Posts tagged marvelrpg
Marvel RPG Week Day Seven: Collation
Dec 7th
And here we are in the final day of Marvel RPG week here at Greywulf Towers. We’ve looked at what made this system so innovative, and it’s awesome random (or not so random, should you so choose) character generation, at the Gamers Handbooks, the task resolution system, the Ultimate Powers supplement and the published adventure modules – and we’ve barely even scratched the surface.
That’s how it is with superhero gaming though. It’s such a large genre full of everything from mutants to magic, from low-powered street-level costumed vigilantes to cosmic reality-warping entities and everything in between. It’s a genre where cavemen can rub shoulders with alien super-technologists (and frequently do) – and Marvel RPG is arguably the first system which truly delivered a system able to handle all levels and styles of play. Where other, equally venerable systems such as Villains & Vigilantes, Golden Heroes and DC Heroes were capable in their own way, it was the Marvel RPG that captured the hearts and minds of our gaming group and many others like it in the UK, US and elsewhere. Personally, I owe Jeff Grubb (hi, Jeff!) and the rest a debt of gratitude every bit as large as that one we owe to Gary Gygax himself. The Marvel RPG is the system which opened my eyes to the possibility of superhero role-playing gaming, and all the way through my years of gaming the lessons I learned from those earliest day have never left.
There’s so much left to explore. Want to join me on the adventure?
If you want to try the Marvel RPG yourself head over to Classic Marvel where the entire system and supplements can be downloaded for free. Go to Other Stuff->Downloads->Advanced Game and Modules for the Marvel RPG Advanced Set. Spend some time surfing the site – it’s a terrific resource full of more role-playing goodness than you can possibly imagine.
Make Mine Marvel! (or DC, or Wizard, or Image, or Wildstorm, or Dark Horse, or………)
Character du Jour sneak peek: Meet Redhawk
Dec 7th
DAZ Studio, no postwork. Click to enlarge.
Coming soon! Here’s Redhawk, my latest superhero from my campaign. Expect full stats, origin and backstory for both Mutants & Masterminds and the Marvel RPG, just because.
I’m pretty pleased with how this guy turned out.
Anyone want to guess what his powers are?
Marvel RPG Week Day Six: Exploration
Dec 6th
A system with great, innovative and exciting rules but no adventures is like owning a car but having nowhere to go. Adventures give the GM and players places to explore, but more than that, they also put across the game designer’s ideas of how the game is supposed to be played. If, for example, most of the published adventures for D&D were set underwater, then you’d find more gamer groups kitting their players out with scuba gear and running their own undersea quests. But no, it’s dungeon adventures we’re given, and it’s dungeon (or dungeon-style) adventures that make up the vast majority of homebrewed games.
This, to some extent, is where the Marvel RPG fell down. The modules for the Advanced Game provided adventures that were, quite literally, all over the place both in terms of setting and overall quality. When they were good – Cosmos Cubed, Ragnarok and Roll and Left Hand of Eternity, among others – the adventures delivered the goods in spades with scenes, villains and challenges that deserve to be right up there in the Museum of RPG Greats. You have to rescue Galactus from Death Himself – c’mon, how freaking cool is that??! Then there’s Warlords of Baluur, the less of which we speak about the better.
This is one area where it’s worth taking a longer look at the modules for the Basic Set instead. These were more grounded in good, solid Urban Adventuring with New York New York and Concrete Jungle providing everything you need to know about street-level adventuring in Marvel’s Golden Age. If you’re a long-time comicbook fan, the Secret Wars modules will either have you weeping with joy or sorrow, depending on what you thought of the series at the time.
If you want to try the Marvel RPG yourself head over to Classic Marvel where the entire system and supplements can be downloaded for free. Go to Other Stuff->Downloads->Advanced Game and Modules for the Marvel RPG Advanced Set. Spend some time surfing the site – it’s a terrific resource full of more role-playing goodness than you can possibly imagine.
Make Mine Marvel!
