See now I need to figure out the Menagerie-verse version of this scene. 
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This is the stress test lab for new Quill inventions, the way they ram cars into walls for safety testing. Quill devices and inventions are routinely put through machines that try to smash, grind, or pulverize them. Hard hats are required in this space.
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While I put together a color pallet for the inside of the Quill Compound (I’m really liking the design of the Cornell Tech campus to help inspire the exterior of the compound) I figured it was time to designs for some of the related characters. As always, input and opinions are welcome.
First up is Jason’s dog, Brigand. Since Brigand is a Cardigan Welsh Corgi, it’s not difficult to make a design for him: make a little loaf and give him a tuxedo and lil socks.
Probably made his head a little too big, makes him look more puppyish than @Dave described him. Hopefully the final versions will look a bit better. I also expect that given the description of Brigand’s modified intellect, I imagine he’s about as smart as Ein from Cowboy Bebop (minus some light hacking) but I could be off.
Next up is Cosmos Jones. Not a lot of detail on her other than some casual mentions here and there, so I could be completely off her. I designed her to just be a general warehouse worker for the Quill Compound, so dressed for utility and a high visibility vest. Other than that, can’t say much.
Leaving the Quill Compound, I had a sketch sitting around for Nono for a while that I decided to slap some quick colors on. She sees like she would dress in bright colors, making her even more at odds with Alycia’s secret agent vibe. Only detail that isn’t visible here is that in keeping with her visual source, I have her being tall, about a head taller than most of the other girls and about as tall (and taller in some cases) as the boys from Gardner Academy.
As a bonus, I also tried thinking about how the description boxes in a comic version of the Agents of AEGIS would look when Nono took her brain drugs, thinking that would be a more long term feature of the character (and it could still be, Bill’s always surprising me with these stories). Very subtle, but I figure it would start much more obvious and then lighten up as the drug ran its course. Or maybe the other way around? There’s value in both options.
Finally, mostly because I didn’t want to post in two different threads, my take on Pyrrhus Chin. Given than Alycia described his expressions as “looking into a mirror” I tried to draw his face as close to how I draw Alycia’s as possible. Familial resemblance perhaps or maybe some reasons, don’t know Bill’s playing close to the vest still.
I also tried to make him resemble Alycia from the painting in this card as close as possible to make the “you have been replaced vibes” as strong as possible.
Not sure what the next thing I’m going to work on is going to be (my interest comes in spurts and stops these days) but hopefully it will be some bad approximations of architectural drawings.
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I used Zalgo text to represent the degeneration, so it’s nice to see some thoughts on how it’d appear visually 
Alycia told her no more, but SNOWMAN pocketed the patches. What could that mean…?
Let’s just say I can be very flexible about how Pyrrhus Chin looks.
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Given my current suspicions, I’m not horribly surprised by that answer.
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I’d forgotten all about her, to be honest. Which brought be back here (and some good color text for warehouse stuff and people, and another good re-read).
I’d imagined a bit more brown and gray in Brigand (not counting the grizzled aspects).
(also a Welsh Cardigan)
I like Pyrrhus.
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Even though we’re not gaming today, I figured I would spend a little bit of my time before I head out to St. Louis talking about some Menagerie gaming adjacent things.
Updates from late time: Unmute’s (the Iconoclast rebrand) villain deck is mechanically complete. A lot of folks often talk about how difficult it is to make villains in Sentinels of the Multiverse and after wrapping up her and Ghostheart, I now agree. She has 17 unique cards, so I have a bit of work to do in the art mines before she’s wrapped up, but I hope to have her all done by the end of the summer. Here’s a preview: Unmute’s flip side, AKA when her cybernetics go haywire and go into overdrive.
Speaking of summer, I have some variants for Radiance and Charade in the hopper. Radiance is pretty easy since hers are tired to certain story events (one is based on my original design for Radiance’s hero costume and the second based on Radiance’s time as a hologram) but Charade is a bit trickier. What I would love to do is narratively tie the mechanics (which thematically involve Charade not have prep time and having to use whatever is on hand to accomplish her goals) to the Agents of AEGIS storyline Bill is doing in Phase Two, but I also don’t want to tie myself to making cards for the rest of that team (SNOWMAN, Nono, Hot Mess, and Agent 1337) so I need to noodle out what to do there.
That leaves the Christmas Invasion as what I should be focusing on mechanically, but I’m also simultaneously working on Concord and Mercury’s hero decks, environment decks for Oakland Cemetary, Halcyon City, the Quill Compound, and St. Lucia’s (the hospital where Mercury’s dad was kept, as well as where the fight with the Concordant Trio took place), and noodling out an overhaul for the Concordant Trio villain deck with my new designer eyes and the events and lore Bill’s come up with during the Princess Peri storyline.
No, I can never focus on just one thing, as much as I would like to.
