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MSH Marvel Super Heroes

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MSH Marvel Super Heroes

Unread postby icycalm » 05 May 2023 18:48

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https://www.enworld.org/threads/tsrs-de ... st-7858898

Alzrius wrote:
James Ward wrote:Marvel is still an unmatched RPG to this day.


Amen to that. I'm still in awe over how elegant karma points were. Having them function as both experience points and action points was brilliant, as was using them to enforce "soft" limits that kept the playstyle genre-appropriate via losing all your karma points if you killed a villain or let an innocent bystander die, while improving your powers was very expensive and buying new powers was prohibitively so. It really was a work of genius.


Sounds very interesting. And look at the ad saying "2 or more players". Presumably that means a player and the GM. It seems like the number of players varies by adventure. E.g. the Fantastic Four adventures require 4 players, but the Wolverine one pictured below seems to be single-player.

Here's a guy on Twitter who's trying to collect the entire game: https://twitter.com/JimZub/status/1383872681951432709

Jim Zub @JimZub wrote:When I was a kid, I always wanted to buy the Marvel Super Heroes RPG. A few of my friends had it, but I never owned a copy.

Thanks to a gent clearing out his collection, my nerdity is finally fulfilled.

Who's up for some FASERIP once the pandemic is over?


There was a surprising amount of stuff released for it. I'd seen a boxed set in the Greek store I was buying (and stealing) my AD&D 2E stuff from, but not much beyond that, so I always imagined it as a small game. Turns out it's only small compared to D&D. Compared to almost everything else, it's quite decently-sized.

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Jim Zub @JimZub wrote:I went through and checked this collection against a checklist of releases. Looks like I'm approximately 8 books from having the full set. Wow.


Jim Zub @JimZub wrote:To fill in the gaps I'll need:
MHAC5 Project Wideawake
MHR2 Webs: Spider-Man Dossier
MHR4 Lands of Dr. Doom
MSL1 X-Terminate
MSL2 Warlord of Baluur
MSL3 Spore of Arthros
MSL4 Stygian Knight
MU8 Gamer's Handbook 1992 Characters Update


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It's a shame they stopped making it in the '90s when the art improved. Look at that Todd McFarlane Spidey cover in the last pic. Imagine if the entire game was made with that level of art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Su ... aying_game)

Wikipedia wrote:In the 2007 book Hobby Games: The 100 Best, Steve Kenson commented that "it's a testament to the game's longevity that it still has enthusiastic fan support on the Internet and an active play community more than a decade after its last product was published. Even more so that it continues to set a standard by which new superhero roleplaying games are measured. Like modern comic book writers and artists following the greats of the Silver Age, modern RPG designers have a tough act to follow."


There were more games released later, but not by TSR, aside from a card-based game.

Wikipedia wrote:Later Marvel RPGs

Before losing the Marvel license back to Marvel Comics, TSR published a different game using their SAGA System game engine, called the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game. This version, written by Mike Selinker, was published in the late 1990s as a card-based version of the Marvel role-playing game (though a method of converting characters from the prior format to the SAGA System was included in the core rules). Though critically praised in various reviews at the time, it never reached a large market and has since faded into obscurity.


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Wikipedia wrote:In 2003, after the gaming license had reverted to Marvel Comics, the Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game was published by Marvel Comics. This edition uses mechanics totally different from any previous versions, using a diceless game mechanic that incorporated a Karma-based resolution system of "stones" (or tokens) to represent character effort. Since its initial publication, a few additional supplements were published by Marvel Comics. However, Marvel stopped supporting the game a little over a year after its initial release, despite going through several printings of the core rulebook.

In August 2011, Margaret Weis Productions acquired the licence to publish an RPG based on Marvel superheroes, and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying was released beginning in 2012. Margaret Weis Productions, however, found that although the game was critically acclaimed, winning two Origins Awards, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying: Civil War "didn’t garner the level of sales necessary to sustain the rest of the line" so they brought the game to a close at the end of April 2013.


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And finally, we have the upcoming game published once more by Marvel themselves, that already has its own thread here and kickass modern artwork: https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=7430

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Why am I posting all this now?

Partly as a brief retrospective of an interesting RPG lineage, and partly because we might be trying some of this sooner than you would think. Look for more news on this as early as next week.
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icycalm
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