousands upon thousands of comics that are left to account for, still. So—
Eric: Right.
Chris: Yeah, we're thrilled to keep making this story.
Eric: I'm going to start blaming bad writers from the 90s on my bad DMing.
Chris: Heck, yeah. [laughs]
Eric: That's probably the best thing that you've ever created. [laughs] That's such a wonderful outlet.
Chris: I'm gonna—I'm gonna fight you on this, though. Bad writers from the 90s are—are your friends. What you want is bad writers from the from the 60s and 70s. [laughs]
Eric: Mmm, that’s right.
Chris: The 90s of bad writers were just going too—too hard and too extreme.
Adam: That's something I realized recently, actually—sorry, this is a little bit of a side note—
Chris: That’s what we do.
Adam: —is that like, the 90s get like a really bad rap for, and like there's some things that the 90s can have a bad rap about, but I feel like the the—the 2000s were a lot more edgy.
Eric: Yeah.
Adam: Like, that's when you got things like Penance, who has like needles on his skin—
[Eric laughs]
Chris: Yeah, right.
Adam: —because he has to feel the pain of every death that he's caused.
Chris: Right, as opposed to the original Penance, which was just like, she was just like sad.
Adam: Yeah.
Chris: But I mean, she had a lot of trauma, but the trauma was external as opposed to… well, anyway.
Eric: God, no, ‘cause, [sarcastic] I have needles on the outside but also on the inside you get it? [laughs]
Chris: Right.
[Adam laughs]
Eric: I have to draw it like this! [laughs] Ah, wonderful.
[transition music]
Amanda: Hey it’s Amanda, this is just a little midroll. A midroll for kids! Here’s some stuff I like: dried flowers, tee shirts so soft they become pajamas, creamed honey, waffle knit anything, the return of tie dye, cheap sunglasses, eucalyptus, those little globes you can use to keep your plants watered while you’re away. Ahh, wasn’t that nice?
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And now, back to the Punchbowl.
[transition music]
Eric: So, this is actually a great question. I would love some advice from you. I feel like I'm running this post-postmodern, wherever we are in art, game of superheroes—are there genres or tropes that in comics that you think that are ripe for breaking down and building back up? The story that we're telling is that in Laketown City, which was a small town in upstate New York, that got turned into the city the size of Portland, because Mayor Dr. Cassandra Morrow found a new Element, diaphorum that created delta radiation, which then turned people into superheroes—
Adam: Like it does.
Eric: Basically, people who were living in there were just, like, had like little bit of powers, and then their children had better powers, and I'm having this conversation of like, you know, people in their late 20s early 30s struggling with things that their parents can help/can’t help them, and actually using, like, capital P powers for good and for evil and all that good stuff.
Chris: Sure.
Eric: So, I feel like I'm telling this like small Daredevil-esque, or Queens-style Spider Man story ,talking about the city itself.
Adam: Yeah, it’s a street level.
Eric: Yeah, very—very street level, as well. I don't have anyone like Ex-Patriot, who's just pulling out guns and shooting people for fun, but, you know, there definitely so some wild ice guns running around—
Adam: And, profit…
Eric: [Laughing] Yeah, she’s also for profit.
Chris: Not just fun.
Eric: Yeah, not just fun. And, um, is there anything—I guess, what’s really interesting about what you're doing, and what I love about Sentinels is that you're considering the character from the 60s and 70s, forward. But, I am grappling a little bit with like, what are things that are interesting to look at in comics in, in the 2020s?
Adam: Sure.
Eric: Is there anything that—that you are looking into? Or you're interested in working with?
Adam: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are grappling with that right now.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: But luckily, you guys can blame it on writers that don't actually exist.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: So like, what are these writers who don't exist in Sentinel Comics?
Chris: Well, now, we wrote ourselves in so we're responsible for a particular era of comics as well.
