Old RPG Magazines #1: Different Worlds #23
A Gamer's Treasure
To say that Different Worlds Issue #23 is an excellent Superhero Themed Gaming Magazine issue would be an understatement. It is closer to the truth to say that this particular issue of Different Worlds is the single best issue of a gaming magazine ever published about Superhero Role Playing Games.
Issue 23, the "Special Superhero" issue, was published in August of 1982 just as superhero roleplaying games were beginning to emerge in the marketplace. 1977 had seen the release of Superhero 2044 (review below). This game was quickly followed by the release of the 1st edition of Villains and Vigilantes by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman and Supergame Aimee Karklyn and John Hartlove. By the time Champions emerged in the marketplace in 1981 at the Origins Game Fair, where it set a new standard in superhero gaming, the genre was well established as a successful gaming milieu.
As I discussed last month (link below), during the early 1980s, fewer gaming magazines were "House Organs" that existed purely to promote the products of the company that published the magazine. The vast majority of gaming magazines were published by game publishers, but these publishers frequently featured articles containing content for their competitor's games and advertisements for their competitor's products. Dragon, The Space Gamer, and Different Worlds were published by TSR, Steve Jackson Games, and Chaosium but they didn't limit themselves to promoting their own products. Of these magazines, Dragon ran the fewest articles covering competitors' products but it contained a significant amount of external advertising. It wasn't until the publication by Steve Jackson Games' AutoDuel Quarterly that a company produced a magazine with the sole goal of promoting a single product line.
If Dragon was the stingiest when it came to containing articles about other companies' offerings, Different Worlds and The Space Gamer were in heavy competition for which magazine was the most generous in supporting the hobby first and the company second. Both were excellent magazines that are sorely missed today.
It is in this environment that Different Worlds issue #23 "hit the stands" and set a high mark for what a magazine could do in support of the hobby itself. If you were considering starting up a magazine that covered the whole RPG hobby this is the issue I would point you toward to demonstrate how to do a themed issue. Given the games I cover on this newsletter, it should be pretty clear that Different Worlds was a big influence on how I approach sharing my love of the gaming hobby.
What makes issue #23 of Different Worlds so important is that it had content that supported all of the major superhero roleplaying games of the day, had reviews of several of their products, and had reviews of some of the smaller emerging titles of the time.
Let's have a look at the issue:
Superhero Role-playing Games (Superhero Survey) by Steve Perrin
Steve Perrin was the author of Superworld and the creator of the Runequest Roleplaying game. His fandom of superhero games extended his entire life and he was working on a second edition of Superhero 2044 when he died in 2021. I backed the project and have drafts of the rules he wrote and it saddens me that the project was in part delayed because of venom directed at the publisher by fans, venom that led the publisher (a single person) to preference putting out a perfect product over just getting the thing out the door. That’s a conversation for another time though. This “survey” serves more as an editorial introduction for the entire issue and covers the state of the Superhero RPG market as of 1983. It is thorough and kind. Though it mentions Perrin’s own Superworld game, it is mentioned in its historic place in the timeline and even humbly states “The game is necessarily less complete than some of its predecessors.” More game writing should read like Perrin’s overview here.
Superhero 2044: Part-Time Superhero
This five page article, written by the game's designer Donald Saxman, provided designer notes for the game, supplemental rules, and an adventure that players could run in their own campaigns. The inclusion of a couple of new characters is helpful to GMs and players who want to use this system. The endnotes provide some additional rules for Superhero 2044 combat and the sample characters in the short adventure Hendrex Island provide a good glimpse for how to design super heroes in the system.
The illustrations for the article is by Luise Perenne, who did the art for the first edition of Runequest. Yep, that famous cover of the female warrior battling the monstrous foe was drawn by Luise Perrene, aka Luise Perrin.
Luise is one of the most underappreciated artists of the early role playing game scene and I adore her linework. It has a sketch like quality that evokes the War Comic illustrators. I’m mildly saddened that she didn’t do a lot of work later in the field. Her illustration style is perfect for Magic: The Gathering. As a demonstration of how underappreciated she is, I took a gander at Steve Perrin’s Wikipedia page while I was writing this and she is never mentioned. Which is really odd since she was his wife. She is also not mentioned on the RuneQuest page. She is, thankfully, mentioned as the illustrator in first edition RuneQuest and while not all of her illustrations in there are her best work, many of them are top tier.
Villains and Vigilantes Designer Notes -- Pages 14 and 15 of the issue have a detailed discussion, by game designer Jeff Dee, of the history of the game and the changes that Dee and Jack Herman made to the system for the newly released (in 1982) 2nd edition of the game. I’m a big fan of both the First Edition of Villains & Vigilantes and the Second Edition of the game. They both require a bit of prep time from the Gamemaster to make sure combat runs smoothly, but they have vastly different game mechanics. Dee discusses the thought processes behind the initial design and why they shifted away from level based Hit Dice to a new system to calculate Hit Points.