Marvel RPG Week Day Five: Expansion
Dec 5th
We’re a greedy lot, we gamers. Give us 8 character classes, and we demand 20. Give us 500 spells and we’ll gobble up another 2,000 and still ache for more. And give us 100 superpowers in the core Marvel RPG books and you just know we’re going to love the Ultimate Powers supplement.
Between the covers you’ll find almost 300 new powers ranging from the useful (Teleport Others) to the downright bizarre (Self-Vegetation, anyone?) and well as a souped up set of character generation tables which unlock all of this goodness as soon as you’re ready to roll the dice. As it says in the preface, the goal of this supplement was to re-create as near as dammit every single power found in the comicbooks, and when we’re talking Marvel, that’s a strange and wonderful source indeed. And boy, have they succeeded. There are, of course, omissions, but you’d be struggling to find them.
What’s fun is being able to mix the powers together during character generation. Resist:Vampirism might make sense if you’re a vampire-battling warrior, but how’s that going to help your battlesuit-wearing alien from the far future? I’ve said it before though – it’s the weird dichtonomies of random generation that make this such a terrific system when it comes to creating characters.
The fun starts with the Physical Form table which take you straight into WTFland. Roll 59 and your character is an Equiman – the likely result of a mating between a centaur and a human. Don’t ask. Just…. don’t. It weirded me out the first time too.
Thankfully, there’s more cool than there is downright strange with several different types of mutant, modified humans (and surgical composites – my favourites!), cyborgs, robots and more. Want to play a deity? Hope you roll 89, or have a GM who’s happy for you to choose from the table.
Unlike the generation from the Advanced Players book, the generation in Ultimate Powers can be time consuming. With the former it’s possible to create your hero in a matter of minutes. Roll the dice, pick your powers from the list, figure out a rough origin then hit the ground running. Quick, simple and immense fun. Characters from Ultimate Powers are more a labour of love with each roll of the dice meaning more strangeness is added to the mix. It takes time to work out the thread that links all the disparate elements together – but the end result is frequently worth it.
If you want to try the Marvel RPG yourself head over to Classic Marvel where the entire system and supplements can be downloaded for free. Go to Other Stuff->Downloads->Advanced Game and Modules for the Marvel RPG Advanced Set. Spend some time surfing the site – it’s a terrific resource full of more role-playing goodness than you can possibly imagine.
Make Mine Marvel!
Marvel RPG Week Day Four: Resolution
Dec 4th
So far, we’ve looked at how Marvel RPG handles character generation, and given the Gamers Handbooks the once over. That’s all well and good, but what really matters is what it’s like to actually sit down and play the thing.
And the great news is, the Marvel RPG plays, brilliantly. Right at it’s core is this chart:
This, plus your character sheet and a d10, is all you need to play the game. Cross-reference your ability with a d100 roll, apply any modifiers (usually giving Column Shifts up or down the table), and check the result. The colour-coding goes from White (a fail – usually a Miss) through to Red (a critical, in modern parlance), but as there’s also Green (success) and Yellow (better….) too, it gives us three degrees of success rather than the more common two (success or critical success).
In other words – don’t be deceived by the simplicity of the rules; it’s actually more granular than other supposedly “advanced” systems. That’s also helped by the wealth of defensive choices in the game too – just check the top of the chart where you’ll find how to Grab, Escape, Charge, Dodge, Evade, Block and Catch too. It’s a system where combat is a two-way thing where both the attacker and defender has a say in the outcome of each block, yet it manages to keep things flowing very quickly indeed.
If big colourful charts aren’t your thing, one of the supplements (New York, New York?) included a Resolution Wheel which you revolved to look up your results. We preferred the table, finding the Wheel just a bit too fiddling and distracting in play. If round things are your thang though, there’s a number of variants (along with an excellent Judges Screen, revised and errata’d copies of the rules and superb netbooks) on this page at Classic Marvel.
Either way, it’s refreshing to play a game that’s so streamlined. Given that the Marvel RPG was released by TSR (famous for making a certain fantasy role-playing game), it’s unsurprising that the mechanics weren’t adapted into other genres. I’d have loved to see an official FASERIP-based fantasy or WWII game, for example. There’s no shortage of unofficial ports though, with Classic Marvel itself providing more than enough information to roll your own.
