Heros Unlimited as Superheroic Fantasy

"Fantasy Heroes 

This is an option similar to the Medieval Heroes setting mentioned previously, but instead of being set within a historical Earth time frame, it is set in a world of fantasy, magic, and legend, such as the one presented in The Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game®, 2nd Edition . In this setting, dragons and magic are very real and the characters mesh easily into it with their super powers, psionics, and other strange abilities. The G.M. can make super abilities available to all inhabitants of this world, or have the player characters belong to one particular race or class of people that demonstrates these powers." 

- Heroes Unlimited GM Guide, page 70.

So, I want to be a dragon-man paladin in a fantasy world, have natural body armor, fire breath, a light blast power, extraordinary strength, fire and heat resistance, and karmic power to lead a "blessed by the gods" life where my natural resistances (and those around me) are heightened. He goes around, saves villages from skeleton armies, defeats demons, and battles the dark necromancer and other nefarious villains.

That paragraph in the Heroes Unlimited GM's Guide gets me thinking...

It would take me 10 minutes to create that exact character in Heros Unlimited, swapping out skill packages for the ones in Palladium Fantasy. Still, I can get there using a template for a mutant-animal superhero. My dragon-man will be unlike any other, and I could do another using an ice-dragon template and another character class inspiration, and get exactly what I want right from the start.

There is no buying $80 crowdfunded books for expanding the game.

There is no waiting for a book to see if the game designers will give this to me.

There is no praying; a class gives me the powers I want, and I am waiting for the power to unlock, forced to go on weeks of pretentious adventures to finally unlock something weak, and I can only use it once or twice per adventure.

There is no begrudgingly accepting weak powers because "they have to be balanced," and there is no being forced to agree to lame things like your flame breath only working once a day. Sorry, Sir Scalelord the Holy can blast holy light and breathe fire all day, blessing everyone around him at will without a short rest, thank you for nothing, Seattle game designers.

And my warlock black dragon-man can breathe pure darkness, summon demons, teleport, have a shadow form, and control minds. My elf can be a trained swordfighting expert. My gnome can be a tinker gnome with a set of steampunk fantasy armor. My dark elf can be a magic-infused rogue who can disappear at will, phase shift through solid walls, and throw huge fans of blades as an area attack. My bard has a sonic attack blast, mental charms, and can strum their lute to bring up a temporary force shield.

Whatever I want, I can have. It is such a simple concept. Why don't more people play fantasy as a superhero game? This is where it all ends up anyway, and you get what you want right from the start.

Why?

Why, why, why?

This is what D&D 4E promised us, fantasy superheroes, and what 5E pulled way back on, bringing back old-school class roles and making the game boring again. I want the superheroes! I want the instant gratification! I like having it all when I start, and being the uber-character who kicks down the dungeon door and snarls, asking, "Who wants some?"

That is why we loved D&D 4E, not for the rules, which were horribly broken, but for the design theory that says, "You start as a fantasy superhero, and it only gets better."

In D&D 5E, you start off as a mid-level OSR character, you get superpowers around 7th-10th level, and then the rules break, you can't die, and you get bored with the campaign. Anticipating having extraordinary powers is more fun than actually having them.

With a superhero game as the base, I get my fantasy world, and since every superhero is different, all the characters are unique, and your dragon-man won't be replaced by a paladin with the same exact powers. Guess what? My paladin dragon-man is the only one like him in the world. And I didn't need to spend thousands of dollars buying subclass options to expand the choice pool so I could have a semi-unique character.

No, he starts off unique, the only one of his kind, and that is fine by me.

In fact, this is what D&D promises, but it keeps delivering the same cookie-cutter characters, copies of each other. Heroes Unlimited has random super-hero character generation, and if I translate that into a fantasy setting, who knows what I will end up being? I just need a few drops of imagination to translate the powers and origin into a fantastic setting, and there I go.

Heroes Unlimited gives me what D&D 4E promised me.

Palladium SDC Games and Sandbox Play

Strangely, the concept of dungeon crawling took over the hobby. It is suitable for follow-on sales, but it feels strangely fake as the core of the hobby. Many games in the 1990s walked away from the dungeon concept, and a lot of creativity and imagination came into the hobby. We had the Palladium games, which were never really dungeon-crawling games, Vampire, GURPS, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, and a few others that did not put "the dungeon" as the peak of adventure gaming. By the 1990s, the dungeon had been done, and even AD&D 2nd Edition shifted more towards story-gaming and modules based on novels.