Supergame Designer Notes -- Jay and Aimee Hartlove have a four page article that has a detailed discussion of the game's development and history. This article also includes Supergame conversions of The Incredible Hulk (Marvel), Raven (DC), Captain America (Marvel), Wonder Woman (DC), Batman (DC), Spider Woman (Marvel), and Wolverine (Marvel).
This article prompted years of searching for copies of Supergame, a search that was not completed until 2002 when I found copies of the first and second edition at the War House in Long Beach. The War House was the home to the Balboa publishing company, the company that published Warlock (aka CalTech D&D) and one of the places John Eric Holmes played D&D while he was teaching at USC. The place had an amazing “old rpg” backroom and a dusty forgotten corner near the restroom was where I found the books. I got them both for cover price. You can get both the first and second editions of the game from Precis Intermedia for a very reasonable price. As an aside, the copy of the 1st edition of the game that Brett used to scan for the Precis Intermedia edition was my copy of the game. Since it was hole punched and held together with brackets, he was able to scan it without damaging the rules in any way.
Modeling existing characters within a specific gaming system is one of the best ways to demonstrate what the benchmarks of a given game are and Jay and Aimee did a bang up job in this issue. They also discussed the limitations of their game. They provide statistics for The Hulk, Raven (Teen Titans), Captain America, Wonder Woman, Batman, Spider Woman, and Wolverine.
Champions
There are two back to back Champions articles in the issue. The first is a set of designer notes by Steve Peterson. Modern Champions players may not be able to envision a day when Steven Long wasn't the man behind the rules set, and he has been a boon for the game, but it's nice to read what the creator of a game thought of his rules and how he wanted them changed for the second edition. The first edition of Champions was a 64 page rulebook released in 1981, Hero Games released a second edition of 80 pages a year later. That "revised" edition contained a number of significant changes. This second edition was the edition of the game I cut my teeth on because it is the version that my friend’s older brother owned, though the 4th edition was the one I played the most and still find to be my favorite edition. What is particularly praiseworthy in Peterson's notes is how responsive he was to how the game was being played.
The second article for Champions is an article by Glenn Thain, a name you will find repeated in many of the early superhero rpgs and someone who has a knack for testing the limits of systems in character design, where he presents statistical representations for the Claremont/ Byrne era X-Men. This article shaped the way that I viewed game balance for quite some time. In hindsight I think that Thain's fandom for the characters made him make them a little more powerful than they would have been written up by a more neutral evaluator.
Regardless of quibbles, Thain presents some good guidelines to be used in individual campaigns that wish to model superheroes. Thain provides statistics for Sprite (Kitty Pride/Shadowcat), Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Wolverine, and Magneto (giving one villain). Given the accuracy of the emulation of the abilities of the characters, this article is a great demonstration of the versatility of the Champions system -- even before it became a 900 page omnibus.
Given that Different Worlds was a Chaosium organ, one would expect to find a section discussing their superhero entry Superworld and Steve Perrin provides a nice designer notes and errata article for the first edition (the one in the Worlds of Wonder boxed set) of the game. Superworld is based on the Basic Role-Playing system, and as such has one of the most intuitive mechanical systems as its underlying structure. Tell someone that they have to roll 11 or less on 3d6 to accomplish a task and they may or may not understand what the probabilities of success are. Tell them that they have a 55% chance and it is instantly crystal clear. Superworld's system is a percentile based one. It is no wonder that this game became the basis for George R. R. Martin's shared world anthology Wild Cards. The game is versatile and easy to understand. The first doesn't have a large power set, but that was soon changed with a second -- and stand alone -- version of the game.
Like Champions, Superworld gets an article wherein the X-men are modeled using the system. In this case the X-Men represented include a couple missing from the Champions article. The heroes included are Angel, Storm, Professor X, Sprite (Kitty Pride/Shadowcat), Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Colossus, and Magneto (the villain). The art is once again illustrated by Luise Perenne and I’m particularly fond of her Angel illustration.
In the reviews section of the issue, there are reviews of Supervillains by Task Force Games (a deservedly negative review by Steve Perrin), The Official Superhero Adventure Game by Brian Phillips (a relatively positive review of the independently published game -- a game that I desperately wish to own), Death Duel with the Destroyers an adventure for Villains and Vigilantes (a deservedly positive review by Steve Perrin), The Ysgarth System (a mixed review of a game that became the foundation of a near impossible to find superhero RPG entitled Challengers which I will review some point this year).
There are many other noteworthy aspects to the issue, not the least of which is the sweet Bill Willingham cover, so if you are a fan of superhero RPGs you absolutely must track down a copy of the issue. I personally own a first printing of the issue and one of the "Collector's Reprints." You should really check it out.
The cover of that issue is one of Bill Willingham's greatest drawings of all time. I picked that magazine up when I was 11 or 12, and that image of the X-Men was burned in my head for years; thanks for bringing it back!