Neuroglyph
First Post
For any “old school” comic book fan-boy, this is an amazing time to be alive. 
For years, the entertainment industry treated comic book material as something to only worthy of a B-movie, or more likely, a “movie of the week” on TV, complete with cheesy special effects and painfully trite dialogue. But those days are in the past, and major studios now battle over the rights to make a comic book into a blockbuster motion picture, and use the best state-of-the-art special effects to bring super-powered heroes and villains to life… sometimes even in 3D!
But back when comic books were being snubbed by Hollywood producers, comic book fans could still live out their super-heroic fantasies in role-playing games. Role-playing games such as Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, Heroes Unlimited, DC Heroes, and Marvel Superheroes offered an opportunity to for a gamer to either play a favorite superhero from their comic book collection or to create their own unique superhero by combining powers into a hero never seen before in the pages of 4-color comics.
Now Bonsai Entertainment has released a new role-playing system for creating and playing super-powered heroes of all types, fighting the good fight again evil villains, aliens, and mega-monsters with Infinite Power and Infinite Enemies!
Infinite Power
Production Quality
The production quality of both books is overall quite good, and the material is presented in a logical sequence to teach game mechanics, and some solid writing skills from the author. Both books use a comic book style font which helps to evoke the game system’s style quite well, and makes it easy to read and assimilate.
Unfortunately, both of these PDF books lack bookmarks to make navigation through the contents easy, although there are tables of content to give some help to a reader. In fact, Infinite Power has a table of content which has “hot links” in it to move around the PDF, but it does require that the reader keep returning to the ToC page to re-navigate to a topic. Infinite Enemies also appeared to have the same “hot links”, but they did not work when clicked on in the review copy used for this report. However, Infinite Enemies did have an index by “challenge”, as well as a table of the origins of the various villains to make matching them against superheroes an easy task. It’s a major disappointment to have a PDF but be unable to navigate through it easily, especially when one considers how simple it is to create a bookmark list for the reader to use.
The artwork in both books was somewhat of a mixed bag, with some instances of really spectacular renditions of superheroes and super villains, but also some fairly lackluster attempts at portraying the spandex-clad image of comic book characters. Upon consulting with a buddy and fellow gamer, who also happens to be an artist, he explained that some of the not-so-impressive illustrations showed poor shadowing and inking, disproportional limbs and musculature, and other issues. But even with some bad illustrations, the artwork used in the books, particularly in the Infinite Enemies, clearly enhanced the reading experience and offered game masters visual clues to portraying the villains.
Infinite Power
Infinite Power would be considered the central component of the Infinite Power System, and is a resource for both the players as well as a game master. You can check out a free sample of this game system with the Infinite Power Quick Start Guide from RPGNow.com, which has a sample superhero, a sample supervillain and enough rules to allow a fairly decent playtest of the combat system.
The Infinite Power System closest equivalent would be the old version of the Hero System as introduced in Champions RPG. But whereas Champions used handfuls of d6’s to resolve combats and fire off super-powered attacks, the Infinite Power System uses d8’s instead. And both systems allow players to build their character’s superpowers from the ground up, creating attacks and defenses from a wide range of powers, further modified by “advantages” and “limitations”.
But where Champions is a fairly complex point-based system, where min-maxing and point shaving meant the difference between a weak character and a potent one, it was pleasing to see that Infinite Powertook a different route instead. Infinite Power has a simple system of “slots” that allow a player to buy stats, profession skills, talents, powers, and power tricks for their character.
Powers are also quite easy to design, costing a base of 1 “slot”, and then applying Enhancements and Limitations in an additive fashion to determine the final cost of a power in “slots”. So for instance to create a cone effect of three squares (+1 Enhancement) would cause a base power to be worth 2 slots, but if that power also had No Knockback effect (-1 Limitation), the power balances back to a 1 slot again. Almost any form of power one could imagine or have read about in comic books could be conceivably recreated in this system, and fairly quickly and easily.
Powers include a wide range of effects, damage types, and attack forms, from raw damage of various elemental forms such as cold, fire, poison, to effects such as intangibility, invisibility, shape-shifting, and size alteration. The addition of Power Tricks add additional modifiers to existing powers, expanding the range and diversity of powers within themes such as Animal power tricks, Cyberpathic power tricks, or Telekinesis power tricks.
