Hello, heroes!

Thanks for bearing with me on Tuesday. I definitely appreciate your patience - I’m doing much better now, and have more to tell you as a result of waiting just a couple days! Things are moving fast around here.

Here’s a roadmap for this update:

Scions

Ultimate Collector’s Case White Box

Scheduling

Plans

Let's get down to business!

More Scions

The last major update featured three of OblivAeon’s Scion servants, so here’s another three of them! And all of these have the same amount of HP! (That doesn’t mean anything - it just happened to work out that way. Look, I thought it was a funny coincidence.)

So, to start, a highly-unstable figure who first appeared on a card in the Sentinels of the Multiverse core game: Borr the Unstable!

He's building up to an explosion of terrifying proportions!

Next, we see someone a bit more familiar. You’ve probably fought this minor villain before, but now he’s back with more power and in a bigger role! Say hello to Empyreon.

Empyreon is barely holding himself together. And the energy that he houses has to go somewhere!

Last but not least, it’s the leader of the Cult of OblivAeon. In a distant galaxy, OblivAeon was worshiped by a group of mentally unhinged aliens. As a group, they sacrificed themselves to imbue the most worth of their number with great power in hopes that their Chosen would serve OblivAeon. OblivAeon was well pleased by their sacrifice, leading to the Scion, Nixious the Chosen.

Nixious wants desperately to prove to OblivAeon that the Chosen of the Flock is OblivAeon's most valuable ally.

With this set of Scions, that’s six down - four to go!

Ultimate Collector’s Case White Box

So! We have the final version of the white box! We’re thrilled, both to have this in hand, and also to finally be done with all the back and forth of this process.

Looks good! OK, OK. To be honest, it looks pretty much the same as all the others. But! There are some distinct differences that will really up the quality and sturdiness of this, the final iteration. All of the edges have been thoroughly reinforced, and the “hinges” of the top and bottom flaps are extremely tear resistant now.

Let’s look at the two most visible alterations.

There’s that front flap we were just talking about. The previous iteration was long enough that it was always pushing against the table when closed, adding extra stress to that top hinge. But that’s solved now!

Just SLIGHTLY shorter! That little bit of height reduction means less stress when sitting on a shelf, and also less stress when the box is being carried. A notable improvement from just a slight change. (That last sentence could be the mission statement of most playtesting.)

The other change was that flat, wide, top drawer.

It sits just a hair deeper in its slot now. In the previous version, it would push against the front flap ever so slightly, and that constant pressure added to the wear of the hinges. Even as reinforced as they are now, they’re still the weak point of the box - there’s always a weak point! A lot of the alterations we’ve been working on are all about protecting that weak point and reducing the stress on the top and bottom hinges. Success!

Time for some additional stress testing!

Here’s a pile of shrink-wrapped sets of cards. These are probably familiar to you, as this is the way cards come in every Sentinels card game product. The important thing here is that they’re wrapped in “bricks” of 100 cards. So! I could grab a giant pile of these bricks and fill the box up to the brim!

Besides the three drawers you see there, I also filled the other standard card-sized drawer, and also filled up the wider bin with tokens and oversized cards. Far too many of each. I even threw a hefty stack of rulebooks and cardstock in the top drawer. All of this resulted in a box that weighs well over 30 pounds!

Info to be gained from this: the Ultimate Collector’s Case can hold well over 6500 cards! Wow! That should help people understand the true volume of this thing. Hopefully that will put some concerns to rest.

Also, while the box was in this massive overloaded state, I dropped it. On purpose! I lifted it several inches over the tabletop and released it so it landed perfectly flat with a resounding THUNK! No damage! The box did not split at any seams! I didn’t take any pictures of this process - I was poised to do so, but it was entirely unremarkable. Nothing to see. If you want to know what the box looked like after the drop test, merely refer to the first image of the box above - that photo was actually taken afterwards when I realized I hadn’t taken a general photo of the box yet. That’s post drop. No damage.

Now, this doesn’t mean this box is indestructible. Let’s be realistic here. If I was carrying this box in my arms and dropped it on our concrete floor and it landed on a corner… it would DEFINITELY take significant damage. Given the weight of the contents, this box could not survive such a fall. So don’t do that. But! Rest assured, the Ultimate Collector’s Case can stand up to normal use and wear-and-tear without difficulty. Hooray!

Scheduling

OblivAeon has been delayed and delayed. Here we are, six months after the initial projected delivery date, and you still don’t have it. Heck, we still don’t have it! I am putting finishing touches on elements of the game, but much of the OblivAeon content is already at the printer. Not all of it! But it will be soon. At this point, we’re on track to begin our process of shipping games out to you in August. We won’t be done with that process before Gen Con, so we won’t be selling OblivAeon at Gen Con. But it will be going out right around then. That said, there is a new scheduling issue that we learned of in the last week, in the midst of all of our travels.

Let’s talk about volume. No, not how loud you are. How much space all this stuff takes up. ESPECIALLY the Ultimate Collector’s Case. All of this stuff is really truly huge. With as much space as all of this content takes up, and how large the print runs of each of these things have to be to fulfill all of the orders (well over 10,000!), it won’t all fit in a cargo container. It won’t fit in two cargo containers! Want to guess how many? Go for it. I’ll wait.

…

It’s going to take ten, 40 foot long, “high-cube” style cargo containers (high cube just means “these containers are taller and wider” - don’t ask me why it’s called that). TEN. That’s ridiculous. We have 3 loading docks and a pretty dang huge warehouse, but there’s no way we’ll be able to unload all of that, have it sit in the warehouse until all of the containers have been unloaded, and then start the ship out process. That’s just too much stuff.

Plans

So, what does this mean for us, and more importantly, what does this mean for you?

As I said, we’ll be starting our shipping process right around Gen Con in mid-August. However, due to the waves of massive containers hitting our warehouse, we’re going to have to go to a shipping system we haven’t used in years: rolling shipouts. Rather than each of them only having a lot of one or two different products, each container will have a cross-section of products necessary to make up your orders, and as we unload the containers, we will pack those orders up and ship them out. This means that weeks will pass between the first person receiving their OblivAeon order and the last person receiving theirs. Is this an ideal solution? Nope. However, it is necessary. And we’re going to be All Hands On Deck with making those shipments go out as fast as humanly possible. I’ve sent an e-mail to Tachyon about it, but I haven’t heard back yet.

So, now you know what we know, and what we intend to do about it. I’ll be posting updates here at least as regularly as I have been leading up to and all the way through this process. You’ll know what we’re doing as we do it. Barring natural catastrophes and/or attacks by criminal masterminds, I anticipate no surprises. I know it’s not all the news that you wanted to hear, but it’s where we are. Overall, I’m committed to three things: 1) getting these games done in a way that I can be proud of, 2) getting them in your hands ASAP, and 3) making sure you all know what we’re doing in every stage of the process.

Concerning other, very different plans, I’ve seen some chatter about us playing a game of OblivAeon that you all could watch. We want to do just that! We’re setting up a live-stream rig here in the office for playing games of Sentinel Comics: the Roleplaying Game starting sometime this summer. As soon as we have a copy of OblivAeon in hand, we’re going to play it using that setup! We’re also going to play other games of Sentinels of the Multiverse on it, but that’s another story for another day. Rest assured: we have many plans!

In conclusion!

Time for me to get back to work! Lots to do. Always. So many things we’re excited to make for all of you, but they all take time!

Bear with us. The Multiverse needs you. Finishing a thing correctly takes time, and we’re willing to take that time. It will be worth it in the end.