Good morning, Sentinels!

How was everyone's weekend? I hope it was great! Now, we have a new week, and with it, new content! We’re starting off the week with a familiar hero — one that was in the original core game, in fact! But, she’s one of the most mechanically changed characters from the original core game. Let’s talk about it!

With the fall of South Korea to North Korea and rumors of nuclear testing near the Chinese-Tibetan border, the late 2000s brought with them a growing suspicion of hostilities from the Far East. When the Chinese began establishing military bases throughout the Pacific Islands and finally announced their nuclear stockpile, the U.S.’s suspicions of China’s aggressive new regime were confirmed.

Not wanting to come out the losers of this new Cold War, President Hargett secretly authorized the Department of Defense to begin testing methods of creating bio-engineered soldiers. Early iterations of testing were limited to soldiers already on active duty, but then Secretary of Defense Anthony Partin greenlit Project Cocoon. Selected from a census of already pregnant Chinese couples with combined high academic test scores, Sun and Pao Long were offered $500,000 to allow scientists to inject their unborn baby with Compound PSY-200.

After six months of weekly injections, Sun gave birth to Vanessa Long. Kept at the testing facility, Vanessa began to exhibit psychic abilities by the age of two months, able to move and manipulate small objects from only a few feet away. At three months, Vanessa’s mother suddenly dropped dead. Unable to confirm that Sun’s fatal brain aneurysm was unrelated to the injections, President Hargett ordered the program to be shut down. Plagued with grief over his lost wife, Pao wanted nothing to do with his infant daughter and left her in the care of the U.S. government. The sole success of the program, Vanessa would be trained to use her powers for combat and reconnaissance.

Fast forward to 2018: the U.S., already severely crippled by an increase in super powered criminal activity, fell to the combined forces of the Pan-Asian People’s Republic. While she’d fought alongside other heroes, including the Freedom Six, her efforts eventually proved fruitless. Realizing that there was nothing else she could do in her time, Vanessa, now calling herself “The Visionary”, used her psychic powers to transport herself back in time to right things before they’d gone so wrong. Unfortunately, psychic time travel is not without its costs. An inter-dimensional hitchhiker, another version of Vanessa who had made very, very different choices, now occupies a corner of her psyche, and the great strain required to bend time ruptured a blood vessel in her brain. While she could use a portion of her abilities to slow the bleeding, her time was still limited. With some extra baggage and a ticking clock, The Visionary will have to use everything at her disposal to save this new world she finds herself in, as well as this reality’s Vanessa Long, who she fears is in grave danger…

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The Visionary has been a notable hero in the pages of Sentinel Comics since her first appearance in the mid 1980s, though her role frequently changed, due to the parasitic “Dark Visionary” deep in her mind. To learn more about her, here are some episodes of The Letters Page podcast!

The Visionary is a powerful psychic, but with some dangerous baggage…

A hero character card with additional information at the bottom of the card was introduced in the Rook City Renegades set with the hero NightMist. That set also introduced the concept of “side decks”, with The Operative having her own deck as part of The Chairman’s villain setup. The Visionary has setup instructions of her own that indicate what sets her apart mechanically: the Dark side deck!

I haven’t been showing off Hero or Villain deck backs, but I must do so in this update, as The Visionary has her main deck of 40 cards, next to which lives her Dark side deck, with its 10 unique cards.

The Visionary’s main deck has cards that give her a lot of power and flexibility, but reaching for that power often comes at a cost…

There are even twists and surprises, including another mechanic introduced in RCR:

That’s right! The Visionary could SUDDENLY Falter and pull a card from the Dark side deck when you weren’t ready for it.

But just what sorts of things lurk in the Dark side deck? It’s got 10 cards, all different, all dangerous.

Each of them give you some options as to how you use them and what costs you’re willing to pay for what effects, but there will be costs, and you can’t control what comes out of the deck — even though The Visionary has a lot of effects that look at the top cards of decks and can reorder or even discard what she finds, she cannot do so to her Dark side deck, as per the rules of side decks.

From the RCR Rulebook:

(Fear not! That’ll also be in the Disparation rulebook.)

As for The Visionary’s variants… just know that even though things might get a bit dark, they also might get a little weird, especially when alternate realities are considered!

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For the first couple weeks, I’d been doing Q&A sections at the end of the updates, but the Qs haven’t been too pressing, so I’m going to change gears for a week! Given how great this campaign has gone so far and the excitement of all you wonderful backers, for the rest of this week, I’ll be highlighting a different crowdfunding campaign at the end of each update!

That said, today’s update ender is a little different: it’s the original Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition crowdfunding campaign! Why am I linking this? Because there have been a few questions about “what is this” and “how is it different” and things like that, which are best answered by the original campaign. There’s some good reading to be had over there, so go check it out!

I’ll see you all tomorrow with a very different update! Keep on saving the Multiverse!

-Christopher