Tag: Comic Books

Age of Wonders: Maly Wywich

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Fantasy Fiction, Superhero Fiction, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying4 Comments

It’s an exciting day! Today we discover the last piece of our starting party’s puzzle. Who will be the third protagonist, member of our erstwhile Crusaders adventurers, joining Emah and Kami? What sort of stories will be possible once the set is complete? Let’s find out… right now!

Background Rolls

As before, I love me some Background Generator tables in ICONS Origins. For any PC in any superhero game that doesn’t have random backgrounds, I can’t imagine starting anywhere but here. Also as before, I’ll include my d6 rolls (sometimes 2d6, sometimes a single d6 or series of d6s) in parentheses. I’ll also include a bit more commentary on each roll than the previous two, since this character completes the picture of the party.

Gender (7): Female! Alright, then… it’s a trio of women as our protagonists.

Ethnicity (6): Stone Isles. That’s a nice balance with Emah and Kami. All the main cultures in Oakton are represented except the Mesca (which will certainly get covered by NPCs).

Age (7,4): 24 years old, the exact same age as Emah and five years younger than Kami. It’s easy to decide, then, that Emah and this character are friends.

Manner (12): Anxious, nervous, or jumpy. Ha! Stark contrast with the other two, and likely makes this character the comedic one of the trio.

Who do you value? (8): Pet. Pet?!

What do you value (6): Friendship. Well, that tracks. She and Emah are definitely besties.

Attitude (5): People need strong leadership and guidance. Truth be told, I originally rolled a 10, which is the same attitude as Emah, and I wanted more diversity. This result is interesting for someone who’s anxious… I’m guessing that she’s a follower more than the leader, but feels leadership is important.

Birthplace (2): Urban. Born and raised in Oakton.

Status (6): Solid and stable, economically speaking.

Tragedy (4): No childhood tragedy.

1st Past Experience (3,6): Windfall. She received some material or financial gains.

2nd Past Experience (6,3): Imprisoned. She was abducted, held hostage, sent to prison, or otherwise held against your will for some reason.

3rd Past Experience (3,3): Opportunity. She found a new opportunity, whether it was a new job, an invention, or a new way of looking at things.

I roll on these tables until either I feel “done” or I get a result that doesn’t fit the story building in my head from the initial rolls. Today, after only three results, she crystalized early and I’m ready to sketch out her backstory. Here it is…

Maly Wywich was an only child to a mother and father who owned a modest business in Oakton. Much to her surprise, when she turned eighteen years old, her last remaining grandparent died of natural causes, leaving Maly a large inheritance. Her parents were offended by the slight but pleased for Maly’s fortune. That is, until news of the inheritance made its way through the town, and an underworld gang intimidated and threatened Maly and her family, forcing her to hand over the deed to her grandfather’s estate and wealth. Infuriated and defiant, Maly tried infiltrating the gang’s headquarters to get back her inheritance but was caught by the town guard and imprisoned for it. The scandal and shock of the events led Maly’s parents to effectively disown her.

Having lost everything and her world shattered, Maly was eventually released from prison without any prospects for the future. She adamantly refused to turn to a life of crime, instead joining the Adventurer’s Guild. There she met Emah, a strong and capable warrior that Maly immediately idolized. The two became fast friends, and Maly sees in Emah someone who may yet help her right the wrongs she’s suffered, restoring her fortune and the relationship with her parents.

I like it! There’s a strong connection between two of our initial party members, and as I mentioned last time, I see Emah and Maly being hired by Kami as the beginning of our adventure.

Origin

Now the all-important (for most superhero games) roll… What sort of character are we talking about here? As a reminder, I’m using the tables from my variant rules post to figure out the rest of Maly’s character sheet.

The Origin is equivalent to class in many d20 games and provides the overall flavor of Maly’s archetype. Here we go… I roll 31 or 13, which is either Wyrding – Arcane or Companion – Animal. Either Maly is, like Kami, directly transformed by the Wyrding, manifesting magical abilities, or else she has an animal companion who was transformed. Well, well, well… remember how Maly values a pet? This is an easy decision, then. Maly will be a non-powered human, as Emah. Unlike our Warrior, however, Maly will have a powerful bond with a powerful animal.

I’ve thought about how to handle a “Companion” character if I rolled one, and my plan is to create TWO character sheets, one for the human and one for the companion. As a result, my three-person party just effectively became four, which is in part why I went for a limited initial number of PCs. If I enjoy this story and want to continue it, I imagine an ensemble cast that at various times bulges and splits off, creating factions that we can follow narratively.

Powers and Attributes

Let’s stick with Maly for now, focusing on her 3 Power rolls and 10 Attribute points. As a nonpowered human, I’ll automatically trade one of those rolls for an additional 4 Attribute points with the Intensive Training option. I’ll also burn a roll for Privileged Background – Maly is independently wealthy, though she won’t have access to that wealth at the beginning of the tale.

That leaves a solitary Power roll, which is: 09 or 90. That gives me Armor, Vigor, Clairvoyance, Telepathy, Energy Blast, Weather Control, Acrobat, or Weapon Master. Even though a lot of those are cool, the only options that make sense, really, are Armor, Acrobat, and Weapon Master. Since Emah is a capable swordswoman, I won’t pick Weapon Master. And given that she’s currently penniless, I have a hard time seeing Maly wearing a sweet suit of platemail armor. That leaves Acrobat, which is a lovely complement. With this power, Maly can vault, somersault, walk tightropes, swing from rooftops, and perform other spectacular feats of agility. She is, in other words, a thief-type of PC. Mechanically, it means she can make acrobatic dodges, adding +5 to her Alertness when defending against melee and missile attacks. She can also break her falls, reducing damage from falls by 20.

For Attributes, Maly will spend her 14 points first and foremost on Alertness, beginning with a 15. She’ll drop a single point onto Physique, four on Prowess, and three on Psyche. She’s vigilant to danger and skilled, with an above-average will. With a 10 Physique, her Vitality is 30, same as Kami.  

Now the juicy part: What kind of animal companion does Maly have? A long time ago, I made an Animal Spirits table for another game, conveniently providing a d100 percentile table upon which to roll in situations like this one.

Some of these obviously won’t work, but let’s allow the dice to tell the story and see what I roll: 68. Panther. Well, that’s just cool as hell. Maly has a friggin’ panther as a companion! I’m guessing that this isn’t an animal that’s ever been seen in or around Oakton, which makes it both a startling companion and something that will immediately cause problems in town. Wonderful stuff.

I’ll also burn a Powers roll for our new panther friend for Intensive Training. Then come the two Power rolls:

Roll 1: 35 or 53, which is Flight, Molecular Morphing, Psychic Blast, Psychic Sense, Energy Manipulation, Force Field, Detective, Marksman.

Roll 2: 90 or 09, which is the same roll as Maly! Once again, that’s Vigor, Armor, Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Weather Control, Energy Blast, Weapon Master, or Acrobatics.

As always, lots of ways to go with those rolls. Unlike Maly, I’m perfectly comfortable going weird here. Off to the Crusaders rulebook I go, reading up on the various powers.

One option is to simply make a Super Panther, taking Detective and Vigor/Acrobatics. I like the addition of an investigative character, but I think we’ve got melee combat handled between Emah and Kami, so I like this option least. I’m also ditching the Molecular Morphing and Vigor combo, which makes a panther that can become stone or wood, which is wandering too close into Kami’s territory.

Another option is to take Energy Manipulation and Energy Blast, making a lightning-cat, or fire-cat, or ice-cat, or whatever. It’s a fun, Pokemon-ish idea and gives the party some range, but I would have liked it more if it had been a regular housecat or less impressive creature than a panther.

A flying panther that Maly could ride? A pega-panther, with Vigor, Acrobatics, or even Weather Control? I love the visual here, but if Maly is going to be our thief analogue, it makes a little less sense for her to be riding a winged panther.

Much to my surprise, then, I find myself drawn to a panther with mental powers. I’ll give the panther Telepathy, which means it can read surface thoughts of other individuals (requiring a Psychic attack if it’s an unwilling target). The panther can also communicate, sending thoughts into the minds of others. This power, then, is how Maly and the panther talk to one another. I’ll also give the panther Psychic Blast, which does indeed provide the party some ranged attack options. Instead of a generic “I assault you with my mind,” I’m going to say that the panther’s stare can cause abject fear in opponents. Maly will provide some comic relief, but the panther will be scary as hell.

I don’t have enough Attribute points to make the panther as bad ass as I picture in my mind, so I’ll have to justify it as a relatively small version who will grow as his and Maly’s Rank grows. For now, I’ll put five points in Psyche and distribute the remaining nine points evenly among the other stats. With a 12 Physique, our animal companion panther will have a Vitality of 26.

Final Touches

Maly’s motivation is front of mind for me. She’s an Avenger, sworn to reclaim her inheritance and, more importantly in her mind, punish the Oakton gang responsible (I’ll have to flesh out that gang at some point). To keep things simple, I’ll say that her panther—whose name I’ve decided is Destiny—chose Maly precisely because of this motivation because he is himself a spirit of vengeance. What Destiny the panther wants to avenge, I have no idea but will figure out over time.

Equipment-wise, Maly will have a dagger and thieves’ tools, and Destiny will of course have claws (which act the same as a dagger).

Here, then, are our two-for-one character sheets:

I’m extremely pleased with what my random rolls have created here. I can picture Maly and her panther Destiny clearly in my mind, and they complement Emah and Kami well both in terms of personality, party composition, and story potential. I can’t wait to get started!

Of course, first I don’t actually have to picture them in my mind, because once again Roland Brown (drawhaus.com) has stepped in with awesome artwork for Maly and Destiny. Here is the initial sketch and final result:

art by Roland Brown (drawhaus.com)
art by Roland Brown (drawhaus.com)

Finally, here’s a little splash of fiction to get a sense of our remaining protagonist(s)…

“‘You’re no fighter,’” Maly said, her tone mocking, her pale, freckled face a mask of abject disgust. She blew out a long, exaggerated breath in frustration, her slim body seeming to deflate against the wooden wall. In a tired voice, she muttered, “I never said I was a fighter. I’m just trying to get my inheritance back!” She yelled those last words, clenching eyes shut and fists tight. With a sob, she sank slowly down to a crouch, her back still against the wall. Somewhere distant, a dog began barking.

Her tirade had disturbed an alley cat, which darted across Maly’s path, escaping the scene. The young woman opened one eye and watched it depart into the shadows, darting around crates as it went. Her other eye, of course, was swollen shut. The unseen dog continued to bark.

“Ow,” she sighed. “Yelling hurts. Everything hurts.”

She lowered her slim hips delicately to the alley floor and stretched out her legs, groaning in pain. Two fingers touched her lip, which felt puffy and split. Maly glanced left and craned her neck right to look down the narrow gap, lit only by streetlamps outside the alleyway. No sign of the cat, or anyone else this late at night.

“Just me and the trash,” she muttered. “And that damned dog.”

For what felt like almost a full bell, Maly sat there, miserable and eyes closed. At some point she placed her forehead against her knees, crying softly.

“Alright,” she sighed, sniffling. “Let’s review. I am penniless, my fortune stolen by one of Oakton’s scariest and biggest gangs. I’ve tried to get it back, and all that’s gotten me is time in a dark stinky jail, my parents disowning me, and now a bunch of scary men and women beating me up. Is that all? That seems like all.” She bonked the back of head a couple of times against the wall behind her.

“Ow,” she said, and stopped.

It must have been well past midnight now, and Maly had never known the town to be so quiet. Even the dog, it seemed, had gone to sleep. Maly sighed, only now fully realizing how much the alleyway reeked of rotting food and urine.

“What am I going to do?” she asked the darkness.

You’re going to fight, a male voice said from somewhere, low and growling. You’re going to tear the East Bay Dragons apart, person by person, brick by brick, until you have your birthright restored.

