Golden Heroes was originally created at about the same time as Champions – probably for the same reasons. The marriage of RPGs and superheroes was an obvious one but the first two entrants into the field, Superhero 2044 and Villains and Vigilantes hadn’t quite nailed it. Initially influenced by TSR’s Gamma World, the game soon…
In the 1980s, Games Workshop picked up an amateur set of superhero roleplaying rules and published a professional version–the critically well received but commercially unsuccessful Golden Heroes. Decades later, after the dawn of the Internet and self publishing, one of Golden Heroes‘ original authors – Simon Burley – discovered a groundswell of nostalgia for the…
by Chris Perrin City of Heroes is a superhero role playing game written by M. Alexander Jurkat with material from Jack Emmert and Sean Fish that is currently awaiting publication by Eden Studios. It is the direct pen and paper adaptation of the Cryptic Studio’s Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) also called City…
Guardians of Order and Big Eyes, Small Mouth Tri-Stat dx is a role-playing game system developed by Guardians of Order in 2003 which was inspired by the original Tri-Stat System developed in 1999. The first Tristat game was the Big Eyes, Small Mouth, or “BESM” anime rpg. The first version of Tri-Stat included the use…
Atomic Sock Monkey and Chad Underkoffler Truth & Justice is a superhero role-playing game designed by Chad Underkoffler and released by Atomic Sock Monkey games. The Truth and Justice RPG uses a version of the “Prose Descriptive Qualities System” for action resolution. The Prose Descriptive Qualities System is often shortened to the “PDQ” system in…
Nightshift Games UNSanctioned: The Dream Corrupted is an alternate world superhero role-playing game designed by Nightshift Games and released in 2000. The 164 page core rulebook was written by Paul Arden Lidberg. The counter-factual history includes standard history up until the end of World War II, except for a few unpowered masked heroes. The dropping…
Fantasy Games Unlimited – Jack Herman & Jeff Dee Villains and Vigilantes, originally published in 1979 by Fantasy Games Unlimited, holds the distinction of being the first superhero role-playing game to gain significant levels of popularity. Co-created by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman–with Dee providing the artwork–V&V paved the way for later games like Superworld…
Dennis Detwiller and Arc Dream Publishing Wild Talents is a role-playing game written by Dennis Detwiller with assistance by Greg Stolze, Shane Ivey, and Kenneth Hite. The game was released by Arc Dream Publishing in 2006. The game is a sequel to Godlike, a superhero RPG set during World War II. Both Godlike and Wild…
White Wolf Superpowered Modern Roleplaying Trinity is the third installment in White Wolf’s treatment of superpowered moderns like what you’d find in comic books, pulp novels, and science fiction settings. Where Adventure! handled pulp stories in the 1920s and 1930s, and Aberrant created a world for superhumans in the year 2008, Trinity takes the action…
Palladium Books Super Hero and Comic Book RPGs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness is a melding of martial arts and superhero role-playing games. Inspired by the popular comic book creations of Kevin Eastman and Pater Laird, the role-playing rules were first published in 1985 by Palladium Books and featured anthropomorphic turtles who used…
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