Tag: review

Age of Wonders: Setting & Variant Rules

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Fantasy Fiction, Superhero Fiction, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying14 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 6: Crusaders

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying10 Comments

Today I continue my game explorations for my next solo play and writing project. If I’m honest, I don’t think to this point that I’ve yet found “the one,” the game system that I immediately want to put into practice upon reading. I’m happy with my process—and diving into previously unexplored rulebooks has been a joy—but so far, my white whale has eluded me. Does a TTRPG soulmate exist for the genre mash-up in my mind’s eye? Will I discover it today?

Spoiler alert:

You know my requirements well by now, but I’m looking for:

  • 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.

Today I plunge into a game that I didn’t even remember that I’d bought until I was digging around looking for a different game on my shelf. A flip through its modest, 100-page contents reminded me of what attracted me to it in the first place: namely, fun black-and-white art and a focus on the 1980’s superhero TTRPG experience. I’m guessing that it’s a game many supers enthusiasts don’t even know exists, but, well… it’s awesome.

Crusaders

Crusaders is a game developed by Olivier Legrand, released in 2022. There aren’t many reviews of the game I could find, partly because it’s a small-press game few know and partly because any web search results on “Crusaders rpg” get polluted by a d20 fantasy game by the same name, Castles and Crusades, Band of Crusaders, Crusaders Quest, and Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done. Woof. I think superhero games need to think more about brand recognition when launching.

Anyway, the intro on page 1 of the book says that the game takes place in the 1980s and is meant to emulate superhero games and comic books of that time, a time when I discovered TTRPGs in general and superhero games like Villains & Vigilantes, Marvel Superheroes,and Golden Heroes specifically. In an interview, Legrand talks about being inspired by Byrne & Claremont X-Men, Byrne’s Alpha Flight, Perez & Wolfman’s New Teen Titans, and Davis’ Captain Britain. He is clearly a kindred spirit, and Crusaders is a game that delights me from the first page through the entire book. Even the black-and-white artwork throughout manages to capture the spirit of the 1980s superhero scene. An example, from the opening page:

art by Rudolf Montemayor

Unlike those 80’s games, the rules in gameplay are massively simplified. Each character has four basic attributes, and, from that same interview: “The system is D100 based but keeps dice rolling to a minimum. Dice are only used for dramatic actions, like attacking, defending, lifting heavy things, attempting power stunts, etc. It’s a very compact, self-contained system, with very few subrules and special cases.” All rolls in the game are opposed percentile rolls, and all rolls are from the hero’s point of view—so if a PC is attacking, the player rolls the attack, but if something is attacking the PC, the player rolls the defense. Players also have Hero Points, a metacurrency that lets them “flip-flop” dice rolls (turning, for example, a 91 to a 19 result), and flip-flopping is a core part of the dice-rolling experience in Crusaders. Distances are abstracted and damage is a set value instead of rolled, both of which are meant to keep combat zippy and unencumbered, which is one of my (and my people’s) primary frustrations of old superhero games. As with most modern superhero games, villains have a “gang of thugs” representation to a single stat (called Fight), lieutenants have a bit more detail, and full villains have the same stats as PCs. Which is all to say that Crusaders is a straightforward system and easy to understand; the whole book is 102 pages, and only 21 of these are dedicated to the core game rules. I get the feeling that playing it would mean needing to puzzle out some situations, but I equally suspect that doing so wouldn’t be difficult.

Character creation in Crusaders is lovingly randomized, so let’s give it a shot…

First comes a percentile roll is for Origin, and I get Freak Accident: The hero got their powers because of a scientific experiment gone wrong or accidental exposure to radiation, chemicals, or—in the world I’m envisioning—wild magic.

Normally heroes get five Power rolls, but since I’m building a lower-level character, I’ll give myself three. I have the option to trade one or more of these rolls for additional Attribute points or perks like a privileged background or connections.

Here I’m going to depart from Crusaders and dip into the very fun Background Generator tables in the Origins supplement for ICONS, which will help me make the decision on spending Power rolls for background perks. After a whole series of rolls, I get a 38-year-old, male, who is friendly and outgoing, who values a mentor or teacher as well as his reputation. He believes that respect is earned, not given away. He was born middle class in a city and, as a child, his family was divided by conflict. He has a foe who’s a family member and a friend who’s a current or past lover. He’s suffered from a physical or mental illness, but he’s renowned for something he’s done.