In fact, one of the best things about this character creation system overall was the simplicity of character creation compared to a game such as Champions. Not that there is anything wrong with the classic Hero System, but it did have a massive front end learning curve in order to understand point tallying and efficient use of points. Infinite Power has much of the same superhero power diversity, but with a considerably gentler learning curve. There are some “figured” characteristics – characteristics generated from base stats – but again the math is kept simple and logical, given that base stats start at 1 and max out at 8. So for instance, a character’s Psychic Attack Value (AV) is computed by adding their Willpower and Presence stats together – quick and easy!
The Infinite Power combat system is also easy to learn, and has many of the comic book features which were embraced by other superhero game systems. Powers knocking heroes around the battlefield, blowing up cars, and wrecking buildings are all taken into account, as well as hand-to-hand combat maneuvers, flight maneuvers, and other superhero effects.
The game master also has a lot of content in Infinite Power in order to be able to pull off a superhero campaign. The author included sections on villain creation and encounter design, as well as samples of superheroes and supervillains. Super-enemies come in four levels of difficulty: Henchmen, Villains, Bosses, and Epics. Henchmen are fractions of a Hero, while Villains are on par with the player-characters one-on-one. Bosses on the other hand are equivalent to about two Heroes, while an Epic is a powerhouse that can take on a whole superhero team. So balancing encounters is fairly straightforward, and can be done by even a neophyte game master.
Infinite Power includes an appendix with a two-page character sheet for use at the table.
Infinite Enemies
Infinite Enemies is a game master supplement to the Infinite Power System, and provides a collection of supervillains, supervillain groups, aliens, and evil organizations to populate a comic campaign world with plenty of threat for the superhero player-characters to face.
There are seven different types of Henchmen, a score of Villains, a half dozen Bosses, and four Epics for game masters to threaten heroes with. There are also five supervillain groups, each containing anywhere from five to eight villains, and four evil enemy organizations with a couple dozen more henchmen, villains, and bosses. All told there are more than a hundred enemies in the book, with a wide range of origins, motivations, and powers.
The various villains and groups have complete descriptions and stat blocks, and in some respects, the background information of the enemy entries also act as adventure hooks and campaign themes. Unfortunately, like the quality of the illustrations in this book, the supervillains and enemies are a bit of a mixed bag, with some very inspiring entries which would be fun to work into a campaign, and other enemies which are lackluster and even a little trite.
But there is a considerable amount of material in this supervillain “monster manual”, and many game masters might find it very useful in launching off a campaign.
Infinite Power - Overall Score : 3.5 out of 5.0
Infinite Enemies - Overall Score : 2.9 out of 5.0
Final Thoughts
Overall, I really liked what I read in Infinite Power, and think it is a pretty solid superhero role-playing system. The system is easy to learn, allows for a wide diversity of superhero powers, and has a straightforward combat system which simulates comic book battles well. Given that is contains a complete game system with game master supplementary material, the price for the PDF is quite reasonable.
Infinite Enemies on the other hand is a mixed bag, with some great villain concepts and art, and some other entries that were frankly pretty poor. It contains a considerable amount of campaign material and ideas, which might be a big help to game masters new to running a campaign in the superhero genre. But many game masters might look upon a book like Infinite Enemies as supplemental and optional material, preferring to produce their own comic book adventure themes. And given the rather steep price of the PDF, many game masters might definitely prefer to design their own supervillains for their campaigns.
So until next review… I wish you Happy Gaming!
Editor’s Note : This Reviewer received complimentary copies of the products in PDF format from which the review was written.
“Infinite Power” Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
“Infinite Enemies” Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
For years, the entertainment industry treated comic book material as something to only worthy of a B-movie, or more likely, a “movie of the week” on TV, complete with cheesy special effects and painfully trite dialogue. But those days are in the past, and major studios now battle over the rights to make a comic book into a blockbuster motion picture, and use the best state-of-the-art special effects to bring super-powered heroes and villains to life… sometimes even in 3D!But back when comic books were being snubbed by Hollywood producers, comic book fans could still live out their super-heroic fantasies in role-playing games. Role-playing games such as Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, Heroes Unlimited, DC Heroes, and Marvel Superheroes offered an opportunity to for a gamer to either play a favorite superhero from their comic book collection or to create their own unique superhero by combining powers into a hero never seen before in the pages of 4-color comics.
