This year, at Adepticon, the Basement of Death crew put on a custom Ultimate Encounter for Marvel: Crisis Protocol, called Mastermold. In this encounter, the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants must band together in order to stop Mastermold from creating an army of Sentinels, which will decimate mutant-kind and bring about a dystopian future.
Basement of Death is a gaming group that has become known for their massive 3D Space Hulk Board and now they are bringing that same passion to Marvel: Crisis Protocol. This year they brought two scenarios, one based on the official Thanos Infinity Gauntlet Ultimate Encounter and this one, a custom encounter designed to bring a Sentinel themed Ultimate Encounter to the game. Both feature custom 3D terrain features to add a little extra pizzazz to the scenario.
In this scenario, Mastermold is represented by a giant custom Sentinel that is seated at one end of the board. The heroes traverse raised platforms that are flanked by two Fabrication Portals, where Sentinels spawn into the game, while a Sentinel Prime starts in the middle of the board to serve as a speed bump for the heroes to deal with. The heroes start at the other end of the board and have to fight their way to reach Mastermold. Meanwhile, new Sentinels spawn at the end of each round. I played this scenario twice while at Adepticon, once as one of my paid events and a second alongside fellow Goonhammerer, Raf Cordero, in a private game session.
The Crisis Team is composed of two Squads of a maximum Threat Value of 18 each. Since this was a convention event, we had four players split into two teams, essentially creating 4 squads of 9 Threat each. This wasn’t exact, though, as some folks had more points worth of characters and some had less. We were also limited to X-Men and Brotherhood of Mutants characters, which helped to sell the theme quite a bit, and I enjoyed that – I live and die by theme when making my own Rosters. As mentioned before, I played this scenario twice during Adepticon. The first time we were limited to models chosen by the event organizer, Coop. The second game, we were allowed to sub in different X-Men or Brotherhood characters if we had them. We also didn’t have access to Team Tactics cards, though we did use Cyclops’ leadership ability during the games.
The Cosmic Threat player takes control of Mastermold and its Sentinel children. Mastermold is the big daddy you’d expect, with cranked up versions of the other Sentinel’s abilities and a whopping 30 hit points. It has a Range 4 builder called Plasma Rocket which allows it to pay power to add dice to the attack roll, and collects power based on damage dealt. Its spender is called Suppression Discharge, which is an Area 2 attack that can dish out Incinerate, Slow or Shock special conditions. He also gains defense dice for each Sentinel in play, making it another reason to take out his children as soon as possible. Other than, that its typical Sentinel fare, plus as an Encounter Character he’s immune to Bleed, Poison, Stagger and Stun.
Each round during the clean-up phase a Sentinel Prime, if its not currently in play, or a standard Sentinel are added to the table on top of one of the Fabrication Portals. Also, at the beginning of the clean-up phase if there are 3 Sentinels on the board – not including Mastermold – the Cosmic Threat player wins the game. So it is very important for the Crisis Team to handle the Sentinels in play, while also taking the fight to Mastermold. Also, if the Crisis Team has 4 or less characters in play the Cosmic Threat player wins.
There is no points tracker used in this scenario. It’s kill or be killed and the main objective for the Crisis Team is simple: destroy Mastermold. If they are successful, they win the scenario once he is reduced to zero health points.
In the first game, we absolutely trounced the encounter. During the first round, Mastermold didn’t have much to do and since he can’t move around the table and we were all well outside of his attack range. We also decimated the Sentinel Prime that started in play, trivializing him. Juggernaut, Colossus, Iceman and Mystique took Mastermold to task and Mystique blew his face off with her pistol. The encounter ended after only an hour, which surprised all of us, and we saved mutant kind from a dystopian future.
After that game, I hung around and chatted with Coop about the encounter and we started playing with ideas of what could be done to make it better. We originally thought of hiding Mastermold behind a laser fence, but that would make the problem of Mastermold being inactive worse. He had extended Mastermold’s Plasma Rocket to Range 5 during the game as well, but it didn’t make a whole lot of difference in the first round since we were still out of range most of the round. When we reconvened for a 2nd game on Saturday, Coop decided to add a 2nd Sentinel to the board at the beginning of the game to see how that worked out. We also added in the laser wall, but took it out during the first round when we realized it wasn’t helping the situation and that we didn’t have a solid system in place for interacting with it.
This time, things were a lot more tense, and at one point we had 3 Sentinels on the table. We were one clean-up phase away from failure until Cyclops was able to Optic Devastation the two that had been dazed the previous round. We had to split our resources in order to deal with Mastermold and the Sentinels and it felt like a much more complete scenario.
In the end, this second game lasted much longer, at roughly 2.5 hours total, and was a lot more fun. We had a many tense moments and we worked together well to decide where our resources were spent. We still came out on top, but it was hard fought and we took some major losses. Coop still had an issue where Mastermold didn’t do much for the first round and that was a bit of a problem.
While we were playing this match, we were brainstorming a few other ideas on how to make Mastermold more threatening, or how to split the party more. It was still just a matter of the Crisis Team marching down the board and handing out damage. We came up with the idea of adding turrets for Mastermold to control, extending his attack range, and forcing the team to get off of the central platform to deal with them. Also adding in control panels for the heroes to interact with to shut down the turrets rather than attack them outright, similar to the way Celestial Technology works in the Survival of the Fittest Ultimate Encounter.
Raf suggested that the turrets be tied to Mastermold’s health and to include the laser wall, cutting off Mastermold from the Crisis Team and making him and his platform inaccessible until the laser wall is taken care of. The wall would also be connected to an interaction that can be done once the turrets are down. Finally, with the turrets and laser wall dealt with, Mastermold would be vulnerable to attack and have a lesser health pool than he has currently.
This sounded like a good solution. It gives Mastermold something to do on his activation, allowing for attacks outside of his regular range. It also forces the team to break up and deal with multiple things at once, and gives support characters like Toad something interesting to do. Having gated progress would also give the players a sense of accomplishment and cinematic elements to the scenario.
Coop wrote all of our suggestions down and is going to look into new ideas to make the scenario better. I am all for it, this was a fun event and I’m very much interested to see where it goes from here. I’d definitely play it again as is, but, I think with a few more tweaks this custom scenario will really start to shine. If it’s at Adepticon again next year, I’ll be signing up for it for sure.
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