As always, that’s juicy and gives me a lot to think about and build. It does not, however, suggest that I need to trade in any of his Power rolls. So back to the Crusaders book I go, and with each roll I can flip-flop the numbers (so a 70 can also be 07), and, thanks to the Freak Accident origin, can choose from either of those results across any of the four Powers tables.

Roll 1: Armor or Super Senses or Clairvoyance or Telekinesis or Energy Manipulation or Magnetic Control or Acrobat or Scientist.

Roll 2: Energy Blast or Super Speed or Psychic Blast or Telekinesis or Fire Mastery or Magnetic Control or Detective or Scientist.

Roll 3: Armor or Energy Immunity or Illusions or Psychic Blast or Energy Manipulation or Fire Mastery or Acrobat or Detective.

Holy cow that’s a lot of options, and demonstrates how the seeming randomness of Power rolls allows for a lot of flexibility to craft a PC I’d enjoy playing. In addition, there is a Crusaders Companion that has even more Origins and Powers to add to the mix. I almost want to write a bunch of pages dedicated to making a series of possible characters with these same rolls like I did in my Golden Heroes deep dive, but to save time and space I’ll go with Acrobat on Roll 1, Super Speed on Roll 2, and Acrobat again on Roll 3, giving me the Supreme Power version of it. My new guy is a super acrobatic speedster. I also get an extra “improvement” on one of my powers, which I’ll give to my Super Speed.

Next, it’s time to select my character’s attributes, which are Physique, Prowess, Alertness, and Psyche. Each character begins with a score of 9 (average) in each, and I get 18 points to distribute, which I’ll dial down to 15 since this is meant to be a lower-powered hero. Since this is a physical character, I’ll leave Psyche at 9, bump Prowess and Alertness each to 15 (well-trained and watchful, respectively), which leaves me with a Physique of 12 (fit). My Vitality (i.e. hit points) is 36 (Physique x3) and my Rank is 1 (more on this in a bit).

Sadly, Crusaders hasn’t made a form-fillable character sheet available, but here are the final stats:

Sam Merita

Origin: Freak accident

Motivation: Gallant (ego thrives on recognition and the admiration of others)

Rank: 1   Hero Points:  1

Physique: 12

Prowess: 15

Alertness: 15

Psyche: 9

Vitality: 36

Powers & Advantages:

1) Acrobat

  • Acrobatic dodges: In combat, can forfeit attack for +5 Alertness vs. all melee and missile attacks
  • Leap: 9m
  • Break fall: Reduce damage from any fall by 20
  • Dazzling attack: In melee, can attack two different opponents in one round
  • Swing into combat: At the start of a fight, can Charge with +5 damage

2) Super Speed

  • Outside of combat, can run 75 km/h.
  • In combat, +5 Alertness to initiative and defense
  • Each round, can use either 2x Movement actions or 2x Attacks or can combine Movement & Attack
  • Like a fish: Gains all benefits when swimming as well as on land

If I were making a character that I intended to play, I would write out a brief backstory, incorporating my rolls from Origins and tying it to the world. For now, you get the idea. Crusaders’ character creation process, I have no doubt, would generate fun and interesting characters with which to play in my world. I would probably play around with the number of powers and how many Attribute points a Rank 1 character receives in my world, but it wouldn’t take a lot of fiddling to get it just right for what I’m envisioning.

Why Crusaders Works For Me

Look, nostalgia is a powerful force. I don’t know what someone who didn’t fall in love with superhero TTRPGs in the 80s would think of Crusaders. My guess is that the twenty- and thirty-somethings of my regular gaming group would squint and wonder what the big deal was. “Seems pretty sparse on the rules,” they might say, or “Ew, random character generation,” or maybe even, “That art seems a little derpy.”

For me, though, Crusaders has a je ne sais quoi that I can neither explain nor feel the need to try. It’s just great. Good job, Olivier Legrand… you’ve managed to capture the spirit of character creation from my early teens while making a combat system that isn’t bogged down in math and simulationism. Everything about the look and feel of reading the rulebook makes me happy. More importantly: It makes me want to pick up dice, roll up characters, and jump into a game. I wish the game had more random tables, plus more examples of gameplay, more optional rules, any VTT support, a more vibrant online community, and a mess of supplements. I do. I wish these things. But as a barely two-year-old game by an individual game designer, it’s fine just the way it is. It’s got a spark that many bigger-press games don’t.

