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spooky-ghostwriter · 10 months

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Sentinels Deck Number 6 - Ol’ Inkwell Town

A while back, I posted some Sentinels stuff which included a set of 1920s cartoon promos for all of my heroes - except Silhouette, who I hadn’t made at the time, but she is not left out!

But I know what you’re thinking. What are these old-timey cartoon versions of my heroes? How do they fit into the flimsy made-up canon that my decks are retroactively based on?

Okay, you’re probably not asking those questions, but I made a whole deck to answer them. Welcome to Ol’ Inkwell Town...

The story behind this deck is basically that the heroes woke up one day and found that they were no longer in New Granwall City. They were in an alternate cartoon version of their hometown - and they had to find a way to get back.

Ol’ Inkwell Town is made up of three distinct locations. My heroes Gold Dragon and Skimmer, plus guest heroes Charade and Alius (by insomn and Mistillitain respectively), explored the main city. Various street corners looked familiar to Gold Dragon and Skimmer, though danger lurked in the skies.

The first cards to show off are pretty simple mechanically, so let’s talk thematics. Ol’ Inkwell Town is mostly based on black and white cartoons. I watched a lot of Popeye in particular, since Gold Dragon’s old timey cartoon version was heavily based on Popeye. The deck also includes some Loony Tunes clichés like falling pianos and anvils.

Instead of simply drawing a falling anvil, I turned it into a character. Living objects is a bizarre trend of those classic cartoons, so I put faces and white gloves on everything from lamp posts to other heroes’ equipment.

The deck is intended to be wacky but deceptively brutal. Making hero equipment cards “come alive” is an effect that already exists in Sentinels, and it’s a dangerous effect because it allows villains to destroy your cards simply by doing damage. Ol’ Inkwell Town’s version is even more brutal by having your equipment fight you when you try to use them. However, heroes whose equipment are mostly magical (denoted by the Relic keyword) are immune.

Bomby is a very destructive effect, but you have a whole round to try deal with him before he goes off.

The second location visited by heroes is the cartoon equivalent of the Alesia Circus. This is where Escarlata, Electrogeist, and Tsukiko ended up.

The Table of Pies is both a benefit and a negative. Playing the top card of the environment deck usually means another cartoon is coming into play, accelerating the deck’s nonsense. Then it increases the damage the cartoons are throwing around by giving them an arsenal of pies.

However, the heroes can use the pies too - either throwing them as well, or eating them to recover HP. Heroes typically have powers that are better than what Table of Pies offers, but in a pinch, those powers might be exactly what you need.

Past the pies and into the circus proper, Escarlata and Tsukiko discovered an old-timey version of Tsukiko herself, who cast a horrifying spell on our modern-day Escarlata...

When Escarlata was pulled into the box, a cartoon version of her appeared as well! Electrogeist and the modern-day Tsukiko were shocked!

The Enraged Escarlata isn’t really a card in the deck. At the start of a game of Sentinels, you choose one of the 2-5 variant character cards that each hero has available, play as that character card, and put the rest back. Only one card in the official game can switch variants mid-game, but I think it’s interesting design space, so I threw it on a card here in an intentionally wacky environment.

The “thematic” way to play this deck is to have my heroes switch into their cartoon selves when Forced Volunteer hits them, but you’re free to switch your hero into any variant you want.

The modern-day Escarlata wasn’t really gone forever, though, and she quickly found her way back to the stage from wherever the magic had put her. There, she met her own cartoon counterpart...

The deck has two copies of Cartoon Counterpart, and even though it took extra drawing, I was convinced to change the art for the second copy. This is an annoyingly wordy card, but the premise is simple. Cartoon Counterpart fights its “owner”, who thematically is the one the cartoon is a counterpart of, but if you beat it up enough, it helps you. Cartoon violence is the solution to all of cartoon life’s problems.

So, where was the original Tsukiko during all of this? Erm... occupied.

When I asked my friends on the Custom Sentinels Discord for things they wanted to see in an old-timey cartoon deck, I got lots of ideas for tropes and clichés (most of which I already had on my list). But someone (insomn?) reminded me of a saw I’d drawn chopping Tsukiko in half on the incap for her own cartoon version.

This inspired Choppy Sawington, who is once again harassing Tsukiko. He has a really nasty effect that I’ve toyed with before, of either chopping a hero’s hand in half or dealing some damage. (I would’ve liked it to chop the hero’s HP in half, but that’s way too strong.)

