Sentinel Comics RPG Core Rulebook

32
from the Mayor.” A quick phone call to the mayor’s
office gives you a leg up on your Overcome action
to infiltrate the sewers.
Track hero points and hero point bonuses on the
front page of your hero sheet. You must convert
hero points to bonuses between issues; you
can’t carry them over from one issue to the next.
Likewise, unused hero point bonuses go away at
the end of the issue.
When they complete the current issue, Muse and
Aeon Girl both have 4 hero points. Christopher,
playing Aeon Girl, decides to take two +2 hero
point bonuses. Rae, playing Muse, decides to take
four +1 hero point bonuses.
Collections
You develop a comic book collection of your
hero’s prior appearances whenever you collect
Back Issues into a Collection. You may call on each
of your Collections once per session, invoking
previous adventures. This can have one of these
effects:
• After rolling, you can change the number on
one die to anything you choose. Determine
Min/Mid/Max after doing that.
• Establish one fact about a scene your hero is
in, based on a previous issue. (Yes, just make
something up, as long as it isn’t ridiculous and is
rooted in the events or lessons from that back
issue. If your idea is out of line, the GM will
veto it and ask you to think of another one.)
• You can invoke your collection instead of
taking a minor twist, provided you can think
of an explanation for how it’s relevant to the
situation.
However you use it, justify how the previous
adventure helps in the current situation. For
example, when fighting Baron Blade, Legacy’s player
might say, “When I last fought Baron Blade, he
suffered a wound on his right side… I’m going to
try to use that to my advantage.” This comment
comes with an editor’s note: “See Justice Comics #8!”
Include an editor’s note to lend the whole thing an
air of authenticity.
Hey you, GM! Be flexible in adjudicating how
players apply these bonuses. Don’t require perfect
recall about what happened in a previous adventure.
The barest justification should work. Comics get
retconned all the time.
Collections, Other Scenes
Limited Collections
Heroes with a lot of collections can be quite
powerful, so issues written to be used by any team
of heroes that happen to try them — from street
level upstarts to cosmically powerful beings — may
limit this power by putting a cap on the number of
collections a hero can use to create bonuses. This
helps level the playing field, especially when a team
has heroes with different levels of experience. If a
hero doesn’t have as many collections as the issue’s
limit, they gain additional uses equal to the amount
they’re missing, leveling the hero playing field.
Other Scenes
Action scenes are just one type of scene that
happens in SCRPG. There are also montage
scenes and social scenes.
Montage Scenes
In comics and on screen, montages are sequences
that string together very short vignettes that give
you the impression of passing time and larger tasks
being accomplished. The classic training montage,
often accompanied by a cheesy inspirational
power ballad, is used in many movies to explain
a character’s sudden increase in skill, for example.
In Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying
Game, montage scenes represent travel, recovery,
repair, training, investigation, and any other sort of
little things that move the story from one spotlight
point to the next.
At the start of a montage scene, all minor twists are
resolved, any mods from Boost and Hinder actions
left over from the previous scene go away (even
persistent ones), and any other temporary effects or
abilities disappear. Each player in turn describes what
their character does to recover from the last scene
and prepare for the next one. Then the GM and
players roleplay short, snappy highlights of what’s
happening and string them together as a montage.
During the montage scene, you can perform one
of these tasks.
• Describe how you recover some Health. As
a result, reset your Health to the maximum of
the next GYRO zone up — from somewhere
in the Red zone to your maximum value in
the Yellow zone, for example. You have to
convincingly narrate how you do this; in any
city you could easily get medical attention,
but at an abandoned base on Mars it might