In addition, despite any warts I’ll outline in the next section, leveling up in Crusaders works just as I’d want it to for this project, and better than any game I’ve covered to date. Every character has a Rank, from 1-10, that symbolizes that character’s reputation and experience. Players begin each “episode” (i.e. game session) with a number of Hero Points equal to their character’s Rank. Those Hero Points get spent to flip-flop rolls during sessions. Each jump in Rank allows PCs to add improvements to powers or points to Attributes. And in a world where I limit myself to 3 Power rolls instead of the typical 5, I can also weave whole new powers onto the Rank track, perhaps something like one new power at Rank 3 and every other Rank thereafter. Which is all to say that Crusaders’ advancement system both works with my original concept and is easy to tweak and tune to my needs.

Indeed, I was so flabbergasted by how strongly Crusaders had pulled me into its nostalgic embrace, I ran back to my bookshelf and pulled out Mighty Protectors (also called V&V 3.0, the 2017 update of Villains & Vigilantes) and Squadron UK (the 2012 update of Golden Heroes) to read through them both. Recall that I’d rejected both games in my initial screen of what games might work for me. However, it occurred to me, maybe all I was searching for was a modern 80’s game, and these other games might improve upon what had so charmed me in Crusaders. Imagine my surprise when much of the licensed stock art from Crusaders that I love so much is also in Squadron UK!

art by Tony Perna

But you know what? I like Crusaders more than these other two, even though they’re the spiritual successors of some of my all-time favorite games, designed by true legends of my gaming childhood. Squadron UK has more crunch to it than I want, with more of an emphasis on outlining the many Skills (both common and technical) a character possesses, and with a significantly more complicated way of handling rolls, within combat and outside of it. Mighty Protectors, on the other hand, has all the random tables I adore, and I have a feeling that character creation might make me slightly happier than Crusaders because of it. Combat, on the other hand, is still a math-y mess, and relies on precise distances and too many calculations to fit what I want. That Jeff Dee art is still friggin’ sweet, though.

My Crusaders Hesitations

The most glaring misfit between Crusaders and my project is the setting. Crusaders is set in the 1980s, though the setting is neither more detailed than that nor hardwired into the game. Like any superhero game, there are rules for medieval weapons and armor, and the distinction between “gear” and “powers” is clear. Still, Crusaders would take some work to transform into a base fantasy setting. I would likely need to tweak Origins, Powers (especially Super Skills), and figure out how to deal with equipment in a way that fit the other mechanics without bogging down the game’s brisk pace or overpowering the PCs. Every monster and foe in a fantasy setting is one I’d have to create myself. The labor involved here isn’t zero.

In fact, the more I stare at the rulebook (so far, I’ve read it cover to cover twice), the more I see things that I’d alter. I’ve already talked about loving the Rank and progression system, but also wanting to fiddle with it to allow “street level” heroes to achieve cosmic power levels. I absolutely love the options in the Crusaders Companion (which literally has the same name as a 300+ page supplement for Castles & Crusades… oy), so would immediately remake the Origin and Powers tables to include them. Long ago, I created a Motivation list that I like better than the one in the book. I think there’s an opportunity to make hazards more dynamic and interesting. And on and on. By the time I was done, I would have likely homebrewed a significant portion of the original rules. None of this work, funnily enough, sounds awful. In fact, most of it is exciting. Again, though, there are barriers between the book as written and my ability to jump in and play.

Finally, like a lot of small-press games, there isn’t a vibrant community online generating discussion and materials to inspire me. The Crusaders Facebook group currently has only 79 members, including me, and Facebook is us oldfolk’s primary way of connecting (and there’s no Discord server I could find). No virtual tabletop support for the game exists. The one saving grace, as far as I can tell, is that Olivier Legrand himself is still passionately plugging away at creating supplements and is accessible. Maybe I don’t need a community if I can email the game’s creator with my hairbrained ideas? Hard to know.

Yes, I’m throwing out hesitations and then immediately rebutting them. I’m seeing the problems of Crusaders, but I’m like a kid who just got his first beat-up car… its flaws are endearing.

