Tag Archive for: Mutants & Masterminds

Ronin Roundtable – Sentinels of Earth-Prime: The Big Picture

We’ve got one day left on our Sentinels of Earth-Prime Kickstarter. If you haven’t backed it yet, head over to Kickstarter and check it out. It’s a cooperative card game that takes place in the core setting of our Mutants & Masterminds RPG and uses the excellent Sentinels of the Multiverse rules by Greater Than Games. The great news is that the Kickstarter funded in nine hours and now has topped $135,000, so we will be making Sentinels of Earth-Prime for sure and we’ll have the resources to produce the first print run up front. That really is one of the best things about Kickstarter from a publisher’s point of view, so if you are a backer, thanks for making it possible. Today I thought I’d share our long-term plans for Sentinels of Earth-Prime because we aren’t just launching a game here, but a game line. Let’s talk about what that means and how it relates to Mutants & Masterminds.

 

The first step is, of course, making the core game and the mini-decks that are part of the Kickstarter. Those are scheduled to ship to backers in April of 2018. We’ll then release them into stores, as we value our partners in retail and distribution and want the game to reach the widest possible audience. This should get Sentinels of Earth-Prime out just before summer, which is convention season for the game industry. We can thus run demos and promote it at important conventions like Origins and GenCon. This should all make for a strong rollout and help establish Sentinels of Earth-Prime as a worthy successor to Sentinels of the Multiverse.

What’s the next step? Expansions, of course! The way we’re designing the core game, it tells the story of key events in the years 2002-2006 of Earth-Prime, most notably the Grue attack on earth and Omega’s invasion of Freedom City. From there we have two boxed expansions planned. The first will advance the timeline to 2012, covering the Silver Storm in Emerald City and related events. The third expansion will bring the timeline up the present day, and include elements from The Cosmic Handbook and the new edition of Freedom City. Our plan is to do one release a year for the line, so the core game in 2018, the first expansion in 2019, and the second expansion in 2020. We may do additional mini-decks along the way. Certainly, we have plenty of characters to work with! Over the past 15 years, we’ve published literally hundreds of heroes and villains from the Earth-Prime setting, and more are on the way.

Mutants & Masterminds, the roleplaying game that birthed the Earth-Prime setting, will of course be continuing its run concurrently with Sentinels of Earth-Prime. The long-awaited third edition of the Freedom City sourcebook is coming out next. It’s in layout now and should be going up for pre-order by the end of the month. After that is a new print collection of the Rogues Gallery series of villains, which will include some all-new content, because you can never have enough villains in a superhero RPG! We round out the year with the launch of the Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook. As the name indicates, this is a beginner friendly entry point into the Mutants & Masterminds RPG. If you’ve never played M&M before, it’ll be a great place to start.

That should give you a good idea where we are going with Sentinels of Earth-Prime and Mutants & Masterminds. If you want to get in on the Sentinels of Earth-Prime Kickstarter, there’s still time! There are some stretch goals we’d love to unlock before the campaign ends, so do check it out. We’re counting on you, heroes!

Add-On Decks for Sentinels of Earth-Prime!

As promised we’ve unveiled the add-ons for Sentinels of Earth-Prime today! The info is on the Kickstarter page but I’ll repeat it here for the sake of convenience.

We’ve got four additional decks for Sentinels of Earth-Prime: two heroes, one villain, and one environment. You can get them by simply increasing your pledge. They are $6 per deck or you can get all four decks for only $20! So if you wanted two decks, you’d increase your pledge by $12. If you want want all four, increase it by $20. You’ll be able to pick the decks you want after the campaign via BackerKit.

Sentinels of Earth-Prime Add-On Decks

Let’s take a look at each of the add-on decks!

Eldrich

Eldrich is the Master Mage of Freedom City. An adventuring archaeologist of the 1930s, he is the reincarnation of the Atlantean mage who imprisoned Malador the Mystic millennia ago. He defends Earth-Prime from mystical threats and is an ally of the Freedom League.

Lantern Jack

The mysterious guardian of Lantern Hill dates back to the Revolutionary War in Freedom City. Stories claim that Lantern Jack is the restless spirit of a colonial patriot slain by a British officer when he attempted to warn the people of the city of an attack. The truth is much darker…

Malador the Mystic

Malador is an ancient sorcerer from the sunken realm of Atlantis. Once a noble protector of humanity and a scholar of mystical lore, Malador has become mad with power-lust. He wants nothing more than to wield ultimate power and be acknowledged as the supreme master of the mystic arts!