Maly yelped and scrambled to her feet. “Who’s there?” she gasped. “What?”

You’re going to fight, it repeated, and now Maly felt certain that the man’s voice had no origin. It did not echo in the confined alley, but felt instead whispered, purring, directly into her ear like a lover’s coo.

Something was moving through the shadows towards her. Maly’s breath came fast and shallow.

When she saw the twin yellow eyes, advancing in the darkness, Maly ran.

Age of Wonders: The Adventure Begins!

art by Roland Brown (drawhaus.com)

Age of Wonders: Kami Misaki

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Fantasy Fiction, Superhero Fiction, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying5 Comments

Today we’ll build the second of three player-characters for my next solo rpg adventure, which I’m calling Age of Wonders. Check out more about the setting and rules here, the town of Oakton here, and our first PC, Emah Elmhill, last post.

I’ll be using the same process for this character as I used for Emah. Let’s discover who will be inhabiting this world as one of our primary protagonists!

Background Rolls

As before, I love me some Background Generator tables in ICONS Origins. Indeed, it’s fun to think that my earlier exploration of ICONS led me to discover it as a tool, just as playing other TTRPGs have introduced me to all sorts of mini-game systems or other ways to enhance whatever game I’m playing. I have my pair of d6s in my hand. I’ll again log each table and results, with the roll in parentheses.

Gender (6): Female.

Ethnicity* (9): Kaizuka. Interesting! This will be my first exploration of them, since their arrival in Oakton wasn’t really covered in my history. I see them as the hardest-luck people in the town, finding the least desirable work.

*the city of Oakton has four major peoples, which are rough analogues of broad-African (Kalee), Spanish/Mexican hybrid (Mesca), English (Stone Isles), and Japanese (Kaizuka), roughly in that order from most- to least-common.

Age (8,9): 29 years old, five years older than Emah.

Manner (4): Proud, aloof, or arrogant.

Who do you value? (6): Themselves.

What do you value (8): Home or family.

Attitude (6): Neutral towards most people.

Birthplace (3): Outskirts of Oakton.

Status (10): Wealthy. Hm… interesting. That flies in the face of what I said above about the Kaizuka. She may own an elicit business or something.

Tragedy (3,2,2,3): One or more family members were murdered.

1st Past Experience (4,3): Opportunity: She found a new opportunity, whether it was a new job, a new invention, or a new way of looking at things.

2nd Past Experience (4,4): Promotion: She received a promotion or a general stepup in her career or recognition of her abilities.

3rd Past Experience (1,2,1): Gained a friend, who is like a family member to her.

4th Past Experience (5,5): Injured: She suffered an injury, and may even have lasting trouble from it, such as a disability or disfigurement.

Okay, I think I’ve got an idea. Sheesh these characters are not for the faint of heart… Emah’s story blurb, much to my surprise, turned out to be as much a commentary on sexual harassment as anything. And now I’m going to dive into the world of prostitution.

Here’s her brief bio (some of which I revised after rolling on the Crusaders Origins and Powers tables):

Kami Misaki came to Oakton when she was very young, in the cargo hold of a ship fleeing Kaizuka, an island nation across the sea. Like many Kaizukan refugees, her family was given no advantages in the Kalee-occupied town, and found themselves doing whatever work they could find. When Kami was thirteen years old, her father ran afoul of one of the many Oakton gangs, who killed Kami’s parents in retribution. Her older brother joined a rival gang, vowing revenge, and Kami stumbled into the employ of one of the town’s many brothels.

Over the next several years, Kami became one of the town’s most sought-after ladies of the night because of her stunning beauty. It was a soul-crushing life, but the madame of her brothel looked after her and protected her as best she could, becoming a surrogate mother to the lovely-but-hardened young woman.

One night, a particularly brutal client attacked Kami with a knife, wickedly scarring her face. Her value to the brothel plummeted, but the madame decided to keep her in her employ, not as a prostitute but instead to use her mind and keen insights into people for their mutual advantage. Kami became part proprietor, part advisor, and was paid handsomely for her efforts.

Hmmm… now how do I steer her towards the Adventurer’s Guild and in cahoots with Emah Elmhill? A narrative mystery to be solved.

Origin

Thank you, Background Generator! Now I’ll set the d6s aside and grab my pair of d10s for the Crusaders tables, revised for this campaign. We start with Origin, which is akin to Class in other systems.

I roll a 99, which is to Choose my Origin! Neat. Well, since Emah is a non-superpowered (which I always want to write as a slightly-pejorative “normie” because, apparently, I’m a superhero snob) PC, let’s focus on Kami as someone directly affected by the Wyrding. I’ll roll again to see if one of those options presents itself, a reroll if not: I get a 76, which is “Wyrding: Humanoid Animal/Plant.” Excellent stuff, and fits her first name well. Now, will it be animal or plant? Let me roll another d10, odds are animal powers and evens are plant powers: 6. Plant powers… here we come!

Powers and Attributes

For something as specific a concept as “plant person,” I’m going to create a special Powers table, as suggested by the Crusaders Companion supplement. Here it is:

  • 01-10   Adaptation
  • 11        Choose/Invent
  • 11-21   Armor
  • 22        Choose/Invent
  • 23-28   Elasticity
  • 29-32   Growth/Shrink
  • 33        Choose/Invent
  • 34-43   Plant Communication
  • 44        Choose/Invent
  • 45-54   Plant Control
  • 55        Choose/Invent
  • 56-65   Regeneration
  • 66        Choose/Invent
  • 67-76   Special Attack (incl. Toxic Attack)
  • 77        Choose/Invent
  • 78-87   Super Strength
  • 88        Choose/Invent
  • 89-98   Vigor
  • 99-00   Choose/Invent

I’m excited by those options! Kami will get 3 Powers rolls to begin with, and I’ll confine my rolls to only this table (which will limit the concept but ensure I use this handy table I just created). She can trade one or more of these in for various other perks, and I may do so after a couple of Powers. But first, the good stuff…

Roll 1: 28 or 82, which is either Elasticity or Super Strength.

Roll 2: 87 or 78, which is Super Strength, period. So she’s definitely a brick!

Roll 3: 50 or 05, which is Plant Control or Adaptation.

As I frequently find with Crusaders, there are a lot of different ways I could go here. She could take Super Strength twice, making her a mega-tank, but that feels weird without Armor or Vigor to go along with it. She could be able to stretch her arms like a vine, control plants, or simply not have to breathe to go along with her strength. Hm. Let me read up on these powers a bit.

While it feels like a missed opportunity to not take the rare Plant Control, I’ve found a combo from the above list that makes me happy. First, of course, Kami will have Super Strength, making her Strength Level equal to her Physique + 20 for feats of strength like lifting or throwing things, unarmed damage, and resistance to knockback. It does not, however, improve her Vitality or Physique score. In other words, she can (and likely will) be of a willowy build, despite her impressive strength.

Second, she will take Elasticity. I have a fondness of stretchy characters, and mechanically this gives her some ability to take damage, since she a) gets a 25 score instead of Alertness to defend against all forms of melee and missile attacks, and b) subtracts 10 from all bashing or lethal damage, except if blindsided or unconscious.

Finally, it just makes sense to me that she has Adaptation, or the ability to survive and act in any environment (underwater, vacuum of space, or extreme temperatures).

What these choices prevent me from doing, unfortunately, is trading one of those rolls for either Privileged Background (making her independently wealthy) or Connections (which makes sense given her long years in a brothel). As a result, I’ll have to limit how much I rely on either part of her background for her advantage. She’ll have the madame as a contact, but she won’t be able to easily tap into a whole underground network for information or sanctuary. Perhaps the madame only trusts her so far, or perhaps she’s an inherently untrustworthy boss.

With her powers done, I’ll turn to distributing her paltry 10 points to the four core Attributes, which each start at 9. I’ll give 1 each to Physique and Prowess, since she has not trained in Oakton to be a fighter. Instead, I’ll drop 4 points each into Alertness and Psyche; Kami is watchful of the world around her and strong-minded.

With a Physique of 10, it’s easy to calculate her Vitality: 30.

Final Touches

I mentioned last time that I had a narrative system in mind about Motivation that will match the PC’s powers. What I’ve rolled for Kami fits into one of the otherworldly forces I have in mind, sort of a Patron in Dungeon Crawl Classics or a warlock in D&D 5E. As a result, she will be an Architect, someone who is driven to create something of lasting value in the world. That motivation makes some sense for someone who fell into prostitution at an early age, lost their parents, and has lived on the fringes of society who has also come into power.

As I described with Emah, I’m going to handwave most of what fantasy games term equipment. Kami is not wearing anything that would constitute armor, nor does she wield weapons. She’s a social “class,” someone who gets by on charm, wits, and discernment, not fighting. Which is all to say that she does not need anything of note on her character sheet, gear-wise:

Now, the exciting part… let’s see how Roland Brown (you can contact him at drawhaus.com) visualized Kami! As with Emah, I’ll post Roland’s awesome concept sketch as well as the final artwork. You’ll see that I asked him to remove the hat to showcase her mask, though I like the look of the hat overall.

art by Roland Brown (drawhaus.com)
art by Roland Brown (drawhaus.com)

Stepping back, I’m thrilled to have my first two characters be a “scrapper” (i.e. someone who can fight with a sword) and a “brick” (i.e. someone strong and tough), and am even more pleased to have one PC directly affected by the Wyding and another who is more of a companion or witness to these changes. Story possibilities abound, and I’m already thinking that perhaps these two will meet because Kami hires Emah to a job. It will be interesting to see if the final character of the bunch is another non-powered character, making Kami somewhat of a centerpiece, or another person transformed, making Emah the white-knuckled tagalong. Or maybe something else. Will the final character also be a woman, which will make this story have a particular set of themes? We’ll find out next time!

Before we get there, though, let’s peek in at a brief piece of fiction just to get a feel for Kami’s personality and background…

“Sit, my darling,” Elyn said, waving a hand at the pillow across from her own. The room smelled faintly of rose petals and scented candles and was both clean and spare. A high window over Elyn’s shoulder added a slanting sunbeam to the candlelight.

Kami did as instructed, smoothing her silk robe before lowering herself, cross-legged, to the plush seat on the wooden floor. She bowed her head, finding it difficult to meet the woman’s eyes. Without meaning to, her fingers reached up to her left cheek.

Her madame tsked gently. “Leave it. Look at me, Kami.”

She brushed a lock of black hair, combed fine, out of her eyes and looked. Elyn Brehill hailed from the Stone Isles, her skin pale as alabaster stone and lightly freckled, her blonde hair pulled into an elaborate braid which hung over her sheer green robes. She was a truly beautiful woman, and as she’d put on weight in her later years had only become more so. Elyn was round in ways that invited the eye, and the permanent twinkle in her green eyes, the half-grin that was her natural countenance, suggested that she knew you were watching and approved. Even as the proprietor of the Golden Heron and the oldest there by a wide margin, Elyn remained one of the highest-priced and most sought-after prostitutes, and she selected her clients carefully.

“Now that you’ve healed, it’s time to talk, darling,” she said. “You were my best girl, and now, well…” This time her handwave was somehow sad.

“I’m ruined,” Kami said dully. Again, her fingers strayed.

“Leave it,” the woman admonished, her voice harder this time. “As a working girl, I’m afraid those words are true.” She sighed elaborately. “I hope they hang him for what he did to you, but we must face facts. You can’t work now, at least not at the Heron. There’s no market for the disfigured here. I’m sure another house will take you if you want to work.”

Kami’s voice seemed to answer distantly, of its own free will. “I understand. I will be out by nightfall.” She began to rise. “Thank you for…”

“For love of the Great Oak, girl, sit!”

Kami started. She willed the brimming tears to stay unshed as she settled back down, bewildered.