One Game to Rule Them All

I spent a full ten minutes staring at my screen, wondering if I’m done. I really, really like Crusaders and, though it doesn’t precisely fit what I want to do without significant tweaking, the process of making those tweaks doesn’t daunt me. It’s funny to compare my reaction to changing parts of Crusaders against systems like City of Mist, Scion, or even Prowlers & Paragons. I haven’t played any of them, but there is something I innately understand about the mechanics of Crusaders that feels familiar. Again, it’s speaking directly to my 1980’s teenage brain.

Back to my central question: Am I done? Has the search ended?

On one hand, what I need to remember is that Crusaders was a pleasant surprise. I had no idea that I would love it, much less consider jettisoning my process halfway through to jump in. Perhaps another system is lurking on my pile, ready to dazzle me even more and without all the adjustments needed.

On the other hand, this is the feeling I want to have with whatever game system I choose, a decisive YES! in my bosom. This entire deep exploration process was meant to find me a game system that made me want to jump into a homebrewed solo game. If I’m excited about Crusaders, why keep looking?

After much contemplation, I’ve decided that I look for games like I shop for clothes: When I find something that fits and I like, I’m done. There are no less than five more games on my “to be explored” pile, at least two of them, I think, would give Crusaders a run for its money. But the systems are all so different… I’ve flipped through them all, thinking about my next post, and suddenly a task that was bringing me energy is draining it away. I want to get started.

Let’s do it: Crusaders is my game of choice!

Age of Wonders: Setting & Variant Rules

Choosing a Supers System, Part 5: Cortex Prime

On By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying1 Comment

Game number four of my deep-dive exploration of superhero games that can be played in a fantasy setting. Sometimes I wonder what’s wrong with me, that this is how my brain works.

By now you’re aware that I’m envisioning a new solo-play venture, one that involves a genre mash-up and thus a particular set of requirements for choosing my next game. These by-now-familiar requirements 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.

After three narrative-light systems in a row, it’s time to turn to something different. Today is my first (and only, at least for this series) dive into a true “setting agnostic” game, not built for any one genre, but meant for games in any of them.

Cortex Prime

Truth be told, I didn’t know that Cortex Prime existed until recently. Instead, I knew Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, a 2012 game by Margaret Weiss Productions and by far my favorite (out of five!) TTRPGs made under the Marvel banner. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying received rave reviews and introduced several innovative mechanics well-suited to the superhero genre. Sadly, the company lost its Marvel license within a year of launching the game and thus disappeared as quickly as it appeared. My sense is that if Margaret Weiss had retained the license, MHR would be talked about today as much as FASERIP, and likely would have spawned Cortex Prime—a generic system using the same engine as MHR—sooner. Instead, designer Cam Banks took the guts of that original game to a 2017 Kickstarter, and Cortex Prime released three years later. It may have sat dimly in my awareness the past few years alongside systems like Genesys and Cypher, but I had mostly steered away from generic systems towards more specific and unique game experiences. At some point this year, I made the connection between Cortex Prime and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, rubbed by eyes in disbelief, and promptly ordered the core rulebook.

The first thing to say about Cortex Prime is that it is beautifully produced. The cover, the interior art, the graphics used to explain game concepts, the layout… it’s all stunning. If the Supers! RED rulebook sits on one end of a sensory-stimulation spectrum, Cortex Prime is on the other.

It’s also a relatively unique rulebook in two ways: First, it reads like a “Game Design 101” textbook as much as a game instruction manual. Everything beyond the core mechanics in Cortex Prime is modular, and optional rules (called, in fact, “mods”) take up more room than the base rules, each painstakingly considered and guiding when you might use or not use that option. Because it’s a generic system, everything has a specific and technical term abstracted away from any one genre, and it’s a game that requires you to think beyond those technical terms to their application. Second, and relatedly, the book is targeted at Game Masters, not players. Because of its modular, design-the-game-to-your-world nature, Cam writes the book to bring GMs into the game design tent, letting them choose what sort of game they want to play. Cortex Prime is the single most earnest attempt I’ve seen to allow GMs to run the very specific game they want to play.

