In the course of some of the social media discussions of my column about the classic Marvel Super-Heroes RPG last week, a couple of people asked about my talking about other super-hero games. Comic book super-heroes are one of my favorite genres, and I've played a lot of the games that have been published during my years as a gamer. I've touched on games like Champions in past columns, and I'll likely talk about others in the future. This week I am going to talk a bit about the Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Superspies games from Palladium Games. The two games are interrelated in my mind (and the games that I have run), and I think between the two of them they cover a lot of ground in the super-hero genre.
To backtrack a little, comics were my introduction to "geekry" as a kid. When I was five, my parents owned a convenience store, and that store had one of those comic book spinner racks. This was 1973, and while my reading comprehension wasn't the greatest, I remember reading Avengers comics at the very least. This was five years before Star Wars came out (and my mom took my younger brother and myself to see it), and six years before my first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing games.
Fast forward then to my experimental college years, and I found a copy of Ninjas & Superspies on the shelf at the closest game store to where I went to college. The cover grabbed me immediately, a mindless fight between a bunch of ninjas and some SHIELD-esque superspies in jumpsuits. There were bodies dropping, signs that corpses were littering the battleground, lasers firing and katanas slashing. Obviously I had to have a copy of the game, and I bought it on the spot.
The method of handling the martial arts in Ninjas & Superspies is one of my favorites in role-playing games, which I am sure that will be controversial to some, but the system of bonuses and the different sorts of attacks is a good simulation of "kung fu fighting."
All of the Palladium Games publications use Kevin Siembieda's heavily house ruled version of the old AD&D 1E rules. While there are some slight variations among the different games, if you know how to play one Palladium game, you will know how to play others, and content or characters from Heroes Unlimited or Nightbane or Beyond The Supernatural or Rifts can be moved between games with a little bit of tinkering. The main difference between the various games is whether or not they are "mega damage" games or not. Just as an aside, how awesome is the idea of mega damage? "How much damage does your character do?" "They do MEGA DAMAGE." The term is probably one of the most metal things that you're going to find in RPGs.
The concept of mega damage debuted in Palladium's 1986 Robotech role-playing game, and was carried over into the company's Rifts role-playing game. The idea was to come up with a scalable way of handling damage from giant robots and space ships. Each point of mega damage is equal to about 100 points of "regular" damage. Your mileage may vary on whether or not the mechanic actually works in a game.
Neither Heroes Unlimited or Ninjas & Superspies are mega damage games. A lot of people complain that Palladium games aren't modern, or are "broken," because the games don't feature unified mechanics, or mechanics that cover their favorite things. I could probably make an entire column about the fallacies of obsolescence in role-playing games, or how comparing game systems to technological advances or operating system upgrades isn't really a one to one comparison. I doubt that I will write a column like that, which is probably good for you, me and the RPG segment of the internet. Suffice it to say, that my take on the matter is that just because something new exists, it doesn't mean that the older ways of designing a game no longer apply.
Can Palladium games be slow in play? Not so much during play, as actual combat in games like Heroes Unlimited or Ninjas & Superspies can go faster than, or as quickly as, older editions of Dungeons & Dragons games. Not everyone will consider that to be a gold standard for "fast" in RPGs, but it can be a lot quicker in places than more contemporary games. Admittedly, it does boil down to person preferences, but I have never found combat to be where Palladium games bog down. Character creation does take time in any Palladium game, because even for a class and level-based game system, there are a lot of options for characters. You have to choose a class, figure out the skills and abilities that your character might have, go back and apply any bonuses that come from the class, determine powers, go back and apply a new set of bonuses to skills and abilities. It takes a lot of time.
One a scale of complexity, character creation for Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas & Superspies is probably somewhere between D&D 5E and Shadowrun 5E. I've been able to oversee a group of characters making their characters within a couple of hours, but when I'm running a Palladium game I typically set aside a session just for character creation. Typically when I run games, I do them in 2-3 hour long sessions.
Advancement is pretty simple, because it is mostly a matter of adding level bonuses to existing skills and abilities. Like the source material the games emulate, characters really don't gain new powers or abilities when they advance in levels. The advancement bonuses are either in the section dealing with the character classes, or in the write-ups for the individual skills. The advancements are also standardized, and don't change as the character goes up in levels.
One place where these games have a flaw is that their presentation is fairly bare bones, and mostly unchanging over the years. The only real changes in the layout and design of their books came when they changed from old wax roll cut and paste physical page layouts to more modern electronic layout and publishing manners. One problem in both methods is that mistakes tend to be preserved, and propagated, as rules are copied and pasted from one book to another. The information design of a Palladium book is dense, and it isn't always easy to find material at first, because rules can end up in a number of different places. The lack of indices can also make finding rules difficult. This can add to the learning curve for a Palladium game and add to the perception that the games are broken. It can also be a pain in the behind when you need to find something during play. Palladium can definitely improve in this regard.
One strong selling point for Palladium's games is that they aren't as expensive as other games. Most Palladium games are softcovers, and the printing is done in black and white. While the games all have a number of supplements available for them, they are ultimately unnecessary to have. Palladium games are self-contained and inexpensive. My copy of Heroes Unlimited is 352 pages with a cover price of $26.95. I picked it up probably 15 or so years ago, replacing the earlier edition that I bought in college. My copy of Ninjas & Superspies is still the copy that I picked up in college in the 1980s, which cost $14.95 and has 176 pages. A quick peek at the Palladium website shows that Heroes Unlimited is still priced the same, while Ninjas & Superspies has increased to $20.95. It is really hard to find a lot of role-playing games with these page counts, at these price points. The games are also more or less the same games they were when I first started playing them. Heroes Unlimited has added a lot more material since the edition I first picked up in college (it was originally about the same size as Ninjas & Superspies when I started playing it), while Ninjas & Superspies is unchanged.
This can mean that material that you buy for these games is always going to work. If you happen to find a copy of the Justice Machine supplement for Heroes Unlimited (which I have never had, and would love to own a copy of), you can still use it with the current version of the game. That also means that you can convert material from your Rifts books, or other Palladium game lines, to Heroes Unlimited. Considering the gonzoness of most comic book universes, this can be a feature rather than a bug.
Palladium games aren't going to be for everyone, but I think that if you are a fan of the OSR, or the various retroclones, that there will be something that will appeal to you in games like Heroes Unlimited or Ninjas & Superspies. They are good games, and there are solid reasons why they have stood the test of time. Yes, games like Rifts have been adapted to more contemporary game systems, but for those looking for a different sort of experience there is a lot of good stuff to be found in these games.
Like a lot of old school games, Heroes Unlimited doesn't have a great deal of explicit setting to it. The core book is fairly setting neutral, while supplements do sketch some of the basics of a setting (if you want one for your games). The implied setting that you get from the types of character classes and character options seems to be defined by the sensibilities of mid to late 80s comics like the Marvel Comics books from that era featuring the X-Men, as well as the early super-hero work published by Image Comics. The tone of the game is gritty and features a mix of aliens, mutants, magic and deviltry that will be familiar to comics fans. While you could play more "four color" games with Heroes Unlimited, I don't think that is where the strengths of the game lay.
I suggest checking the games out, if you haven't already. I have gotten years of entertainment out of Palladium games, and they have survived the recent ongoing purges that I have been going to scale back my physical possessions. Heroes Unlimited was my gateway to these games, and these worlds, and it could be yours as well.
