My Top Supers RPGs

I've been thinking lately about a supers campaign. I've always been a fan of the genre, but I've never gotten more than one or two sessions to work for me as a GM. I believe that, in general, a supers game needs a good amount of prep—maybe more than other games—and that's my weakest point as a Game Master. I'm now taking a long view and really planning a future campaign. That said, because of my interest in the genre, I've read and played a lot of these games. I've narrowed it down to three go-to games. I'll present them here, along with some thoughts on their strengths.

Traditional: Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion (Second Edition)

Honestly I hate the word "traditional" as a descriptor for RPGs because the word feels like implies "right," which is not my intention here. In this case when I think of a traditional supers RPG, I think of Champions. Sure Villains and Vigilantes came first, but I believe Champions is what propelled the format forward. I also believe that Mutants & Masterminds improved on Champions, and that it's from this formula that the Super Powers Companion (henceforth SPC) was formed.

My favorite feature of the SPC was an option in the first edition and rightly made the default assumption in the second edition—static power level. I believe that (and correct me if I'm wrong) the SPC is the first supers system that maintains a constant power level for supers, while still allowing characters to improve in other areas, like skills, Edges, etc. I believe this is the best "happy accident" of the modularity of Savage Worlds, as it feels closest to the comics I grew up with.

Another thing I love about the SPC is a benefit of Savage Worlds, in general, and that's the ability to play with the dials of grittiness and lethality, among many others. And speaking of modularity, the SPC was designed to have cross-compatibilty with the Savage Worlds Science Fiction Companion, opening up two more common comic book tropes to the game, aliens (ex: Guardians of the Galaxy) and futuristic supers stories (ex: Legion of Super Heroes).

Honorable Mention: Mutants & Masterminds Third Edition, BASH! Ultimate Edition

Narrative: Prowlers & Paragons

Another term with a lot of baggage in the RPG world, in this case by "narrative," I'm referring to the word's literal definition, rather than the infamous descriptor born out of GNS theory.

Prowlers & Paragons (henceforth P&P) is interesting to me because it's literally more of a conversation and really pulls back from the crunchiness of the aforementioned traditional supers games. It's also a great use of dice outcomes being used to confer narrative control, rather than effects. I'm told there will be a more "in depth" version of P&P released down the road, and it's my hope they tread lightly, being careful not to lose what makes this game so compelling. The only drawback I see with this game is that it's niche in terms of the type of group who will excel at and enjoy playing it.

Honorable Mention: Worlds In Peril

Pick-Up: ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying: The Assembled Edition

You can literally make characters and play a scenario of ICONS in the same sitting, only losing 15-20 minutes of a typical session. Some people chafe at random character generation, but ICONS mitigates this with a series of on-the-fly options that come up during creation. I've built lots of characters, and I've never had a problem coming up with something fun and playable. The powers list for this game is short but can be made more in-depth with the addition of the Great Power supplement. There's also a simple option for a point buy build, if you're into that sort of thing... Honestly I think ICONS is plenty robust for most applications, in addition to being a great pick-up game, I think it would serve as a great compromise between the SPC and P&P.

Honorable Mention: Fate Accelerated Edition, Venture City Stories (for Fate Core)

So tell me about your supers favorites? Do you have just one or do you have different games for different applications like me?

#RPGaDay2015 - 19th - Favorite Supers RPG

It's August 2015, and to follow on with the success of last year's #RPGaDay event, David Chapman at Autocratik has created a new list. Each day in August, I'll be posting my "answer" to that day's topic.

There are a ridiculous amount of supers RPGs on the market, and many of them are amazing. For me, the best of the best is ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying: The Assembled Edition. For longtime readers of this blog, you may recall I had some issues with the original edition of the game, this version serves to explain itself much better and the organization is like night and day. There have also been a couple tweaks that allow for more options against particularly tough opponents. If I was running a supers game tomorrow, and it was 100% my choice of what to run, it would be ICONS.

#RPGaDay2015 - 11th - Favorite RPG Writer

It's August 2015, and to follow on with the success of last year's #RPGaDay event, David Chapman at Autocratik has created a new list. Each day in August, I'll be posting my "answer" to that day's topic.

This is the toughest question of the month. I had to actually have a conversation with my wife about this one. I started out with five names, and at the end of the conversation, I was only able to narrow it down to three: Shane Hensley, Steve Kenson, and Harley Stroh.

Shane created two of my all-time favorite RPG things, Savage Worlds and Deadlands. He also did a great version of Lankhmar and worked on my favorite D&D setting, Dark Sun, back in the days of TSR. If Shane writes it, I'll buy it.

Steve Kenson wrote what was arguably the first true "next generation" D20 System game, in Mutants & Masterminds. It was also the first supers RPG to rival the classic Champions. More recently he wrote my current favorite supers RPG, Icons.

Harley Stroh is a beautiful, sick and twisted, genius. As one of the key writers for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, his adventures are consistently the most interesting and entertaining, even to read, let alone run or play. Check out Peril on the Purple Planet, it's pretty great stuff.

