8 Great Tabletop Superhero RPG? lol

Two games that you missed were Golden Heroes and Underground.

Underground is one of the more interesting ones since it's very similar to Pat Mills and Kev O'Neil's comic book Marshal Law. Governmental program to mass create super soldiers where the effects of the experiments done on the soldiers may cause a few psychological quirks for them. It definitely isn't a four color world.

 

Gratuitous use of zippers combined with a fashionable gimp mask... and topped off with a SFPD belt buckle. Don't let this pic leak out, people might think its a post Sanctuary City police uniform. Christians will see an anti-religious Judge Dredd, progressives will see a ku-klux clan mask on his belt for emergency racism meetings. Grandpas will see a SS officer's hat.

Picture made my night lol

 

Well, It's Marshal Law. He *is* wearing bondage gear, with real barbed wire around his arm. The SFPD is San Futuro police department (After huge quake hits the west coast, they renamed the rebuild). His uniform *is* based on an SS uniform, but the mask is a trophy from yet another superhero who decided to resist arrest. Notice the evidence of the warning shot fired into the forehead.

When the gangs of super-soldiers begin causing trouble on the streets, the SFPD sends in Marshal Law. I like this deconstruction of the Superhero genre much better than Watchmen. Marshal Law, on the one hand, is the brutal SOB the SOB's in charge send in to deal with out of control supers. On the other hand, the Marshal is just another of the returned from combat supers, who has his own problems and issues to deal with, chief among these is the fact that he really does care and has a very strangled core of idealism. Damn, I'm looking at TV Tropes and it's nice to see that even they don't get some points.

 

I had assumed a jaded flower child joke about San Francisco which was always way more scummy than advertised by the Woodstock crowd, some of my family immigrated from Ellis Island to there and my dad came back from Vietnam and basically left his child hood stomping grounds because it got taken over by drug dealers and the black panthers. My grandmother lived down the street from a Hell's Angel bar and a gay club, and the rumors about the overlap weren't rumors at all.

Some people have parents whose moral lessons don't stick because they seem hypocritcal. My dad's childhood stories gave me proxy-ptsd. I just assumed it was a regular SFPD but with Super Heros, sorta like the comic Powers.

I'm guessing Zombie Harvey Milk isn't a character?

 

It's much, much worse. It's something like, Transmetropolitan or The Boys.


"If Watchmen did in any way kill off the superhero - which is a dubious proposition - then Marshal Law has taken it further with this wonderful act of necrophilia, where it has degraded the corpse in a really amusing way. I think that's great... Pat and Kevin do it so well, with such style and with such obvious malice; that's the fun thing about Marshal Law. They're not just kidding, they really hate superheroes."
— Alan Moore, The Comics Journal #138

As usual, Moore really doesn't get it. His characters are pretty one-dimensional, so, he doesn't get the deeper nuances.

They don't hate superheroes, they love superheroes. You can only get that level of anger about something you love, but, think the other writers not only, just don't get it but seem to not get it in a manner that fills you with a psychotic and psychopathic rage.

For an example, they got so *angry* over the way DC mauled Superman, they created their own version of Superman, just so Marshal Law could beat the living hell out of a parody of DC's Superman.

 

I'd say I feel like a comic book noob now, but that is a seriously awesome take on the "Watchman" killed superheroes crap.

I never realized it was something the author himself spread around, which explains why I've heard it before as a non-fanatical follower of comics.

 

The most recent game on your list there is Mutants and Masterminds, which is on its third edition. It's a fine game -- I play it -- but there are others that are influential.

Of the newer ones, I think Masks: the Next Generation has made a splash because it shows how focused a superhero TTRPG can be. It uses the Powered by the Apocalypse setting to deal with teen superheroes coming of age.

Sentinel Comics derives many of its mechanics from the Cortex system (Margaret Weis house system - some of the same people worked on it) but it is explicitly about the comics that the characters appear in, which is an interesting difference. Yes, you can do straight superheroes, but it works very hard at simulating that kind of fiction (as opposed to, say, Champions, which I also adore, which is more about creating an internally consistent physics for superpowered individuals).

 

I completely agree with the statement that superheroes are currently experiencing a golden age, especially in the realm of film and television. The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe, among others, has created a huge demand for superhero content.

Tabletop games are a great way for people to engage with the superhero genre on a more personal level, allowing players to create and develop their own characters and embark on their own heroic journeys. These games offer a unique and immersive experience that is not often found in other forms of media.

 

I might put up a bit of game lit outlining the start of a scene and how it would be played in a system. The system would probably be ICONS because I am currently running that and playing DragonBane (a BRP-derived system), and I find it hard to hold more than two active systems in my head. I often describe ICONS as the lovechild of FATE and Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP).