Blackmoor Vituperative

Here are some books I recommend to start your Mutants & Masterminds library. These would make great presents for the role-player in your life.

Mutants & Masterminds Pocket Players Guide

Mutants & Masterminds, 2nd Edition

Mutants & Masterminds GM Screen

Mutants & Masterminds Masterminds Manual

Mutants & Masterminds Ultimate Power Sourcebook

Mutants & Masterminds Golden Age Sourcebook

MDSnowman’s 2e Conversions

The top of the first post has dozens of well-known characters converted to
Mutants & Masterminds.

Near the bottom of the first post is a nice list of various fights between
characters. Nice way to get a feel for the flow of combat.

If you are looking for a superhero role-playing game, look no further than Mutants & Masterminds, from Green Ronin Publishing.

Mutants & Masterminds has been called “the best, most exciting superhero RPG in years.” It sets “new standards in design and presentation.” It has won multiple ENnie and Pen & Paper Awards and it appeared on every critic’s “best of” list for 2002. Now the World’s Greatest Super-hero Roleplaying Game is even better! Mutants & Masterminds, Second Edition, takes the best of the original edition and supercharges it to make it the most complete, detailed, and fun super-hero game yet! In this 256-page hardcover with a stunning new cover by Ramon Perez, you’ll find a complete roleplaying game that’s a perfect starting point for your own comic book adventures. Mutants & Masterminds, Second Edition, has everything you need to create your own super-heroes and villains. It also offers more than a dozen ready-made super-hero archetypes and even more ready-to-use super-villain archetypes, plus two introductory adventures so you can start playing right away. Don’t let your super-powers fall behind! Mutants & Masterminds, Second Edition, will take your game (and your heroes) to the next level!

I only discovered this game a couple of months ago, and I am hooked. It’s amazing how many little things have been irking me about the Champions game system for decades, and which have been fixed in Mutants & Masterminds. Someone finally did a superhero RPG right.

One thing to take care with, if you decide to pick up some of the M&M books, is to be careful to get those which are compatible with the second edition. There were quite a few rule changes between the first and second editions, and the overall quality of the second edition source material is also higher.

You might or might not know that Green Ronin’s DC Adventures book (published in August) uses the same ruleset that Mutants & Masterminds 3e will.

This demo session might give folks an idea what the game is like in play (more or less — they explain things that wouldn’t be explained if no one were recording it, and the role-playing is very sparse for the same reason).

“Vigilance Press Podcast has DC freelancer Jack Norris and artists extraordinaire James Dawsey and Dan Houser join them for a game of DC Adventures to see how it plays (and Jack gets to play Green Lantern). Check it out!”

http://mikelaff.podbean.com/2010/09/08/dc-adventures-actual-play-demo/

I recently stumbled across a number of free-to-download game books published by West End Games (such as d6 Space). On flipping through them, I thought, “Hey: this is actually pretty cool.”

So I spent some time looking around for source material. I did find a bit (d6 Space Ships), but no setting material or adventures or anything like that. So I looked around for West End Games’ web site, only to discover that http://www.westendgames.com/ is no longer online.

Gone? Just… gone? How very odd. So I turned to that fickle friend, Wikipedia, and read the whole sad story of West End Games. Such a shame.

More’s the pity. On reading d6 Space, I got to thinking that this might be a palatable compromise between extremely rules-light games (like my neglected stepchild, Jazz) and more mechanically complex games like Mutants & Masterminds (which I like very much, but I confess the mass of game mechanics weighs heavily on me). I even wondered if it might be worth dusting off my affectionately misbegotten cyberpunk-immortal pastiche, Legacy: War Of Ages, revising it and rewriting it using the Opend6 game system. Or, heck, maybe even writing something altogether new….

But, alas, it appears that these d6 books are, like Legacy, no more than the weathered artifacts of a game company that strut and fret its hour upon the stage, and then was heard no more.

Here’s to you, West End Games. You rose higher, and fell further, than Black Gate Publishing ever did.

A quick list of what books I am reading right now, or intend to read in the near future:

• Characters & Viewpoint
• Description & Setting
• Dialogue
• How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Learning Nagios 3.0
• Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore
• Plot & Structure
• Practical Subversion
• Warriors & Warlocks: A Mutants & Masterminds Sourcebook

I need to read more fiction. I will start looking at novels or short story compilations after I finish with this stack.

We have a Mutants & Masterminds game this Saturday. I am so excited!

I am running it. Mwah-ha-ha.