In a recent stream about the new Kickstarter for Ghost Mountain, Shane Hensley mentioned they have tried to get the Thundarr license but at the time he managed to track down the right person to ask they weren’t interested. He keeps it on his ‘to do list’ to ask them again periodically!
Savage Worlds is my favourite system to GM and play. It’s a great start point for any pulp game (and that is my default approach to any genre) and easy to tweak and fine-tune for individual campaigns. Characters are broadly capable without being over powered, and the system keeps all enemies relevant due to the exploding dice mechanism which means any attack is a potential threat.
The damage system is very different to D&D. Significant characters like the PCs and ‘named enemies’ can take a few wounds before being incapacitated, and that number hardly ever changes. You can become more resilient through improving combat skills and armour, but there isn’t the ever-growing buffer of HP like with D&D. That is a radically different resource model and it has significant impact on how the game plays. D&D-ish games kind of assume a series of less demanding encounters to burn up some resources before getting to the more challenging fights. We find with Savage Worlds that you can skip these ‘speed bump’ fights and focus on the more interesting ones, which we find means we spend our combat time on more interesting fights. You can certainly have less significant combat, however these is a sub-system called ‘quick encounters’ which can be used to address these in just a skill roll from each participant - the outcome is mostly assured but the party may suffer some hardship in the process.
Magic is also different in feel. There are power points and skill rolls and spells are a bit less impacting in combat (though still effective and worthwhile) which means “linear fighter, quadratic wizard’ isn’t a thing in SW. And fighters get more options, too, which also helps.
Big spells are better handled using ‘dramatic tasks’ which are a great mechanism for gaming non-combat challenges of a wide variety. We use them for infiltration, exploration and overcoming all sorts of different obstacles.
I haven’t played much Deadlands, but it is the flagship campaign world, and I have read it. It’s a combination of Wild West, fantasy, and horror. I certainly plan to run it in the future and it is very well supported. There is also Savage Pathfinder if you want a pre-adapted fantasy game, and Savage Rifts if you want gonzo science-fantasy.
We’ve run home brew 40k and Warhammer Fantasy, and a game inspired by Joe Abercrombie’s books. it was all super-easy and a huge amount of fun.
