Advanced FASERIP, now with more BLACK TERROR!

Ah the Marvel Heroes FASERIP game from the 80’s, the Superhero game we should have been playing as kids instead of Champions and TMNT– well maybe not TMNT, that deserved roll in the hay or three. While I haven’t played the FASERIP rules in several years, I developed a short campaign for it awhile back but never had the players go for it (and I got lazy and just ran DCC). The version we played was the retroclone called FASERIP by Gubintroll Games and came out in 2015. It was great BUT had one major issue– compatibility with all the Marvel Heroes stuff (and there is a LOT) from the 1980’s and early 90’s. Self-contained, it was a blast and I loved the push your luck character generation system, there just wasn’t anything out for the system to pick up and play, so while we played it, I jetted over to the older game.

That said, there is a NEW edition called Advanced FASERIP that cleans up some rules (which were already streamlined from the older game) adds some more combat options and best yet, comes in a hardback book from DrivethruRPG for a mere 25 bucks!

Why would you want this when there are so many other Superhero games on the market? If you haven’t tried it the Marvel Heroes game where FASERIP came from is excellent, and is by far the most OSR superhero game (rulings over rules) AND has the only meta-currency (karma) outside of Japanese RPG games that makes sense. FATE and other games got their bennies and chips from FASERIP, but IMO, FASERIP does a better job with it than it’s children. Give it a spin, generate some randos and go to town!

Excellent Interview on FASERIP

Dungeon Designers Guild did a long and excellent interview with Jeff Grubb, the designer and mastermind behind FASERIP (aka, Marvel Superheroes RPG from 1984) on FASERIP itself (he’s done a lot of other stuff).

Look, there’s the real Captain Marvel!!!

I have probably posted this on this blog before but Matt and I got this as kids and I learned it and tried to play and it just did not grab us, especially from just the base set. I think it was the small set of characters, the fact that you can’t make your OWN characters (at first at least), the rather oddly written rulebook and the apparent SIMPLICITY of the game compared to what we were playing at the time (Call of Cthulhu and AD&D mostly). We had been playing Champions which was a total mess to play with great mid-max character generation. I wish I had stuck with FASERIP back in the day until the Advanced version came out and tried it again– it’s really good and still probably the best Superhero game. While it would be fun to create a hero, in all honesty I’d probably just grab She-Hulk and punch stuff and say lawyer quotes from Better Call Saul.

Anyway, enough of my words, listen to the podcast.

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