Marvelous Friday Night Game

"Cuchulain" could not make the session. So we were going to play Warhammer Quest. However I go my hands on a new game and had time to prep it before hand. It was one we were looking forward to due to love of Cortex+.    

So Friday night we played the great new Marvel Heroic Role Playing Game.

We did the included adventure/mini Epic and it was a lot of fun. More so for me as I remember reading the comic it was based on and it made it that much more enjoyable.

The Players took a bunch of Avengers or soon to be Avengers to the disaster on the Raft [did it ever occur to anyone the Hudson is a bad place for a super  prison? I guess so hence the negative zone prison but still right off NY what where they thinking?]. We lampooned this many times during the game session.

The roster of your dreams

Ms Marvel, Spider Woman, Cap, Wolvie, Luke and Iron Fist were the active roster at the time of the breakout. Things got heated up pretty quickly when Count Nefaria was the first prisoner out of the Raft accompanied by his Lethal Legion of Living Laser, Whirlwind and Power Man (Erik Josten). Well after that it was on!!!

Battles were great, mental and social conflict equally so. Initiative is so simple and yet innovative
It goes like this once the "Scene" has been introduced and the stakes have been set and its clear to everyone what happening one of the players gets to go first it can be say the central leader hero, or one who is fast, or the first player to speaks up. Once the first character has had a go, whether it’s a player hero or a GM's character, the "Action-Order" has begun. And here is the genius of the system It’s the player of the character who just acted that determines who goes next. The other neat wrinkle is that the person in control of the last character to act (player or GM called the Watcher in the game) in the "Action-Order" chooses who goes first at the top of the next action order. Its so simple and yet in play its genius. This one item alone is a great piece of rpg design. I think it may come from LARP as it feels like a LARP rule in its simplicity.

Sure. All Ozi heroes are like this.

Their are other rules which are very close to Leverage and more close again to Smallville, with a number of new tweaks to make action scenes really shine. The effect die which has sort of been in Cotext+ really gets called out in this game and you can make some fun tactical choices about your use of the dice that "feels" like your making in game decisions. 

We are still learning the new rule nuances but we where up and running really quickly.
There are some great play aids which make leaning the game easy and plenty of great examples to make gaming actions understandable. These proved very handy as many of the rules are very subtle and nuanced yet far reaching so we really appreciated these aids and hints. 

Now that's a much better Aussie Hero

Ultimately (pun) we had a great time and the PC's won the day and will be off to the Savage Lands. as a result. It was great the way the rules encouraged the following of character and adventure agendas via "milestones" one of the game innovative subsystems and  experience points get "used-up" by in-game actions the players will want to take. 

We are having fun and will be doing this game again soon.

Oh yeah in case your wondering there IS support for making your own heroes, and normally we would do just that. However the game has done such a good job in capturing the flavor of each of the characters you just want to play them. I found myself really wanting to be able to purchase a Datafile character book to just drool over like the old Gamers Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

I'm really anxiously awaiting the other releases in the line.

It probably wont take the place of our regular game [although it *could*] but it will be our choice of "pick-up" game for the foreseeable future.