If you want to try the Marvel RPG yourself head over to Classic Marvel where the entire system and supplements can be downloaded for free. Go to Other Stuff->Downloads->Advanced Game and Modules for the Marvel RPG Advanced Set. Spend some time surfing the site – it’s a terrific resource full of more role-playing goodness than you can possibly imagine.
Super Special Day Four Bonus: Head over to The Gamer Dome where they’ve very kindly compiled all of the Supplemental articles from the pages of Dragon Magazine into one terrific free PDF of Marvelly goodness. The high-point for me has to article about ROM and the Space Knights complete with character generation so you can roll your own Space Knight!
Make Mine Marvel!
Marvel RPG Week Day Three: Revelation
Dec 3rd
Imagine, if you will, that there somehow existed a resource which listed the complete game stats, origin and information about the heroes of your childhood. Imagine being able to look up and compare the relative strengths of each, and even somehow actually use that information right in your role-playing games as fully playable characters or NPCs straight off the page. Imagine them all written up and readily available for all with none of that Intellectual Property Rights nonsense that blights the modern age.
Gamers Handbooks of the Marvel Universe are exactly that dream, come true. Published as four hefty tomes then updated yearly from 1989 to 1992, these books contained pretty much the entire Marvel roll call, fully stated out and ready for play. The sheer number of heroes and villains is overwhelming, and it’s a testament to the number of different comics that Marvel turned out in the 70s and 80s. Your average non-comic loving geek might recognise perhaps 5% of these, and even your typical superheroes lover would struggle to know more than a third. Anyone who claims to know more that 50% of them is either lying, or really needs to get out more :D
Granted, a high percentage of them totally suck, but that’s a large part of their charm. It’s comforting to know that no matter how bad a character you create, someone at Marvel probably made one worse – and they were paid to do it too! It vindicates Marvel RPG’s use of random character generation as I suspect some of the characters in the Gamers Handbooks were created in a similarly random (if not intoxicated and/or drug-induced) fashion.
The fun thing though is that it’s the bat-shit crazy ones I love. Give me characters like Angar the Screamer, Arkon or Doctor Sun (look ‘em up) and I’m in heaven – and as these books come complete with full gamestats for ‘em, they’re immediately droppable into your Marvel RPG game too. Conversion to other systems (*cough* Mutants & Masterminds *cough*) isn’t that difficult either as the heavy lifting has already been done for you.
As with the rest of the Marvel RPG, the Gamers Handbooks are available for free download from Classic Marvel. The first four (covering Abomination to Zzzax - I kid you not) weight in at a total of 136Mb of pdfs, and are well worth the disk space. A word of warning though – the 1989 Character Update is a 91Mb all on it’s own, though 1990-1992 are just 29Mb in total. The scan quality overall isn’t that great but they’re still very readable and usable nonetheless.
Given that these books are close on 25 years old, you’d think that they’re no longer relevant in today’s comicbook age – and you’d be wrong. The more you look through them, the more you realised that fuck-all has happened in the Marvel Universe in the past quarter-century. Around 75% of the characters in these books will never see light of day again in these leaner, meaner times, but the A- and B-list Marvel guys are near-as-dammit exactly the same as they have ever been. Iron Man might be slightly less alcoholic these days, Hulk a little angrier and Captain America…. well ok, he died, but otherwise they’re all the same as they ever have been. I blame the comic-buying public, personally. For all that we love the fantastic, we hate evolution and change, and consistently decry and moan about our precious heroes being messed with. We hated Spider-man‘s One More Day storyline, but we’re all much happier bunnies that he’s back being…. well, exactly the same guy you’ll find in the 20-odd year old Gamers Handbooks.
If you want to try the Marvel RPG yourself head over to Classic Marvel where the entire system and supplements can be downloaded for free. Go to Other Stuff->Downloads->Advanced Game and Modules for the Marvel RPG Advanced Set. Spend some time surfing the site – it’s a terrific resource full of more role-playing goodness than you can possibly imagine.
Make Mine Marvel!
