Vote in the 2021 ENNIES!
about 3 years ago – Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 07:53:57 AM

Hey, everyone!

We are incredibly honored to have been nominated for several ENNIE Awards, mostly for products related to this very Kickstarter!

For more details on the ENNIES and the awards we were nominated for, check out this post I made on the GTG website a couple weeks ago.

We would love it if you voted in the ENNIES Awards! To do so, check out what I wrote about that process here, and then follow this link to go vote!

See you all in a couple weeks for another monthly update! And don't forget to spread the word about Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game, and go vote in the 2021 ENNIES!

And now, a word from our... hero?
over 3 years ago – Wed, Aug 04, 2021 at 03:43:58 AM

Hey, folks! This update was supposed to be some words from the talented Laser, author of the best parts of Chapter 1 of The Guise Book, but SOMEONE insisted on interrupting instead. So, with apologies, I am honored *ahem* to hand the mic over to the one, the only...

Hello, everyone! Guise here.

Hello to all you fine folks here tonight! Thanks for coming. You're a beautiful audience. Thank you, thank you — you're too kind.

Anyone here from Boston? Great city. Or so I've heard. Never been. Not for want of visiting, though! I was... way too into the Mighty Mighty Bosstones in the late 90s, to the point that there's a bit of a, uh, let's call it a "court suggestion" that I not visit the city of Boston. What can I say? I make a memorable first impression.

Anyway! I'm told this is a Kickstarter update. Not sure what all that's about. But the important thing is: I'm writing words, and you're reading them. What a treat for you! I hear there's a whole book coming out, just about me! What a world you live in. It must be wonderful and perfect and nothing ever goes wrong! In my world, we had a terrible cosmic Huge McLarge fella show up and try to stomp the world into submission and my best friend erased himself from reality to save my life and I'm not at all over it thank you for asking... uh, point being, your world sounds way better than mine and like nothing major or terrible happened to you last year.

Hold on. What's that? Uh, I've just been told that I'm way wrong. So, whoops? Sorry about that. And very sorry to hear you had your own reality-shattering event. Where do these writers and editors get off, thinking they can just jerk us around for their little stories?! Pfft. If you ask me, we don't get enough credit for the value of content we're creating for our viewers and readers. I just hope your audience is as adoring as mine is.

OK, OK, announcements. Really, I'm here to share some announcements with you, but I had to, you know, make it mine. Get into character. Really feel the role. It's called "The Method" and it's very serious! Anyway. The product called "The Guise Book" (what a good name!) is finally 100% done being written and arted and is going through the final playtester review process either this week or next week. (Man, there's a lot in that sentence that I don't understand.) The factory that will be printing the book is aware of the upcoming print run and is ready to turn it around quickly. Plus, it's being printed in the US, as you can print books here better than other products made by Greater Than Games, so this wonderfully named book won't be held up by the shipping woes of other less Guise-having products. Maybe they should have included Guise, that way I could have solved their problems, but nooooooooo.

Bleh, none of that was particularly fun or cool or really up to the standards of what I've come to expect from my roles. Boooring. But now you know! And I'm assured that's the stuff you came here for. Huh, no accounting for taste. Just like I have no taste for accounting! (My personal finances are a mess. No joke.)

Well, that's all the time we have today, folks! Remember, tip your waitstaff. Try the banana pizza. I'd say that I'll be here all week, but I won't. I've got stuff to do. Catch ya later!

-Guise

Guise Book Authors, part 2 of 3
over 3 years ago – Thu, Jul 08, 2021 at 05:26:04 PM

Good morning!

Things are moving right along here, with hopes to have The Guise Book to the printer by the end of this month! Everything is looking great, and the content is honestly far better than one might expect in a book about this guy:

I've got another post from one of the many talented authors of The Guise Book! This month, we're graced with the presence of Banana Chan! I am always impressed with just how many games she's working on — seems like there's a new game with Banana Chan's fingerprints on it coming out every day! OK, that's an obvious exaggeration, but not by much! She's a writer, a game designer and developer, and also publisher through her company Game and a Curry! And even with all that going on, she still made time to write an entire, hilarious adventure issue for Guise! Here's her take on how that process went:

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The Life and Times of Guise

A story of how one writer tried to tackle writing about the enigmatic character, Guise

By Banana Chan

It was raining that day. I was making my regular slop of oatmeal in oat milk when I received a call from a familiar name. Dave Chalker. He had been doing project management for SCRPG. I remember our interaction well:

“Hey kiddo, I gotta job for ya.”

“Yeah?” I spoon some oat milk-flavored oatmeal into my face. “It better not be as bad as that last job you had me doing. I’m still picking demonic energy out of my hair.”

“Nah, nothing like that. You’re gonna be working with someone new.” Dramatic pause. “His name’s Guise.”

Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly how it went down. But I was very excited to write for Guise. Though he and I had never met until that point, I was looking forward to meeting him.

(Out-of-character: In this article, I’ll be describing what I imagine would’ve happened if Guise took a physical form alongside what actually happened).

We sat down at a coffee shop, the buzzing noise of chatter and light royalty-free jazz music whirred in the background.

I was sitting in my room with relaxing coffee shop sounds playing in the background from a YouTube video I found, pretending that I’m outside, when I’m actually not.

We joined the chatter. I enjoyed his presence. He’s down-to-earth and doesn’t take himself too seriously, which I liked. But he was also passionate and full of energy. Especially for the things that he really cared about, like avocado toast and skee ball.