The Family Game

Recently, we've started a family roleplaying game on Sunday afternoons.


I am GMing the game, and the players are my wife (Veronica), my brother (Cliff), my brother-in-law (Scott), and my daughter (CaLeigh), who's nearly eight. While my wife and I have quite a bit of experience, everyone else at the table has little to no experience with pen and paper RPGs.


To keep it simple and free-flowing, I've decided to run ICONS. Veronica put aside her prejudice against random character creation, and we went all in with it. To say the least, character creation was quite a bit of fun. Despite the ability to throw together a character in minutes, we decided to do it as a group; and I walked them through each step. We ended up with:

• Lady Flux (CaLeigh): A shape changer who can grow and shrink, usually into animals - think Beast Boy.
• Knight Shade (Cliff): A crime fighter with elemental power over darkness.
• Force (Scott): A mutant with the power of telekinesis.
• SwitchBack (Veronica): An ex-cat burglar with a transmutation gun.

After a quick discussion, Cliff and Veronica decided Knight Shade convinced SwitchBack to become a hero (in Knight Shade #42!), so there was at least one connection in the group. We decided the team would get together after a chance meeting, so we're running the first adventure, Sins of the Past by Theron Bretz, before doing Team Creation.


I did make one small mechanical change to the rules. Veronica is not a fan of the d6-d6 dice mechanic, and I thought the ladder concept, in general, might cause some confusion with CaLeigh. So I'm just having everyone roll up and add, and on the back end, I'm simply adding 7 to the difficulty. Shedding the plus/minus concept doesn't change any probabilities, and it seemed to make the game run just a bit faster. It may not be technically faster, but I for one have been rolling 2d6 for a very long time (going back to Monopoly when I was younger than CaLeigh). It just feels really natural.


We started late for our first play session, and Cliff and Scott had plans after our scheduled stop time; so we only got through the first two chapters of the story. There were still some highlights. Lady Flux turned into a huge ape and belly-flopped an armored bad gal. SwitchBack used her transmutaion gun to turn the same bad gal's armor to pudding (it'll turn back in 10 pages). Knight Shade overconfidently raised a wall of darkness, only to have it shut down by a villain with probability control. Force used his telekinesis to throw a metal desk through the darkness, only to find the armored villain holding it when Knight Shade's wall came down.


Fun was had by all.

ICONS Revisited

Awhile back, I put ICONS back on the shelf. Having run it twice, I wanted to love it, but I couldn't bring myself to. There were a couple reasons, but the principle one was in play. I couldn't get past the Invulnerability power.

Basically a character with Invulnerability can never be physically harmed by a character with Strength two or more points below that Invulnerability. From a genre standpoint, it makes total sense--Batman can smack the heck out of Superman for days and it wouldn't do anything but annoy Superman. But from a game standpoint, it felt wrong. In my experience there should always be a way to hurt the bad guy.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with Chuck Rice, who writes a lot of support material for ICONS. I decided to bring up this flaw to maybe get some house rules from a subject matter expert. It didn't go the way I'd planned. Chuck made some pretty good arguments for why this was OK. So I resolved myself to run the game one more time, looking at it from his standpoint--it is a genre convention; it forces the players to thing outside the box; this is a Good Thing.

This week my Friday group was down a player, and since we're just starting a campaign, I didn't want to go on without him. I took the opportunity to run Steve Kenson's excellent adventure, The Skeletron Key, using the official freebie characters given out to promote the release of ICONS. Justin played the Hangman, Ed played the Mighty Saguaro (brilliantly, I might add), Veronica played Miss Tikal (that name still cracks me up a year later), and our guest player, Matt, played All-Star.

I warned the players in advance about the inability to damage some things--they wouldn't necessarily be able to smash their way to victory. I told them to think outside the box when this issue came up. The group really thought on their feet. They used Stunts and Retcons to defeat the physically tough opponents. All-Star was equipped to hurt anything in the story, but that didn't stop the other players from doing their part. 

I was impressed. Not only did the players get around my perceived flaw in the game, they had a blast doing it. And it felt more like reading a comic or watching a cartoon. The result is ICONS does a great job of providing an authentic-feeling, super-powered experience.

Another thing I learned about the game is I'll be running it exclusively from my iPad. As a physical book it's beautiful, but I have some organization issues with it. There is no index and the table of contents is anemic. The powers section is not organized in a way that lends itself to quick reference. Powers are broken down alphabetically by type, rather than just alphabetically. Further, there's no alphabetical page number reference to make things easier to find, and the table of contents doesn't tell you what page the sections for power type start. It makes for a very frustrating experience when you're new to the game and need information now. On the iPad, I just bookmarked this stuff, and I can now reference the book very quickly.

Overall, ICONS is a great game, and as long as you warn the players of the genre conventions and keep your copy on a laptop or iPad, you should enjoy it too.

Con Report: MagnaCon 2011

MagnaCon was a lot of fun. I ran five games (in four different systems) and met some awesome people. I'd like to especially thank Veronica Livingston for being a great host, and I'd like to thank Matthew Ward for getting me involved in the first place.

