Silver Age Sentinels RPG by Mark C. MacKinnon

by Mark C. MacKinnon

hard cover games manual, well illustrated,

Genres: Superheroes, Role Playing Games

Hardcover

First published December 16, 2002

Reviews

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like reading new role playing systems. Seems each one has a few things I like and adapt to my games. This one is a very nicely written superhero game with a nice detailed world history. Recommended

[Benjamin]

(Note: the original publishing company Guardians of Order ran into some financial difficulties in the 200s and I have heard that the publisher Mark MacKinnon acted in an unethical matter around that time. (Considering that the news of the company's dissolution was announced first by George R. R. Martin rather than by MacKinnon, that seems believable.) After leaving games publishing for a while, he seems to be back, so.)

Somewhere along the line I picked up the deluxe version of this superhero roleplaying game, and I had a certain amount of fondness for it -- Silver Age heroics, with plenty of discussion of how to capture comic book shenanigans. So when I got myself some pandemic presents, I decided to finish out my collection. (Did I? I just found reference to two books that I don't now own, but that might never have been published.)

This set includes:
Silver Age Sentinels (all the rules, in the tri-stat system, and a bunch of setting info for their base setting, Empire City)
Shields of Justice (a hero guidebook) and Criminal Intent (the villain guidebook) (which both include some notes about running heroes/villains, making teams, and then include stats for a bunch of characters)
Emergency Response 1 and 2 (both two-part adventures)
Roll Call 1, 2, and 3 (lists of characters, the second themed around sidekicks, the third called "Country Matters," but is actually just themed around women who had a relationship with this one core villain, bah)
From the Files of Matthews Gentech (a list of monsters created by the scientific genius villain who hates heroes)

I like the system (which feels pretty comprehensive), and the setting is... fine. The RPG is explicitly focused on emulating comic books, so of course there's a lot of tropes. For me, this is most evident in the Matthews Gentech book, which mines the silliness of animal-people hybrids straight out of a certain era of Batman. A special note about the art, which I quite like as setting the tone in the first books (they include a bunch of fake comic book covers -- in fact, this RPG has a whole fake history of their comic books, noting the characters' first appearances and what not), but in the later books becomes a little less inspiring.

Also, some of the material in the hero and villain guidebook seems like it could use a different organization. Like, I'm all for putting examples close to the rules and whatnot, but this doesn't quite work.

[Jose Vidal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este juego de 2003 cuenta, de nuevo, entre sus autores con Stephen Kenson (si, el de ICONS y el de Mutants and Masterminds) junto con Mark C. MacKinnon,Jeff Mackintosh y Jesse Scoble.

Fue publicado por la canadiense Guardians of Order, compañía que consiguió destacar con su primer juego, de espíritu anime, Big Eyes, Small Mouth RPG, el primero con el que sería su sistema de la casa (llamado Tri-Stat). Con dicho sistema publicaron, por ejemplo, el juego de rol de Sailor Moon, entre otras licencias anime, pero también este Silver Age Sentinels y otros juegos. En 2005 publicaron el primer juego de rol ambientado en el mundo de Westeros, A Game of Thrones (que incluía reglas en versión d20 y en versión Tri-Stat), pero pese a sus posibilidades comerciales (aunque aún lejos de la fama de la franquicia tras el inicio de la serie televisiva) no pudo sacar a la compañía de una deuda acumulada que terminaría por llevarles a la quiebra.

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