Which is why my Palladium SDC games are sticking around. They come from the post-D&D era and tried to do something new. We are in that post-D&D era again, where the "dungeon as adventure" has been done to death, and we are ready for more story-based adventures. Once you build your character in a Palladium game, that is your "playing piece" that you take through various situations and scenarios. That sounds precisely like D&D, but it differs from the 90s RPGs.

The first goal is to "assemble your team of experts," and characters in Palladium's games need each other since they are all specialists in certain areas, and below average in areas unrelated to their specialties. In Palladium games, if you pick the archer, you will be the best archer ever. If you choose the ninja, you will be the best ninja ever. You will excel in your area of specialization, but you need the healer, warrior, wizard, and all others in your group.

You are trying to solve a series of situations with your characters, where you will all have a chance to shine. A dungeon is not a dry grid of room descriptions; more than it is a list of situations you will all need to resolve, circumvent, or work your way through to achieve your objective.

The "SB" in SBRPG stands for situation-based. This is what our game was about.

The gameplay in situation-based gaming is dynamic and incompatible with set-in-stone keyed room descriptions. It is almost sandbox-based play, with factions in the world working "live" to achieve their own goals, and you running around trying to stop them. In a Keep on the Borderlands-style adventure, the Caves of Chaos would not be the focus. The area map would be better filled with hamlets and villages around the keep, interesting locations, a wizard's tower, a soaring ancient bridge, small farms, outposts, trading camps, and other spots. Then, the tribes would enter the map, set up camps, and begin to take down civilization as marauders.

Each group's force numbers and memorable NPCs would be tracked and killed, and the situation would evolve organically. Your group may choose to root out the goblins stealing food from farms and burning them down first, and that may slow down the other forces when they begin to suffer food shortages. You may choose to break the orc siege of a southern town first, and that would free up men to reinforce the outposts.

The concept works on a master "situation" and breaks down into lower levels of "sub-situations" each faction pursues to achieve a goal. Your goal, as heroes, is to be the monkey wrench thrown into the scene. The master situation will not end well. Left unchecked, these bands of humanoids will surround the keep, lay siege, kill everyone inside, and take over the fort as an evil, demon-worshipping humanoid stronghold and blight upon every surrounding kingdom as more evil flows in from the broken lands.

This is how we played these 90s games; they were never dungeon crawls but live, active, dynamic, and engaging meshes of cause-and-effect, live situations that required multiple play sessions to work out and play through. There are no 'passive skills' that play the game for you, so you can stay on your phone. The Palladium games are perfect for this 'live action' play since your "team of experts" is there to tackle these problems with the tools you have and in the best way you see fit.

Do you have a stealthy ranger and ninja pair that can wreak havoc on goblin warbands?

Are you more a heavy metal group with tanks and healers, meant to bloody the nose of an orc assault?

Do you work more with magic that manipulates the mind and can turn the humanoid factions against each other? Or are you a more arcane sorcerer who can summon elemental forces or twist the land to stop the invaders?

Are you more in tune with nature and turn the land and animals against the invaders, washing out roads, tangling vines to slow them down, and calling on woodland spirits to fight alongside you? Are there nature factions to align with for this character type?

In Palladium games, other characters need you, and you need them.

The story modules for D&D in the 1990s were all about railroads. They were a series of combat encounters strung together by a story. Again, the live sandbox style of play ends up being the same series of combat encounters, but again, there is a vast difference here. There was typically zero freedom in how you pursued your goals in the 1990s TSR story modules.

The structure of the D&D adventuring party did not change, and it felt like a poor fit for those scenarios. Even today, D&D struggles with skills, and characters don't feel like "they have the tools for the job."

Palladium?

I have the skills for many jobs, thank you.

D&D rarely does "big magic," and 90% of the powers in the game are meant to be used in a small room. In the old days, you had "big spells" mixed into the list, like 'illusionary terrain' spell, and the 'pass without trace' spell. By the time we got to D&D 4, the game's scope had shrunk to become an MMO with small powers, and 5E continues in that direction.

Does it matter that characters in Palladium games are complex and take a while to create? No. Character creation is 90% of the game, where the focus of the rules should be. The rest of any Palladium game is so simple it puts rules-light games to shame. Combat is simple. Turn actions are simple. Skill rolls are simple. The action economy is simple. Damage and healing are simple. Armor is simple. Resources burn down, requiring rest and breaks, so you need to be able to plan for downtime and replenishment.