The icon on Choppy is Tsukiko’s nemesis icon, meaning that Tsukiko and Choppy deal extra damage to each other. Given Choppy’s ties to stage magic, and Choppy focusing on discarding cards compared to Tsukiko’s focus on handing out card draw, and the fact that Choppy’s only victim so far has been Tsukiko, I felt it was more than justified.

The third location in the environment is only touched on briefly, but it’s the haunted mansion where a devilish vampire lives.

Silhouette’s cartoon counterpart, The Zany Zywen mentioned right at the start, is a user of dark magic who offers power to those who seek her out. This is usually a monkey’s paw situation where the person who gains the power realizes they were better off without it.

Naturally, Silhouette herself is all about dark magic and cursed power, and envious of her cartoon self, so she charged right into the castle. A guest hero, Antiquarian by Gaist, joins her.

The gargoyles themselves are your typical prankster minions, and in the game they’re annoyingly hard to kill and annoyingly destroy the heroes’ stuff. I don’t have much to say on them in particular, so let me go off on an art tangent.

When I first started this deck, I’d been drawing simple backgrounds (or no backgrounds at all!) for the old-timey cartoon stuff. However, not only did I need some background art for the digital implementation of the deck, actual old-timey cartoons really did have nice background art.

The backgrounds are still fairly simple compared to what I usually do, but I used CSP’s pencil tool to shade and add a unique texture to everything. I wanted to give everything a grainy look to it and make the non-cartoon characters really pop.

Zany Bats is a card designed pretty much for Silhouette. The bats seek out the hero with the lowest HP, and Silhouette is likely to be lowest since she starts with such low HP. A hero bitten by the bats may deal themselves Infernal damage, which is Silhouette’s whole shtick. And finally - this one was accidental synergy - if Silhouette plays her own Form of the Bat card, she has enough damage reduction that the bats won’t hit her at all.

After the three groups of heroes escaped their perils, they all tried to meet up to share their findings. But there were still two obstacles...

As the various cartoons met up, they started a fight that escalated into a giant brawl.

The two in the center of Big Ball of Violence are Escarlata and The Zany Zywen. You can also see Tsukiko’s Tank Top sticking out of the cloud, as well as Gold Dragon’s tail, one of Charade’s now-sentient Stun Batons, Choppy Sawington’s... nose...?, and a foot. That foot belongs to Ampere, another guest hero by Mistillitain.

Finally, there was but a single obstacle...

Me!

Cartoons and their animator fighting is a classic cartoon trope - though admittedly it’s more of a Looney Tunes thing than a black-and-white cartoon thing.

I had some mixed thoughts about what the animator should look like. A giant hand from the sky? Should it even be a character, or just the reality-warping pencil itself? But I like where this settled.

The Animator has two abilities. It “erases” a cartoon and deals radiant damage, and it also plays the top card of each deck, essentially creating and rewriting the game every round.

In the art, we see a guest hero Chronan the Barbarian (made by Gaist) as The Animator draws a cartoon counterpart for him.

And that’s the deck! None of the cards represent how the heroes actually got home, but I think there are a few possible options. Maybe The Animator was the one responsible for bringing them there (I was) and sent them back. Maybe Silhouette managed to make a deal with her cartoon self and got sent back with dark magic. And maybe Tsukiko’s magic box was powerful enough to return them to the real world.

Whatever the case, I had a blast making this deck and I hope Sentinels custom content players have just as much fun playing it.

#sentinels of the multiverse #fan-made environment #new granwall guardians #tsukiko #silhouette #escarlata #gold dragon #my art

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spooky-ghostwriter · 1 year

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Sentinels Deck Number 5 - Silhouette

Normally, some time after finishing a Sentinels deck, I like to give a general explanation of what the deck is about, using a few cards as examples. This time, I felt I had something to say about darn near every card in the deck. So... let’s lean into that. I’ll go through the cards roughly in chronological order and tell the story of Silhouette, the goth vampire heroine.

Though Silhouette (civilian name Zywen Lotus) has a fascination with darkness, she’s still... mostly heroic. Silhouette gets her shadowy powers from an evil vampiric artifact called the Shadow Veil, and I wanted the player to feel like her powers are dangerous. Because of that, she starts with a pathetically low 20 hit points and a lot of cards in her deck have her deal herself damage. Trying to prevent the damage typically doesn’t work, so you’ll need some classic vampire life-stealing powers to keep Silhouette healthy!

This also marks my switch to Clip Studio Paint for digital art, and it helped me make some of the best art I’ve ever drawn!