[Eric laughs]
Chris: But, yeah, so I would say like, you have two really different directions, you can go—you have more than that—you have a couple of really different directions, you can go with comics, where you can be like, “Alright, I'm just going to tell a story that is—that has some has some life connections, but is about the story that's happening in the comic book pages, and it's character driven, and its character run.” And then, the other direction you can go is, “I want to—I want this to be, to have some sort of moral to it, I want to have some sort of point, I want to be doing some sort of message and, and that one is going to start with the point, the moral, the message, and you're gonna work backwards from there. And, I much prefer—and Adam, I believe you do, as well—telling stories that are character driven from the point of like, “Okay, what is it the characters want to do? And, we'll let the let the moral and the point kind of be emergent from that.” But if you have some sort of, like, “I really want to tell a story about the dangers of just accepting information told to you just because it's from an authority figure.”
Eric: Yeah.
Chris: So, great, yeah, you set up a whole thing from there, you start your points, you release your information, and then you begin digging at that. That's—that's a that's a fantastic jumping off point.
Adam: I think you're making you're making your work harder for yourself doing it that way. But I think that like, if you are to do it that way, it's easiest to start with the villain.
Chris: Yeah.
Eric: Yeah.
Adam: And, like, come up with like, someone who has a feasible plot based on misinformation or what like, like you're saying there. [Pause] Oh, and being willing to let go of your message, as the story continues. Like, that's really—that’s really the, I think, the sticking point that a lot of people have when they try to make a message-based story, is that they are not willing to let go of their point, even if their characters kind of diverge from that.
Chris: Mhm.
Eric: Sure.
Chris: We are—we are lucky, in that when Adam and I are doing RPG stories in a comic book hero world, we use the Sentinel Comics roleplaying game, and the Sentinel Comics role playing game has this nifty aspect to it, that every hero has two principles.
Eric: Yep.
Chris: And, those principles are like—so I have the character, Aeon Girl here. And, Aeon Girl has two principles. She's—she's young, she's, she's young at heart, yeah, young at heart and young at mind, and she's—but incredibly powerful with this—all this cosmic energy. And, she kind of presents as a teenager, even though she's actually only a few months old. Weird alien space stuff. But, as you're like, “Okay, how do I sum this character up?” The fact that she has her two principles gives her a lot of information for her player and for her GM, because the principles—she has the principle of levity and the principle of cosmic energy. And, the principle of levity says, well, during role playing, you keep your positive outlook, even when all hope is lost, and your spirit is nearly impossible to break. And, the principle of cosmic energy tells us that she has an affinity with cosmic energy, and she can interact with cosmic energy with ease. Okay, whatever those things mean, that—but what we know is that those two things give us storytelling prompts for the players and for the GMs. But also, they give us—they tell us what's important to the character.
Eric: Yeah.
Chris: And, when I look at my group of three, four, or five heroes, in an RPG, and I look at all their principles, I’m like, these are the things that are important to these heroes. These are the things that people care about. If I ever—like, the, your, whenever you have minor or major twists that happen in the game, which is a mechanic of the roleplaying game, they get pulled from these principles. And so, as a GM, when I'm looking at the table, I'm like, okay, something bad happens. What kind of bad thing do these players care about? If they're all about like, “Okay, we've got our weapons and our powers, and we're gonna fight the villain, and we are very much about fight.” Alright, great, your principles probably lead into that, and you want some sort of combat thing. But, I've had groups that were almost entirely not really fighting characters, they’re like, “We're actually about investigation, and about, like trying to fix and heal the world, and trying to like reach out in a in a non-combat way to solve this—and our principles reflect that.” And, so, when I look for something bad to happen, maybe it isn't, a guy with a knife jumps out at you, maybe it's like some sort of—some sort of trauma rears its head in a way that, that makes people grapple with the thing they weren't ready for. And, so, even in a game that doesn't codify that sort of principle thing, I like to do—and I mean, those, in a lot of ways, came from this moment, that Adam and I and Dave Chalker from Critical Hits, who is one of the primary creators of the RPG system—we've talked a lot about that in other games, that in other RPG that we've played, we like to do a similar thing at the start of the game be like, “Hey, so-and-so, you're playing your hero, you're playing your character—” you know, whatever the—the theme of this is. If it’s d&d game you're like, “You’re playing your—your elven barbarian—why are you an elven barbarian? What is your story? What is it you care about?” And as a GM, I like to have just like a couple of super minor notes about like, what are these characters principles, so that when bad stuff happens, I'm pushing on those principles. Because you could always say, “A bad thing is happening! There is a man with a laser sword, and he is chopping everything he sees.” That's a problem, we definitely know we have to solve it. But, if we can make sure that threat that's happening is directly connected to one of the players, then whatever story you tell from there, the players will take that ball and run with it, because they've got more, they've got more skin in the game, then—then you as a GM even can set up with really good storytelling on your own.