Sub-Terra

Sub-Terra is the strange realm deep beneath the surface of Earth-Prime, where the Serpent People and Morlocks engaged in a long and brutal war. It is a place of monsters, myth, and menaces spawned from both science and sorcery.

These decks have a decidedly mystical spin and will add a lot to the core game. Consider adding them to your pledge today!

The Star Raiders: New Mutants & Masterminds PDF

Star Raiders

Star Raiders

We have a new Mutants & Masterminds PDF for you today. Presenting … the Star Raiders!

In a galaxy in upheaval, heroes are found in unlikely places. That’s certainly the case for the crew of the Marauder, who have become known—and wanted—in the Stellar Imperium and the Grue Unity for their involvement in recent events. Some within the Republic Alliance call the Star Raiders heroes; others dismiss them as pirates, mercenaries, or renegades. In truth, they are all of those things and more.

Designed to mesh nicely with our Cosmic Handbook sourcebook, the Star Raiders are a band of ready-made rogues and swashbucklers ready to ply the spaceways as rivals in your cosmic adventures, or as a ready-made band of intergalactic heroes!

The Star Raiders PDF can be yours for just $4.95, or, if you place an order for Cosmic Handbook in print or PDF format, we’ll throw in the Star Raiders PDF for free!

Ronin Roundtable: Freedom City, Then and Now

The worlds we create certainly can take on a life of their own. That has been my experience with Freedom City, the central starting point for the Earth-Prime setting for Mutants & Masterminds, now the focus of two major forthcoming projects that reflect the history of the setting and its future.

Sentinels of Earth-Prime

Over on Kickstarter, the Sentinels of Earth-Prime card game takes the hugely popular Sentinels of the Multiverse and brings its game mechanics and design to Freedom City, focusing on the “classic” era of the second edition of the Freedom City sourcebook from 2005, and the Freedom League of that time, along with some of their most fiendish foes, like Omega, Argo, Hades, and the Meta-Mind of the alien Grue Unity.

For M&M fans new to the card game, Sentinels pits teams of heroes up against the challenges of particular villains and environments, using decks of cards to represent all of those factors, and emphasizing just the kind of heroic teamwork the Freedom League is know for. For Sentinels fans new to Mutants & Masterminds, the Freedom City setting is meant to capture the classic feel of the superhero comics and offer a setting for telling all kinds of stories in a roleplaying context. If you’re unfamiliar with the heroes of the Freedom League or their foes, worry not! We have plans to profile all of the characters in the days to come while the Kickstarter is ongoing, along with providing you with some looks at Freedom City, its history, geography, and feel as a setting

For those who’d prefer not to wait, of course, you can find out plenty about the larger context of the Earth-Prime setting in the Atlas of Earth-Prime, Emerald City, Hero High, and Cosmic Handbook sourcebooks, available in print and PDF from the Green Ronin online store. Speaking of which….

Freedom City, Third Edition

Freedom City is also getting some much-needed attention from the roleplaying side of things in the forthcoming third edition of the Freedom City setting sourcebook, which rounds out all of those previously mentioned setting books to provide a complete look at Earth-Prime. More than ten years after the events in the previous edition of Freedom City that is the focus for Sentinels of Earth-Prime, the Freedom League and other elements of the world have seen some changes: Older heroes have retired, passing on their mantles to a new generation, and new heroes have appeared, often with ties to past events.

Captain Thunder and Lady Liberty have both lost their powers and left the Freedom League, but the Light of Liberty has chosen a successor, and Captain Thunder’s son, Ray, Jr., has graduated from the Next-Gen and the Claremont Academy to take his father’s place in the League, although not in quite the form anyone expected. Likewise, the Raven has followed in her father’s footsteps to pass her dark cloak and experience on to a young hero operating out of New York City (as detailed in Atlas of Earth-Prime) to take up a career in politics. Meanwhile, the previous “rookie” heroes of the League like Bowman, Johnny Rocket, and Star Knight are now seasoned veterans, helping out the “new kids” like Thunderbolt, Lady Liberty, and Centuria, the daughter of the legendary hero Centurion from an alternate Earth destroyed by Omega. The ageless and immortal members of the team, like Daedalus, Dr. Metropolis, and Siren, remain largely unchanged, although Daedalus’ involvement in aiding alien refugees from the shattered Lor Republic has led some earthly authorities to question his loyalties.

