Cinematic Superhero Rpg Universes

While we may be past the era of "peak television," we seem to be entering the era of peak superhero TV. The CW and HBOMax have got new DC shows, and Disney+ has the latest Marvel offerings. Then there's a few other things on Amazon Prime like The Boys and Invincible. The superhero dominance of the box office got put on hiatus by the pandemic, but it has gone on long enough now to get backlash.

All of this makes me wonder when we'll get a superhero rpg with more of a cinematic vibe, much in the the same way we got a number of rpgs with a "animated series" aesthetic (some of that could be pragmatic, though. There may be more artists able to do a cartoony style willing to work at rpg rates). Of course, you don't have to want for a new game to run a cinematic style campaign. You could even reboot an old campaign in a cinematic version.

What would "cinematic superhero universe" mean in a rpg context? I haven't really fully formulated an answer to that but their are some traits I can think of:

• Fewer superhumans (though they are getting more all the time!), particularly villains
• Lower power levels (in general), but...
• Fewer "skilled normal" masked heroes. (Captain America seems super-strong in the CMU; Falcon as more gadgets)
• Fewer secret identities, fewer masks
• Less colorful costumes
• A smaller array of possible origins
• Heroes more likely to engage in potentially lethal action

In general, cinematic universe changes seem similar to "ultimate universe" changes. They are more "realistic" versions of the characters.

Flashback: DC at Marvel Collected Edition

The original version of this post appeared in 2018...

In case you missed the previous installments, here's a collated list of the posts I've done so far based on the idea that the staff at Marvel in the late 50s early 60s got to revamp DC's Golden Age characters (except for those that never stopped being published). The idea was introduced here.

All the characters presented so far are statted for the TSR Marvel Superheroes rpg:

The Atom The Nuclear Man!
Green Lantern Most Cosmic Hero of Them All!
Hawkman Master of Flight!
And a couple of villains Silver Scarab, the nemesis of Hawkman, and Star Sapphire--is she Green Lantern's lover or his enemy--or both?

Wednesday Comics: DC, March 1980 (part 2)

Continuing my read through of DC Comics output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around December 20,1979.

Action Comics #505: Bates and Swan bring us a tale of a puppy-eyed, hairy hominid from space, who charms children and can wallop Superman. In a twist I did not expect, the creature turns out to be a synthetic being from Krypton. The story is continued to next issue. I kind of dug this one.

Adventure Comics #469: The Starman story here has a bit more of classic space opera vibe than the previous installments, which is a welcome change of pace. The Plastic Man story is the same old stuff. I can't say I'm really excited about either of these features.

Brave & the Bold #160: With Superman and Batgirl teaming up early this month, now it's Batman's and Supergirl's turn. Burkett and Aparo have Batman do some mentoring with Supergirl, which works well. The story suffers from a bland villain who doesn't seem like he'd be a challenge for Batman, much less Batman and Supergirl.

Green Lantern #126: O'Neil and Staton ended last issue with an impending Qwardian invasion of Earth, and now...well, we get the Shark. Sure, it turns out the Qwardians are employing the Shark, but it seems unclear why they would need to do so. It seems like it's just stalling before the main event.

House of Mystery #278: The cover story by Jay Zilber and Rubeny goes out of its way to make the parents of a kid with the power to pull things (weapons mostly) from out of the TV the bad guys, when anyone would be sensibly worried about the kid. The other two stories have sort of dumb morals: truth-telling isn't always good, and old people can be bad, too!

Legion of Super-Heroes #261: Conway and Estrada complete this LSH undercover circus mystery. Doesn't seem like it really warranted a two-parter. The basic idea was good, but the story is lacking.

New Adventures of Superboy #3: A nerd jealous of Superboy and Clark Kent, uses a device to project back his mental energy to make himself cool in the past. What's interesting about this one to me is that it clearly sets the present of Metropolis in "winter 70-80," with this story in Clark's high school years prior.

Sgt. Rock #338: Rock and the boys from Easy try to take a few days R&R at a ski lodge, only to be menaced by ski Nazis. We get the almost obligatory, semi-honorable German commander, though that doesn't mean he makes it out alive. There's more continuity than I remembered: Kanigher has this issue pick up directly after the events of last issue.

Super Friends #30: Grodd and Giganta are employing a ray to change humans into gorillas as a bid for world conquest. Fradon's art is charming as always.