Adam: Yeah, I always use this example. I'm not gonna go into the full details, but one of the things about this RPG also, is when you're doing the twists, you can allow the players to think of their own things that go wrong.
Eric: Hell, yeah.
Adam: And, they will—I would say, 95% of the time—
Chris: Always be worse [laughs].
Adam: —be worse than something that you would inflict upon them.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, no, like Adam said, we're gonna not even gonna go into it—
Adam: I, would—
Chris: We have infinite stories.
Adam: I had one session that just, everything spiraled out of control, because I let them run with it. And, there was just trucks exploding, and robots exploding, and extra civilians put in danger, because they decided that that's what the consequences of their actions were.
Chris: Yeah.
Eric: I love that. I'm actually gonna put that in my pocket for something that's coming up. That's, that's wonderful.
Chris: Perfect.
Eric: Yeah, I really like that. I think that's something that might be a little bit different between fantasy and superheroes. The genre—although they're both, you know, genre fiction—is that like superheroes are so much about the superhero. It is it is character driven. And, remembering that the—the people have principles, and you got to push on those principles, as opposed to like, the genre of fantasy, I think, overcomes. Like the fact that, like, oh, check out there's a fucking dragon there! But, you have to remember that there is a person behind the mask at all time, which is why we're doing a superhero story right now.
Chris: Yep.
Eric: And, why I'm talking to you, and that's—this is all—this is all perfect. Adam, I have one specific question for you—
Adam: Yeah [laughs].
Eric: —because, I know your triangle here of the, the three people who work together on Greater Than Games. Chris, you're the writer person, that's—that is most like me. We have a business person, like you have Paul, we have Amanda. And Adam, you're very close to what we have with our head of production, Brandon, who does the—the sound stuff, but you do the drawing.
Adam: Yes.
Eric: And, I have no concept of how you take the stuff that like I say—or, that Chris says, or in my case, what I say—and then, you turn it into visual stuff. And, I know that what you're doing is sinking to what the art style of the particular timeframe is—
Adam: Mhm.
Eric: But like, how do you render these ideas and these fun things that you'll come up with? Like, what is your artistic process here? Because, I don't know. And, I'm going to sit next to Chris and be like, “Oh, hey, remember, like writing 10,000 words about something that totally doesn't matter? Like, that sounds great.” But, like Adam, what do you—how do you turn that into a visual, an actual visual thing—whether it's a, like, a character or a cover?
Adam: Yeah, so, I mean, step one is practice.
[Eric laughs]
Adam: Step two is practice. [Laughs] Um, you know, I've been drawing since I was probably five years old. And, I'm, I'm closing in on 40 here, you can see it a few years away. That's a big thing. The other thing is having an immense visual library. We have a—we have a go-to joke, that it's like, “I'm an artist, I look at pictures.”
Chris: It's what you do.
[Eric laughs]
Adam: And, like, that's only kind of half a joke. I spend a lot of time researching, and building—like I have, I have a Pinterest board, that I have thousands of images saved to. I have folders on my computer, that I have thousands of images saved to, that is, like, all very meticulously sorted into like, “Oh, I need to know how to draw a robot arm, like, what are some different robot arms? Let's look at that folder.”
Eric: Yeah.
