MARVEL SUPER HEROES Revisited

Since my D&D group has been on hiatus for a while, I've gone back to my other games looking for inspiration. I took out the old MARVEL SUPER HEROESRPG by TSR published back in 1984 and started preserving my ruleset. I do this by typing the rules into my computer, faithfully keeping the look of the pages as they were, including scanned illustrations and formatting. I started with the Battle Book and was so proud of what I accomplished that I then finished up with the Campaign Book the other weekend. It took a while but now that ruleset is completely digitally preserved! My softcover rulebooks are over 30 years old and not holding up as well as my hardcover AD&D books.

But then I started looking at the adventures to see what else I could do. Since I never ran any of the published adventures and kept them in magazine bags, they are all in perfect condition. So there was no need to input them into the computer. I prefer my own adventures, but never got around to running a real Marvel campaign that I was satisfied with. I think it has to do with the transitory comic book experience. The characters evolve every issue - changing powers, identities, gadgets, headquarters, villains, or even histories and origin stories. How can you make an adventure based on stats that are constantly in flux? This was not always the case. The Silver Age of Marvel was fairly static. Titles came and went with popularity but the major players were always there: Spider-Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, and the Fantastic Four. The other heroes went through wild changes throughout their careers - X-Men, Daredevil, some of the Avengers, etc. Costume changes aside, by the late 1980s I couldn't even tell some of the heroes from the villains!! And the art in the late 1980s actually drove me away from Marvel comics - I defected and became a DC Heroes fan!

After college, I joined a group of like-minded comic junkies and we played the heck out of the DC Heroes RPG, loving ever minute of it. I kept trying to convert Marvel heroes into the system, but it never seemed to work out. We tried going back to Marvel several times, but ended up playing Villains & Vigilantes, preferring that to the FASERIP system.

I kinda like the basic MARVEL RPG. I love converting comics into adventures, and I'm currently working on the first adventure arc from ALPHA FLIGHT #2-4 (the origin of Marrina and the appearance of the Master). It would make a good 8 page module, with some guest NPCs (Sue Storm and Namor the Sub-Mariner) and features Guardian, Sasquatch, Snowbird, Northstar, and Aurora as the main players. The goal is to locate/rescue Marrina, so she is an NPC in this module. This story occured at the end of 1983. MSH was published in 1984 and I believe that it debuted at GenCon (in August), so by the time that the Alpha Flight module MH-5 was printed, Guardian was already dead. I like clean slates, so I'm trying to decide on what point I want the Marvel Universe to just STOP and allow the players to dictate how the Marvel Universe proceeds from there. Since most of the people I know now only remember the later versions of the characters (and I stopped collecting Marvel in 1989) this could be a challenge. Ideally, I would like 1984 to be the launch point for any campaigns, since that was the publishing date of the game. I'll have to check out my other campaign ideas before I make a decision.