Unexpected #196: The first there stories in this are nonsense, but Mike Barr and Vic Catan Jr. present a somewhat clever twist on the sell your soul to the Devil plot in a story about a doctor willing to do anything to stop a deadly, global pandemic.

Unknown Soldier #237: A rabbi, a black guy, and the Unknown Soldier cross German lines dressed as the Magi. It's not a joke; it's a Bob Haney Christmas story! Like many war stories of this period, it tackles racism, but also has a extra bit of "all men are brothers" holiday oomph to it. It's silly in ways, I guess, but one of my favorite war stories since I started this project. The second feature is pretty good too. I liked the art by Tenny Henson.

Warlord #31: I talked about this issue here.

Weird Western Tales #65: An anti-war story is unexpected in a Western book, but it works reasonably well. Conway's story also picks up right after Scalphunter bids farewell to Bat Lash following their team-up last issue.

This month, we also had two digest books: Best of DC #4 was a quartet of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stories (who knew DC had so many?), and  DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #1, which featured four reprints staring the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Sentinel Comics RPG Session 1: "Itsy Bitsy Spiderbots"

Roll Call:

Action Jack: Man of Action--Man Out of Time!
Fibbit: Manic Pixie Extradimensional Dream Girl!
Infranaut: IR-Powered Celebrity Hero!
Il Masso: The Rock-Solid Hero of Little Italy!
Space Racer: Cosmic Speedster!

Supporting Characters: Zauber the Magnificent (flashback only)

Villains: Spiderbots (first appearance)

Synopsis: Individually, enjoying a day in Empire Park, our heroes are startled by an attacked of spider-shaped robots emerging from the sewers, which seem to be particularly targeting them. Our heroes destroy the robots, and join forces. During the melee, Fibbit catches gets images of a peculiar industrial building and a man dressed as a magician, who ages before her eyes. Space Racer had a flashback to a vague memory of a dead world, somehow displaced in time.

Action Jack recognizes Fibbit magician as Zauber the Magnificent, a magician and crime fighter from the war years.

Fibbit also warns the others that she also sensed a malevolent force in the direction of the spiderbots' origin--and it seemed to sense her back!

Again, The Giants! Collated

Art by Jason Sholtis

Back in 2017, I did a series posts doing adventure sketches re-imaging Against the Giants. Here's the complete list:

Wedding of the Hill Giant Chief

Sanctum of the Stone Giant Space God

Glacial Gallery of the Frost Giant Artist

What I Want in A Superhero Rpg

When it comes to superhero rpgs, I've played and enjoyed a few of them over the years starting with Villains & Vigilantes and going through the Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game, DC Heroes rpg, Champions, GURPS Supers, and Mutants & Masterminds. I've owned and read numerous others, including Heroes Unlimited, Wild Talents, Silver Age Sentinels and ICONS. I'm about to give the Sentinel Comics rpg a whirl.

I don't think I've ever found the perfect supers game for me, though. At least, not perfect for what the 2021 version of me wants out of one. These are the things I think I'm looking for:

Low to Medium crunch. I'm not interested in rules heavier games like Champions or GURPS currently. I would suspect medium crunch games would probably give the best balance between covering what needs to be covered, but not doing too much.

Emulates comics. I'm interested in something that supports creating the sort of thing we see in comic books (or superhero film) not "a world with superheroes." Some of my following points sort of flow from this one.

"Every member of the Justice League gets to do something important." Older superhero games, to me, make the mistake of wanting to tailor attributes/power levels to benchmarks, winding up with disparate power levels. Sure, things like Karma/Hero Points address some of this, but in comics it mostly seems that power levels wind up being more about how characters tackle problems than whether they can tackle them. The Fantastic Four beats Dr. Doom, but so does the Punisher (or close enough). They just do it in different ways.

Heroic Normals are viable. Because of the ability score benchmarks, guys like Nick Fury or the Challengers of the Unknown tend to come out pretty samey in abilities because the normal end of the scale gets shortened. A system that gave them more variation would be nice. Of course, if you wanted a campaign of these folks, one could just play a nonsuperhero game, so this perhaps isn't as important to me as other points.

Variable Villains. Ever noticed how villains tend to be tougher or weaker depending on the hero or heroes their dealing with? I suppose it could be argued the heroes change and the villains stay the same, but anyway it might be nice if supers rpgs had mechanics for this difference.