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We all know that Alycia is carrying that entire team so you can pretend those useless loads aren’t around
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Update time and it comes with a lot of positive news. First, Unmute is all wrapped up.
I think this turned out great. Added a lot of stuff to my art process where I was able to complete two to three illustrations a week without feeling like trash afterwards. In fact, I was usually looking forward to completing the next illustration when I finished up. So big positive there.
Also, it’s fun to have an excuse to draw the team in some bad situations. Going to have to work on more early days Menagerie stuff so Jason can show up other than to be tormented though.
Additionally, I also managed to finish up the other piece that I had talked about in my last post.
Summer is adorable as always, even when upset that her designs drew the attention of an ancient god with designs of vengeance. This one was a bit experimental in places, particularly the colors, but I think it turned out well.
Next steps are to work on the Christmas Invasion deck and whittle it down to something reasonable (I don’t know how I could have too many ideas about that event either) and wait for the Unmute digital deck programming to be done so I can make sure my plans for her character cutouts work.
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Looks like you got some positive shoutouts for this work:
I do get quite a bit of praise for my work with these card sets.
While I could discount Telsa_Coil and bobbertoriely’s comments in that thread a bit since they are both my friends and primary contributors of feedback for my decks (along with a couple others also mentioned in that thread), I can’t deny that the Menagerie of the Multiverse has the second-most playtime out of any user submitted set on Steam other than the Cauldron (which is 54 decks made over nine years and have a license from the creators of the actual game to sell their decks in storefronts), so coming in second to someone with a large existing fanbase is pretty good.
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Super small update, but I figured I would share that my programmer friends are moving right along with getting Unmute moved over to Digital and I’m having a bit too much fun writing dialogue for when you have different heroes in the lead spot against her. (For the record, I only do the villain side. The character’s creator does the hero’s side, but they can also have special text for when facing a particular villain.)
All the code and extra artwork is probably going to be done by this weekend, but I’ve got to wait a little bit for some music I commissioned to get finished up. Unmute is a bit of a pain because she needs two versions: one for her normal victory and one for her special “you lose the game” condition.
Also have I mentioned I’ve been commissioning music and it’s turned out really cool so far?
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Things are progressing a bit slower than expected with Unmute, but still progressing. I still need three more art assets and one of them is going to be a bit tricky, but I think once I have the composition right everything else will fall into place.
One thing I don't think I've talked about is exactly what decks I want to do. My initial plan was just to do the final configuration of the Menagerie and some villains I found interesting and call it a day, but ambition has gotten the better of me and I now have a three-tier system that ranks everything from MUST HAVE to WOULD BE COOL TO HAVE.
MUST HAVE
Hero Decks
CharadeDONE
Concord
Ghost GirlDONE
Mercury
RadianceDONEVillain Decks
Netherwarden (Ghostheart rebrand)DONE
Tyran Corporation (Rook Industries rebrand)
Unmute (Iconoclast rebrand)DONEEnvironment Decks
Downtown Halcyon
Oakland Cemetery
St. Lucia Medical
WOULD LIKE TO HAVE
Hero Decks
A10
Armiger
Jason Quill
Link and Pneuma (both represented in a single deck)Villain Decks
The Azure Empire (Vyrotivia/Dread Queen rebrand)
The Christmas Invasion
Clockwork (Doctor Infinity rebrand)
The Concordant TrioEnvironment Decks
AEGIS Prison Break
Halcyon International
The Sepiaverse
WOULD BE COOL TO HAVE
Hero Decks
Hot Mess
The Newmen Brothers (Otto, Mo, and Bill)
Nono
Snowman
Space Bug (Farlander rebrand) (?!)
Super ChicaVillain Decks
The Architects of Evil (Blaster of Paris, the Flying Bu�ress, Intern, Madhesive, Rubble Rouser,
and Super-Grandma)
Grasscutter One (Carbine rebrand)
Sablestar (rebranded, eventually)Environment Decks
The Orphean Market
On top of these, I also have some decks from other superhero games I’ve played/run I would like to make for myself, mostly because I think more people need to experience the awfulness of Cortex Rex and Cybersaurs (still one of my greatest accomplishments as a GM, by far).
Ambition is a hell of a thing.
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Similar to Link & Pneuma, what if you had a combo Hot Mess/Nono deck on the list? That means one fewer item on the backlog.
We haven’t seen much of Big Bill outside a couple teamups, and nothing of Mo. That’ll be changing soon.
I’ve been writing the Trio more toward anti-hero territory but they could still function as villains. I do have some space villains in the works…
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That is true, and everything in the Would be Cool to Have list is so far out (other than Space Bug which is due to my love for feral gremlin characters and him mostly being based on when I played him in supers game two years ago) that it’s highly possible that they could work like that. It’s also entirely possible they just show up as non-character targets in other decks (Alex AND Hot Mess in the AEGIS deck? It could work.)