“Come now. Kami Misaki. You’re stronger than this,” she shook her head with disapproval, her bottom lip extending prettily. “When one door closes, another opens. You told me this, when I first took you into my employ, did you not? I understand a time to mourn the loss of your face, I do. But now it’s done. Time to look forward.”

Kami said nothing, her tears forgotten in her confusion. She watched Elyn, trying to read her meaning and body language, but the woman had always been frustratingly immune to her intuition.

Elyn, for her part, seemed to assess the young woman in front of her in equal measure. After several heartbeats, she again sighed dramatically and reached behind her. Her hand returned with a bag of red silk, something heavy causing it to bulge at odd angles and hang from its delicate strings.

“I have a gift. No, don’t open it yet. You can keep it no matter your answer, but I’d first ask you a question.”

Kami took the bag with her slender fingers. Whatever was in it seemed hard and complexly shaped, like a wooden carving of an animal. She said nothing and waited for Elyn to ask her question, though her hands and a slice of her mind puzzled at the bag.

“The question is this: Can you get over your shock and horror at this…” she waved vaguely at Kami’s face. “Setback? I need your confidence and keen eyes, not your tears and shame. There’s less room for those in the Heron than ugliness.”

“I… don’t understand,” she said honestly, fingers turning the bag over. Whatever it was, it was flat but curved.

“You were my best girl, Kami. My most beautiful, true, but more than that. I value your eyes and mind more than your face and body. Well, almost as much.” She chuckled lasciviously.

“I’m sorry. I still don’t understand, ma’am. You want me to… stay?”

Elyn’s eyes twinkled. Her dimples deepened. “Just so. I’d take you as my assistant, someone to keep those sharp eyes on patrons and the other girls, and whose mind I can use to sort through certain business problems.”

“Your assistant,” Kami whispered, her thoughts awhirl. “But, like this?” One hand left whatever was in the silk bag and strayed to her face again. This time the madame did not admonish her.

“Ah, yes. Well. Now you open the bag,” Elyn said with a smile, settling her weight back onto her own plush pillow in anticipation.

Looking down, Kami’s fingers returned to her lap and worked at the cinched top. She pulled the bag open and reached inside.

It was a delicately carved mask, made of a light wood of almost skin tone. In truth, it was more half a mask, meant to cover most of the forehead, one cheek and jawline, with an eye hole and the mask itself curving around the lips. In other words, it was meant to cover exactly the parts of Kami’s face that had been so hideously carved. A simple red ribbon was attached to each of the mask’s top corners.

“Made by Gontro, Oakton’s finest woodsmith. He owed me a favor, of course.”

Kami turned the item in her hands, examining it from every angle.

“He says he’ll adjust the straps and shape of the wood if needed,” Elyn continued. “The idea is that it molds to your face and is comfortable enough that you never need take it off. Oh, do give it a try, will you? Go on.”

This time, Kami let the tears fall freely.

Age of Wonders: Character 3!

art by Roland Brown (drawhaus.com)

Age of Wonders: Setting & Variant Rules

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Fantasy Fiction, Superhero Fiction, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying15 Comments

Happy New Year! I love that my first official post on my new project goes live on the first day of 2025.

New project, you say?

Today was supposed to be my umpteenth deep-dive exploration of superhero games, in search of a system that I wanted to run as my next solo game. Then I discovered Crusaders, a book that had been sitting on my shelf unread for months. I’m too distracted by my excitement, so I’ve abandoned my pile of games to be explored. It’s my blog, right? My muse cannot be tamed.

Deep breath. Let’s get started.

My Setting: The Age of Wonders

I’m a big believer that worldbuilding is a trap meant to paralyze GMs from starting homebrewed campaigns. I have a vague sense of what I want to do in this next solo game, based on an idea for a novel I had years ago. But I’m going to discover the world as I play rather than go deep into its history, deities, warring factions, and bestiary.

Here are the elements that are grounding me:

This is a traditional fantasy setting, with faux-medieval technology and cultures loosely inspired by fables and Appendix N-like literature. Taverns and inns have fun names, beware the dark woods, and all that.

At the launch of the game, humans are the only ancestry, living in fortified settlements scattered across the land under a distant monarch’s banner. I don’t yet know who the monarch is or much about the nation, but it’s a relative time of peace.

That said, I envision a town or city where the people are diverse, and many cultures coexist. Too much fantasy, in my opinion, is dominated by the analogue of medieval Anglo-Saxons or Vikings. They’ll likely exist here (because knights and horned helms are cool) alongside African and Latin America-inspired cultures, in a continent that is somewhat a crossroads of the world.

Monsters roam the wilderness, making travel between settlements dangerous and a need for fortified defenses. I need to flesh out what these monsters are, but they’re generally mythical beasts more than nonhuman ancestries. In other words, there aren’t Societies of Scary Things, just hungry predators who want to eat you.

The gods disappeared long ago and took magic with them. Humans are just humans, doing what they can to survive in a harsh world full of creatures mightier than them. Oh sure, people claim that they can cast spells and speak with the divine, because there are all sorts of stories of ages past where these things did exist. But, as far as anyone knows, magic died when the gods abandoned the world long, long ago. As a result, the people in this setting are generally more humanist than religious.

But ho, our heroes are manifesting superpowers! I haven’t decided if the beginning of the story will be the unleashing of wild magic into the world or if we’ll start sometime shortly afterwards. Either way, an event known as The Wyrding will grant some people amazing powers, animate long-forgotten constructs, give some animals sentience, and on and on. The Age of Wonders has begun. Is it random or is there a reason behind the changes? That’s part of the story.

Tone-wise, I’m aiming for something akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (phases 1-3, let’s look away from the multiverse stuff) meets traditional fantasy, set in an untraditional cultural setting. This story is meant to be fun, snappy, and action-packed (which is a big part of why I wanted a supers game), character centric, and with emotions that span the spectrum but fall on the more hopeful side of things. In my mind’s eye, it’s a story that starts Grimbright and moves to Noblebright as the characters grow in power. We’re beginning in a decidedly Grimbright story, though… a fantasy town with random people struggling to survive despite the titanic threats surrounding them.

“Moment’s Peace” by Rebecca Guay

That’s it. The details on any of the above and all the texture I’ll discover first by making the starting town, then the main protagonists, then through playing the game. Unlike a novel, I don’t have a story arc in mind, either. I want to find the central antagonists and tensions alongside the characters. It’s an emergent tale, one uniquely possible thanks to TTRPGs and serial fiction.

Recrafting Crusaders Tables and Variant Rules

With these broad brushstrokes in mind, let’s circle back to my game of choice.

As I mentioned last time, I’ll need to do some work on Crusaders to both fit the setting above and combine its core rulebook random tables with the excellent Crusaders Companion. As I suspected, this work was both fun and rewarding, resulting in a set of tables and rules I’m excited to implement.

Origins

Literally the first page of the rules in Crusaders, the first of several random tables, is the Origin of your hero and how you came to be a PC. It is often the most central question to any superhero TTRPG and is the place where I most needed to think through how my setting and Crusaders interact. In some ways, as well, the Origin here substitutes for “character class” in D&D or Pathfinder, helping shape what abilities the character manifests as they grow in power.

Here is where I ended up:

There’s a lot to absorb on a table like this, especially without knowing the game system intimately and with my own homebrew-setting biases littered throughout. One way of understanding this table is that, when making a new character, I have a roughly 50% chance of making someone transformed directly by The Wyrding, 15% chance of someone who’s the companion of a transformed or awakened nonhuman entity, 15% chance of a “fantasy adventurer” who wasn’t transformed but is along for the ride anyway (think Sokka in Avatar: the Last Airbender), 10% chance of someone who is wielding a newly-magical item, and 10% chance to either choose one of these options or create something new/niche. I’ll use this table for both heroes, major NPCs, and important antagonists, since they’re all created using the same process. Speaking of which, expect any PC to also begin with the ICONS Origins Background generator, which I can use mostly unaltered.

Powers

Next up are the retooled Powers tables, which is less about my homebrewed setting and more about a) combining the core rulebook and Companion lists, while also b) curating the lists to the archetypes and powers I most enjoy playing. As you’ll recall from my brief “let’s roll up a PC” foray last post, each percentile roll on a table also gives you the “flip-flop” option (so a 25 is also a 52) across all four tables, giving you a lot of say over what sort of character you’re building. The one place where a fantasy setting crept in is on the Super Skills list, but even here I was surprisingly able to use most skills unaltered.

Here are the lists:

I won’t detail my many, many tweaks from the original lists to these. Suffice it to say, I used the same “what percentage would I want each to occur in the world?” rationale as when making the Origins list. I also added a few items cross-category, so, for example, Acrobat is both a Super Skill but now also a Physical Power, matching things like Super Strength and Vigor. I was tempted to break the Physical Powers list into two lists—either offensive/defensive or separating out travel powers—to make the lists roughly equal in options, but I wasn’t sure such an endeavor gained me anything in character creation. I also didn’t do a deep dive into the flip-flop options, making sure that any number combination on each table provided vibrantly different choices. I’m going to trust that there is both enough variety and randomness in these tables to stimulate my creativity.

Motivations

Motivations are oddly anticlimactic in Crusaders. They get a relatively substantial treatment: a full two-page spread in the character creation section (by comparison, the same length as Origins and twice the length of Character Growth), yet with no real mechanical impact on the game. Motivations are there to flesh out a character and provide roleplaying depth for players, and potential plot hooks for GMs.

I’d like to make Motivations matter more in my game, either by adding Victory Points (the Crusaders equivalent of xp) or Hero Points (the metacurrency that allows PCs to flip-flop die rolls) when characters are acting in direct accordance with their motivation or achieve some story milestone. Possibly both, though I’m leaning towards Hero Points. It’s something I’ll watch once I’m playing and getting a better feel for the system.

In the meantime, long ago I created a handy Motivations list for my various characters, both in TTRPGs and writing fiction. The inspiration for this list originally came from an excellent list in the first edition of the Aberrant rpg, and I slowly added to it over time. My thought is that any character, protagonist or antagonist, can have one of these motivations.

Note that the list is technically a table I can roll on to determine a character’s motivation randomly (good use for those Dungeon Crawl Classics d30s!), though I’m likely going to choose the main PCs’ goals.

Rank and Advancement

As I’ve been saying constantly, I want to create a game with clear jumps in power, taking the PCs from “street level heroes” to godhood. When I made my sample Crusaders character in the last post, I tried using 3 Power rolls instead of 5, and 15 Attribute points instead of 18. I’ve since revised my thinking here, with the following structure for starting values and progression:

Rank in Crusaders is more a symbol of fame and accomplishment than power, so in some ways this is the place where I’m most radically altering the game. Here, Rank 5 is equivalent to what a starting PC in the base Crusaders game would be (5 Powers rolls, 18 Attribute points), which is targeted as a comic book level superhero. To get there, a Rank 1 character is relatively weak, and a Rank 10 character is relatively overpowered. Thankfully, because Crusaders isn’t a game with a defined bestiary and cast of villains, I’m going to be creating all the NPCs and antagonists from scratch anyway, so it’s not like my Rank 1 characters are going to be any more vulnerable if I don’t want them to be.

What are titles, you may be asking? And what does “Godhood” mean? I’m not sure, honestly, except to say that I like the idea of there being a “fame” element to Ranks in addition to power, and I’ve always loved earned titles in fantasy games and literature.

Critical Hits and Critical Failures

Finally, I love that Hero Points in Crusaders are so straightforward and tied to Rank. You get 1 HP per Rank at the start of each Issue, and you can cash one in to flip-flop any d100 roll. Neat. Easy. Cool.

The more I’ve played around with the system, though, the more that double-digits (11, 22, 33, etc.) feel special. The game treats them as special for character creation rolls, in which you’re meant to flip-flop; on the tables above, doubles allow you to choose your own result or invent something new. So, it’s odd to me that the same doesn’t hold true during gameplay.

