Marvel superhero roleplaying game

Here at ClassicMarvelForever. If you would like to play via the internet in whatever form, I suggest you post on the messageboard for locations of current games. Someone may know and be able to help. The idea grew and it was made available on the net as a resource page, at ClassicMarvel. Now 20 years on, the site and the community has grown incredibly, and are located today at ClassicMarvelForever. We have a plethora of gaming material for a Classic Marvel campaign including a heap of character profiles, custom rules, a lively message board, links, and much, much more.

Now over 6 times larger than when it started, and in its 4th incarnation. TSR inc. This site is not intended to make money. It provides resources to players of a game no longer being produced.

Published adventures commonly included maps of the specific "dungeons" that appear. Three box sets were published. Each set included all the needed material to start playing, including rules, campaign descriptions, example card templates and even maps; albeit further versions reviewed and improved the previous ones:. Four books, tagged with the string "MA" Marvel Accessory?

Eight issues of the Gamer's Handbook emulated the formula from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe , with individual entries for superheroes, villains and teams; this time adding role-playing statistics, powers with specific rules sometimes making a few assumptions to dodge ambiguities and a paragraph of notes on how to role-play the character and describing anything -inclduing rules- that cannot be covered in other areas.

The four first issues were encyclopedic in nature to cover heroes A to Z first volume is A to D; second starts in E… ; the last four issues each cover A to Z, and included only individuals from a given year or those who had suffered very relevant changes E.

Eighteen books were published, nine of them with the string "MH" Marvel Heroes? Each adventure was an autonomous story. Some of the issues titled "MHAC" were however not adventures, but accessories for the game.

Seven sagas of adventures or "game modules" were published. Each of these sagas included several published adventures, commonly three except for Mutating Mutants that was the lone adventure of its own saga; and X-Terminate does not seem plotwise related to the rest of the "MSL" adventures. Although each adventure had its title, many of these sagas did not have a name.

The sagas can be played in succession, with argumental sense; or individually even if the previous adventure is not available. Letter-and-number codes were used to identify the saga.

Six boxed sets, similar in format to the Rule Box Sets , were published. The second variable, Popularity, reflected how much the character was liked or disliked in the Marvel Universe. Popularity could be used to influence non-player characters. A superhero with a high rating, like Captain America whose popularity is Unearthly-the highest most characters can achieve , might be able to use his Popularity to gain entrance to a club because the general population of the Marvel Universe admires him.

If he were to try the same thing as his secret identity Steve Rogers whose Popularity is only Typical , he would probably be unable to do it. Villains also had a Popularity score, which was usually negative a bouncer might let Doctor Doom or Magneto into the aforementioned club simply out of fear.

There were several ways Popularity could change. For example, if Doctor Doom defeated Spider-Man in front of the general public, Spidey's Popularity would go down for a short time. But if everyone's favorite web-slinger managed to foil one of Doctor Doom's plans and the word got out, he would enjoy a temporary Popularity boost. Since mutants were generally feared and distrusted in the Marvel Universe, these characters start with a Popularity of 0 and have a hard time improving this attribute.

The game was intended to be played using existing Marvel characters as the heroes. In addition, the Basic Set Campaign Book also allowed players to create original heroes by simply describing the desired kind of hero, and working together with the GM to assign the appropriate abilities, powers, and talents. The Ultimate Powers Book , by David Edward Martin, expanded and organized the game's list of powers, making a fairly comprehensive survey of comic book-style super-powers.

Players were given a wide variety of body types, secret origins, weaknesses, and powers. The UPB gave a much greater range to characters one could create. The expanded, corrected version of the book is available for free on the Web, and was compiled by Zan of Heroplay. The game's equivalent of experience points was Karma , a pool of points initially determined as the sum of a character's three mental attributes Reason, Intuition, and Psyche.

The basic system allowed players to increase their chances of success at most tasks by spending points of Karma. For example, a player who wanted to make sure he would hit a villain in a critical situation could spend however many Karma points were necessary to raise the dice roll to the desired result.

Additional Karma points were distributed by the referee at the end of game sessions, typically as rewards for accomplishing heroic goals, such as defeating villains, saving innocents, and foiling crimes. Conversely, Karma could be lost for unheroic actions such as fleeing from a villain, or failing to stop a crime: in fact, in a notable departure from many RPGs but strongly in keeping with the genre , all Karma was lost if a hero killed someone or allowed someone to die.

In the Advanced Game, Karma points could also be spent to permanently increase character attributes and powers at a relatively moderate cost, ten times the attribute number raised, powers were steeper, at twenty times the number.

The Karma system thus united two RPG mechanics—"Action" or "Hero" points which allow players to control random outcomes and character advancement e. Though this system could frustrate both referees and players the former because a player willing and able to spend Karma could effectively overcome any challenge at least once; the latter because advancement was slow compared with most other RPGs , it had the virtue of emulating two central features of super-hero comics, namely, that heroes almost always win, even in improbable circumstances, and that heroes' power levels remain mostly static.

Furthermore, the system encouraged players to keep their characters' behavior to the equivalent concept of their alignment by giving an incentive to behave heroically and morally correct. Marvel Superheroes was driven by two primary game mechanics: column shifts and colored results. Both essentially influenced the difficulty of an action.

A column shift is used when a character is attempting an exceptionally hard or easy action. A column shift to the left indicates a penalty, while a shift to the right indicates a bonus. For example, Reed Richards Mr. Fantastic has an Intuition of Excellent, making him significantly more perceptive than the average person whose Intuition is Typical two ranks lower.

The GM might determine that spotting a trap hidden beneath a few sticks and leaves will be fairly easy, and give the player running Mr. His Intuition will be treated as Remarkable the next column to the right. However, a trap buried underground might be considerably harder to spot, and the GM might give the player a -1 column shift penalty. In this case, Mr.