Adam: And then, you know, combining that with the style folder, combining that with the era folder—like there's just a lot—a massive, massive visual library, is something that I spend time ongoingly curating. And, I think that that's, that's a big part of it. You know, I've read a lot of comics. And so like, I, I see—I know what I know that storytelling conventions, I know—I've read a lot of books, also about creating comics, and staging and composition. And, there's, there's just—there's a lot of research that goes into it, is essentially how I know how to do that. And, then, when it comes to a specific art, we'll—like, what we're doing today, is we go through every deck, or every character RPG, and we say, “Okay, what moments do we want to show on this? What are we trying to communicate with this card? What is the story that we're—that we're showing you? Where does that happen?” We decide those things pretty much first and then decide what's happening in there. And, then, from there, It's just up to me to come up with a cool composition and, and show that thing. Because, if I drew the same punch a thousand times, like that's not gonna, that's not gonna be exciting.
Chris: You get really good at drawing that punch though.
Adam: Yeah, I would get really good at drawing that punch.
[Chris and Eric laugh]
Adam: I was—something we were talking about earlier, though, also is combat as character development.
Eric: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Adam: So, like, how—how do different characters use the same weapon? Or, how does each different character throw a punch? Like, that's gonna look different? Does this character throw a punch? Do they kick? Do they use a different type of kick? Like, that's a big part of it, too.
Chris: Yeah. Action scenes as characterization is—is a very challenging thing to do well. But when it's done correctly, it's—it tells so much, it's not just like, “Okay, I get in there, and I swing my sword around.” It's like no, but how and, and why and what do we see out of that?
Adam: Right, are you—are you swinging like a barbarian and just, bludgeoning? Or, do you use it more like a rapier? And, you know, are you—do you do things precise?
Chris: I like also being able to see character development over Nexus, you know, characters changing the way they do something from the beginning to the end, based on what they care about in this.
Eric: Yeah.
Chris: So…
Eric: I like—I, listen, I'm, again, I'm very bowled over by the fact that you're able to like, “Yeah, I use this pen, and look, I created a thing that looks visual!”
[Adam laughs]
Eric: But I mean, it's—I know, it's the same principles—but, I'm just like, “Man, that—that looks so cool!” Thank you, for doing that. So, but it's—
Adam: Thank you!
Eric: —it's all the same. And, I should, I should have known that. But, it's wonderful. The reason why I was thinking about that—and, this is gonna go to the final thing, that we're all going to do together—is something you do on the letters page, where you all kind of just like come up with something that should exist, or we haven't explored necessarily yet in the Sentinel comics world. And, then, you create a cover if it's about a particular comic, and I'm just like, “Oh, look at that cover! That's exactly what they were talking about!”
[Adam laughs]
Eric: But, let's—if you will indulge me, I would love to do a little thing with—with you all, do a little writers room.
Chris: As long as Adam doesn’t have to draw a cover for it [laughs]
Adam: Yeah, man—
Eric: No, Adam, no, [laughing] don’t draw a cover for it—
Adam: There’s plenty to draw as it is.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Um, so something that we do in Laketown City—and I, we’re doing, like, this modern world, I’d say it's set in 2020x, in this alternate world, where Laketown City is the capital of New York and is the size of Portland and all that other stuff. Pretty much where like New York and Vermont meet across Lake Champlain. But, we really love using technology and whenever we roll our Carnage Checks, because we don't have as much like capital M magic, we do, we use that as tech checks.
Adam: Okay.
Eric: But, I would love to, if, together, if we could come up with a—an app that modern heroes would use to make their, to make their lives a little bit easier.
Adam: Sure.
Chris: It's called it's spelled “Capr.”
[Eric laughs]
Chris: It’s spelled, C-A-P, and then, R.
Adam: Yeah.
Eric: Of course. Of course. It's—there's no—there's no vowels.
Chris: Right, it's much like, uhh when you, you—various heroes can use it, and you—you kind of put up there what you're working on. We've got this, this, this threat that comes up, and so you immediately post about it like “Okay guys, here's the deal. The Gigatron is attacking downtown, again. But, it's—it's just, it's just—I'm here by myself, I mean, it's just me and Recycle Bin—” I just looked at the thing, and said the thing I saw. But, there's a hero named Recycle Bin—
[Adam laughs]
Chris: —and his name is Ben, like Benjamin, but he's Recycle Ben.