I’m going to play around with doubles meaning either critical hits (if the roll is under the chance of success for a given roll) or critical failure (if the roll is over). I like this system because it means that if you’re particularly good at something—say, with an 80% chance of success—you get more chances to critically succeed and fewer to critically fail. If you’re facing a particularly tough challenge, the opposite is true. That’s elegant and fits the Crusaders ethos.

The question is: What does a critical success or failure mean when you’ve rolled it? Here I’m going to feel my way and decide depending on the situation. Eventually, I might come up with a more coherent, hard-and-fast rule for how to handle these rolls. For now, I just want them to have juice, either helping or hurting the PCs in some meaningful way.

Let me reiterate that I’m super excited about Crusaders as a game to play. My many tweaks above are a testament to that excitement rather than a criticism. So many of the game books I read had me making puzzled, hesitant notes about rules interactions that I didn’t understand or that felt odd to me. In Crusaders, however, I felt like I immediately “got” the game, and so instead found myself saying, “Aha! That means I could…” All the energy I spent crafting the above tables and rules felt like good energy, generating more enthusiasm for me to jump in and play.

Speaking of which, enough of this table-setting nonsense for one New Year’s Day. Next time we’ll begin diving into the town in which our adventure will begin, and then crafting our player characters. Fun fun! As always, hit me up with any questions or comments below.

Joyfully yours,

-jms

Age of Wonders: Oakton

Choosing a Supers System, Part 3: Prowlers & Paragons

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying5 Comments

It’s my second of many superhero TTRPG deep dives (links at the end of each installment to the others)!

Why am I suddenly diving into so many games? I’m planning to continue my solo gaming experience, but this time using a homebrewed world, story, and characters. The setting I’m envisioning is a genre mash-up, basically superpowers layered onto traditional fantasy, with a sprinkling of technology. Could I have started with something simpler? Heck yes, and maybe I should have done so. But I’m enjoying the specific requirements for a project like this one, and using it as an excuse to pour over some games on my shelf that I’ve either never read or have wanted to take for a test spin. Choosing the system has become a time-consuming tangle, but it’s been fun so far.

Speaking of requirements, I’ve articulated them as:

  • A superhero game that can be played in a fantasy setting, plus allow for anachronistic weapons and technology. Basically, the superpowers and fantasy elements need to be satisfying, but allow for other genre shenanigans.
  • Is neither too crunchy (if I’m consulting forums or rulebooks more often than writing, that’s bad) nor too lightweight (I need to feel like the dice are guiding the story and enhancing the narrative). I want to feel like the mechanics support the story.
  • Level-up jumps in power. My idea is that the PCs start as “street level” heroes and become demigods as the story progresses. Something will be pushing them closer to godhood, which is a core part of the story. The game should not only allow for those different levels, but be fun to play at all of them.
  • No hard-wired comics tropes (like secret identities, costumes, etc.). The story will be a genre mash-up, so I can’t hew too closely to any overly specific formulas.

My previous exploration tackled Supers! RED, a game that I’d bought after reading its glowing reviews but that I’d never sat down to read cover to cover. The other game in this vein is Prowlers & Paragons, also bought when I was in a superhero TTRPG buying frenzy because of how many people said they love it. What’s different about P&P is how many folks declare loudly that it’s their favorite supers system. When I added it to my “to be explored” pile, it was in large part to give me an excuse to understand what everyone was raving about. Let’s jump in!

Prowlers & Paragons

Prowlers & Paragons was first released in 2013, with the “Ultimate Edition” launched via a 2019 Kickstarter. Before I sit down to read a rulebook for the first time, I often search through easy-to-find game reviews to orient my brain. What’s fascinating (and exciting) about P&P is how many old-school lovers of Champions swear by it, and it seems to be a haven for people who, for whatever reason, bounced off Mutants & Masterminds. Hey, I’m a lover of Champions! I bounced off M&M (at least gameplay… I still love making characters)!

Check out this comment, from Richard in the above DMs Guild forum: “I would recommend this game for players of games like Champions or Mutants & Masterminds who find the math oriented nature of combat to feel very clunky and not very comic book like. Likewise I feel that fans of other narrative games, such as Cortex Prime, could look at this and have a good alternative game to use if their players want more crunch in the character creation. Alternatively I could see this game being used to create a really good fantasy game as well. I have often used super hero rpgs to run Dungeons & Dragons games. I feel character creation is much more fun in such situations and combat tends to work better.”

Squeee!!

In terms of how the core mechanics work, I’m going to use another quotation, this time from a 2022 review from Timothy S. Brannan: “The game mechanic is very basic and very easy to use. Every trait, ability, power, or what have you has a score. Figure out what you want to do, find the right combination, add those numbers up, minus any negative modifiers, and then roll that number of d6s.  “2s” and “4s” are one success, “6s” are two successes.  Compare that to the Thresholds table and you will know by how much you succeed, or fail.”

In a lot of ways, then, Prowlers & Paragaons shares its base DNA with Supers! RED. Everything has a d6 value, and gameplay involves rolling pools of dice. The difference here is that you aren’t adding the dice values in a pool, but instead counting the number of successes. As a result, dice pools in P&P can get large, since the game doesn’t care about your ability to do much math. The book routinely uses pools of 12d6 or more. If you like fistfuls of dice, this is a great game for you.

Combat is the crunchiest part of P&P, with specific terms like “active and passive defense” and “subdual damage,” but everything is theater of the mind and based on the basic mechanics from the review quoted above. Range and movement are abstracted to provide narrative flexibility, and a GM can decide how much things like size and cover matter to combat (or not). There are multiple pages of combat maneuvers, including rules for grappling, stunts, ambushes, defending others, etc. My general sense in reading the rulebook is that the non-combat parts of P&P are about who the narrator is, with a lot of open space to describe what’s happening. Combat, on the other hand, becomes more scripted, with clear initiative order and Health tracking. I’m not sure how I feel about the balance here without playing it.

Also like Supers! RED, character creation in P&P is a point-buy system with an optional random generator if you need a launching pad for ideas. The main differences between the two are a) the overall pool of points is larger (for street-level heroes, I used 12 for Supers! RED and 75 for P&P), b) P&P has more Attributes and Talents, which is what soaks up a lot of those extra points, and c) Flaws serve a different purpose. In Supers! RED, the equivalent of Flaws give you extra points to spend. In Prowlers & Paragons, though, Flaws create roleplaying situations in which you can receive Resolve points, the metacurrency that allows players to add dice, reroll dice, or add narrative features to a scene.

Because there are so many parallels between the two, I thought it might be fun to try and recreate my character Evlyn from the last post to see how it might differ here:

Comparing the two Evlyns from Supers! RED and P&P, you can see that, even with a street level hero, there is more detail here. Indeed, I’ve heard new players sometimes feel intimidated by the sheer number of Attributes, Talents, and Powers, especially if they’ve entered expecting a “light mechanics” system. That said, most of that sheet is fluff (though I like the many ways to add flavor), and since everything is expressed in a simple Xd format, once you’ve stared at a few characters sheets it’s all easy to grasp. Making my first PC took a little more time than Supers! RED, but not much. Like any points-buy system, the biggest trick was the “add one point here, take away two there” fiddling at the end to make sure I used exactly 75 points. Overall, I felt that I had plenty of points and options to make the character from my mind’s eye.

Why Prowlers & Paragons Works For Me

I worry that Supers! RED is too light mechanically, and Prowlers & Paragons is a definite step up in complexity. Combats can get crunchy, and things like chases and hazards are handled in “goals,” or multiple steps to resolve the situation. Because the “who gets to narrate” question is a core focus of the game, it’s a little odd to think about it in solo play. Thankfully there’s a “traditional results” variant rule that creates a table reminiscent of Blades in the Dark, changing the narrate-and-respond structure of resolving actions into “failure,” “success,” or “failure/success with a twist” which the GM can dictate. I love those mechanics, and it’s something I often find myself weaving into other TTRPGs. Also, like Supers! RED, we have tiering of enemies into Villains (full stats), Foes (same stats, half health), and Minions (one xd6 value), which creates encounters where PCs can feel especially super. Which is all to say, Prowlers & Paragons seems to have a lot of things I want out of my next game.

The system also has easy, clear jumps in power level built into the system since everything is based on point-buy character creation. Check out this glorious table from the core rulebook:

Perfect! I can easily see, instead of allowing PCs to spend the incremental Hero Points they receive at the end of each successful adventure, forcing them to save up until reaching a certain threshold. This sort of sudden jump in ability is, mechanically, what I’m hoping to create, and P&P makes this part of the storytelling easy and straightforward.

Finally, I want to say it’s a minor thing, but the more superhero game books I read, the more it matters to me: The Prowlers & Paragons book is gorgeous. Some of the art makes me wish it was a full comic book, and the layout is clean and easy to follow. Bouncing around chapters to find information is easy. The writing is clever and often delivered with a wink. After half a year with Dungeon Crawls Classics’ absolute monster of a rulebook and its scattered supplements, it’s delightful to have such a well-assembled book.

My Prowlers & Paragons Hesitations

Despite the quotation earlier in this exploration, I think the base P&P game requires some work to make it fit cleanly into a fantasy setting. Several of the Talents–Professional, Science, Technology, and Vehicles–are aimed at a decidedly modern comic book experience, and missing are things like Lore and Magic/Arcana. Similarly, several of the descriptions for Motivations, Flaws, etc. lean heavily into modern comic book tropes. None of these problems are crippling to my ability to play it in a fantasy setting, but it’s not out-of-the-box ready. As I’ve said before, I’m leery of homebrewing a system before I’ve even had a chance to play it as intended, and though the core game here is simple to grasp, it’s unlike most other TTRPGs I’ve played.

The biggest stumbling block for a fantasy setting is Gear. For me, equipment in P&P is caught in a weird limbo between narrative and crunchy. Characters can basically have whatever mundane gear they want, but these items often have mechanical boosts or effects. At some point, equipment is good enough to justify becoming its own Power, but that point isn’t obvious to me. Armor and weapons have tags that have defined mechanical impacts as well, some of which mimic Perks or Flaws that would normally cost or give you Hero Points. When thinking about a fantasy world where the PCs have superpowers but others don’t, the whole thing feels like a mess to sort through. I wish there was a P&P supplement that fully explored alternate settings like sword-and-sorcery or cyberpunk, which would help me feel more confident in how to navigate the many issues I see ahead.

I have a few other minor gripes about the system that already make me want to fiddle with it. For example, why doesn’t a character’s Motivation, which is given more than a full page in the book, somehow provide ways to generate Resolve? Another example: when making Evlyn, the only distinction between Blink and Teleport seems to be about combat, and so buying both felt overly taxing on my points build. I read in some reviews that P&P is easy to “break” from a balance perspective, and I’m just beginning to sniff at the edges of this problem even from a single read through the book. There is a way that a highly crunchy system like GURPS Supers or a highly abstracted system like Supers! RED works better for me, which is a surprise to discover.

Finally, I’m bummed to see that Prowlers & Paragons neither has a vibrant, active community nor even a creator website where I can find discussions, alternate rules, sample builds, etc. for inspiration (though I do believe a small Discord server exists). There’s no VTT support that I can find. These absences aren’t an enormous barrier, but they are discouraging to my confidence for committing to it for more than a one-shot foray.

One Game to Rule Them All

When I began my exploration into Prowlers & Paragons and reading reviews, I was sure that it would rank ahead of Supers! RED. Much to my surprise, I can more easily see committing to Supers! RED, and, while writing this post, often found myself thinking “this would be easier to figure out in Supers! RED than here.” My worries about Supers! RED being too lightweight and thus not keeping my interest remain, but P&P simply didn’t pull me in, despite its flashy presentation. In fact, if Supers! RED had the same art and layout, I’m pretty sure that the decision would have been ridiculously easy to make.