Now Bonsai Entertainment has released a new role-playing system for creating and playing super-powered heroes of all types, fighting the good fight again evil villains, aliens, and mega-monsters with Infinite Power and Infinite Enemies!
Infinite Power
- Authors: Levi Mote
- Illustrators: Mesozoic Press
- Publisher: Bonsai Entertainment
- Year: 2010
- Media: PDF (104 pages)
- Cost: $19.99 (available from RPGNow.com)
- Author: Levi Mote
- Editor: Sarah Sharp
- Illustrators: Nether Void Production Studios (cover), Frank Parr, Adrian Smith, Chris Poquette, Zack Feldman, Raf “Crazy” Gonzalez, Gonzo, Kevin Olmstead, Jordan Carlson, Stephen Rickman (interior)
- Publisher: Bonsai Entertainment
- Year: 2011
- Media: PDF (128 pages)
- Cost: $24.99 (available from RPGNow.com)
Production Quality
The production quality of both books is overall quite good, and the material is presented in a logical sequence to teach game mechanics, and some solid writing skills from the author. Both books use a comic book style font which helps to evoke the game system’s style quite well, and makes it easy to read and assimilate.
Unfortunately, both of these PDF books lack bookmarks to make navigation through the contents easy, although there are tables of content to give some help to a reader. In fact, Infinite Power has a table of content which has “hot links” in it to move around the PDF, but it does require that the reader keep returning to the ToC page to re-navigate to a topic. Infinite Enemies also appeared to have the same “hot links”, but they did not work when clicked on in the review copy used for this report. However, Infinite Enemies did have an index by “challenge”, as well as a table of the origins of the various villains to make matching them against superheroes an easy task. It’s a major disappointment to have a PDF but be unable to navigate through it easily, especially when one considers how simple it is to create a bookmark list for the reader to use.
The artwork in both books was somewhat of a mixed bag, with some instances of really spectacular renditions of superheroes and super villains, but also some fairly lackluster attempts at portraying the spandex-clad image of comic book characters. Upon consulting with a buddy and fellow gamer, who also happens to be an artist, he explained that some of the not-so-impressive illustrations showed poor shadowing and inking, disproportional limbs and musculature, and other issues. But even with some bad illustrations, the artwork used in the books, particularly in the Infinite Enemies, clearly enhanced the reading experience and offered game masters visual clues to portraying the villains.
Infinite Power
Infinite Power would be considered the central component of the Infinite Power System, and is a resource for both the players as well as a game master. You can check out a free sample of this game system with the Infinite Power Quick Start Guide from RPGNow.com, which has a sample superhero, a sample supervillain and enough rules to allow a fairly decent playtest of the combat system.
The Infinite Power System closest equivalent would be the old version of the Hero System as introduced in Champions RPG. But whereas Champions used handfuls of d6’s to resolve combats and fire off super-powered attacks, the Infinite Power System uses d8’s instead. And both systems allow players to build their character’s superpowers from the ground up, creating attacks and defenses from a wide range of powers, further modified by “advantages” and “limitations”.
But where Champions is a fairly complex point-based system, where min-maxing and point shaving meant the difference between a weak character and a potent one, it was pleasing to see that Infinite Powertook a different route instead. Infinite Power has a simple system of “slots” that allow a player to buy stats, profession skills, talents, powers, and power tricks for their character.
Powers are also quite easy to design, costing a base of 1 “slot”, and then applying Enhancements and Limitations in an additive fashion to determine the final cost of a power in “slots”. So for instance to create a cone effect of three squares (+1 Enhancement) would cause a base power to be worth 2 slots, but if that power also had No Knockback effect (-1 Limitation), the power balances back to a 1 slot again. Almost any form of power one could imagine or have read about in comic books could be conceivably recreated in this system, and fairly quickly and easily.