Marvel RPG Week Day Two: Generation
Dec 2nd
I wrote about Marvel RPG’s wonderful random character generation back in July, but I’m going to say it all over again just to hammer the point home: Random Character Generation rocks.
Most modern RPGs (4e D&D included) are based upon the principle that the player should be in complete control of character generation from start to finish, being able to pick the race, class and even stats as they fill their character sheet. It’s good, but also roughly akin to telling a child that you’ll feed them only what they want; you end up with fat, lazy gamers who don’t eat their greens. Ok, maybe not the best analogy in the world…..
Marvel RPG’s character generation puts the majority of decisions over to the dice. You roll your origin, attributes, how many and what type of Powers and Talents you possess, then given the choice to either roll or select your Powers and Talents from a sublist. If you roll the same category of Power twice, you’re given the choice to either increase the rank of an existing Power or select/roll an additional one. It’s a terrific blend of random and selection where (if the dice go your way) you can end up with exactly the kind of character you desire, and if they don’t you’re likely left with something that’s batshit crazy but immense fun to play. As this is Marvel, the crazier character the better; when we take a look at the Gamer’s Handbooks later you’ll see how Random Generation perfectly suits the Marvel Way of character design.
What Marvel RPG’s random character generation gives you is Inspiration, and that’s sadly lacking in modern RPGs – and I include my own much-loved Mutants & Masterminds in this. When generation throws you an odd blend of Powers and Talents, a large part of the fun is trying to work out a coherent thread through them, turning the random into something that works. One of my old, long-time players was brilliant at this, able to work out a name, origin and backstory that left you hitting your forehead mumbling “Of course!” at how it all magically ties together.
It’s a dying art, and one that’s well worth grabbing Marvel RPG just to master. To be able to see something behind the raw stats and turn it from just a Load of Numbers into a Character is one of the core traits of being a great Player or GM. I cut my teeth in Marvel RPG doing just that, and occasionally still turn to those tables for Inspiration for new heroes and villains for Mutants & Masterminds.
But there’s more. There’s the excellent Zan’s Marvel Character Generator which allows you to create both random and custom characters, outputting both text and html versions of your character. For the real Random Character Generation magic, just hit CTRL-R to create a completely unique, one-of-a-kind character, then try to explain the origin. While it might take a few bounces on CTRL-R to find a character that appeals, with practise you’ll soon find that there’s few totally unplayable, unworkable characters, even if some end up…. odd. The generator defaults to using the generation options from the Ultimate Powers book which provides more origins, powers and options for the game. If you prefer to start with options just from the Advanced Players Book, remember to set that in Preferences.
Here’s a quick example using Zan’s Character Generator and the Ultimate Powers option.
Dayshift AKA Sister Maeve Jarvis (High Technology hero)
34, Female, 6’4″, 190 lbs., White skin, Brown hair, Silver eyes
Fighting: Typical (6)
Agility: Typical (6)
Strength: Excellent (20)
Endurance: Good (10)
Reason: Good (10)
Intuition: Good (10)
Psyche: Excellent (20)
Health: 42, Karma: 40, Resources: Typical (4), Popularity: Good (6)
Resist:Vampirism (Excellent)
Extradimensional Detection (Typical)
Berserker (Good)
Talents: Sharp Weapons
Contacts: Religion
Dayshift hearkens from a darker alternate Earth where humans have battled vampires in a 100 year long Undying War. Her nanite-enhanced strength, silver eyes, vampiric immunity, raw ferocity and blessed Blade mark her as one of the Most Faithful, a warrior bred by the Catholic Church to combat the heresy of Vampirism in the bloodiest way possible. She was pulled to this Earth through a portal which summoned a Master Vampire as she was about to slay him; he escaped, and now she’s stuck on a parallel Earth with the very real threat of a new breed of vampires in a world unprepared for their arrival.
Bishop + Blade = Slayer Nun! Oh yeh.
In a Berkerer rage, her Reason and Psyche both drop to Feeble Rank, and her Fighting increases to Excellent (19) and her Strength to Incredible (39). Ouch.