To be clear: I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum; if P&P is your favorite supers system, that’s great. Feel free to argue with me in the comments. For me and for this particular project, however, I see too many ways it doesn’t quite match my hopes for it, despite the ridiculously-lovely rulebook.

As a result, our top contender hasn’t changed…

Top Contender: Supers! RED

Not currently in consideration:

Choosing a Supers System, Part 4

Choosing a Supers System, Part 2: Supers! RED

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying4 Comments

Last time, I outlined my dreams for my next project: Continuing the solo-play, serial writing I’ve done the past year with Dungeon Crawl Classics, but in a fantasy-superhero mash-up story of my own creation. Because DCC doesn’t do superheroes, I’ve opened the door to another TTRPG as the underlying system I’m playing. My general instinct has been that it’s easier to adapt a superhero game to a fantasy setting than taking a fantasy game and adding superpowers. I’m also open to more setting-agnostic games, especially ones that have both fantasy and superhero supplements.

The special requirements for the game I choose are:

  • A superhero game that can be played in a fantasy setting, plus allow for anachronistic weapons and technology. Basically, the superpowers and fantasy elements need to be satisfying, but allow for other genre shenanigans.
  • Is neither too crunchy (if I’m consulting forums or rulebooks more often than writing, that’s bad) nor too lightweight (I need to feel like the dice are guiding the story and enhancing the narrative). I want to feel like the mechanics support the story.
  • Level-up jumps in power. My idea is that the PCs start as “street level” heroes and become demigods as the story progresses. Something will be pushing them closer to godhood, which is a core part of the story. The game should not only allow for those different levels, but be fun to play at all of them.
  • No hard-wired comics tropes (like secret identities, costumes, etc.). The story will be a genre mash-up, so I can’t hew too closely to any overly specific formulas.

I’ve discussed the dozens of popular games that I’ve already discarded from consideration, including all the behemoths in the genre and some of my personal favorites. Today I begin my dive into the eight (yes, last time I said seven… but comments on the last post here, plus Facebook and Reddit discussion, convinced me to add one) games I’m still actively pondering. Truly, I still have no idea which one I’ll choose, but I’m hoping this series will untangle my brain. Each post is meant to be a full dive and exploration, to really pressure-test each system against my needs and wants.

Let’s kick things off! First off is one of the games on the pile I know the least…

Supers! RED

Probably the most annoying thing about Supers! RED is its name, which is just generic enough to make web searches difficult. It’s an abbreviation for Supers! Revised Edition, a 2014 revamp of a game originally published in 2010 by a different author. Any reviews and play-throughs I can find on the game use the “RED” nomenclature, though, so Supers! RED it is. Also, sometimes SUPERS! is all caps, but inconsistently, so shhh.

The original Supers! is a lightweight game system, using handfuls of d6s in a way that I think originated from the West End Games Star Wars system. I don’t own the original Supers! book, but here’s a nice interview with the RED authors describing why they decided to revise it and what improvements they made. Suffice it to say, they clarified rules, filled in gaps not covered (like how you break things or grappling rules), improved the presentation, and added examples and optional rules—so the game is essentially the same, but polished up and with more options. In other words, if you want to buy the game, get Supers! RED by Hazard Studios, not the original.

The core mechanic is that each attribute, skill, and power have an xd6 value, which you roll whenever you want to do something. In combat, opponents also roll abilities or powers to defend themselves, setting the DC to succeed. Each character has four resistances (Composure, Fortitude, Reaction, and Will), and PCs (not the GM) choose when taking damage which resistances to lower, so each character effectively has four distinct “hit point” pools. Indeed, one of the strengths of the system is that the PCs have a good amount of control over how to interpret what happens and why, while still grounding these decisions in dice rolls. For a tutorial on the basic system, check out this short video. Watching that video alone, it’s apparent that Supers! RED is easy to figure out, has a lot of narrative wiggle room, and adapts easily to multiple genres (there’s no functional difference between, for example, an arrow and a laser).

On top of that basic system are several tweaks that give the game some depth. There are combat maneuvers, Competency dice (the game’s meta-currency to give players an edge), power boosts and complications, PC advantages and disadvantages, plus optional rules for dice caps, pushing actions, wild dice, and alternate damage. Even without the options (the one I like best is adding a “wild die” to each dice pool that explodes, making actions have the potential for more dramatic effects, since the level of success matters when determining results of an action), there are interesting trade-offs in playing Supers! RED that hopefully keep the game fun to play despite its seeming simplicity.

One more thing I love (which is similar to my favorite supers game Sentinel Comics RPG): Enemies have different levels of complexity based on how important they are to the story. Major villains are built like PCs, with all the same Resistances and access to abilities. Major lieutenants are “henchmen,” and have an xD value, scaled to the threat they represent and what they use for all attacks and defense. “Mooks,” meanwhile, are groups of nameless enemies with a single xD value. Mechanically, henchmen and mooks are identical but get interpreted differently, one as an individual and one as a mob. This system allows PCs to feel like real superheroes, tackling piles of low-level enemies at a time and making bigger threats feel like final bosses.

To wrap my head more fully around the system, I made a starter character, keeping it a low-powered PC with a more classic fantasy base. Here she is:

I’m not going to go into all the ins and outs of what’s on the sheet, but a few quick notes: You can see that from all the white space that the system does not contain a lot of detail (although admittedly this is a low-level “pulp hero,” about as basic as it gets). It was easy for me to grasp the character creation process, what trade-off choices I was making, and how to build what was in my mind’s eye, even only reading through the book once. Start to finish, Evlyn took me about fifteen minutes to make.

Interestingly, there isn’t anything particularly “fantasy” about Evlyn when looking at the sheet, though I had a fantasy trope in mind when building her—namely, the bookish scholar pulled unwittingly into danger. What’s heartening is that, although she’s meant to be a scholarly and investigative character, Evlyn is still useful in combat. As far as I can tell, in fact, there’s no such thing as a “useless in combat” Supers! RED character because of the open-to-interpretation nature of the Aptitudes and Powers, and the flexibility to attack or defend with anything on your sheet that has a d6 value as long as you can explain it.

Why Supers! RED Works For Me

As the above section illustrates, Supers! RED is an incredibly flexible system, grounded in creatively explaining how the few words and dice-value on a character sheet interact. Falling off a building? I’ll use my Ice Powers as a defense, creating a frozen slide to keep me safe. Someone’s throwing knives at me and hits? The damage is to my Composure, because they didn’t physically hit me but now I’m freaking out. I’m attacking a group of 2D mooks, doing 1D damage? I land on one of them, then spin a kick, sending a second one into a third, cutting my number of foes in half before they can blink. All the rules in Supers! RED are ways of increasing or decreasing the number of d6 used, and the effect adds or subtracts from the available d6s next time. It’s elegant and open to whatever interpretation works in your game. As a result, it’s a system that can basically work in any genre, all with a 168-page rulebook and nothing else. For a genre mash-up game, that’s a boon. In fact, I took glee in a Reddit comment from a player that said they’d played a multi-year Supers! RED fantasy, sword-and-sorcery campaign without superheroes.

Speaking of campaigns, I love the game’s clear scaling of power levels. Pulp heroes are 10-15D total in value, all the way up to cosmic legends of 50D value. I can imagine starting my PCs at 12D characters like Evlyn, awarding them Competency Dice each milestone or adventure, and letting them spend those Dice to improve their Resistances/Aptitudes/Powers, purchase Boosts/Advantages/Powers, or reduce Complications once they’d hit 15D, and then every 5D after that. After only eight “level” jumps, the PCs would have moved from barely enhanced humans like Evlyn above to a true cosmic demigod. This is exactly the sort of power jump that I consider a core part of the game I run next.

Because of the sparse, easy-to-understand system, making NPCs on the fly or improvising situations appears absurdly easy. The deeper I went into the rulebook, the more I thought that I could convert any adventure in any game system into Supers! RED without hassle. For a GM, the game is silly-easy to prep and requires simply the ability to translate situations into appropriately sized d6 pools. Oh, there’s a wildfire? That’s a 3D hazard. Twenty lizard men come pouring out of a fissure in the earth? Let’s call those two 2D groups of mooks, oh and let’s say they have a leader who’s a bruising 3D henchman leader. The simplicity of Supers! RED keeps the focus on vivid description and away from rules lawyering.

My Supers! RED Hesitations

I have one big worry about Supers! RED and three smaller ones. My largest hesitation is probably obvious: The system may be too lightweight to be satisfying. Making Evlyn’s character sheet was easy. Staring at it, though, it’s difficult to find inspiration for creativity. She has four Aptitudes and one Power… those five values must literally explain every single action she makes, adventure after adventure, until she levels up and adds 1-2 more (and that assumes that I add Aptitudes or Powers instead of solely increasing the value of those she already has). Will I get bored describing enemy after enemy in similarly restrained ways? Is a 3D fire elemental going to feel different enough from a 3D gang of skeletons to be interesting? The strength of Supers! RED is its open-to-interpretation, narrative focus, but I’m looking for something that gives me a feeling of tension and exhilaration when I roll the dice. I’m worried that I may not be giving myself enough narrative tools to enhance my writing versus simply, you know… writing.

I’ll cover my other three gripes quickly because they’re all minor. First, Supers! RED has very little support as a game system. There are no player or GM forums, there’s no module on Foundry VTT or any other virtual tabletop, and few supplemental books exist by Hazard Studios or other third parties. That’s fine, but I often mine forums and supplements for inspiration, ask questions of fellow GMs, and use the VTT to immerse myself in the game experience. None of that is possible here.

Second, I’m surprised to find that the lack of randomness–both in character creation and game play–is an unwelcome shock after playing so much Dungeon Crawl Classics (which is famous for how laden it is with random tables). There’s a random character creation variant process at the back of the rulebook, but it doesn’t really work for me and honestly feels a little half-baked. Thinking about it, I would probably make random characters in a different system, then quickly translate them into Supers! RED. That’s a fine workaround, I suppose, but strikes me as pretty silly if I’m going through all of this trouble to pick my game system of choice.

Finally, as someone who almost became a comic book artist after college, I’m utterly uninspired by the artwork in Supers! RED. I feel terrible saying it out loud, because I know how difficult good artwork is. A real joy about PF2E, however, is the rampant Wayne Reynolds art. DCC is famous for its old-school approach, led by Doug Kovacs. Heck, Johan Egerkranz is almost the entire reason that I bought physical copies of Dragonbane and Vaesen. For me, the art in a game is best when it sets my mind on fire with possibilities, wanting to lose myself in the world. Any superhero game is trying to attract comic books fans, which is a visual medium defined by its artists, so I’m a little baffled when supers TTRPGs get this wrong. With Supers! RED, I’m distracted by how little I enjoy looking at the book. Add to “the art problem” the lower quality paper and print from my print-on-demand copy of the rulebook, and I find the sensory experience of the game frustratingly poor. I am looking past a lot of blech to see the possibilities in this game.

Are any of these last three reasons enough to ditch Supers! RED as my chosen game? Absolutely not. It’s the lightweight gameplay that’s the primary worry. But since I have seven more systems (unless I continue to find more… lord help me) to consider, I suppose that everything is a factor. Speaking of which…

One Game to Rule Them All

I have a feeling that, at the end of this assessment process, I will have a pile of games that weren’t exactly right for my current project but that I desperately want to take for a test spin. In future installments, I’ll take the time to rank each system here. The game at the top will be the one I choose to solo-play next, but a handy ranked list will help kickstart me next time, if there is a next time. For now, though, I’ve only done one full exploration, so this section is as sparse as it gets:

Top Contender: Supers! RED

Next time: The exploration continues! If you have thoughts about this system or others I should add to my pile, I’m all ears!

Choosing a Supers System, Part 3

Goings Ons and What Comes Next

On By MagicJMSIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Hoo nelly… it’s been a looooong time since I’ve written anything here. The reasons for my lack of activity are threefold.