Powers include a wide range of effects, damage types, and attack forms, from raw damage of various elemental forms such as cold, fire, poison, to effects such as intangibility, invisibility, shape-shifting, and size alteration. The addition of Power Tricks add additional modifiers to existing powers, expanding the range and diversity of powers within themes such as Animal power tricks, Cyberpathic power tricks, or Telekinesis power tricks.
In fact, one of the best things about this character creation system overall was the simplicity of character creation compared to a game such as Champions. Not that there is anything wrong with the classic Hero System, but it did have a massive front end learning curve in order to understand point tallying and efficient use of points. Infinite Power has much of the same superhero power diversity, but with a considerably gentler learning curve. There are some “figured” characteristics – characteristics generated from base stats – but again the math is kept simple and logical, given that base stats start at 1 and max out at 8. So for instance, a character’s Psychic Attack Value (AV) is computed by adding their Willpower and Presence stats together – quick and easy!
The Infinite Power combat system is also easy to learn, and has many of the comic book features which were embraced by other superhero game systems. Powers knocking heroes around the battlefield, blowing up cars, and wrecking buildings are all taken into account, as well as hand-to-hand combat maneuvers, flight maneuvers, and other superhero effects.
The game master also has a lot of content in Infinite Power in order to be able to pull off a superhero campaign. The author included sections on villain creation and encounter design, as well as samples of superheroes and supervillains. Super-enemies come in four levels of difficulty: Henchmen, Villains, Bosses, and Epics. Henchmen are fractions of a Hero, while Villains are on par with the player-characters one-on-one. Bosses on the other hand are equivalent to about two Heroes, while an Epic is a powerhouse that can take on a whole superhero team. So balancing encounters is fairly straightforward, and can be done by even a neophyte game master.
Infinite Power includes an appendix with a two-page character sheet for use at the table.
Infinite Enemies
Infinite Enemies is a game master supplement to the Infinite Power System, and provides a collection of supervillains, supervillain groups, aliens, and evil organizations to populate a comic campaign world with plenty of threat for the superhero player-characters to face.
There are seven different types of Henchmen, a score of Villains, a half dozen Bosses, and four Epics for game masters to threaten heroes with. There are also five supervillain groups, each containing anywhere from five to eight villains, and four evil enemy organizations with a couple dozen more henchmen, villains, and bosses. All told there are more than a hundred enemies in the book, with a wide range of origins, motivations, and powers.
The various villains and groups have complete descriptions and stat blocks, and in some respects, the background information of the enemy entries also act as adventure hooks and campaign themes. Unfortunately, like the quality of the illustrations in this book, the supervillains and enemies are a bit of a mixed bag, with some very inspiring entries which would be fun to work into a campaign, and other enemies which are lackluster and even a little trite.
But there is a considerable amount of material in this supervillain “monster manual”, and many game masters might find it very useful in launching off a campaign.
Infinite Power - Overall Score : 3.5 out of 5.0
Infinite Enemies - Overall Score : 2.9 out of 5.0
Final Thoughts
Overall, I really liked what I read in Infinite Power, and think it is a pretty solid superhero role-playing system. The system is easy to learn, allows for a wide diversity of superhero powers, and has a straightforward combat system which simulates comic book battles well. Given that is contains a complete game system with game master supplementary material, the price for the PDF is quite reasonable.
Infinite Enemies on the other hand is a mixed bag, with some great villain concepts and art, and some other entries that were frankly pretty poor. It contains a considerable amount of campaign material and ideas, which might be a big help to game masters new to running a campaign in the superhero genre. But many game masters might look upon a book like Infinite Enemies as supplemental and optional material, preferring to produce their own comic book adventure themes. And given the rather steep price of the PDF, many game masters might definitely prefer to design their own supervillains for their campaigns.
So until next review… I wish you Happy Gaming!
Editor’s Note : This Reviewer received complimentary copies of the products in PDF format from which the review was written.
“Infinite Power” Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
- Presentation: 3.5
- - Design: 4
- - Illustrations: 3
- Content: 4
- - Crunch: 4.5
- - Fluff: 3.5
- Value: 3
“Infinite Enemies” Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
- Presentation: 3.75
- - Design: 3.5
- - Illustrations: 2.5
- Content: 3.5
- - Crunch: 4
- - Fluff: 3.5
- Value: 1.5