Adam: Oh, man…
Chris: And, the thing he does is, he can touch objects, and then reform them into something else made of the same components—Recycle Ben is a hero, There you go.
Eric: [Laughs] Bang!
Chris: And, yeah—
[Adam laughs]
Chris: —so, it's just me here with Recycle Ben, and we can't take on Gigatron by ourselves. So, we're gonna post on Capr, and see if we get some other heroes to come help us out.
Eric: Nice.
Chris: And, maybe other heroes can't even come help us out, in terms of like, “We're gonna join the fight!” But, like, “Ahh—I can, like, drop some stuff off on my way by, or like shoot a laser beam across the city, but I've got this other thing I'm dealing with.” So, you can—you can get call-in’s that way, or you can get full full cameos. That's what I would do, just at first. This isn’t frequently how Adam and I will create a thing, actually, you did a great job, Eric, setting this up, where, not even knowing it, Adam will be like, “We need a thing like this!” And I'll be like, “Okay, great. Here's a thing like this.” And, then, Adam’s job is to say, “No, I disagree with half of the things you just said. And I’m like, “Ahh, okay, I can fix ‘em—”
[Eric laughs]
Chris: “—I can fix ‘em, I can fix ‘em.”
Adam: I like all those—
Chris: Oh, really?
Adam: Um, I have another—
Chris: Oh, okay.
Adam: —I have, I have another one, though.
Chris: Do it.
Adam: Because—it's different, though.
Chris: Sure, sure.
Adam: This one would just be called “Help!” with an exclamation point.
Chris: Okay. Does it say, “Help: My baby!”
[Everyone laughs]
Adam: Yeah. And, it is, ah—you can review your hero experience.
Chris: Oh yeah, there we go.
Adam: Like, that’s—
Chris: You can leave your views.
Adam: Yeah.
Chris: I wonder if this’s just a help section of the Capr thing, so you can use Capr as, as a vigilante or as a—as a—as a civilian, and as a civilian you—you're using caper in the, in the help section to leave reviews.
Adam: There's—yeah, there's—you can go to the help website, also.
Chris: Yeah.
Adam: But you’re like “Ahh, Recycle Ben did not do a great job! I have bodily harm from this! Don't—do not pick him.”
Chris: “Two stars.”
Adam: But—yeah [starts laughing], two stars.
Chris: “He stopped Gigatron, but he converted my car into a sword to do it.”
Adam: Does that just disappear? I have no—
Chris: I don’t—
Adam: “I don’t have car to sword insurance…”
Chris: Right.
Adam: Like, if I got it direct, that'd be one—
Chris: Right, and the insurance company’s like, “You still have the sword, right?” So, you’re like, “Yeah, but I can't lift it, it weighs as much as a car.” There’re like “Sounds like a personal problem.”
Adam: Right. It's a very dense—
[Everyone laughs]
Adam: —the density doesn't change.
Chris: I feel like you could sell that sword, for a lot of money.
Adam: I mean, the mass doesn't change.
Chris: Right.
Eric: What—what I like about the things that you both created was that, there are such obvious ways for someone—whether it's society or a supervillain—to, like, ruin it immediately.
Chris: Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure.
Adam: Oh, yeah.
Chris: For sure. Absolutely.
Adam: [Laughing] You could abuse the hell out of both of those.
Chris: Yeah.
Eric: Yeah. Like, what—what is the penalty that you get from, like, the Superhero League, if you're—you go below like four stars?
Chris: Right.
Adam: [Laughing] Below a certain rating? Yeah.
Chris: I mean, if you—if you're below a certain rating, yeah, the—the community is like, “Oh, so you're a villain, right?”
[Eric laughs]
Chris: Like, even if you're like, “No, I'm a hero!” You're just treated with great suspicion by all the heroes—
Adam: Yeah.
Chris: —until the point it’s like, “Okay, well, you're now—"
Adam: And by all the civilians.
Chris: Right.
Adam: And, your—your rep’s dependent on your—your score.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. And then that rep just determines the caliber of jobs you get selected for on Capr. And, so that means, you're gonna have to be doing a lot of the—the less savory jobs, a lot of the less, uh, the less nice jobs. Fewer saving kittens from trees, more fishing something important out of the, out of the septic tank. So, like, come on, what kind of—what kind of jobs do you want to get greenlit for?