And that’s just within the ranks of the Freedom League! The new edition of Freedom City also looks at various other heroes of the setting, like the Atom Family, along with the ranks of some of Earth-Prime’s most infamous villains, nearly a hundred characters in all. This is combined with new and updated art and additional views of Freedom City like those seen here.

Today: Kickstarter Launch! Tomorrow: Talent Search Rules!

Today we launched the Sentinels of Earth-Prime Kickstarter and it’s going great! As I write this, we are already over 75% funded and it looks like we’ll hit our basic funding goal on day 1. Amazing! Sentinels of Earth-Prime is a cooperative comic book card game that takes the setting of our Mutants & Masterminds RPG and combines it with Greater Than Games’ terrific Sentinels of the Multiverse rules. Sentinels of Earth-Prime is a stand-alone game but it’s 100% compatible with Sentinels of the Multiverse, so you can mix and match decks from either game. It’s like a comic crossover on your tabletop! For more info, head on over to Kickstarter and check out the campaign.

Tomorrow we’ll be posting the rules for our Talent Search. We know that there are a lot of folks waiting eagerly to see them. Just one more day and all will be revealed! If you missed the original announcement about the talent search, you can read about it here.

Ronin Roundtable: Sentinels of Earth-Prime Card Game Coming to Kickstarter This Month!

Sentinels of Earth-Prime, coming to Kickstarter, April 2017

Mutants & Masterminds is Green Ronin’s longest running RPG, first debuting in 2002 and receiving continual support ever since. The game’s very first supplement, Freedom City, introduced a world that we’ve continued to expand upon over the years in ways big and small. This culminated in January with the release of the Atlas of Earth-Prime, a full world book for the setting. It was a fitting way to celebrate Mutants & Mastermind’s 15 year anniversary but there’s more to come. The Third Edition of the Freedom City sourcebook is coming out in June. And later this month we’re launching a Kickstarter for the first ever Mutants & Masterminds card game, Sentinels of Earth-Prime!

I’ve long wanted to bring some of our RPG properties to the world of card and board games and Sentinels of Earth-Prime is our chance to do just that. It’s happening because a few years ago I started playing a lot of Sentinels of the Multiverse from Greater Than Games. I got to know its designer, Christopher Badell, on the JoCo Cruise and it turned out he was a long time Mutants & Masterminds fan. Comics, of course, are no strangers to crossovers and team ups, so it didn’t take long for us to start talking about doing a project together. The result will take Christopher’s excellent Sentinels of the Multiverse rules and our Mutants & Masterminds setting and combine them together into a powerhouse new game, Sentinels of Earth-Prime! As you may have read in our press release a few weeks ago, this will be a joint venture between Green Ronin and Greater Than Games.

Sentinels of Earth-Prime will have the same basic format as Sentinels of the Multiverse. It will include decks for ten heroes, four villains, and four environments. Naturally, I brought in Steve Kenson (designer of Mutants & Masterminds and creator of Earth-Prime) to help with the setting and story side of things. I wanted to use the classic Freedom League as the game’s heroes, as they had deep roots in M&M and conveniently consisted of exactly ten characters. Steve then suggested we use events from previous RPG books as the basis for our story, in particular the many invasions that the heroes of Earth-Prime had fought against over the years. The core game will concentrate on events that took place from 2002-2006 on Earth-Prime. Then we’ll advance the timeline in expansions down the road, until the card game and the RPG are synched up. In this way Sentinels of Earth-Prime will both explore the setting and serve as a tour through its recent history.

The Sentinels of Earth-Prime Kickstarter will go live the week of April 17. Follow us on Twitter (@GreenRoninPub) or Facebook to keep up with it and other Green Ronin news. We’re incredibly excited about this project and the chance to work with Greater Than Games. We’re starting a whole new chapter to the Mutants & Masterminds story. We hope you’ll be a part of it!