If you want to try the Marvel RPG yourself head over to Classic Marvel where the entire system and supplements can be downloaded for free. Go to Other Stuff->Downloads->Advanced Game and Modules for the Marvel RPG Advanced Set. Spend some time surfing the site – it’s a terrific resource full of more role-playing goodness than you can possibly imagine.
Special Day Two Bonus: Topless Robot’s timely and excellent list of 5 Greatest (and 5 Worst) Cartoons Based on Marvel Comic Characters.
Make Mine Marvel!
Marvel RPG Week Day One: Innovation
Dec 1st
If you had to come up with a list of “Top 100 years of all time”, 1984 wouldn’t exactly make the top 20. Granted, it had some things going for it; the first Apple Mac was released, Torvill & Dean score 12 perfect 6.0s in the Winter Olympics and – most important of all – the original Marvel RPG was released.
This first edition of the rules was targeted firmly at the comic loving Fighting Fantasy reading school kids – perfect fodder for introducing to the role-playing hobby. The expectation was that the game would revolve around players using existing Marvel characters; after all, who could resist being able to actually play as Spiderman, Iron Man or The Punisher – I know I couldn’t. Simple character generation rules were slotted at the back of the Campaign Book as a good, but strictly optional, extra. The game was also very well supported with regular boxed supplements (remember those?) released covering everything from the Avengers to Spiderman and Marvel’s street-level heroes.
Fast forward a few years, and TSR followed this up with the Advanced Set, and that’s the one I’m going to focus on this week. Perhaps bolstered by the surprise success of the Basic Set, this Edition was put together with a flair and attention to detail that put it leagues ahead of anything else out at the time.
For a system to succeed, it needs to either be fun, or have great rules. Most systems from the 1980s fell into the first category with systems such as the Palladium RPG and AD&D itself having very ropey rules systems but being an absolute blast to play. The Marvel RPG had it all – a superbly simple and consistent engine that’s pure, unadulterated FUN to play. It was one of the first systems I saw which had a single Universal mechanic; for a player used to different rules for save effects, combat, skill use, etc this was a total revelation. That, plus the use of Real Words as a measure of comparative Rank (something only really popularised in FUDGE/FATE) meant that this was a game that could be learned and understood in minutes, but hold up to a lifetime of play.
In the Marvel RPG, everything is given a Rank, ranging from Feeble to Unearthly and beyond with Typical being… well, typical, or the human norm. Your completely average Joe Public would have Typical Rank in Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition and Psyche. I can hear old-timers weeping now at the memory of the FASERIP acronym right now. There, there.
A Rank of Typical roughly equates to a D&D stat of 10-11. Ranks also have a number ranking from 1-2 (the Feeble range) to 5000 for Class 5000 Rank. They ran out of comparatives after Unearthly, it seems. This meant that two characters with Remarkable Rank Fighting could be differentiated by their rank number – one might be Remarkable(26), and the other Remarkable(35). There’s little difference in-game, but it’s this degree of fine-tuning that marks the game throughout.
Over the next few days we’re going to be looking at everything from Random Character Generation to the super-powers, combat and the utterly wonderful Gamer’s Handbooks of the Marvel Universe.
If you want to try the Marvel RPG yourself head over to Classic Marvel where the entire system and supplements can be downloaded for free. Go to Other Stuff->Downloads->Advanced Game and Modules for the Marvel RPG Advanced Set. Spend some time surfing the site – it’s a terrific resource full of more role-playing goodness than you can possibly imagine.
Special Day One Bonus: To geek you out even further, check out this awesome end-to-end infinite display of all the covers of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Now that’s what I’m talking about!
Make Mine Marvel!
Marvel RPG Week!
Nov 29th
Starting Monday, Make Mine Marvel! I’m going to take a full week to take you through another one of the greatest RPGs from the history of this great hobby. Each day I’ll pick apart one piece of the system to show you just why it deserves being given a chance on your game table right now.
If you want to get a head start, either dive into that attic and dust down your prized copy of rules, or head over to Classic Marvel and grab the Advanced Players and Judges Handbooks, for free.
Get ready, True Believers! It’s coming…………
