Follow Up - Some Old-School Marvel Resources

 

As a follow up to yesterday's post here are some links to some great support sites:

 First up is the granddaddy of them all Classic Marvel Forever. This site has been around for years and was the one-stop shop for all things MSH including PDFs of the original books. The obvious links are gone these days but I suspect they are still reachable with some creativity. Beyond that there is a ton of extra material from character profiles (including DC!), organizations, house rules, and just a lot of interesting material if you're actually running a campaign.

Another solid one is FASERIP.com which is a site I was previously unaware of but does have a ton of material as well. The Links section in particular is a gold mine for characters and character generators and all kinds of useful materials. The site's author has also created their own MSH retroclone which apparently takes the FASERIP rules I mentioned in yesterdays post and adds a bunch more stuff. I have not checked it out myself but I will at some point. Until then here's a link to the FASERIPopedia in case you want to take a look.

Finally there is MSH Gamer which is another great, modern site with character writeups, rules, links - it's just a great site and is definitely worth a look if you're interested in MSH.

Finally a personal note - MSH has gotten some flack over the years about the color chart and how people don't like charts and how it may seem like a kids' game etc. I'd like to point out that one of the goals of many more recent RPG designs is to achieve something beyond basic pass/fail results with their base mechanic. From Savage Worlds success/raise mechanic, One-Roll Engine's height/width mechanic, FFG's funky dice results for several of their games, various dice pool games, and others, have all tried to implement a simple mechanic that gives something more than a simple made it/didn't make it result. 

Well ... here's a game that had -three- possible levels of success plus failure on -every- roll with guidelines on what those different levels could mean while covering a power level that ranged from Aunt May to Thor and Hulk and beyond ... and it's from 1984. So before you dismiss it as "the kid's superhero RPG" or an introductory superhero game, take another look. There's a reason people still discuss it and use it today beyond "nostalgia". There is a serious, robust, time-tested game system here that is as capable as anything newer on the market.