Oh yeah, they definitely fall more into the “was antagonists in a handful of stories” camp than strictly villains. If I get far enough, I would really want to release a hero deck version of the Trio (and Ghostheart/Netherwarden) for exactly that reason. Sentinels of the Multiverse did that exact same thing, so I think I’m allowed.
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So now that we have the list of decks, let’s assign some level of efforts to them.
Clockwork [villain deck]
I honestly have no idea how to handle this deck. Its entirely possible to have it be a big supers slugfest (that was kind of what the original fight looked like) but time travellers have the possibility of leading to interesting mechanics (the Cauldron’s Mistress of Fate basically plays out like Groundhog’s Day, while Marvel Champions’ take on Kang the Conqueror involves the heroes getting split up into different time periods fighting different incarnations of Kang and having to regroup) and I feel like Clockwork warrants at least exploring that possibility.
LOE: High
Jason Quill [hero deck]
There are two paths to take with Jason: play up the nanites or play up the science adventurer. You could go with both, but I would be worried that if you attached mechanics to either, you would leave yourself a bit bare there. I currently have one that goes all in on the nanites, but I think it doesn’t show off enough of Jason’s character and will likely go much more into the science adventurer route with the nanites just being something that are there but don’t have a lot of mechanics around them.
That said, I do kind of want there to be a mechanical hook to Jason in case I ever feel the need to make a deck for the evil version of Jason from the future, that way I can make that villain a riff on Jason’s existing mechanics.
LOE: Medium
Grasscuter One [villain deck]
Bill’s rebranding of Carbine as the mercenary group of the Grasscuters instantly sparked a lot of ideas for me. And I have the basics of a deck already drafted for their leader, Grasscuter One. Currently, there’s an effort among the Playtest Group to make villains for the Vengeance Mode of play (where instead of fighting a single villain, you fight a team of three-to-five villains) that aren’t a pain in the butt and scale horrendously, but Vengeance mode is perfect for relatively one-note villains and I think GC1 qualifies there.
Really, the biggest challenge here is going to be fluff and theming. I have styled GC1 as a former Chin follower and most likely a Charade nemesis, so I’m probably just going to need to run some stuff by Dave to make sure they fit his vision for the followers of Achilles.
LOE: Low
Bonus Round: Environments
Environments are simulantously very easy and very hard. They’re easy in that you can just slap a bunch of mechanics together and call them a deck, and they fall right in line with what already exists out there both canon and fan-created. But they are difficult in that it means they live and die by theming.
And the Menagerie’s fights tended to not matter too much about where they took place at. It says a lot that when I think of strong ideas for environments, a particular museum and an under construction skyscraper come to mind more clearly than anywhere the Menagerie went.
Oakland Cemetery is on the easier end: Ghosts. Lots of ghosts and ghost adjacent things.
St. Lucia Medical is a mixed bag: I can pull some stuff from the Menagerie’s fight with the Trio, some stuff with Silver Streak while he was laid up with the mental whammy put on him, and also cheat in Doctor Liljenquist from CWC. That might be enough, but we’ll see.
Downtown Halcyon is simultaneously too big and too small: so many things that I could include, but so few of them canon. After watching the finale of season four of Young Justice (four years after hearing about how much I should watch the show and I finally watched it over the course of last month) I’m thinking about stealing some ideas and concepts from that to flesh this out a bit. I’ll keep things vague for spoiler reasons, but hopefully I’ll have something to show off in a couple weeks.
That said, if you ever feel the desire to start making custom content for Sentinels, I wholehearted recommend starting with environments.
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“The Magic Kingdom” is going to be all about time war from the time warriors’ perspective. It’s Summer, Jordan, Nassir Amari, Ghost Girl, and Ghostheart vs. Doctor Infinity. Hopefully how I handle it will give you some ideas.
I’ll always defer to Dave here, but Jason’s Phase Two story right now uses the “science adventurer” angle as the way he gets things done, with “nanites” being more the MacGuffin and story driver than the source of his moment-to-moment powers.
I don’t know how much you want to incorporate things like Jenny’s Poppet system, where there’s other spinoffs of Jason’s nanotech that do more specialized things, but I’m writing those in as options.
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I am both eagerly looking forward to this and completely frightened by this synopsis.
That is probably the route to go, barring Dave’s input. That could also be the basis for the separation between hero Jason (Jason who uses the nanites as a tool) and villain Jason (Jason who is all in on the nanites).
Trust me, the moment I get to use the Antibodies, the Poppet system, and Talos in any meaningful way I’m going to take it. It makes me slightly disappointed I didn’t go in on modding Marvel Champions where I could make some cool Antibody-themed modular set so that Antibodies could mix in other villains’ plots.
Hmmm, Talos as a Vengeance villain? The FSB site from The Golden Fleece as an environment? 
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No spoilers! (Yet.) I’m trying to wangle Margie into watching the last half of the season with me.
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