On Friday, I started out running Swords & Wizardry. I only had two players initially. They each ran two characters so we could run the adventure. Eric and Camdon were both good sports, and I think we all had a good time. Later in the session, we were joined by Matt, who managed to have two characters die on him. Finally, the last part was rounded out with the addition of my wife, Veronica.

For the Deadlands session, we had Wife Veronica, Camdon, Matt, Ed, Other Ron, and Lee. That game was a blast. I was going to go with a post-train robbery, Reservoir Dogs kinda thing, but at the last minute I decided to go with more of a From Dusk Till Dawn thing. My great friend Clint Black put that bug in my ear early last week, and by Friday morning, I'd decided he'd made a better call. It ended up being a blast.

Saturday morning, I ran Icons for Wife Veronica, Lee, and Olivia (11 years old--awesome!). It was a good time. The cheesy, in-character one-liners were hilarious.

Running two of the same story at MagnaCon turned out to be a mistake, as evidenced by the one person who showed up to re-play the S&W story I was running. So Camdon, my wife, and I put our heads together and decided to grab some Savage Worlds fantasy pregens from the Reality Blurs website and run something off the cuff. I consulted the excellent book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, and had a story ready in minutes. It was relatively short, but I think we all had fun.

For the finale, I ran my Chicago, A.D. (After Dresden) story using the excellent Dresden Files RPG. We had Wife Veronica, Camdon, Ed, RP, Matt, and Chuck. Despite several factors--noise, group size, and mild food poisoning on my part--the game went pretty well. I have to say FUDGE dice hate me. I rolled multiple -4s and -3s in that game. This wasn't an isolated incident, either. It's happened every time I've played FATE. Unlike what the math fans will tell you, FUDGE dice really average -1, at least in my experience. I mean when I rolled high, the players were even celebrating.

So in my judgment, I am a little nuts for taking on as much as I did for MagnaCon. I won't put myself in quite that situation again--running so many games in so many different systems. That said I had a lot of fun.

But I have to say, "mission accomplished," on multiple levels. I ran five stories in four systems. People seemed to have fun. I had fun. Most importantly, potentially long-lasting relationships were formed in those two days. And that last thing is what this hobby is all about for me.

The only truly negative experience of the weekend (other than the mild food poisoning) was I missed my daughter terribly (as typically happens when we're separated for more than a day), so Vern and I have made the decision to take CaLeigh to Genghis Con Jr. next month. She was excited when we told her. I'm really looking forward to seeing how that goes.

Overall, MagnaCon is really a board game con, and they're trying to add RPGs. If board games are your bag, they had everything. The open library rivaled Pulp Gamer's, and Time Well Spent was there selling games at website prices.

MagnaCon 2011

Tonight and tomorrow I will be at MagnaCon in Denver, running roleplaying games. Here's what I'm running:

Friday
3:00pm - 7:00pm: Swords & Wizardry (up to 8 players)
Labyrinth Tomb of the Minotaur Lords - Enter the dungeon and discover it's treasures. Swords & Wizardry is a revival of the original fantasy roleplaying game. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and your own set of polyhedral dice.

8:00pm - 12:00am: Deadlands: Reloaded (up to 8 players)
Greed - Your gang has just robbed a train full of railroad payroll. The heat is on, and you're holed up in a small town, waiting out the law. But something's... wrong. This horror western uses the Savage Worlds game system. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and your own set of polyhedral dice, including a separate, different six-sider.

Saturday
9:00am - 1:00pm: ICONS (up to 8 players)
It's Saturday morning--time for cartoons! In this super-powered game, your super team must foil the Siderial Schemes of Dr. Zodiac. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and two different-colored standard dice.

2:00pm - 6:00pm: Swords & Wizardry (up to 8 players)
Labyrinth Tomb of the Minotaur Lords - Enter the dungeon and discover it's treasures. Swords & Wizardry is a revival of the original fantasy roleplaying game. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and your own set of polyhedral dice. THIS IS A REPLAY OF THE FRIDAY EVENING GAME.

8:00pm - 12:00am: The Dresden Files (up to 8 players)
Chicago, A.D. (After Dresden) - Harry Dresden is dead or missing, and there's a power vacuum left in Chicago. Can Harry's friends stop a new player from filling the void? This FATE game is based on the popular Dresden Files novels by Jim Butcher, but no knowledge of the books is required to play. All materials necessary to play are provided, but feel free to bring a pencil and pad to take notes, and your own set of FUDGE dice.

The ICONS and S&W games are published adventures, which I'd normally avoid, except Dr. Zodiac was only made available to folks who pre-ordered ICONS, and the S&W adventure was published in a fanzine. So I feel safe running them. The other two are my creation, though Vernie helped me with the DFRPG one.

You might be saying, "Ron, that's four different systems" or "that's open to close on both days," or somesuch. You're likely thinking, "this guy's nuts." But it's a good cause.

I'll let you know if I'm nuts Monday...