First, a lot of what I was posting here was cutscene blurbs from my weekly, in-person Pathfinder 2nd Edition Age of Ashes campaign. That group has broken up indefinitely and the campaign ended (at level 18 of 20… so close to the end!), a result of clashing personalities made worse by trying to make a podcast together. It’s a bummer, but in-person gaming groups are a rare and precious thing, really only disbanding because of either conflict or life-events (moving or having kids, usually). We had a fun three-year run, and I’m thankful for those hundreds of hours of memories.

Second, I started a new job last Fall. It’s an incredibly different job than I’ve had before, and has demanded, among other things, a major shift in schedule. It’s taken me awhile to figure out how to layer in online games to replace Age of Ashes alongside a brand new kind of work, plus establish modified exercise, family, and friend routines. On top of that, my seventeen-year old daughter is in the heart of college recruiting for soccer, which is taking up a ton of time (exciting! but stressful. but exciting! but stressful).

Finally, I actually HAVE been writing regularly, on a novella that I’m planning to publish on the Pathfinder Infinite site later this Spring. I’m genuinely excited about this project and you better believe I’ll link to it here when I’m done — I just crossed 33k words this morning and have the final proof of the cover art. I’m guessing that I’ll have a complete first draft in a month or so, and then spend a few weeks getting feedback and editing before I hit “Publish.” But I haven’t wanted to spoil any of the prose here.

Right before I took my hiatus, I had just started a series of deep-dives into various superhero tabletop role-playing games (you can find my Golden Heroes exploration here, and the Aberrant one here). These two installments were great fun to write. Unfortunately, while I’m still obsessed with my list of every superhero TTRPG ever published*, given everything I’ve said above, those deep-dives are rather more work than I have the bandwidth for right now.

But! Obsession is obsession, whether I have an in-person group, or life is full, or even whether I’m currently writing a long-form story in a different genre. Superhero TTRPG lists must be explored, people. I don’t make the rules, I just live by them.

So, very soon, I’ll begin a different sort of series based on my list. I’m going to just focus on modern superhero games (and I’ll define “modern” in the first installment), and zero in exclusively on the character-creation process of each game.

Why just modern games? Primarily because, while there is a lot of nostalgia woven into my love of superhero role-playing games, some of the older systems are truly obtuse and clunky. Thinking about writing about those older systems sounds slightly painful, whereas the chance to familiarize myself with newer games is exciting. Plus, the list is just too danged long; narrowing my focus to the past decade or so of games helps give me a manageable group of games to tackle.

Why just the character-creation process? Because it is my belief that one of the distinct features of superhero gaming is that making characters is at least half the fun. In other genres like fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, making characters is awesome, but playing those characters is considerably more awesome. It’s the unfolding story and those surprising die-rolls that keep me coming back again and again. Meanwhile, playing superheroes in stories where literally anything can happen (aliens! mutants! robots! time travel! martial arts! magic! other realities! spycraft!) is great. Honestly, it would be a dream come true to have a local group of friends who wanted to play a long campaign of supers. But, oddly, superheroes is the only genre where some of my fondest memories are making characters instead of the game sessions themselves. Writing about making new superheroes for new game systems sounds like a blast, even if I don’t get to play them immediately (or ever).

I’m not sure when this new series will kick off, exactly, but getting an idea like this one in my head usually means my fingers start moving of their own volition. So… sometime soon.

Fun fun!

* As always, if you know of a game not on the list please let me know! Literally every time I do even a small bit of research I discover new games.

An Aberrant Brain

On By MagicJMSIn Superhero Gaming4 Comments

Oh my goodness, I did not intend to have so much time pass between posts. A big work development plus two major trips (a third next week!) plus my first bout of Covid have all kept me away from my laptop.

And yet I had a lot of fun pouring over one of my favorite games of my childhood, Golden Heroes. It was a nice validation of what I want to write about these days: the long list of superhero tabletop roleplaying games (hereafter TTRPGs) that rarely get enough attention. I’m going to continue jumping around the list of games, spotlighting ones I either love or that intrigue me.

Since I started in the 1980s, let’s fast forward a decade. Honestly, the 1990s isn’t a particularly interesting span of superhero games. It’s the time when Champions and, to a lesser extent, GURPS Supers, took up most of the oxygen in the room. Goodness knows I spent my TTRPG time in the ‘90s running two different Champions campaigns and loving the crunchiness that would become the HERO System.

But right at the end of the decade entered a game that I’ve owned for more than twenty years yet barely played: Aberrant. My curiosity in this game abounds. I picked it up at a time in my life when I had just moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, was deep, deeeeeeeep into Magic: the Gathering, and without a dedicated roleplaying group. By the time I was back into TTRPGs there were newer, fresher games to play. As a result, it’s one of those handful of games I own that I’ve played only in a couple of one-shots.

The more I’ve explored Aberrant as part of this blog, though, the more curious I’ve become (and also slightly poorer, since I bought the next two versions to compare them). Let’s see why…

A few weeks ago, I only had three books. Hm…

A Brief History of Aberrant

I couldn’t find a rich, narrative history of Aberrant like I did Golden Heroes, so here is the story as I understand it. Apologies in advance for anything I’m somehow misinterpreting or not seeing clearly.

White Wolf Publishing was a new and powerhouse European game publisher in the 1990s. White Wolf was most successful and famous with its World of Darkness games, but it also produced some fantasy TTRPGs and, right at the end of the decade, the trio of games now known as the Trinity Continuum.

The Trinity Continuum was ambitious because it was essentially three different games interconnected by the same basic mechanics and fundamental lore: Adventure! was an action-pulp, alternate-1920’s game. Aberrant was a near-future superhero game. And Æon was a far-future sci-fi game. All three shared, essentially, one universe with each taking place on a different part of that universe’s timeline. It’s a cool idea, and one that has followed each game through various editions. Although this post is focused on Aberrant, each time the game appeared it has been joined by Adventure!, Æon, and a variety of Trinity-spanning books.

This is speculation on my part, but in looking at White Wolf’s projects I suspect that they saw the success of their World of Darkness games and thought the future was in taking these properties into videogames. They merged with an Icelandic videogame company in 2006 and were acquired by another in 2015. Shortly after that, a scandal led to the dissolution of White Wolf as an independent entity.  

Whatever the case, after three years and quite a few supplements, Trinity generally and Aberrant specifically in 2002 ceased publication. The games tried a d20 reboot in 2004 (because pretty much everyone at the time was seeing if they could make d20 work, sort of like 5E now), but they never found their footing. There is shockingly little content I could find on this d20 foray.

Then, for fifteen years, Aberrant faded into the background as a cool setting with a sometimes-unwieldy game behind it. Eventually Onyx Path Publishing, founded by a White Wolf alum, obtained the tabletop publishing rights to a lot of White Wolf’s old games, including Aberrant. After a recently successful Kickstarter, a new version of Aberrant was born using Onyx’s Storypath System. For these reasons, sometimes this new Aberrant is called “Second Edition” and sometimes “Storypath Edition.” Almost everyone calls the 1999 game “First Edition.” (And again, no one refers to the d20 version as anything, really.)

I was able to find this 2019 interview with the most recent version’s core authors, Steve Kenson and Ian Watson. There isn’t much history-telling to fill in the blanks above, but it’s a great introduction to the broad brushstrokes of the Trinity Continuum generally and a deep look at what excited the authors about this newest incarnation of Aberrant. Check it out!

It’s amazing to think that the original game only lasted three years. As far as I know, people are still playing Aberrant campaigns from First Edition, and it’s still some people’s favorite “crunchy” superhero game. And hey, it spawned a reboot twenty years later that is already seeing a ton of new supplements. What makes it so intriguing, you ask?

What’s Great About Aberrant

The single best thing about Aberrant is the one thing that has endured across three distinct game systems: the setting.

It occurs to me that superhero TTRPGs fundamentally need to decide how much to invest in worldbuilding a setting that explains – and potentially sets the boundaries for – superpowers. Most games just assume that it’s a comic book reality, in which radioactive insects, mystical artifacts, aliens, time travel, interdimensional demons, and giant robots just exist, and that people with amazing powers (often bestowed by some combination of the above) choose sides and battle with their fists and eye lasers.

Aberrant does deep worldbuilding. Indeed, the first HUNDRED pages of their 285-page core book in 1999 are dedicated to fleshing out how superpowers came to be and how “novas” – the people with these powers – exist within society. Those pages are also the only ones in color, full of rich, creative entries detailing news reports, science journals, celebrity interviews and, yes, comic book pages. The art throughout is consistently excellent and evocative of the “Iron Age” of comics, clearly a core inspiration for the tone and flavor of Aberrant. In the newest version, the setting takes up even more space (over half of the roughly 300 pages) and is still the centerpiece of drawing you into the game.

I won’t try and do a full review of the setting here. Suffice it to say, Aberrant takes place about ten years in the future after an international space station blew up and irradiated the globe, spawning the rise of novas. The authors have created a richly textured story as to how the world embraced these thousands of superpowered individuals, full of factions, internet celebrity, private companies, and varied government interventions. Playing Aberrant means becoming facile in terms like quantum flux (and quantum tech and, honestly, quantum everything), The Utopia Society, eufiber, the Æon Society, The Teragen, OpNet, the XWF, Mazarin-Rashoud Coils, and yes… Aberrants (both a slur term for novas and a formal organization).

Getting steeped in Aberrant’s setting is as daunting as learning the game’s mechanics, and in fact creates a sort of dual barrier to entry for new players. The First Edition book didn’t help matters by making the setting a series of wildly creative but unorganized snapshots, something very cool when you spend time with it but incredibly difficult to skim or reference later. The newest edition, thankfully, does a bit of indexing and exposition, but it’s still dense stuff.

But just like any deep worldbuilding, the density and depth of the setting are also the things that fans of the game are most passionate about. The world of Aberrant is evocative and full of intrigue. Reading those first hundred pages of the original book or the setting chapters of the new one, it’s impossible not to have your mind explode with campaign and character ideas, very much like modern Blades in the Dark or Symbaroum, but even more globally expansive.

Aberrant’s setting strives to take a realistic view of how the world would react to superpowers. It’s also, as I said, steeped in the Iron Age of comic books, full of the gray morality and grittiness of the 1990s. There is a very real sense that power corrupts. It’s even baked into the mechanics, as the thing most likely to take your character out of a campaign isn’t death – it’s the tainted transformation from modern god to monster. There are rules in the most recent edition for adapting Aberrant to different tones, but I’m a big believer in playing to a system or setting’s strengths. Aberrant is about the costs and perils of having superpowers as much or more as the glory. It’s a game about tough choices in a complicated world.

Here’s a terrific summary from a very good 2019 review of the original game:

“You are placed as central figures participating in a tragedy played out in slow motion. All Novas are doomed to be tainted by their powers in time, despite any good intentions. No matter how hard they try, they will lose that which makes them human. It’s inevitable. It’s a devastating bit of storytelling, and creates a setting rife with narrative rabbit holes to fall down. I haven’t found a superpowered RPG that comes close to this level of depth in its world building.”

For a detailed look at all things Aberrant, check out the OpCast podcast – a podcast completely dedicated to the Trinity Continuum. There is an episode specifically looking at the First Edition of the game, and a five-episode breakdown of the new Storypath book. Not surprisingly, these episodes slant heavily towards the setting.

Let’s Talk Mechanics (And Lots and Lots of Dice)

The strength and richness of Aberrant’s setting are, I believe, what has engendered so much nostalgic love for the game and the reason why it’s respawned into a new edition. It’s certainly the reason I kept cracking open the original 1999 rulebook over the years. But I’ve made it almost to the end of this write-up without mentioning the mechanics. So how does Aberrant actually play?

