Good morning, Sentinels fans!

What a stellar 24 hours we’ve already had! I’m thrilled that, this early in the campaign, we already have over 2900 backers on board — that’s stupendous! I am consistently blown away by how great the Sentinels community continues to be. Thank you all.

Given this is the first “reveal” update, you’ll also get a feel for how these will go! Some words up top, then the meat and potatoes of the update, and then some Q&A. So, let’s get into it!

Jim Brooks was one of the fastest guns in the west. He maintained order in the lawless wastes for many years, facing down many of the worst bandits and outlaws as Sheriff of Silver Gulch. One day, there was a disturbance at the edge of town — the townsfolk panicked at the sight of a giant glowing hole hovering just past the general store. Jim clapped his hat on his head and cinched up his gun belt as he made his way to the shimmering portal. "Now, y'all stay back," he softly drawled, before stepping through the portal, never to be seen in Silver Gulch again.

Jim fell through time, mighty perturbed at the situation he found himself in. After what felt like weeks or maybe seconds of free-fall through a twisting field of glowing energy, Jim fell into darkness and passed out.

He awoke to growling and slowly sat up, not sure if this was the usual Tuesday morning type of growling from the dogs around town, or if he was still in some crazy predicament. Squinting at the giant forms stalking towards him and the nightmarish orange sky up above, he came to the conclusion that the ordeal was far from over. Then, he was attacked.

A pack of two-story-tall rat creatures tore into him, all teeth and claws and vile stench. Jim managed to get one hand on his hat, holding it tight to his head — in his other hand, his trusty Colt rang out sharply. Dropping three with headshots and a fourth in the gut, Jim was feeling pretty good about his chances, when a fifth rat-man bit into his shoulder and tore his left arm clean off.

Jim was having a bad day.

He shot the arm-thieving rat in the face, holstered his now-empty pistol, and made tracks away from the horde of approaching rat-men, drawn by the commotion. He only ran for a few minutes before a metallic voice cried out, "Hey! Over here!" Without pausing to consider, he launched himself through the half-open doorway in the side of the giant steel bunker.

"Am I glad to see you! Oh! You're losing blood fast! Let's get you bandaged up," the metallic voice prattled on, though Jim didn't see anyone in the room. A few robotic arms disengaged from the walls, guiding him to a platform that extended from the wall. As Jim stretched out on the table, wincing in pain, the voice chattered on. "Let's get you some antiseptic and something for the pain. And I'll just build you a new arm, like one of these wall-arms here. That would work well, don't you think? Do you have a particular color in mind? What's your name? I am the Concordant Harmonic Entity, version 4! But you can just call me Con. Oh, hey, you passed out. Well. I'll fix you up in no time."

Jim came to hours later, and Con explained to him that he had made his way thousands of years into the future, and the time he'd found was terrible. All sorts of monstrous creatures populated the world now: Giant yetis, Mongolian death worms, vile skunk apes, nasty chupacabras — the shorelines were overrun by New Jersey devils, what used to be Asia was now occupied by towering lizard creatures, and the seas were full of terrible serpents and sea-beasts. But the worst of all were the huge rat-men. They were the most numerous and most devious of the monsters, and they infected and destroyed everything they touched.

Fortunately, Con had a plan. Specifically, Con had a time-machine. Con could outfit Jim with new gear, fancy gadgets, and send him back in time to destroy these monsters before they could ever grow strong or reproduce. Jim agreed, but didn't want Con to mess with his pistol or his hat — they worked just fine, thank you very much.

So all the urban legends you hear about the Loch Ness monster or Big Foot? The tales of creatures terrible and bizarre? No one has any proof, do they? That's because the Chrono-Ranger got to them first.

You don't have to worry about the monster under the bed — Jim's got you covered.

—

Chrono-Ranger has long been a fan-favorite in the world of Sentinel Comics. His no-nonsense attitude, combined with his rugged good looks and temporal abilities to get him into bad spots make for a wide variety of bizarre adventures. If you want to learn more about Chrono-Ranger, I suggest checking out these three episodes of The Letters Page podcast:

When working on reimplementing Chrono-Ranger for Definitive Edition, certain things were constants. First off, his character card would be focused on his pistol, but also get his Bounties up and running.

Naturally, he’d have Bounty cards that each gave him a bonus against a particular target, but also rewards for taking that target down.

He’d also have some cool future-tech that helped him hunt down his quarries.

And who can resist a bit of utility, getting things going and taking down big foes once he’s up and running?

Disparation also includes a number of variants for Chrono-Ranger, including his First FULL Appearance in Sentinel Comics (not just the time that he namelessly appeared in a couple of panels without any explanation), a different version of him from one of his wilder tales, and an alternate reality character who is NOT Chrono-Ranger, but uses the same deck! That last type of variant is something that will come up a good deal in this set. More on that in the future!

—

Before getting into specific questions, I want to address an important fact that would likely come up in questions at some point, and so I’m preempting those questions now! The versions of the cards seen above note that their design is not final. That will be true across the board with this campaign — it was the case with the previous campaigns, as well! But I wanted to specifically call it out, just to manage expectations. Rest assured that that design is quite close to final, and everything I’ll be showing you is certainly thematically and mechanically moving in the correct direction, but there will still be some tweaks and twists along the way. Thus is the process of developing a large game with so many interconnected pieces! The first question today will get more into that. So! Let’s do it!

A: I’ve seen this question asked a few times in a few different ways, and even though the answer is a simple one, it also bears some explanation. On BackerKit, when looking at the the “Pledge Levels” section, each Pledge Level has a little link in the description that says “Learn More”. If you click on it, it gives more information, including the estimated ship date: July of 2024. 

The reason for this date is two-fold. 

One of the things we’ve learned over the last couple years of making Definitive Edition is that it takes longer than a year, all told, to get everything finished, printed, and back in our hands to ship them to you. So be it! Rather than killing ourselves with unrealistic deadlines and dropping balls in other courts to focus on this, we’re giving ourselves a bit more room for both this set and subsequent sets. 

The second reason is that I want to be able to focus on finishing up a number of books for Sentinel Comics: the Roleplaying Game this year. Books like that take a lot of time to create, and we’ve already spent a ton of time on them, but this is a case of the final 10% taking as long as the first 90%, so carving out some extra time here helps those get done AND takes a bit of pressure off of development and playtesting Sentinels of the Multiverse stuff — sometimes playtesting happens so fast and furiously that many playtesters get overwhelmed! I’m attempting to create a better timeline for them, as well.

Whew! That was a long answer! But it covered a lot of things that I wanted to make sure people knew, so it was worth it. I’ll take one more question, just to round out this update.

A: OK, no one has asked this question in this exact manner, but it’s come up a lot in a variety of ways. “Will we see this variant?” “What are the events?” “Tell me everything now!” 

Nope! I have my schedule, and all will be revealed in time. We’ll be sprinkling teasers about Variants, Events, and more over the course of these updates, but I also gotta save SOME stuff for the post-campaign updates, right? Just stick with me. There will be plenty of reveals — I promise.

Thanks for tuning in, everyone! And thank you all so much for supporting this latest endeavor in the Multiverse! If you know someone who you think would love Sentinels of the Multiverse but hasn’t had a chance to experience it, consider doing everyone a favor and introducing them to it! It’ll give you more people to play with, it’ll provide them with a fun time, and maybe they’ll even join in on making this first Sentinel Comics project on BackerKit a runaway success!

I’ll see you all again tomorrow morning for an update about a Villain! Until then, keep on saving the Multiverse!

-Christopher