The following article was the first stirrings of what eventually developed into the ICONS game, when I was playing around with marrying some of the concepts from Fudge and Marvel Super-Heroes.

Back when I first started playing roleplaying games, I was a big fan of the original Marvel Super-Heroes RPG from TSR (particularly in its Advanced Set incarnation by the inimitable Jeff Grubb). The game was simple, evocative, and easy to use.

I’m also an admirer of the work of Stefan O’Sullivan. His Freeform Universal Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine (FUDGE) has many of the same qualities of Marvel Super-Heroes: a simple, straightforward system based on descriptive terms rather than a lot of hard numbers.

For quite some time, I’ve tinkered with the idea of combining the best of the two systems in some way. This page contains some rough ideas along those lines, what I’m calling the Superlative System for ease of reference. Folks are naturally free to play around them them further.

The Marvel Super-Heroes RPG is copyright TSR, Inc. FUDGE is copyright Stefan O’Sullivan. No infringement of either property is intended. Continue reading →