Eric: Hmm, yeah, well, what if I really like the septic tank jobs? Maybe I'm—I'm taking them myself?
Chris: Maybe you're an antihero. Maybe—maybe you are—but like, septic tank aside, maybe you're—maybe you’re like, “You know what? I want the unsavory jobs. Maybe—I'm gonna, I'm gonna spit in people's face. And, I do a good job. I get the job done. I don't make anybody happy when I deal with though.” And, so, you… that's—
Eric: Then it all becomes—then it’s all brand building, and then we have a whole other problem here—
Chris: Yep.
Adam: Yeah.
Eric: —this whole thing that's happening.
Adam: Well, that's something you got to worry about, your brand as a modern superhero. That's really important.
Eric: Absolutely. That's—this is—this is so funny, that I just said that, and [laughing] you guys just have these things lurking in the back of your mind—
Chris: No, we made those up [laughs].
Adam: [Laughing] Yeah.
Eric: I need to know so much more about Recycle Ben, now. Like—
Chris: Yeah, Recycle Ben is great. Like I said, I saw a recycling bin right next to my desk, and I was like, “What is a hero? Oh, a recycle bin. Oh, that works!”
[Chris laughs]
Eric: He can only recycle plastic one and plastic two, but the other three through seven—
[Chris laughs]
Eric: —are his, like, kryptonite. That's a big fault.
Chris: Right. There's certain materials— like metal, paper and glass, he's really good with. Plastic one and two, he can do a bit, but it's tricky. Other stuff, it's like, he can't do it all.
Adam: He's like, “Yard waste—”
Chris: “Nooo! Yard waste—ahh!!!”
[Everyone laughs]
Chris: “Yard Waste” is one of his foes. “Yard Waste” is such a good phone name. It’s spelled W-A-Y-S-T. Wayste.
Adam: Yeah.
Eric: [Laughing] He has an electric guitar—
Chris: See-yow!!
Eric: —that he uses to—
Chris: “You're about to get Yard-Wayst-ed!” [comic book fighting noises]
Adam: There’s just branches everywhere.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Eric: Incredible. Um, what if the app was… not necessarily for public consumption, but it was only for superheroes? Because, I feel like, when we got this with Help! is that—Adam, is that how you pronounce it? Help!
Adam: Yeah.
Eric: Okay, with Help! it's starting to become, like, citizen—it's citizen focused?
Adam: Yeah, the Capr part is hero focused.
Chris: Yeah.
Eric: Oh, okay. Is there, like, a social media aspect? Also, there's like a, like a real Clubhouse—
Chris: Oh, yeah. I think, on Capr, you definitely have a stream that you can post, and you can, like, follow your certain friends, or, you know, um—
Adam: What something—here, I'm gonna give you a prompt.
Eric: Please.
Adam: How would a hero use an app to crowdfund themselves?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so the trick is, you've got a hero, and they're doing hero-ing full time, and they need—but like, they don't, they—they've been working their day job and doing hero-ing, and it was just too much, there's just too much bad stuff going on—
Eric: Right.
Chris: So, they need to switch over to being a hero full time.
Adam: Yep. What's the Patreon for heroes?
Chris: Right. But, the trick is, what they want to do is—Patreon is a really good example, because what they want to do is, they don't want to set up a system where they charge people for saving them, because that flies in the face of what they're doing. So, they've set up a Patreon-model, they set up a donation-model, where people who think they're doing a good job, are like “Look. Look at my Capr rating, it's very high. You can see all these appearances that I've done, where the media has noted that I've saved this—this ship from sinking, and I saved this school bus from burning, and so, like, and so I have cultivated social media presence on these various platforms—”
Eric: I wonder if it's about, like, go—what I thought it was, something you said that was really interesting—and, from going from being a part-time to full-time superhero.
Adam: Mhm.
Eric: It is very similar to what we see on Patreon, now.
Adam: You have that goal.
