Marvel Super Heroes RPG

Hey All,
I'm clearing my shit out of my parent's basement and came across the TSR Marvel Super Heroes I bought as a kid with my first cheque as a peofessional actor. It totally brought back tonnes of memories of DMing games with my fellow castmates (all kids around my age). I also found the "Advanced Set", the "Deluxe City Campaign Set" (both unused) and a shitload of modules.

Two questions:

a) It's been over 20 years since I lasted played the basic set, is it or teh advanced set any good?

b) Are they of any value or can I just chuck 'em?

The TSR Marvel RPG is still one of my favorites. Yes it lacks the flash of newer supers RPGs like Mutants and Masterminds, but there is a charm in the simplicity that the Marvel RPG had. I am a huge sucker for the old FASERIP system, Red FEATS and all.

I think the main drawback would be that the characters are all now dated by 20ish years. Not a huge problem if you haven't been reading comics, but if are a comics fan it can be a little annoying to have to update all the characters.

I honestly don't know what the stuff is worth, but I would be more than willing to take them off of your hands as a lot. Let me know what you decide to do with them and what you are looking to get for them!

The Marvel RPG is great! But I doubt your books have much monetary value as nearly all the books ever made are now available (legally, I believe) on www.marvelrpg.net .

Oh yeah man, we played the hell out of this. It completely replaced D&D for us. To this day I still remember about Ultron--AIM FOR THE KNEES~! (I think they were "only" Incredible.)


As for updating the characters, screw that. Most of them came from a time when comic continuity was worth a shit. Now it's all "WHAT CHARACTER WILL WE PRETEND TO KILL THIS WEEK~!"

Like...they killed BATMAN? Give me a fucking break. Like THAT'S going to stick. Sadly, I think they killed Martian Manhunter too, and that actually might stick.


Modern mainstream comics are fuckin' LAMERS, man! Bring back Jerry-curl Beyonder! Bring back the Jean Grey/Cyclops/Psylocke love triangle! Bring back Wolverine that didn't know his name was fucking "JAMES HOWLETT"!



Eh? What? Time for my medicine? *shambles off*

Wait, child actor? Huh?

My favorite part of the Marvel Superheroes RPG was making up my own super heroes. Never actually played the game, but I made up countless heroes.

Played it a ton in high school. Loved rolling up our own superheroes, but we played a Spidey, Daredevil, Hulk, Ironman crew for a bit.

Man...those were the days.

"Okay...I got a 58"

"What color is that?"

"Green"

"Only a green?"

"It's a deep green!"

Marvel was great fun. But we scrapped most of the karma rules. Lose all your karma if you kill someone? Our super-mega strong building destroyers would wade through the crowd of enemy guards lightly tapping them on the head hoping they could withstand the damage until one of them inevitably got killed by mistake. With all the karma wiped out nothing was holding them back from rampaging through everything that was left. *dink* *dink* *dink* *splat*...aww shit...*BLAMMO BLAMMO BLAMMO*

-MMM

Octavian wrote:

Marvel was great fun. But we scrapped most of the karma rules. Lose all your karma if you kill someone? Our super-mega strong building destroyers would wade through the crowd of enemy guards lightly tapping them on the head hoping they could withstand the damage until one of them inevitably got killed by mistake. With all the karma wiped out nothing was holding them back from rampaging through everything that was left. *dink* *dink* *dink* *splat*...aww shit...*BLAMMO BLAMMO BLAMMO*

-MMM

The rules for playing villains was straight busted. We tried them once...villains actually get karma for killing, destroying, whatever.

So we went on a wild, wanton rampage and built up a TON of karma. Since it would be stupid to have the heroes standing there right away, we had a few turns to wreck stuff.

By the time the heroes got there, we were karma-jacked to the eyeballs. REEE-diculous.

Ken B. wrote:

Octavian wrote:

Marvel was great fun. But we scrapped most of the karma rules. Lose all your karma if you kill someone? Our super-mega strong building destroyers would wade through the crowd of enemy guards lightly tapping them on the head hoping they could withstand the damage until one of them inevitably got killed by mistake. With all the karma wiped out nothing was holding them back from rampaging through everything that was left. *dink* *dink* *dink* *splat*...aww shit...*BLAMMO BLAMMO BLAMMO*

-MMM

The rules for playing villains was straight busted. We tried them once...villains actually get karma for killing, destroying, whatever.