Chronologically, the earliest we see Silhouette is on the incapacitated art for Escarlata, a hero I showed off some time ago. At that point, Silhouette was a little blonde girl by the name of Abby Adler.

Abby’s parents were obsessed with making her into their ideal daughter - a prim and proper good catholic girl. They controlled how she dressed, how she acted, what she studied, everything they could.

In contrast, Abby was more interested in dark and spooky things that her parents would have disapproved of. In particular, she started visiting a vampire coven. She became enraptured by vampire culture and history.

When Abby’s best friend Cassandra was released from the hospital depicted above, Cassandra had gained the power to control fire. Jealous of Cassandra’s relative freedom and superpowers, Abby manipulated the coven master into converting her into a vampire.

Abby returned home to her parents, newly converted and with a new name, Zywen. Her parents kicked Zywen out of the house in the middle of a sunny day, where Zywen nearly died. Luckily, Cassandra found her in the nick of time.

So this brings us to the first step of Zywen’s journey. She is now a vampire. I wanted to include a bunch of “obvious vampire tropes” in the deck for a few reasons. For one thing, the deck also includes a lot of ‘shadow magic’, and I wanted it to be as clear as possible that the character you’re playing is a vampire. But also, vampires vary so wildly from one work of fiction to the next that I wanted to nail down what my vampires can do.

Vampires in the Spooky Ghostwriter Comics-verse are significantly physically stronger than humans at night, but weaker during the day. They drink blood, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be human blood. Animal blood works just fine. They can turn into bats and have slight hypnotic abilities.

Another important piece of any hero deck is to show off the character’s personality. Zywen is an edgy edgy girl. Why drink blood out of a glass when you can have a goblet? Why have a desk lamp if it’s not shaped like a skeletal arm?

However, as disappointing as it may be for her, she is not an ancient sorceress in a Victorian-era mansion. She lives in an ordinary with Cassandra. She plays video games and dresses up her friends in modern goth outfits.

The next step of Zywen’s journey focuses on a character that I haven’t made a deck for yet...

La Nocturna, also pictured in Escarlata’s deck, is one of Escarlata’s greatest nemeses. She’s a vampire, but with even greater powers than normal. La Nocturna had the ability to summon hands made out of solid shadow.

La Nocturna was considered to be a hero, a member of the New Granwall Guardians just like Escarlata. However, La Nocturna didn’t just arrest criminals - she massacred them. In her eyes, the rest of the Guardians were too soft to do what needed to be done to prevent further crime. (Though even that was a justification - really, La Nocturna just wanted to drink human blood and used her hero work as an excuse.)

Escarlata and La Nocturna fought some pretty brutal battles, but it was Zywen who ended the feud once and for all. Zywen knew that the source of La Nocturna’s power was the Shadow Veil. After a particularly rough fight that left Escarlata in bad shape, Zywen used her skills of deception and knowledge of vampire lore to ambush La Nocturna and take the Shadow Veil for herself.

However, when Zywen first put on the Shadow Veil, La Nocturna dissolved into dust. The dark magic that fueled all vampire powers left La Nocturna and was absorbed into the veil, killing her. Whether Zywen knew this would happen or not is intentionally ambiguous...

Now, Zywen had the same shadow powers as La Nocturna, and in rare circumstances, used them to fight criminals. But she still didn’t consider herself a hero, wrought with guilt over killing La Nocturna. Furthermore, the Shadow Veil was full of evil magic, and it had a tight grip on Zywen’s mental state.

This is where the core of the deck’s mechanic comes in. The Shadow Veil is evil. Using it hurts Zywen, but you also get benefits from taking on those risks. When you play the game, you’re moving HP tokens around, but you’re also deciding how far Zywen’s willing to tap into her dark powers.

(Side-note: Soulsearching shows off another quirk my setting’s vampires share with some other vampire mythos - no reflections!)

Finally, as villainy in New Granwall City became worse and the New Granwall Guardians began to need more members, Zywen decided to move forward. Maybe she didn’t fully forgive herself for what she’d done, but however she got her powers, it was worth doing some good with them.

Zywen briefly joined the New Granwall Guardians with an exact replica of La Nocturna’s outfit, taking over her identity. This was really confusing for me as a writer and I couldn’t expect anyone to figure out how this “second La Nocturna” thing worked by looking at a deck of 16 unique cards. So I skipped over this part of the story and moved on to the introduction of Silhouette.

