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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8923850" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 131: August 1998part 3/5Marvel Tales: So how did we get from there to here. The old line stopped releasing material in 1992 but it looks like TSR still had the licence. (or at least, no-one could make a better offer to Marvel in the intervening years) TSR probably started a new one shortly before they collapsed. But unlike Buck Rogers, WotC were eager to add this IP to their roster and continue development, see if they could prove the SAGA system was adaptable to genres other than romantic fantasy. Mike Selinker was the guy assigned to be lead developer shortly after the changeover, which came as a bit of a surprise to him as he’s not a huge comics nerd, but it’s always nice to start a project knowing there’s a definite audience for it. The important thing in his mind was to make it fast to play, after many experiences with game that take hours to play out a few rounds of combat, but still have plenty of ways you can twist the rules if you draw the right kind of cards. Since this is a promotional article, he obviously thinks he’s succeeded at that job, and the approval guys at Marvel seem happy too, but it remains to be seen what the general public thinks. So they’re making it clear that this is a very different game from the old edition, but don’t seem too antagonistic about the comparison. It’s not that the old way sucks, they just wanted to do something different this time. Save that for D&D where getting the majority of the audience to go along with the switch is genuinely important to their bottom line and failing to do so requires another hasty edition change to a version that plays things much safer rules-wise. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Summer Jobs: Penny Williams (nee Petticord) returns to the newszine she used to run after a very long absence indeed, to give us our first Marvel SAGA adventure. All the PC’s are young mutants who’s powers have recently manifested. Since Professor X is currently dead again and the Legacy virus is rampaging through the mutant population, they’ve been recruited by the millionaire philanthropist Mr Xaine, who claims he can keep them stable with his experimental implants. While technically true, that means he can also shut down your powers at any time, and he’ll have no hesitation in doing so and selling you off for experimentation if he feels you’ve outlived your usefulness to him. How long will you keep doing errands for him before realising something is very wrong around here and it would be the heroic thing to turn on him or at least be pragmatic and make an escape. So this is a bit short and basic, as it’s obviously designed as a single session introductory adventure for new players, with pregens aimed at us the readers, to give examples of how you build characters, but it’s not a railroad, giving you a decent number of scenes and different ways you could get from one to another & resolve them in noncombat ways. That continues to be a big strength of the SAGA system whatever genre they turn it to. The Balanced Super Team: Once again they try to hammer in that this is a game built around teams of superheroes, not a bunch of characters rolled up individually and then thrown together, so you should think about that when creating yours. They then list a bunch of the common powersets that turn up repeatedly in these kinds of stories. We’ve had several articles like that before. The difference from the old days is that instead of just one role, they now think in terms of a powers axis and a social axis, with players picking one from each independently, often with quirky results. (after all, very few superheroes get to choose precisely what their powers are and conflict between their nature and the situations they’re thrown into is a key part of comic storytelling) That’s been standard in White Wolf games for a while now, and Steve Kenson has done a fair bit of writing for them, so I’m not surprised he’d bring that here as well. This shows that roleplaying as a whole is still developing in sophistication, and a change in people at the top has made them more open to taking on ideas from other companies. They’re continuing to present a consistent picture of how this game differs from the previous edition and how you ought to play it, which is something I approve of.</blockquote>

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