Palladium still captures the classic resource management elements of the classic role-playing games.

With d20 games like D&D, the story is the same as in the 1990s. D&D's characters are too simple and lack the tools to deal with dynamic situations. Your powers are room-based and don't do anything big and cool. While characters are specialized, they are specialists. The overlap of spells and abilities makes some character types obsolete. Every class is set up to tackle dungeons and not live situations. With frequent rests restoring most resources, the game feels like an MMO where your powers are full in every encounter.

Yes, there is always the Rifts game, but I am not focused on Rifts right now. I do not want MDC. I want a lower-level game where hit points and SDC matter. That part of the Palladium system is excellent, and focusing on the SDC games in an SDC universe is a joy. MDC weapons and powers are a distraction and trivialize the combat math into all-or-nothing, alpha-attacks, and going first. Playing with weapons that can destroy city blocks is fun, but my heart lies in the lower-level, smaller-focused, personal games.

The Rifts game is another discussion entirely. It is a lot like Robotech at heart; that is where you need to begin understanding it all. For me, the SDC games capture the Palladium charm the best.

I like the SDC games. I wish they made more of them. I would love to have a Weird West game or a 'hard science fiction' game combining horror and psychic powers from them. These books would also be great to combine with Rifts, adding cowboys, shamans, astronauts, and space marines. I would love a gangster game, pulp adventure, or a take on the Cthulhu mythos. I can make all these myself with any of their modern-day games (Dead Reign, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited, or Beyond the Supernatural). Still, they have a way of making a single-book game compelling and exciting.

Mail Room: Heroes Unlimited

Don't be the game master who promises your group a superhero game, picks Heroes Unlimited, has everyone create superheroes...

...and then send them all into Rifts.

I have heard this happening more than a few times; like somehow the non-Rifts Palladium RPGs are "gateway games" to get people into a Rifts campaign. Yeah, we started in Dead Reign, but...

Stop.

You made a promise to this group to play THIS game. Do not pull a fast one on your friends! They want to be the X-Men, not run around as Rifts characters.

It makes me happy I have banned Rifts from my Palladium-verse for the time being, and I am considering and playing these games by themselves without using them as "starting zones" for the eventual Rifts game everything ends up as. These are fun games and they deserve to be played on their own, in their own universe, and given their own moment to shine without the Rifts Cinematic Universe showing up and turning this into the one game to rule them all.

A parallel Palladium Universe where Rifts never happened.

And no, this parallel universe isn't going to eventually end up in Rifts.

How can that happen? Well, the superheroes of Heroes Unlimited stopped the plot a long time ago and Rifts never happened in this universe. The demons are pretty angry they can't ride MDC motorcycles, but hey, whatever. Anything that used to be linked to Rifts - but does not come from the world -  goes back to the closest aligned universe as SDC entities. The gods in Pantheons of the Megaverse? Back in Palladium Fantasy. Some of the other strange alien intelligence monsters? Probably in Beyond the Supernatural or Nightbane. Some things ended up in After the Bomb, others in Dead Reign.

I am happy with my SDC Cinematic Universe (SDC-CU) and it will stay the way it is.

Whenever I played Rifts it wasn't "that" connected and I tended to treat outsiders as special NPCs instead of the norm. I liked those who came from the world and gave them the spotlight, and the game felt more grounded and real.

I had the original game and this is my first time with the revision. I am looking forward to exploring this and playing with it as a part of my SDC-CU. I am going to set these games in the era I want them to be set in, and not all of them will be the current day. With Heroes Unlimited, I would love to set my game in the '90s with those Jim Lee-style heroes and X-Men attitudes. The Ninjas and Superspies game needs to be in the Chuck Norris, Rambo, Schwarzenegger, and action-movie 1980s (plus the technology is right). Beyond the Supernatural is the early 2000s. Dead Reign is the 2010s. Nightbane feels like the 1990s. Basically, the publication date of the game is when I am setting them.

Looking forward to this one, and no, I am not doing any copyrighted characters from Marvel or DC in this universe. I am happy to randomly generate them all and let the chips fall where they may. I am done with a lot of those trademarked characters anyway and want to move on with my own creativity.

More soon.