Ronin Roundtable: It’s a Team Effort

We are a very tiny team here at Mutants & Masterminds, and can only protect so much of the city on our own. But many tiny teams make for a mighty league. Thankfully, Green Ronin does not stand alone on the field of superhero gaming. We’re backed by some of the coolest and most creative third-party publishers in the hobby industry, and there are a lot of them out there, from small passion-project companies with one or two offerings to powerhouses that turn out monthly or even weekly offerings. Time spent in exciting crossovers with Green Ronin’s many allies won’t be wasted, and here are just a few of my personal favorites:

(the Might Miracle Guardians by Tony Parker)

Vigilance Press offers some of the most fun and creative characters out there. Their two Rogues, Rivals, and Renegades collections are some memorable lineups or rogues and rivals (as one would expect from the label), but my personal delight is the Kaiju Kultists installment of the Due Vigilance series and the oft-requested romance comic rules available in Strange Attractors. For added entertainment, give their podcast a listen; Beacon City is a great campaign that features guest stars from the Freedomverse!

Rogue Genius Games’s weekly Super Powered Legends series offers familiar faces from pop culture with modern twists, all written and illustrated by the double-threat Jacob Blackman. Also among their offerings is the incredibly useful Super Powered Bestiary.

The brilliant Steven Trustrum and I got started in the industry around the same time, and I spent most of my twenties with a professional crush on his writing. His company, Misfit Studios, puts out some of the most useful and insightful products around, including the indispensable Better Mousetrap which contains a wealth of character-building ideas, GM advice, new villains and organizations, and plenty of expanded options for the core Mutants & Masterminds rules.

Finally, Xion Studio offers the popular and well-developed Watchguard campaign setting, which I am embarrassed to admit I still haven’t managed to read through despite the incredible reviews and popularity. Despite my personal blind spot, Xion is worth highlighting if only because Charlie McElvy, the creator of Watchguard, is helping Carlos Cabaleiro and Vito Delsante bring the world of their comic book, Golden Guard, to life as an RPG as part of their kickstarter!

Our third-party publishers are an amazing group that work hard and deserve plenty of love. There’s nowhere near enough space here to highlight all the amazing creators who deserve it, so please share your favorites here on our forums or on social media!

Press Release: Green Ronin and Greater Than Games Team Up For Sentinels of Earth-Prime

Sentinels of Earth-Prime, coming to Kickstarter, April 2017

Sentinels of Earth-Prime, coming to Kickstarter, April 2017

 

GREEN RONIN AND GREATER THAN GAMES TEAM UP FOR SENTINELS OF EARTH-PRIME

New Card Game to Bring Together Mutants & Masterminds and Sentinels of the Multiverse

February 14, 2017—SEATTLE, WA: Green Ronin Publishing and Greater Than Games announced today that they would be working together to create Sentinels of Earth-Prime, a new version of the hugely successful Sentinels of the Multiverse card game using the core setting of the Mutants & Masterminds RPG. The game, a joint venture between the companies, is coming to Kickstarter in April.

“Nothing says superheroes like a great team up!” said Green Ronin President Chris Pramas. “We are big fans of Sentinels of the Multiverse around here, so there was no way we were going to pass up the chance to work with Greater Than Games. I’m especially excited that Christopher Badell, the original designer of Sentinels of the Multiverse, will be designing Sentinels of Earth-Prime as well.”

“Mutants & Masterminds is one of our favorite super-heroic RPGs—we’ve been fans since the first edition,” said Christopher Badell, Editor-in-Chief of Greater Than Games. “Some of the side characters from Sentinels of the Multiverse even started out as heroes and villains from our home games of M&M! So, when Chris Pramas mentioned doing a Mutants & Masterminds card game, we jumped at the chance. I am eager to bring the rich lore, characters, and settings from Steve Kenson—a hero in his own right—to the card game format, now that the Sentinels of the Multiverse line is coming to a close.”

Earth-Prime has been the core setting of the Mutants & Masterminds RPG since its debut in 2002. Its characters and stories have been detailed in many books over the years, from Freedom City and Foes of Freedom to Emerald City and the Cosmic Handbook. The Atlas of Earth-Prime, a comprehensive setting book, was just released in January.

Sentinels of Earth-Prime will be a stand-alone card game that can be played on its own or with decks and characters from Sentinels of the Multiverse for universe-spanning action. Its Kickstarter launches in April and Green Ronin will publish the finished game in 2018.