The 1999 edition was based on White Wolf’s Storyteller system, which uses d10s exclusively. At its core the system is elegant: You create a dice pool when trying something, and every 7 or better on a d10 is a success. The more successes, the better the result. Aberrant built on this core idea by adding “Mega” (or superpowered) attributes and abilities, which count two successes for a 7-9 and THREE for a 10, resulting in much splashier results.

Although elegant, the original Aberrant broke down in how big the dice pools became. It wasn’t uncommon to have twenty or even thirty d10s in a pool. Although rolling dice is fun, it’s apparently possible to have too much of a good thing. Add in that a 1 on a d10 is a “Botch” and those big dice pools start getting weird. Most longtime players of the First Edition shake their head at how out-of-control silly the game experience could be, especially as the power level increased. As one player commented in a Reddit forum: “The idea [of Aberrant] is fantastic, but you will need to houserule the crap out of it.”

Unlike Golden Heroes, character creation is time consuming and complicated, using a point-buy system that isn’t hard to grasp but does involve a lot of steps. It’s nowhere near as crunchy as Champions (which, as I said, was the dominant superhero game when the first edition of Aberrant came out), but it’s not easy either. The good news is that the system allows for pretty much any superpowered concept, but it’s also a process that a GM is going to have to supervise.

I mentioned earlier the inevitable decline from god to monster inherent in Aberrant’s system. This mechanically in the 1999 game is called “Taint” (which, yes, everyone made fun of then and still do today) – basically, the more Taint your character accrues the less human they become. I really like the idea of this system, but in practice it was a little clunky and surprisingly easy to avoid, a better concept than execution.

So along comes the Storypath system from Onyx Path Publishing, an updated version of White Wolf’s Storyteller system. It’s still d10 based, still with Mega attributes and a point-buy system to create any and all powers. Dice pools are less unwieldy. Taint becomes “Flux” and is more flexible (and less narratively inevitable). And the rulebook is definitely, definitely better organized and thus easier to navigate than the First Edition one. For a good overall review of the new Aberrant compared the original, check out this write-up.

Alas, though: I haven’t yet been able to play the newest edition of Aberrant. It remains on my “super interested to try it out” pile. So consider today’s post a nostalgic reminiscence of the 1999 game more than an analysis of the update. Still, my interest is piqued. Here’s hoping the power of my nostalgia and the strength of the overall Trinity setting is one that pulls you into checking it out. And if you do… drop me a line and let me know how it goes!

Next time I’ll jump forward another decade into the 2000s and pluck some fun-but-lesser-known game out of the pile. Until then, uh… may your Summer be Taint-free and all of your experiences Mega? I don’t know, man. I didn’t really have a closing in mind.

My Golden Heroes Brain

On By MagicJMSIn Superhero Gaming6 Comments

Starting in early adolescence and continuing through college, I mostly played Villains & Vigilantes and Champions (shhh… yes, I’m old), and someday soon I’m sure to have a lot to say about these two beauties. They are two of my all-time favorite games in any genre.

Amidst epic, mask-clad campaigns with friends, my broader exploration of superhero tabletop role-playing games took root. Of the “other” (meaning, not V&V or Champions) superhero games from my teens and twenties, my favorite is a little-known British game called Golden Heroes.

A Quick Golden Heroes History Lesson

The year is 1984. The original Apple Macintosh computer runs its first television commercial. Los Angeles hosts the Summer Olympics. Cyndi Lauper and Wham! are dominating the radio. And a skinny Jay Salazar, just starting middle school, convinces his grandmother during a regular visit to their local gaming store to buy him a new superhero game just hitting the shelves.

It’s amazing that Golden Heroes and I found each other that 1984 day, back at Wargames West in Albuquerque. The game didn’t stay in print long, particularly in the United States. I’m the only person I know across my many gaming groups who ever owned it. Heck, I probably bought one of the few copies in the state of New Mexico.

Why was its tenure so short? Years earlier and across the pond, authors Simon Burley and Peter Haines were university students and friends in England, inspired by Chris Claremont and John Byrne at the height of their powers. They self-published copies of their game and sent it to major publishers hoping for a deal. Check out how the original looked!

The original Golden Heroes, pre-Games Workshop

It was Games Workshop, a London-based publisher now famous for the Warhammer miniatures game, that showed interest. Although few people associate the two, Golden Heroes became GH’s first-ever homegrown game.

Unfortunately, Games Workshop lost access to the Marvel Comics license they had intended to use for Golden Heroes, a license that would instead get used for TSR’s famous FASERIP-system Marvel Superheroes game. Marvel Superheroes beat Golden Heroes’ release by weeks and soaked up consumers’ attention, even though many people – me included – thought Golden Heroes was the superior game. A year later, having published two adventures (Legacy of Eagles and Queen Victoria and The Holy Grail), a Supervisor’s (GM) kit, and some embarrassingly bad miniatures, Games Workshop quietly closed the doors on Golden Heroes.  

For a lovely look into Simon Burley’s stories of the game’s founding and rules, check out the Grognard RPG Files podcast (Part 1 and Part 2). There are a ton of fun stories there, including Simon and Peter going to conventions with their new game, stirring interest by simulating famous battles from the comic books like the X-Men vs. Shi’ar Imperial Guard fight in Claremont/Byrne’s Dark Phoenix saga.

Despite its lack of commercial success, I love this game. My good fortune to discover Golden Heroes led to countless hours of joy for me during those painfully awkward middle school years. I’ve carried the books with me for forty years and counting even though I have yet to play it for more than a single session with friends.

Well-traveled and well-loved

What’s Great About Golden Heroes

Before I get into the game, I want to say something about the art. Art matters in any TTRPG, but for me it matters even more in a genre meant to simulate a visual medium like comic books. Golden Heroes showcases art from several different artists, and the quality varies. But the good far outweighs the bad, and I am nostalgically giddy about the stuff from Alan Davis, Mike Collins, Brett Ewins, and Jon Glentoran.

As I’ve spent the last week reading reviews of Golden Heroes (for two stand-outs, check out here and here), I’m relieved to see that what everyone loves most about the game is character creation. Those reviews make me feel significantly less self-conscious about the memories of me and my friend Ted rolling up character after character after character, then drawing them into our sketchbooks and going back for more. I sort-of-almost-remember actually playing the game, but not in any way that stands out. What I vividly remember is the joy of making characters… all told, probably more than a hundred of them over the years.

Character creation is fully random in Golden Heroes, which on the surface sounds like a nightmare. You roll on four Attributes: Ego, Strength, Dexterity, and Vigour (yay for British spelling!). You roll on how much damage your character can take and dish out. You of course roll up your superpowers. Finally, you roll on the character’s Background, or life before becoming a hero.

That series of random rolls can potentially lead to a mess, but there’s a safeguard built into the system. Golden Heroes gets around the goofiness of rolling up someone with incredible Strength, low Vigour, a Chameleon Ability, Replication, Teleport, and a Vehicle by making a player rationalize how these particular powers hang together. From the Players Book:

“This is where you must use your skill and imagination as a comic-book writer. You must concoct, possibly with the help of the [GM}, a plausible background for your character which explains how they got their Superpowers. You should attempt to explain as many of your character’s powers as possible, for which the [GM] deems are inconsistent are forfeited.”

p.9

You can trade off power rolls as you go for upgrades to already-rolled powers or for an Advantageous Background (like being a Bruce Wayne / Tony Stark billionaire). So while character creation is indeed random, it gives the player a ton of latitude to sculpt those initial rolls into something that’s fun to play.

Simply put, character creation in Golden Heroes is quick and easy, full of flavor and guided by narrative. At the end of this post I’ll roll one up to demonstrate.

Golden Heroes’ “let’s remember that we’re all comic-book writers” vibe permeates the rules of play as well. There’s a heavy focus on combat and set pieces, dividing combat actions into Frames. Different activities cost different amounts of Frames per round (very similar to the modern Pathfinder Second Edition, actually), giving the action a delightfully comic book feel.

Combat can get overly crunchy, unfortunately. For example, there are different rules to resolve a Parry versus a Dodge, and they use different dice (and to be honest, Parry rules are just bonkers). Tables rule everything, as was common in the 1980s. My guess is that, if I ever got into a regular campaign, I’d eventually simplify some of the mechanics to keep everything moving and as fluid as character creation. Even amidst the crunch, though, there are some cool ideas. In addition to Frames-as-actions, you have two hit-point pools: Hit-to-Coma (HTC) and Hit-to-Kill (HTK), and this distinction helps simulate the fact that comic books can toggle between characters beating each other to a pulp but never dying and life-or-death stakes.

Between combats, characters get a certain amount of downtime phases, which is also easy to picture making their way into comics books. And in a truly narrative RPG innovation, every campaign in Golden Heroes has a set of Campaign Ratings that are built collaboratively between players and Supervisor (the GM) that fluctuate based on the adventures the characters undertake and their role-playing. Campaign Ratings also get awfully crunchy, but it’s clear that despite the complexity the goal here is to have a dynamic world and story built off individual character backstories. Supervisors reward players for being heroes instead of murder hobos or powermongers, and these rewards help them achieve more success in the campaign world. It’s a cool rewards system that veers away from individual level-progression and, again, mimics what superheroes experience within comic books.

If you’re intrigued by the game but either don’t want to track down expensive, hard-to-find books or play outdated crunchy tables of the ‘80s, Simon Burley has gone on to update the system as Squadron UK. It’s easy enough to pick up on DriveThruRPG. Because I can’t help myself, I’ve ordered a copy and may dive into it in a future blog post.

Let’s Roll Some Dice!

As I’ve said, the glory of Golden Heroes is the character creation. In fact, there is an absolutely wonderful section in the Players Book that dedicates three full pages to showing the “now you interpret your powers” system in action – using one set of powers rolls to flesh out eight (!) in-depth character ideas. Let’s walk through the steps and see what happens.

For the four core attributes, it’s old school D&D style: Roll 3d6 and that’s your score. Alright [rattles dice in hand]. Here we go.

Ego is a measure of my character’s willpower. I roll 5,4,3: 12.

Strength is, um… how strong my character is. I roll, 3,5,1: 9.

Dexterity measures manual dexterity rather than physical agility. I roll 5,4,3 again: 12.

Vigour (ha!) is a measure of how fit and healthy my character is. I roll 6,2,2: 10.

Wow. My character is pretty much the definition of average.

Hits to Coma (HTC) is the amount of damage my character can take before passing out. I roll 1d6 for each point of Vigour, or 10d6. Fun! I roll 1,1,2,3,4,1,5,2,6,5: 30. Blech. My character will be Staggered at 1/5 of my HTC, or 6, and will be Stunned at 1/10, or 3.

Hits to Kill (HTK) is the amount of damage my character can take before dying. 10d6 again yields 6,6,4,1,3,2,3,6,3,1: 34. My character will be Hospitalized at 3 HTK.

Movement is how far my character can move in a Frame, measured in metres (ha!). The calculation here is (Strength + Dexterity + Vigour) / 6. My character’s movement is 5.

Now comes the fun part.

I get a number of power rolls equal to 2d6 halved + 4 (why not 1d6+4? I don’t know, man. I suppose the idea is that rounding up gives you slightly more rolls on average). Since I’m rolling mediocre today, of course I roll 7, rounded up is EIGHT power roles. Wheeee!

Each Power Roll can be used to either:

  • Determine an Advantageous Background
  • Roll on the Superpower Generation table
  • Upgrade a Superpower already rolled
  • Enhance Superpowers and skills (used for campaigns)

Roll 1-2: 55 = Psi Powers, which the table tells me immediately costs an additional power roll. Psi Powers are COOL and makes a ton of sense for someone with decidedly average stats.

Roll 3: 56 = Psi Powers! This automatically bumps me from Grade 1 Psi Powers to Grade 2, something I would have probably done anyway. Neat.