A number of great reviews of the system exist, and I’ll link to a few here by Mephit James, Gnome Stew, and Jeff’s Game Box. The best summary of the core mechanics are from a terrifically-written review by Cannibal Halfling, which I’ll quote here:

“Cortex is at its core a ‘roll and keep’ dice mechanic. For any challenge the player assembles a dice pool of around three dice, rolls them, and keeps the highest two results. Depending on which of your character’s traits are relevant to the roll, you could be rolling d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s, or d12s, with d6 being average, larger dice being better, and d4 being much less good, especially considering the high probability of rolling a 1. All dice rolls are opposed rolls; the base dice pool that the GM rolls is two dice whose size vary depending on the difficulty of the task.

There are two other mechanics which depend on the die results. First is the Effect Die. Once a player chooses the two dice they wish to keep, they choose the largest remaining die to be an Effect Die. The Effect Die determines the impact of certain dice rolls, and is dependent on the size (rather than result) of the chosen die. This does mean that it might sometimes be advantageous to choose a lower absolute result (provided it still meets the threshold for success) if it produces a larger Effect Die. Second result-based mechanic is the Hitch. A Hitch occurs when a player rolls a 1 on one of their dice. A die showing a one cannot be chosen for results or for the Effect Die. While there are no direct consequences beyond that for rolling a one (only rolling all 1s is considered a critical failure and is called a Botch), the GM may choose to spend that 1 on the roll to create a Complication. Complications, and their positive counterparts Assets, represent circumstances or items that exist in a scene, much like Aspects in Fate. A GM can add the die value of a relevant Complication to the dice pool that opposes a character’s roll, while the player can do the opposite with a relevant Asset. When a character creates an Asset, they may use the Effect Die to determine its die size and therefore its impact on the scene. The other core mechanic of note is the Plot Point System. Each player starts play with a Plot Point, and when the GM activates a Complication from a player rolling a 1, they also give that player a Plot Point. Plot Points can be spent on activating abilities, counting more dice in rolls, and preventing a character from being Taken Out of a Conflict. As more options are defined, so too are more ways to earn and spend Plot Points.”

For the previous games, I made a sample character to test out the system. I can’t do that here, because to make a character in Cortex Prime means first making a dizzying number of choices about what mods exist in a particular world. Are we defining characters by Attributes, Skills, Roles, Powers, Relationships, Affiliations, Values, or something else? What do the superpowers do in this world? What factions exist that characters can join? Etcetera etcetera etcetera. Every character sheet in Cortex Prime is unique to that GM’s vision for the world. Take, for example, the same character sheet on the game’s website, for their sample Hammerheads (sci-fi) setting:

Everything on the sheet above—the three Attributes, the Training Packages, how Relationships work, what Distinctions matter—it’s all a setting-driven choice that the GM made before a player ever got involved. The possibilities are dizzying, and means that, once a GM has done the work of designing the world, everything in it bends towards the specific setting and stories in that setting.

Why Cortex Prme Works For Me

In a lot of ways, Cortex Prime is my wildest dream come true. It is a system designed for genre mashups, to allow GMs to feel unconstrained by any pre-existing setting. This is exactly what I’ve been searching for in this exploration. Reading through my criteria at the top of this post, it’s hard to see how any of the next game systems are ever going to address my criteria better than Cortex Prime. I get the strong sense that I could spend months worldbuilding and turning all the modular knobs to create exactly, EXACTLY what I want to do. Heck, once I’d done this work, I would have a game sourcebook in my hands that I could use far beyond my own solo play adventures. I would be tempted to consider writing adventures for my world and publishing them, surely reaching out to my regular game group to start a campaign. It’s kind of like a dream come true for homebrew worldbuilders.

What about jumps in character leveling, something that I’ve been using as a primary screen against other systems? You guessed it: There are mods for that too. Character advancement is its own section in the Cortex Prime rulebook, and I could make leveling up as milestone-driven or dramatic as I want.

Finally, once the world and game are built and all that knob-fiddling is done, the game has exactly the balance between crunch and narrative that I’ve been seeking. The mechanics are clear and easy to execute, and the decisions lead to exciting story moments. Even though the book often reads like a dense technical manual, it’s obvious that the density of mechanics is meant to allow the GM to make choices before players get involved, but that gameplay is meant to be fluid and fun. Look back to the game that launched the system in the first place, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. In a lot of ways, MHR is an example of what Cortex Prime looks like once the GM choices are done.