Chris: Right. If I get enough—
Eric: Yeah, “I need to go—I need, like, I need, like 500 patrons, so that instead of subscribing to the league, or—and having to follow what they do and follow their codes, I can just do it, because, like, I'm here for the love of the game. I just want to do it.” So, I wonder if it's just like the end—it's the idea, there's like an implication there, that it's like, “If I don't get funded, then like, man, I can only superhero for, like, five hours a week. It's my side gig. It's definitely not going to be any good.” So, I feel like, something that involves—even if you're moving away from the, from the getting paid per—per saving, there is something, like, a little nefarious about it, that you just can't shake.
Chris: Yeah.
Adam: Yeah.
Eric: Unfortunately, I'm still stuck on what you said about that. I'm thinking about, uh, Side-Kickstarter—
Chris: [Laughing] Side-Kickstarter—
Eric: —which is where you get sidekicks to—
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Where you can vote on getting, ah, sidekicks promoted from sidekick to full hero-status and them being able to do it on their own.
Chris: Yeah, I can see messing around with, ah, terms like “Angel Investor” for the name.
Eric: Mmm.
Chris: Ah, and do something with, like, benefactor x.
Adam: I like using Side-Kickstarter to—to fund gadgets or like power suits for teens.
Chris: Yeah.
[Adam and Eric laugh]
Chris: Yeah, nothing is—Side-Kickstarter has two wings. you have the direction of Side-Kickstarter—
Adam: Yeah…
Chris: —where you—it's, it’s making people who want to be sidekicks into sidekicks. And, then, the other thing you can do with it is making sidekicks into—into full-fledged heroes.
Eric: Yeah.
Adam: Mhm.
Eric: And, someone has definitely started an afterschool program called “Power Suits for Teens”. Thank you, Adam.
[Adam and Eric laugh]
Eric: I wonder what they're, like, special goals—maybe it's like, “If I get enough money on Side- Kickstarter, then I will go to that—uh, I'll have like a suit that lets me go to space. And, then I can finally fight that evil, that alien thing—"
Chris: Right.
Eric: I feel like the progression on Side-Kickstarter is the same as in a comic, how you go from city to country to world to space.
[Adam and Chris laugh]
Chris: Yeah, and like, they're like, “Look, we would love to include international superhero-ing here, but international superhero-ing we can only get with a certain level because, it just costs more to do international. And we'd like to do international—”
Adam: Right, cause you’d have to buy the license…
Chris: Right. Like, “We're not really licensed for regional right now.” And, so, yeah.
Eric: [Laughs] I can't go and leave the tri-state area, because I actually don't have certification there.
Adam: Yeah, I'm only certified, for—
Eric: It's very funny. I love that. And, thank you for doing that with me.
Chris: Sure.
Eric: That’s wonderful. You—you all, you said something I'm gonna have to listen back to this, because Adam, you literally said something, that I want to put in my game. I cannot remember what—Oh, the—no, Chris, you just said it. The VC—the fact that a VC-funder, funding a superhero—
Adam: Yeah, the angel investors.
Eric: —and, like, that's bad. An angel investor, quote unquote, is—that's the scariest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
[Adam laughs]
Chris: Angel investors, yeah. Yeah.
Eric: And, I'm definitely gonna start putting that in my game, and people aren't gonna [makes “I don’t know” sound], unless they listen to this interview! You need to listen to this interview, so you can see spoilers on “Join the Party”.
Eric: Incredible. Thank you so much for being here. Chris and Adam, please plug the new stuff that's coming out.
Chris: By the time this interview comes out, the core game of Sentinels of the Multiverse, Definitive Edition—currently on Kickstarter irrelevant to the listeners—will be…not out yet, but it will be out soon, within a couple months of this episode coming out.
Adam: Well, we have pre-orders.
Chris: We'll probably—yeah, we’ll have pre-orders live, because we'll have the orders live by the end of… May, he said question mark? By the time you hear this, but we'll definitely have pre-orders live.
Eric: All right.
