Marvel Superheroes by TSR was my first foray into superhero gaming. I had missed out on Villains & Vigilantes, Champions, and DC Heroes so far- I would discover those games later. I remember sitting with some friends after a session of M.U.L.E. on a Commodore 64 and cracking open the box. I was greeted with none other than the Amazing Spider-Man telling me what the game was and how to play it in the yellow-covered Battle Book.
It’s no secret that Spidey was my favorite superhero as a kid, and remains so, and while I appreciated the Superfriends, I was a “Make Mine Marvel” kid whose all-time favorite superhero cartoon still is Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. So this… this was freakin’ awesome.
TSR Hobbies went through this phase in the mid-80s where everything had to have these multi-colored charts to resolve die rolls. Indiana Jones, Conan, Zebulon’s Guide for Star Frontiers and the 3rd edition of Gamma World all had them. Marvel was perhaps my favorite incarnation of all of these, and the way it worked was a great emulation of the supers genre with the slams and bashes and bullseyes and stuff.
So, MSH is a system that uses percentile dice to roll on a table for everything. This table has columns given ratings like “Good”, “Excellent”, “Fair” etc. For example, if Spider-Man needed to do something based on Agility, he’d roll on the “Amazing” column and see what result he got. A white result was a no-go, a green result was a success, and a yellow or red result were very good indeed, sometimes coming with special effects. The game is often referred to as FASERIP, which stands for the abilities. Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, and Psyche. Each rank has a number associated with it. For example, Cyclops can fire Optic Blasts of Excellent (20) damage. This means if he hit someone wearing Good (10) body armor, he’d do 10 damage. If someone had Excellent (20) or better body armor, Cyke would have to roll a critical.
Marvel also has Karma, which are both XP, and a pool of points from which the players can adjust die rolls and pull off new power stunts. I keep thinking that plot points, bennies, etc. are 21st Century inventions, then I remember they existed back in the 80s. Oh, and if you kill someone? You lose ALL your Karma. Heroes don’t kill people. Let’s roll up a heroine. We’ll be using the original Basic Set.
Character Creation System:
All right, True Believers, we’re digging into the original Marvel Superheroes Campaign Book from 1984, to see what kind of heroine we’re going to create.
First, we roll for origin. Is this hero a mutant? A robot? An inventor like Tony Stark? A human altered by circumstance like Peter Parker? 26 on the dice- that makes our heroine a Mutant.
Step two is rolling up our FASERIP. D100 for each, in order. 06, 97, 37, 35, 83, 65, 60. So our initial ranks are:
- Fighting: Poor (4)
- Agility: Amazing (50)
- Strength: Good (10)
- Endurance: Good (10)
- Reason: Incredible (40)
- Intuition: Remarkable (30)
- Psyche: Remarkable (30)
Step three is calculating the derived numbers, like Health and Karma. Health is the sum of the rank numbers for the first four scores, F+A+S+E. Starting Karma is the sum of R+I+P. So our heroine has a Health of 84 and a starting Karma of 100. That’s not too shabby. Her starting Popularity is… grim. Starting with a figure of 50, subtracting 20 for a secret origin, and another 20 for a secret identity, then 40 for being a mutant… Yeah, Senator Kelley called, he hates our heroine, whose initial popularity is -30. We rolled an 09 for Resources, meaning her financial situation is Poor.
Step four: POWERS! We roll to see just how many our heroine has. 16, she has two. Rolling for what kind of powers, the first one is an offensive body alteration power, and the second a nature control power. We choose Weather Control and Claws. Rolling for how powerful these abilities are, we get a Weather Control of Excellent (20) and a Claws of Incredible (40)! Also- I think she now has a name. Thundercat! (A quick search of the Marvel database we didn’t have in the 80s shows no character by that name)
In step five, we get talents, what other games would call skills. We roll to see how many… 99! Wow, Thundercat has the maximum of four talents. Let’s see what they are… Genetics, Geology, Scholar, and Aeronautics (Pilot). This is getting interesting. Now we go to ste six, which is the details of the character’s life. So we’ll go ahead and put that in the next section.
The Character:
Felina Fairlane led a perfectly happy life for her first decade of childhood. Naturally gifted academically and athletically, she excelled in gymnastics and was completing High School science coursework in 4th grade. She was on track for an early graduation when tragedy struck- a freak accident as her parents were pulling into their driveway. An inattentive driver slammed into their car as Felina stood on the porch with her gym bag, waiting to jump in the car for gymnastics. She saw the accident, and a combination of adrenaline and the latent mutant powers she had not yet discovered spurred her to leap onto the car, slicing away the twisted metal with claws she instinctively knew she could summon. As she struggled to free her parents from the wreckage, relieved that they were at least alive, she turned to see the unhurt driver of the other car staring at her in disbelief. Her rage at the careless motorist expressed itself in a darkening of the skies over the accident site, and a sudden volley of thunder and unearthly winds. Unbidden, at least not consciously, a bolt of lightning struck and killed the hapless driver as Felina’s dazed parents watched.Rather than their gratitude, Felina found herself the object of her parent’s horror- her eyes were now slitted like a cat’s, and the gleaming claws that now protruded from her fingertips glistened in the headlights of the stricken family station wagon. A tail snaked its way up from her back, and a coat of soft black fur grew before Felina’s eyes as she watched with amazement. Her mother screamed, her father made the sign of the cross.
The bodily changes went away with the adrenaline, but the fear in her parent’s eyes never did. Felina’s parents treated her like a stranger, and took her to numerous doctors, psychologists, and priests to try to find answers. Their search ended when Felina met Professor Charles Xavier, who told the Fairlanes he could teach their daughter to control what her parents had come to call “demonic episodes.”
Four years at Xaiver’s School taught Thundercat, as she now preferred to be called, how to control her transformations, and fly the Blackbird. Felina finished her undergraduate work by age 18 and transferred to Empire State University to finish graduate work in Geology and Genetics. To the world, she became Doctor Felina Fairlane, Ph.D., postgraduate researcher at ESU, but at need, she is Thundercat of the X-Men.
My Thoughts:
OK, dammit. Now I wanna play Marvel. Man, did I forget how much fun it was to roll up random supers and try to explain their powers. This was half the fun of playing Marvel, to be honest. Damn, do I love this game.So, Marvel is another game that I love to show people who aren’t roleplayers. Star Wars and Marvel are usually gateways for people into full-on geek gaming. Grab some d10s, some poker chips for Karma, and maybe even a crap ton of HeroClix minis for a massive battle. One of the best Marvel GMs I’ve ever played with, Kelly Rowe, laid out a huge battlefield for us to try to do Avengers: Endgame our way, to see if our solution was any better, and damned if Galactus didn’t show up to take a swipe at the Infinity Gauntlet for himself. I mean, maybe he could fit in on the tip of a fingernail?
The chart can feel a bit cumbersome at first, but once you get used to it, it really produces some fun results. For example, The Thing can uproot a light pole and whack a Doom Bot with it, baseball style, and “grand slam” the Bot across the street and into a building, where both the building and the bot will take additional damage. It’s clobberin’ time. My advice is make sure each player has a color copy of the chart in front of them- print a few at a copy shop and laminate them.
Again a game worth playing, but I don’t think I’m doing characters from any games that aren’t.
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