So we went on a wild, wanton rampage and built up a TON of karma. Since it would be stupid to have the heroes standing there right away, we had a few turns to wreck stuff.

By the time the heroes got there, we were karma-jacked to the eyeballs. REEE-diculous.

We ended up doing away with a lot of the karma rules. We were into more cinematic RPGing anyways, so rather than building up characters over months and years we were far more into having completely new characters tailored for a specific story that would last a few sessions and then move on. So we rarely ever dealt with building up stats and straight out disallowed using karma to jack roll results. We would use karma for power stunts and power stunts only. That was clearly the most dramatic use of karma anyways, so it fit right in to our play style.

Favorite Marvel character:

A telekinetic...but not your typical geeky physically weak telekinetic...a big ass Ving Rhames type telekinetic. He could hurl things with great force but didn't have much precision the further things were from his body. Close to his body he had tons of control, but more than a few feet out and all he could really do was move things fast and in a straight line. The main way he used this (other than throwing heavy things at bad guys) was to turn basically anything that wasn't bolted down in the environment to use as a suit of armor. Two favorite encounters were the bar fight where I was wearing the pool table and a confrontation at a construction yard where I got to use the wrecking ball as a huge ass flail.

-MMM

I was still a serious Marvel zombie when this rpg came out, so I got into it right away. The original yellow box edition wasn't very good. The blue box base set was better, but the game was still fundamentally linked to fixed point values, that lame stoplight chart, and a very limited character generation process. The early adventures were all kinds of dumb, and my friends were obsessed with playing their own characters instead of the major Marvel heroes, which detracted from the appeal of the setting.

Then the Marvel rpg started doing interesting things. The Ultimate Powers book was very cool, covering a stunning range of potential powers including cool ones that still haven't been seen in real comics yet. Better yet, the overall generation system in that book was superior, allowing potential for creating characters that were androids, gods, sentient animals, and even weirder stuff like you might find in the northern hemisphere of Well World (for an extremely random and obscure reference).

The magic rules had surprising depth, explaining how magic works in the Marvel Universe even better than Marvel's own comics ever did. And there were two surprisingly ambitious series of modules. One allowed players to play serious powerhouse characters like Doctor Strange and Thor, all teamed up on a major cosmic quest. The other module series was set in the dark future portrayed in Uncanny X-Men #141-2, the one where the Sentinels have taken over and most heroes are dead. My players loved that one, it was sort of Gamma World meets the Third Reich in the Marvel Universe, and definitely encouraged players to create their own (mutant) characters, all members of the underground resistance.

I have a banker box crammed with this stuff, including that Deluxe city campaign box, just gathering dust. I will probably never play it again, but it would probably be fun if I could talk some players into it.

Well I took it to a local game/toy/sword 'n'armour with my boxed talking Freddy Kruger doll and paid $35 for Dune. I would never play it again, good memories aside but Shell I think you hit it right on the head.

Shellhead wrote:

The magic rules had surprising depth, explaining how magic works in the Marvel Universe even better than Marvel's own comics ever did.

Wait did they redo the rules? I thought I remembered that the original yellow box magic rules were this:

Think of something you want to happen. The GM will assign a difficulty. If you succedd... IT DOES HAPPEN!!!!"

Or am I completely delusional?

Yeah, they did a very neat sourcebook for magic in MSH. Actually it was three sourcebooks wrapped in a ref screen just for that sourcebook.



40 pages of magic spells.

16 pages of stats on 16 mystical characters, including Doctor Strange, Shaman and Brother Voodoo.

40 pages of info about exotic locales, artifacts, entities, etc.

There's even a variant character creation system just for mystical characters.

That and the Ultimate Powers book are the two best supplements for the game, far better than the quality of everything else published for MSH.

Now _that_ is awesome... I always felt like they just phoned in the magic rules and gave short shrift to Doc Strange and his ilk because no GM in his right mind would allow a magic user character in their games... Thanks for the heads up!