[Adam laughs]
Chris: So yeah, as you mentioned early on, Eric, you started off by talking about Sentinels of the Multiverse, which is the game that started this all, we—that's the game that Adam and I wrote in 2010 and published as a company in 2011. And, that game—we spent six years making cool expansions for that. We put—we made the Kickstarter for the last one in 2016. And so, Adam’s art has grown greatly since then. And so, now, we are returning to Sentinels of the Multiverse to… early on, very early on. I think one of the first things I said when I introduced myself is that Sentinel Comics, and the various things with it, is, like, my life's work.
Eric: Mhm.
Chris: And, that's really true, for Adam and I, there is a solid chance that there's nothing else we will ever make in our lives that is more good, qualitative, enduring than the world of Sentinel Comics. And, that's true, and that's fine, we're okay with that. But, we—as a result, we want to make sure that Sentinels of the Multiverse can be the best it possibly can be. And so, we are re-making it from the start, not quite from scratch, but really everything is getting rebuilt from the ground up. And so, Sentinels of the Multiverse, Definitive Edition is coming out this Fall, Fall of 2021. And, ah—
Adam: New art, new mechanics—
Chris: New everything. Um, very recognizable as the same game, but every part of it is better.
Adam: It's just, it is the version we wished we always had made.
Chris: Yeah, we didn't have the resources financially or timewise or skill-wise, to make it in 2010. And, we wouldn't have had—without the success of it, we wouldn't have had this last 10 years of creating in this world to have enough Sentinel Comics content to make what we're making now. So, anyway, point being, Sentinels of the Multiverse, Definitive Edition, coming soon. Additionally, right now, if you like RPGs, which we hope you do, you can go out and get Sentinel Comics, the Roleplaying Game, it just released to the public in January of 2021. And, it's doing quite well already. And, it is just great fun. A lot of fun. A lot of good superhero action there.
Adam: My—my favorite tabletop role playing game.
Chris: That's right. That's right. So, those are there. And, then, there's a lot of other great things that our company, Greater Than Games, makes. We have a mind-reading party game called “Medium”, that's a blast. We've got an in-depth cooperative, settler-destruction game, called “Spirit Island,” that is a pretty singular experience. So, if you—go check it out. But, ah, for more information, go to greaterthangames.com, that's where all of our stuff is. If you want to check out our podcast, “The Letters Page,” that has been referenced a few times, you can go to greaterthangames.com/theletterspage. “The Letters Page” has a Patreon, we don't have a site Kickstarter for it, yet, ah, or an angel investor system.
[Adam laughs]
Chris: But once those are set up, we'll probably have those. But for now, you can find us at patreon.com/theletterspage. And then, Adam and I—I think the only social media that either of us sort of do is Twitter.
Adam: Mhm.
Chris: I am on there as @gtgchristopher.
Adam: I’m @gtgadam. I also stream on Twitch, at twitch.tv/comicsandcoffee.
Chris: Comics and coffee?
Adam: Comics and coffee. Those are the things that I like.
Chris: Yes.
[Eric laughs]
Eric: Perfect, I will put links to every single one of those things in our episode description.
Chris: So many links.
Eric: There's so many links, but you all do so much.
[Chris laughs]
Eric: And that's, ah… it's definitely worth it. Yes, thank you. This has been incredible. I—I want to say, like back in 2012, when I—or, back in like 2014, when I first was like, “I like games, I think games are good, I should figure that out.”
[Adam laughs]
Eric: And, I like, tried to make like a, like a board game comic. But, the thing that was keeping me going and that actually gave me something to do, while I was like, a high school English teacher, and then when I was doing a bunch of other creative things that were very—that were close to it, was that I would play solo Sentinels of the Multiverse. I’d play three heroes by myself, against a villain in an environment, and being able to talk to you guys about the stuff that you're doing and the expansion of the Sentinel Comics world has been so much fun. So, thank you so much for creating this. And, for, you know, reminding people that, that like working with genre and tropes and working—bouncing off of that, and creating something that you're being inspired by, it that's outside of the, everything that's giant and huge, that it's still worthwhile and great. So, thank you so much for doing all that.
Adam: Creation is always worthwhile.
Chris: Yeah. It's our genuine pleasure.
Transcript by Sarah Patt