The cherry on top: Because it’s a new game with such a wide scope and elegant presentation, the community around Cortex Prime is still vibrant. Unlike some other games I’m considering, I have no doubt that there would be plenty of people with which to bounce ideas or to lend inspiration. Moreover, I expect more and more setting books will be released over time, providing a whole ecosystem of Cortex Prime ideas to mine.

So, am I done? Did I find my perfect system? It sounds like it, right?

My Cortex Prime Hesitations

On average, I think each page of the ~250-page Cortex Prime rulebook took me more time to consume than any other game book I own. I had to reread sections multiple times to grok it and connect what I was learning with other sections, taking breaks between sections to allow my mind to breathe. It’s the only rpg book in memory that I’ve brought on an international business trip so that I could have the long plane rides to read it without distraction. To be clear: I’m not criticizing the book’s presentation or layout. For me, learning Cortex Prime is akin to learning a new language. Cam Banks has invited me to become a game designer and given me tools to do so. It’s as if I started the process of finding the perfect car for myself and stumbled upon a custom-kit dealership, where I can have any unique car I want if I’m willing to learn how to build it.

What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I’m not fundamentally a game designer. At best, I’m a competent GM who is comfortable homebrewing certain rules and tweaking settings to my taste. I’m a writer first, game player second. I don’t aspire to publish my own game system. Jumping back to my analogy, I’m a car enthusiast, not a mechanic—I want to buy a car and have someone give me the keys, complete with a maintenance plan if I run into trouble later. It’s clear to me that Cortex Prime offers the exact game experience I want for my project, as long as I’m willing to put in the significant work to assemble it from parts. Is that the work I want to do? I don’t think so. Everything about Cortex Prime feels tantalizingly full of possibilities but frustratingly far away.

I have two additional quibbles, but they are minor compared to the daunting, steep learning curve of building the system to my homebrewed world. First, as I’ve said throughout this series, Dungeon Crawl Classics titillated me with the story possibilities inherent in random tables. The more randomness I can insert into my process, the more that I surprise myself in my storytelling. Unless I want to build the tables myself, nothing about character creation in Cortex Prime is random. I’m sure that Cam Banks would encourage me to build those tables, but it’s just another step to a long process before I get to play and write. Woof.

Second, it sounds like there is some collective handwringing in the Cortex Prime community about how licensing works with the system (another article on this topic is here). In other words, once I’d put in the months of fiddling with the system to have it exactly represent my homebrewed, mashup setting, how public could I be with the choices I’d made? If I wanted to start releasing bits on this blog that became my own specific character sheets, powers lists, etc. – who owns those? It makes sense that there are legal questions there, because as I said, the Cortex Prime book feels uniquely like a game design toolbox more than a typical game rulebook. I don’t have specific goals or an endpoint in mind for this project (and honestly am not particularly ambitious about it), but I’d hate to regret choosing it as a system without fully educating myself on how licensing works. Add this step to the long lists of things I’d have to understand before beginning to play, which just all makes me want to sigh heavily.

One Game to Rule Them All

If it’s not obvious, I’m incredibly impressed by Cortex Prime as a system. It’s brilliant and unlike anything else I have on my TTRPG shelves. Kudos all around to Cam Banks and anyone else who created it.

It’s also a sobering game to explore. On the one hand, Cortex Prime delivers exactly what I want, as long as I’m willing to put in upfront work to create it. My resistance to doing that work is palpable, however, and makes me realize that I want a game that satisfies my requirements without needing to design the game myself. Back to my car analogy, I’d rather spend more time test-driving cars, finding the best one of the options available that I can drive right off the lot, than learning the skills necessary to build my own from a kit. There’s a reason that I spend time playing games and writing fiction and don’t spend that same time designing games. I hadn’t been forced to confront my missing game-designer gene until Cortex Prime.

As a result, I’ll keep it as an option, but distantly behind the others. If I truly can’t find something that works for me—or if I find myself with tons of free time and a willingness to crack my designer knuckles—it’s cool to know that Cortex Prime is there waiting for me.

Top Contender: ICONS

Second: Supers! RED

Third: Cortex Prime

Not currently in consideration:

Choosing a Supers System, Part 6

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