About Green Ronin Publishing

Green Ronin Publishing is a Seattle based company dedicated to the art of great games. Since the year 2000 Green Ronin has established a reputation for quality and innovation that is second to none, publishing such roleplaying game hits as Fantasy AGE, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, and Mutants & Masterminds, and winning over 40 awards for excellence. For an unprecedented three years running Green Ronin won the prestigious GenCon & EnWorld Award for Best Publisher.

About Greater Than Games

Founded in January 2011 by Christopher Badell, Adam Rebottaro, and Paul Bender, Greater Than Games, LLC designs and publishes tabletop games. At Gen Con 2011, they released Sentinels of the Multiverse, which was called the best game of Gen Con 2011 by notable reviewers. Sentinels went on to have several highly successful Kickstarter campaigns, culminating in the OblivAeon campaign in 2016, which raised over 1.5 million dollars.

Greater Than Games and Dice Hate Me Games (founded by Chris Kirkman) merged in 2015, combining their powers to maximize the awesomeness of the games they publish.

Contact Green Ronin Publishing

Nicole Lindroos
General Manager
nicole@greenronin.com
https://greenronin.com/

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Cosmic Science Sale and Charitable Giving Initiative

Green Ronin has done a good amount of charitable giving over the years. This has generally been on an ad hoc basis though, with us either reacting to disasters like the earthquake in Haiti or taking opportunities that came our way, like the Worldbuilders fundraising event at Emerald City Comic Con last year. Things feel different in 2017 though. It’s like we’ve all moved into a darker timeline, with forces thought vanquished in WWII coming back to haunt us again while a dangerous instability affects America and the world.

We’ve thus decided to be more active in our charitable giving. We’ve set up a page on our website about it, so you can see what we’ve done and keep up on what we are doing. Starting now we will also be having a sale in our online store each month that benefits a different charity. We will use these sales to highlight organizations doing good and important work that can help us all weather the coming days.

Our February sale will benefit the Union of Concerned Scientists. This a group founded in 1969. To quote their website: “Appalled at how the U.S. government was misusing science, the UCS founders drafted a statement calling for scientific research to be directed away from military technologies and toward solving pressing environmental and social problems.” Things were bad then. They are far worse now. Science and indeed the scientific method are under assault. This is short sighted to say the least, and the effects on America and the world may be dire.

We are putting The Cosmic Handbook on sale for $19.95 in print and $12.95 in PDF this month. $10 of each sale will go the Union of Concerned Scientists. Thank you for your support.

Cosmic Handbook

Cosmic Handbook (PDF)

—Chris Pramas

Begin at the Beginning

Every hero needs an exciting origin story. They also need an antagonist that holds a dark mirror up to their defining qualities, to better highlight the heroic nature of their choices and sacrifices, but one step at a time. Origin stories define a hero’s abilities, challenges, and boundaries, and just like a superhero, every gamer needs an origin story that introduces them to the hobby. And introducing your friends to Mutants and Masterminds is about to get a lot easier, because later this year we’ll be releasing the Basic Hero’s Handbook!

 

Targeted for release later in 2017, the Basic Hero’s Handbook is especially designed to be an easy introduction to Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition, giving players everything they need to pick up the rules, make their own characters, and run games.

 

 

Is this a revised rules system?

 

Nope, this is the same 3rd edition rule set you know and love, cleaned up and organized. Some of the more complicated rules are set aside for the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook. The Basic Hero’s Handbook focuses on getting to the action as a soon as possible, with streamlined character creation that only calls for a handful of player choices before you have a complete superhero ready to play! At its core, the BHH uses the same rules you’re used to, and your table can include players using the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook and the Basic Hero’s Handbook without any conversions or adjustments.

 

Is there anything in this for deluxe players?

 

If you’re a veteran to Mutants & Masterminds who already has a copy of the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook, there’s still plenty for you in the Basic Hero’s Handbook. We’re working on organizing all the rules a player needs at the table, making the book an inexpensive player’s reference for maneuvers, conditions, and other rules for easy perusal at the table. The Basic Hero’s Handbook is also a handy gamemaster training tool, with several pregenerated villains and four ready-to- play adventures. If you want to get your mom into M&M, or just want an inexpensive extra rulebook, the Basic Hero’s Handbook should have you covered!