Creating Supers Characters – Villains and Vigilantes

Having noted that designer Jeff Grubb cited Villains and Vigilantes as one of Marvel Super Heroes' contemporaries, I took a look in my Drivethru library and – lo and behold – discovered I owned the cleaned up version of the 1982 original. Let's take it for a spin!

Creating Supers Characters – Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP)

Before I get started, I should mention that Truth & Justice does include a few tables to roll up random characters and provide inspiration, and they're totally fine.

But when it comes to truly gonzo random character generation, nothing really approaches the psychotic variety and dubious playability of characters that the classic Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set spits out, particularly when the Ultimate Powers Book is brought into the equation. And though it's entirely possible to leave this up to a program, I'm going to run it all manually.

Creating Supers Characters - Truth & Justice

There are a lot of supers tabletop RPGs out there, and there's a pretty wide gulf between narrativist and simulationist takes on the genre. Although I've purchased many a crunchy supers game -- I'm looking at two editions of you, Mutants and Masterminds -- I find myself put off by the massive point buy systems that generally underlie them, and the ludicrous variety of abilities, modifiers, and available combat actions that result. That said, I think it might be instructive to play around on the spectrum. So let's take a look at one of the least crunchy supers games I know: Atomic Sock Monkey Press' Truth & Justice.

Character Creation

I think it ought to be considered axiomatic that character creation be exciting. I've noticed an increase in collaborative character creation systems of late, and that's deeply encouraging -- but along those same lines, I think it should also be fun (and possible) to roll up a character on your own. Being able to start playing on day 1 with a bit of not-particularly-guided homework under one's belt is also fairly exciting.

So I'll be taking a look at my terrifyingly vast collection of tabletop RPGs and going as far as I can as quickly as I can. Let's go!