There’s a subsystem in Psi Powers to determine my powers. I get 15 + 1d10 Psi Points and I roll a 9. 24 Psi Points, which is a resource pool for using my psychic powers. What psychic powers? Let’s roll four d10s and find out:

  • Psi roll 1: 6. Telekinesis. This is my Specialty Power (meaning it costs less Psi Points to use than the others).
  • Psi roll 2: 4. Precognition
  • Psi roll 3: 5. Psi Blast
  • Psi roll 4: 8. Telepathy

Roll 4: 02 = Agility, which as I said is different from Dexterity. This means my character can leap 4 metres in a Frame, swing at 2-4 times my Movement, gain a bonus to dodge, and can do extra damage by swinging or leaping into combat.

Roll 5: 33 = Health. Another table here, which I roll 5 on a d6: Toxin Immunity. My character will be immune to poison.

Roll 6: 20 = Energy Attack. Another table, which I roll 6 on a d10: Vibration. My character can emit destructive vibrations.

Roll 7: 24 = Flight, which is what it says it is and doesn’t require another roll.

Roll 8 is my Advantageous Background roll (which the rules allow me to pick, but I’m embracing full randomness): Previous Training, which allows me to add 2 to any Attribute or 1 to two Attributes and should represent some sort of elite training.

My character’s Superpower rolls:

  1. Psi Powers (Grade 2 – Telekinesis, Precognition, Psi Blast, Telepathy)
  2. Agility
  3. Health (Toxin Immunity)
  4. Energy Attack (Vibration)
  5. Flight
  6. Background: Previous Training

Now comes the time to rationalize and make sense of these rolls. As the Players Guide says, I need to come up with an origin story and narrative that ties everything I’ve rolled together, forfeiting what doesn’t make sense.

Can I get eight distinct concepts out of this list? Gauntlet thrown!

Concept 1: Hand of Gaia

Maasa Abebe is a young, talented archeologist (Previous Training, +2 Ego). At a dig she discovers the literal heart of the world, an artifact linked to the primordial goddess Gaia. Thereafter she is a living avatar of the goddess, able to tap into the ancient soul of the Earth itself to move objects, read others’ thoughts, and even unleash localized earthquakes. Her connection to her goddess makes her immune to natural toxins and preternaturally light on her feet.

I can’t really make Flight makes sense here but kept all others.

Concept 2: Psion

Cassidy O’Toole is in the prime of her life and a doctoral student of cognitive psychology (Previous Training, +2 Ego) when she discovers her terminal illness. Her wealthy parents sign her up for an experimental set of treatments to find a cure. The bad news is that the treatment facility is destroyed during a super-powered battle, with Cassidy the only survivor. The good news is that the chemicals and supervillain powers combine to cure Cassidy and leave her with superior health and psychic powers. She is adopted by the superhero group responsible, becoming an invaluable member.

I don’t really see a room for Energy Attack here (Flight, I’m saying, is a result of Telekinesis on herself).

Concept 3: Quake

Adam Johnson is a dedicated, albeit mediocre gymnast (Previous Training, +1 Strength, +1 Vigour, also accounts for Agility) and geology student at UC Berkeley. During a particularly humiliating competition, Adam’s mutant powers manifest and his rage causes an earthquake to level the gymnasium. Horrified, he retreats from school and vows to understand these new abilities before returning to society. He is quickly found by a group of mutants who train him in his vibration-themed powers (including flight and a metabolism so high it’s resistant to toxins) and give him purpose.

In this version, I’m dropping the highly valuable Psi Powers and would likely request that the Supervisor allow me to upgrade Energy Attack to at least Grade 2 to compensate.

Concept 4: Nomad

No’madd is the sole survivor of an alien spacecraft that has crashed on Earth. In a desperate gambit to save their species from a dying planet, No’madd’s people rigorously trained countless explorers (Previous Training, +2 Ego) and sent them to the far reaches of the galaxy. Now stranded here and utterly alone, No’madd has vowed to ingratiate themself to the local populace and improve life on Earth as much as possible, always hoping more of their people will find their way here.

Aliens always feel a little like cheating in Golden Heroes because I can basically keep everything and say it’s innate. I’d probably ask the Supervisor to switch from Vibration on my Energy Attack to Cosmic.

Concept 5: Prana

Sunita Singh was born and raised in a monastic order (Previous Training, +2 Ego) where she quickly became a prodigy of the mindfulness and inward-centered teachings. At fifteen years old, she had surpassed all masters of the order. At twenty, she went into a meditation so deep that she did not eat or sleep for years. At twenty-five, finally, she awakens with a glowing third eye on her forehead and manifests a broad array of psychic abilities. She has perfect control of her body, full of grace and immune to toxins. Sunita, without a word, flies up and away from the monastery, full of intent to change the world.

I’m keeping everything here except the Energy Attack.

Concept 6: Noir

Christopher Knight was a hardboiled detective (Previous Training, +2 Ego) in Chicago in the 1920s, killed during a case investigating a crime boss. Now he has reappeared, spectral but solid enough to interact with the world. Why now? What is he here to do? Chris doesn’t know, but he picks up the trail of that cold case, intent on finding out.

The Psi Powers, Flight, and Health are all easy enough to fold into “dead guy powers,” and the Agility is decently noir-style pulp detective. I’d work with the Supervisor to say that his Energy Attack is his spectral pistol, using Vibration as an energy type but saying it’s basically ghost bullets.

Concept 7: ATHENA-5.5

Nine years after Dr. Dara Melamed’s death, the ATHENA prototype artificial intelligence she created finishes building itself a physical shell (stretching here, but I’m saying self-educating itself for years has led to Previous Training, +2 Ego). The smooth, silver globe rises from Dr. Melamed’s secret laboratory and drifts out into the city. (It’s the story of Ultron from Marvel Comics, but a creation that strives for making the world better through collaboration with its fellow populace.)

I don’t think it makes sense to keep Agility, since a floating globe won’t really be leaping or swinging anywhere. Everything else makes sense, though I would talk to the Supervisor about making the Energy Attack Sonic or Laser instead of Vibration, which is more what I picture.

Concept 8: Medusa

Deep-sea diver (Previous Training, +2 Vigour) Sophie Kim discovers a new, bizarre species of jellyfish, an amazing and groundbreaking find. Unfortunately, it stings her and sends her into a coma for nearly two years, and the jellyfish is never seen again. When she awakes in a government science facility, Sophie’s body has turned translucent like a jellyfish, her hair a mass of tentacles and her brain pulses with electricity within her iridescent skull. She has amazing psychic powers, immunity to toxins, and she can swim at astounding speeds. Government officials give her the codename Medusae (which the media mistakenly changes to “Medusa,” a name that sticks) and send her out on aquatic missions.

No Energy Attack here, and I’d say the Agility and Flight are water-based. She can’t technically breathe underwater, so I’d either ask for a device to allow her to do so or to provide a Grade 2 on Health from the Supervisor to compensate for the self-imposed limitations on my powers.

There we go! Eight distinct thumbnail concepts from the same random rolls, all of which I can see being a fun foundation for a series of adventures. So yes, fully random rolls can be a mess. But there’s enough freedom in character creation that somehow solid characters still emerge. It’s fair to say that very few of these ideas would manifest in quite the same ways if I was using a point-buy system and starting with my own concept. That’s the joy of Golden Heroes character creation, and why it’s so addictive.

Holy cow this post became a beast. I’ll set my eyes on another game from my master list of games and see where the next post takes me.

In the meantime, may your Vigour be high and your Movement take you many metres!

A New, Heroic Adventure

On By MagicJMSIn Superhero Gaming1 Comment

For the past couple of years, my posts here have primarily been scenes I’ve written for my longstanding Pathfinder campaign. Because of some dynamics within the gaming group, we’re taking an extended break. Being a Game Master of a deep and complex story has been soaking up my creative energy for almost three years now, and I suddenly find myself with time and space for something new. I’ve learned over the years that a) I only have room in my brain for one creative project at a time, and b) there must always be a project.

What to do with this fresh, blank canvas? Normally I would turn to superhero fiction, either character sketches in preparation for something ambitious or short, contained stories. But I’ve been loving this tabletop role-playing renaissance in my life, and I’m not ready to fully replace my TTRPG creative space with something entirely non-TTRPG related. The switch from traditional fantasy to superheroes is an easy one, but my grip on my dice bag is white-knuckled and fierce.

Alrighty then. It’s time to turn this blog into a blog.

Superhero Tabletop Role-Playing Games

For as long as I’ve played fantasy TTRPGs – which for me started in middle school back in the 1980s – I’ve played superhero TTRPGs. I’m a lifelong comic book reader, and the opportunity to live those stories was and continues to be a siren’s call.

The first superhero tabletop game, Superhero 2044, followed the more popular Dungeons & Dragons by a mere three years (1977 vs 1974). Since then, for forty-five friggin’ years and counting, a handful of superhero games have continued to regularly pepper the broader role-playing game landscape, nowhere close in popularity but ever-present.

The lack of popularity, by the way, confuses me. Even in our modern age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe dominating cinema and television, superhero games take a backseat to elves and dragons, steampunk industrial fantasy, horror, and futuristic sci-fi. I mean, look at the top graphic from this 2021 analysis, where a superhero game doesn’t even crack the top fourteen Google searches (unless you count small slivers of the Powered By The Apocalypse or Blades in the Dark systems). That same article says that the superhero genre makes up a measly 6% of the broader TTRPG market.

Maybe it’s that simulating superhero action – where traditionally anything can and does happen, full of characters with wildly different power levels – is more difficult than other fantasy genres. Maybe it’s that people want to watch adults dress in spandex, imagine it, but ultimately get embarrassed actively pretending it with friends. I don’t know. For now, the important point here is that, okay, these games aren’t incredibly popular with most people.

To me, though, they’re THE BEST.

Neeeeerrrrrrd Alert!

Indeed, I have a full cabinet full of superhero TTRPGs I’ve collected over the years. Many I’ve played with friends over the decades, but just as many I’ve only made some characters and wished that I had a gaming group eager to tell superhero stories with me instead of sword-and-sorcery ones. It’s fair to say at this point that I’ll probably never play all the comic book-inspired games that I own.

At some point in the last year, the collector in me started getting curious as to what percentage of the entire superhero TTRPG market I knew, and if there were any new or major publications I’d missed over the decades.

(This sort of side quest, the need to generate a list or framework, is common for me. Heck, two years ago I started compiling a “Favorite 300 Albums” spreadsheet and hope to finish it before Christmas. My brain is a demanding, dissatisfied master.)

The result of my curiosity is this list. Or perhaps I should say THE LIST. It is beautiful and daunting and full of masks… every superhero role-playing game ever published. I’m not saying it’s perfectly comprehensive because every time I dig through the internet, I miraculously find little gems I never knew existed. But I am saying that this list is the most complete list of superhero TTRPGs around.

Basking in Superheroic Glory: A Blog Pivot

Now that I have this wonderous, sparkling list, what do I do with it?!? On its own, it’s cool but not particularly useful. At one point I fantasized about launching a podcast where I walked through each game, systematically looking at what made it special or fun and taking it for a test spin. But the technical start-up costs of a podcast are daunting and not something I’m particularly excited to take on right now.

But you know what I am excited to do right now? Write, baby.

Welcome to my new creative project. I’m going to take some time to explore these superhero role-playing games, one by one. I’m not going to march in order down the list, because wow does that sound like grappling with a lot of archaic, bad games early on. Instead, my intention is to cherry-pick games I either love or that intrigue me, and just generally see where this series goes. Maybe I’ll only write about a small handful of games and feel ready to jump into more fiction writing. Or maybe this list will be satisfying enough to keep going. I’m excited to find out.

We’ll begin next time with a low-key favorite game of mine from high school, often overlooked but utterly delightful. Here’s a hint: I probably should have said “low-key favourite game.”

Stay tuned!