Powers not overly detailed, but not quite freeform. Honestly, I lean toward more of a "just tell me what is does take", but you need to certain mechanics attached to powers to use them in the game, and you also need suggestions for people modeling powers, so for that it seems like completely freeform isn't the way to go. 

Supreme effort. This is one supers games seem to consistently pick up, but it bears repeating. There should be a means of a hero giving it that extra oomph in a dramatic moment.

There's probably something else I'm not thinking of, but that's all I've got now.

Wednesday Comics: DC, March 1980 (part 1)

I'm continuing my read through of DC Comics output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis. This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around December 6,1979.

All-Out War #4: I'm still not impressed with the Viking Commando, but otherwise this is better than last issue, with a decent Black Eagle story, and a good Force 3 tale by Kanigher and Grandenetti. The non-series tales are better, to with the Korean War story "Road to Sunchon" by Archie Goodwin and evocative art by Ernesto Patricio tackling the common war comic theme of racism. Goodwin reaches for a little too much in the last panel, but it's otherwise solid.

Batman #321: This one starts off promising with a cover by José Luis García-López, and delivers a solid tale of the Joker's birthday by Wein and Walt Simonson. The best issue of Batman yet in the 1980s cover dates.

DC Comics Presents #19: O'Neil and Staton offers up a goofy yarn of a hawk-headed mutant psychically causing a violent reaction at a dinner party. Good thing Superman and Batgirl are there! O'Neil's script keeps referring to Batgirl as the "dominoed daredoll." I wonder if it bothered him that nickname never caught on?

Flash #283: Cary Bates is making each issue better than the last, I think, and Don Heck is supporting that. Not a lot has happened these 3 issues, admittedly, but they aren't decompressed, more like movie serial cliffhanger installments. Anyway, Reverse Flash tries to kill the Flash just as Flash is returning from the future with knowledge of Iris' killer. The Flash doesn't die of course, and lays into Reverse Flash who, in fact, is the murder. Of course, he gets away in the end, so everything is continued/

Ghosts #86: More ghostly tales with the conceit of being true. The most "high concept" (heh) tale has to be the one by Kashdan and Henson about a murderous stunt pilot who gets his comeuppeance when his dead partner's body drops into his airplane's cockpit decades later.

Jonah Hex #34: Our first Christmas story of the month! Fleischer and Dan Spiegle serve up and unusually humorous tale for the normally fairly grim world of Jonah Hex, where Hex is on the trail of some murderous robbers, and finds his father acting as sheriff in a haven for outlaws. He forces his no-account, abusive father to play Santa Claus for the kids at the orphanage.

Justice League of America #176: The whole JLA takes on Doctor Destiny in a classic "split in pairs and collect something" plot. Not terrible, but nothing special.

Men of War #26: Harris and Ayers give us a crossover. Gravedigger leads the combat-happy joes of Easy (minus Sgt. Rock) on a mission. Harris does a pretty good Kanigher imitation, but it's lightweight, late era, DC war stuff. This is the last issue of Men of War and the last appearance of Gravedigger until Who's Who.

Secrets of Haunted House #22: Destiny narrates two tales. The most unusual of the two is by Kashdan and Ruben "Rubeny" Yandoc and is like Fantastic Voyage if the blood clot was a witch doctor.

Superboy Spectacular #1: This is mostly reprints, but it does include a map of Krypton, and a cutaway view of Superboy's house. The only new story is a "solve-it-yourself mystery" by Bridwell and Swan, which I won't spoil.

Superman #345: Time on Earth gets reversed due to the action of aliens. Conway and Swan serve up  a fairly Silver Age "puzzle" yarn.

Superman Family #200: This is a high-concept entry anthology, tales of the future at the "turn of the 21st Century" when Lois and Clark have a 16 year-old kid, and Linda "Superwoman" Danvers is governor of Florida. All the stories take place on the Kent's anniversary. Conway writes all of these stories but a number of artists appear.

Weird War Tales #85: J.M. DeMatteis and Tenny Henson deliver tale of alternate realities, where the enemy is various alternate United States. An interesting departure from the usual stuff from this comic.

Wonder Woman #265: An "untold tale" of Diana Prince's time with NASA, featuring a shuttle crash, aliens and dinosaurs by Conway and Delbo. The Wonder Girl backup has nice art by Ric Estrada.