Zywen decided that the Shadow Veil as it had been known before was La Nocturna’s symbol - a symbol of fear and evil. In her studies into vampire lore and magic, she found a way to change the veil’s appearance.

Transmute the Veil is a huge moment in Zywen’s story. Zywen is a character who very rarely has control. She starts out controlled by her parents. Then when she gets the Shadow Veil, she’s fighting for control over it.

Now, she’s the one calling the shots. And I wanted to represent that by making sure that Transmute the Veil offers a choice. “Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you find two semi-specific cards, choose one and keep it” is not a rare effect in Sentinels. But Transmute the Veil does something that no other card does - it makes sure the two cards are distinct. Every time you play Transmute the Veil, you will have a choice.

With the Shadow Veil in a new form, Zywen created a new costume and became Silhouette. From here, the rest of the deck generally just shows Silhouette on various adventures. She works alongside Escarlata in Brutal Ambush, and a couple cameo heroes in Drown In Darkness:

Alius, on Silhouette’s left is an upcoming hero created by Mistilitain. Charlie, on her right, is a shapeshifting detective created by Bobbertoriley. Bobbertoriley also created the environments depicted on both these cards. Brutal Ambush shows a casino run by and named after Jericho Moondancer (the non-demon). Drown In Darkness takes place in the spooky woods of Birchwood, Mass. The hedgehog gremlins being drowned are cryptids you can fight there!

Notably, both of these cards carry the “Infernal self-damage” cost. The Shadow Veil’s evil influence is still around - using shadowy powers or being too brutal still makes Silhouette deal herself damage.

The struggle between Silhouette’s good nature and her evil powers is a recurring theme.

This brings us to everybody’s favourite card of the deck. I love it because it, along with Brutal Ambush, are some of the best pieces of art I’ve ever drawn. Players love it because it’s one of Silhouette’s strongest cards and sets up a fun challenge where players earlier in turn order want to leave lots of enemies alive with juuuust enough HP for Silhouette to jump in and drink their blood.

So what’s going on here in terms of story? Well, most vampires in New Granwall City believe in living peacefully with humans. Zywen does too. But one coven master, Lazarus Vane, thinks differently. Lazarus wants vampires to return to their baser instincts and has the magical ability to make it happen. Casting a spell on the very moon, Lazarus made all the vampires in the city go berserk. Once again, poor ol’ Zywen just can’t stay in control of herself.

(By the way, the character getting his blood sucked is The Shining Knight, a minor villain who also shows up in Escarlata’s deck.)

Spooky.

Well, only a few more cards to go. Let’s get this done.

Silhouette becomes more adept with the Shadow Veil than La Nocturna ever was. La Nocturna could only create shadow hands. Silhouette eventually learns how to create an iron maiden.

Screaming Shadows represents her pulling a victim into a sort of shadowy realm full of distorted faces that scream at them. The faces also scream at Silhouette. Fun times.

The one getting screamed at is Unmute - a villain by @insomn14 . We were working on these decks concurrently, and are both fans of each other’s work. So I have Unmute as a cameo here, and Silhouette shows up on one of Unmute’s cards.

The guest character in Black Iron Maiden is The Faithful, created by zerami.

Vampire’s Tome is the spellbook that taught Zywen how to morph the Shadow Veil, but it taught her a lot more than that!

Spirit Siphon is a technique that only a few vampires can perform - drinking someone’s very essence instead of their blood. It could theoretically leave her target an empty husk, but that wouldn’t be very heroic. Silhouette’s version of the spell typically leaves her victim too tired to continue the fight while also restoring her stamina.

Spirit Siphon has another guest hero on it - Radiance, also created by @insomn14 . Radiance is one of my favourite heroes in the game, homebrew and otherwise. insomn and I also got a kick out of how Radiance and Silhouette have some mechanical similarities while being as opposite characters as possible. Radiance is a cheerful ray of sunshine that motivates her allies.

Because of all that, I knew I wanted to give Radiance a key role in Silhouette’s deck. Spirit Siphon is Silhouette’s only card that appears in the deck at 4 copies. You’re probably going to draw one every game, so you’re probably going to see Radiance.

And that is every card in Silhouette’s deck, and why it’s there. Thanks for indulging me! Here’s a close-up of Brutal Ambush, my favourite art in the deck alongside Bloodlust.

See you next time when I turn everybody into 1920s cartoons.

#sentinels of the multiverse #fan-made hero #silhouette #escarlata #gold dragon #tsukiko #my art #new granwall guardians #whoops forgot to post this for like six months

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