I was thinking about the things I like: the award-winning reality television show, Below Deck, puns, and brunch. I was also thinking about the things I like to complain about: overpriced lattes, rent being too damn high, and having to meet people for brunch. I also thought about one of my flakey friends who used to invite random strangers that they met on the street into my home (we’ll call them Alexi).

In some ways, Guise is a lot like me. We share a lot of the same interests. In others, Guise is a lot like my friend Alexi—a big kid who smokes too much weed with way too much responsibility. Like that time they invited an entire group of larpers that they had met in the park to my friend’s wedding, forgetting that catering costs money.

I like looking to my friends for inspiration.

When we finished our discussion, I had pages and pages of notes. We hugged and promised that we’d meet up for brunch one day. Or maybe we’d bump into one another at a Whole Foods. Or maybe we can sign up for an underground billiards league.

I took some of the notes that the SCRPG team had given me as must-haves and made an outline of how the acts would look, before filling each section out, breathing life into the characters that players would encounter.

Weeks passed, before I finally finished writing my piece. When Dave read it, he took one puff of his cigar and nodded, “Good job, kiddo. We’ll have the editor go over it.”

Making things takes a long time and working with editors and project managers is all about communication.

I hope folks get a sense of what Guise is like through my words. Not just as a superhero, but also as that relatable, annoying, well-intentioned friend who almost set fire to your house that one time, because they forgot to turn off the stove after making you popcorn.

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Next update, we'll have word from the third guest Guise author! Until then, keep playing to your principles and taking those minor twists!

-Christopher

Introducing: Guise Book Authors, part 1 of 3
over 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 08:56:08 PM

Hey there, Sentinels fans!

Today, I am so proud to introduce you to a fantastic writer and great thinker: Richard Malena-Webber. Richard is one of the most clever people I know, a master of puzzles, storytelling, and with a heart that's possibly two sizes too big. Not, like, in a medically concerning way or anything. Just that he's super kind and genuine and thoughtful. He has a blog about games! He's running a Kickstarter right now! But none of those things are why I'm telling you about Richard. I'm writing about this swell chap today, because he wrote one of the adventures in the upcoming Guise book! Also, he's graced us with even more of his writing today, as I asked him to say some words about how that process went, and he certainly did so!

So, without further ado, here's Richard!

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Hey folks! My name is Richard and I’m one of the guest writers for The Guise Book! I wanted to stop by and share a little bit about my process for writing an adventure for the Sentinel Comics RPG.

(Wait, wait. This whole just the facts thing is not how I wanted to start. Hold on. )

I’d like to spend this update activating the Principle of Compassion, attempting to connect with you, a human audience, on a personal level.

(Probably shouldn’t have said human audience. We’re all, each and every one of us, definitely humans. )

Here’s the thing. I really like writing adventures. Filling pages with stories of heroics, mystery, wonder, and derring-do, all meant to be played by new faces again and again? It’s a dream job. I’ve actually spent most of the last year writing adventures and running them for kids ages 11-15 as part of the Academy of Adventures! That’s my online D&D summer camp that you can find on Kickstarter right now!

(Ooooh, a plug? In the first two hundred words? Nice. )

Writing adventures for kids takes a special kind of mindset. It’s, uh, hard to plan for everything. There’s a youthful energy that can change focus in the blink of an eye. Say I design an excursion to a deserted island with magical buried treasure. If the kids come up with a more exciting plan, then I need to be ready to shift gears and run with their story. If I can adapt to their choices, but fill their story with my highlight moments, then we can build something amazing together. It’s a method of controlling chaos that requires improvisation, communication, patience, and a passing familiarity with the absurd.

At some point, the fine folks at GTG set me up to write an adventure for The Guise Book and I immediately knew that, compared to the chaos of writing for kids, this was going to be—

(Don’t, don’t, do NOT say it. )

—worse. Like a lot worse. I’d need to dig deep and bring out my own inner chaos. I would let Guise be my harbinger, so that I might, in the end, be his.

So I binged five full seasons of the BBC’s Merlin.

When I think about Camelot, I imagine this place that exemplifies the ideals of knightly virtue. Those old stories always left me with this nagging feeling of “Wait, is this supposed to be goodness and honor? That’s messed up.” The BBC’s Merlin takes that many, many steps further. Young Prince Arthur begins the show by being mean and spiteful, eventually growing up to become a leader who is... just still mean and spiteful.

(But he’s got this regal jawline and that’s really all it takes. )

Merlin is totally inept, his mentor is used for comic relief, and the King makes the same mistakes, every single episode, never once learning a thing or changing in any meaningful way, and as my brain threatened to collapse in a singularity of episodic mediocrity, I had a sudden breakthrough. 

If the BBC can screw up Camelot, so can I. 

Sorry. I meant, so can you. This adventure is a gift. As you make your mark on the Camelot mythos, no matter what ridiculousness you bring to this Guise-fueled quest, you will always be better than the BBC series. Always.

Let chaos reign.

(And hey, if you’ve got kids ages 11-15 who would love to play some D&D with kids online, you should definitely check out the Academy of Adventures before the Kickstarter wraps up on June 2nd! ) 

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Catch you next update, in which I'll get to introduce you to another fantastic author of this hilarious book!

-Christopher

Work continues! More previews!
over 3 years ago – Wed, May 05, 2021 at 07:45:56 PM

Hey, folks!

The Guise Book! continues to be in progress and the top SCRPG priority currently. Looking forward to moving on to the next books, but this one's gotta get wrapped up first! Fortunately, things are going quite well on that front.

Here are some art previews of a few characters, along with an ability for each of them! 

And that's only a fraction of what's in this book! More on that in future updates...

Anyway! Back to the editing mines! Be great, everyone!

-Christopher