SENTINEL #4 Kickstarter Funded, Final Production Underway

Comics, D&D and other unburdenings...

Hello my friends,

I started writing this on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, and have been writing and rewriting it since. I should have written this on Saturday, Nov. 2, shortly after the Kickstarter funds were processed and disbursed. Oops.

That would have been a good time to give you all an update on how things are going. Because back then, I could have just told you how things were going with the Kickstarter. A happy report. Now, however, I find myself contemplating the meaning of “how things are going.” It carries with it a heaviness that did not exist on Nov. 2. Now, I’m struggling to write this stupid little newsletter for my stupid little comic. 

*SIGH*

Here’s the question I’m wrestling with: Do I talk about ‘it?’ Or do I pretend it didn’t happen and just talk about SENTINEL?

OK…

SENTINEL FIRST

It was a feeling of great joy when I learned (amidst playing a D&D game on a Wednesday night) that our Kickstarter for SENTINEL 1-4 had successfully reached its goal. We exceeded the goal by several hundred dollars, including late pledges. Running the campaign during Granite State Comicon and some help from the local media telling my story truly helped. 

Thank you to all who supported this campaign!

This was certainly the strongest campaign we’ve had for the series to-date. Alas, we did not meet the stretch goal to reprint the first issue of SENTINEL (and provide those new variants as rewards) -- but I have a few ideas I’m kicking around to get that done some other way.

The campaign is over, but the “Late Pledges” option is still available to late comers. If you missed the boat, it’s not too late to preorder your copy of Issue 4 or past issues. Click here to make a late pledge.

We immediately started designing some of the design pages we’ll need to wrap up the book, starting with a new logo for the Cover C art by JK Woodward. If you recall, this is meant to be an homage to the Wrath of Khan poster by Bob Peak.

Designer Simon Casado, a new SENTINEL team member, did a fantastic job. Check it out!

I hope to make this into a poster as well. We have a few other pages to work on and then we should be ready to send it to the printers, barring any additional pinup art etc. that might straggle its way in.

The goal is to send everyone their rewards some time early next year, no later than February.

D&D Stuff

As my first calendar year of running monthly D&D one-shots at my local comic shop comes to a close, I’m proud to look back and say this little experiment has been a resounding success. I’ve also gone legit and hired Simon to make me a logo for paid one-shots, and purchased a URL (website to come later). Check it out!

Some may measure success of Wondrous One-Shots by the popularity of the thing but that’s a little too “Might Makes Right” for my comfort (seems like some folks need reminding that Might Makes Right is a logical fallacy that tends to be favored by bullies and tyrants). I digress. I measure the success of this series by how much I learn from it and how much the players enjoy an immersive, fun experience. The one-shots have been growing, for what it’s worth. We had a table of 11 players in the November game, which was unwieldy but we made it work.

I had advertised a limit of 7 players, but had no mechanism to enforce it, nor needed one for most of the year. Now, we will have to preregister players and perhaps break it up into two groups.

The October game was a haunted house adventure, with some fun added twists and tropes that I really enjoyed. We also decorated the game room at the comic shop to be all dark and spooky. In September, we did a game where everyone was an evil wizard going through the final trials and puzzles to graduate from an evil wizard school… that was one of my original homebrew concepts and I think the players really enjoyed the balanced mix of roleplay, mystery, puzzles and combat. Another homebrew game had players design a magic sand castle hotel and distract a VIP guest while fighting off a horde of zombies attacking the outer walls--that was a hoot! I’ve also had fun creating some continuity between various one-shots so it feels a little like a micro-campaign.

It was also my distinct privilege to run some birthday one-shots for hire, which were some of my favorite games of the year, particularly one for a 13-year-old boy named Phin, whose halfling cleric learned he was part merfolk while delving through the belly of a behemoth sea creature. (Another bespoke homebrew by yours truly).

If you are in the southern New Hampshire area and want to hire me for a birthday D&D one-shot, reach out to me at ryan@birthdayoneshots.com! 

I’ve spent much of my weekends rotting in sweatpants and hoodie, trying to plot out the next calendar year of adventures for the monthly Wondrous One-Shots series. I’m excited about some of the original concepts and a brand new setting we’ll be exploring. 

And sure, I might be manically reading D&D books to keep my mind off of current events…  

‘It’

To be honest, I’m struggling emotionally. I, like many of you, are having difficulty reconciling the fact that so many people made the wrong choice (not politically, but morally) and that so many of our friends and family were among them. To me, this is the greatest moral failing of the century. And I’m so incredibly disappointed.

To my friends who are nonwhite, women, LGBTQ+, members of the press and other groups who have literally been threatened by the new leaders of this nation and their cultish adherents with violence or to be stripped of your rights, I stand in solidarity with you and your right to exist, to live with dignity and to speak truth to power. 

As many of you know, I first wrote SENTINEL in 2012 as a TV spec script for a new Star Trek series. Back then, we had no new Star Trek content on TV and no sign that any was coming. No new shows came out between Enterprise, which had aired its last episode in May 2005 and Discovery, which aired September 2017. It was a barren time for the franchise.

During that time, we were also seeing a rise in xenophobia, incivility, political polarization and a blanket distrust of all news media (casting the baby out with the bathwater).

This is what SENTINEL is about. It’s not just a fun adventurous romp through space (it is also that). SENTINEL, like its spiritual forebear Star Trek, is a morality play. It’s a story about people trying to find a place where they belong in this world, about what makes a free society, and the role that pluralism and a free press plays in that, about what happens when an aging republic becomes corrupted by lies, isolationism and the concentration of privilege, and about how embracing the things that make us different can make us stronger than ever before.

The dream of America is to create a society that welcomes difference, empowers reason and truth, and gives equal opportunity no matter how humble your beginnings, your gender, who you love or the color of your skin. We’ve never needed to be more reminded of this than now.

I love you all. Please be kind to one another. That is how we resist; with every day kindness and respect. By not letting hate win in our own lives.

…

In conclusion, be creative, be curious and be caring. These are the best things to be.

BYE