Truth and Justice: just enough crunch

Atomic Sock Monkey (which as far as I can tell is mostly Chad
Underkoffler) has a new supers game out called Truth and Justice. It uses
the PDQ system from their Dead Inside and Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot
games, but tuned a bit for Super-Hero gaming.

It's reasonably rules light, not quite as light as say, Risus, or vanilla
Fudge, but lots lighter than even Silver Age Sentinels. There are decent
power writeups for a lot of typical comic-book powers, but there's also
good info on how to come up with your own. It's got a nice flexible Stunt
system for new uses of powers (it's similar to the old TSR Advanced MSH
game, but much more flexible and cheaper), Hero Points for when you
....must...hold on...a...few...more...minutes! or other meta-game things.
You get them for acting heroic (or getting hosed by the GM), and you can
use them for quite a few different things (upping abilities, "discovering"
new details about a situation, adding to die rolls, etc.).

The conflict rules and powers section show a game where your character
sheet mostly reflects your character's "narrative effectiveness" -- that
is, any character in say, the Justice League would probably have the same
level of abilites on their character sheet. This is a game where
Spider-Man and Superman could fight each other and have it come out the
way it does in the comics. In fact, there were many times when I was
reading the rules when I thought "That's just like in the comics!"

The preview PDF is good (it has a great example of conflict and a big
chunk of the mechanics section), and there's a free "rogue's gallery" type
of supplement called "Dial S for Superhumans". The game really shows a
love of and understanding of supers comics, cartoons, and movies...even
most of the examples are pretty nifty. (The first chapter is almost
completely devoid of game mechanics, but discusses supers gaming, the
tropes involved, and four different Styles from Grim 'n' Gritty to
Animated in a way that's useful to just about any supers gamer, even if
you're not using the T&J rules themselves.)

The game's info homepage is here:
http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/products/tj.asp
You can get to the free preview and Dial S for Superhumans here:
http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/freebies.asp#tj

There are links to other reviews around, too. Here's a forum post with a
list of the things in the Bibliography (even the Bibliography was good
reading): http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=4356455&postcount=4

Oh yeah, and the game comes with three sample campaign settings, at least
two of which are detailed enough to jump right in and start playing with
minimal prep time on the part of the GM. (Character generation is also a
snap...it will almost always take longer to come up with an idea for the
character than to stat him or her up.)

[Note: I do have a character in the Dial S for Superhumans setup, but this
isn't a paid ad or anything...I just like the game.]
--
chuk

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005 22:44:34 +0000 (UTC), cgoodin.DeleteThis@sfu.ca (Chuk Goodin)
wrote:

>is, any character in say, the Justice League would probably have the same
>level of abilites on their character sheet. This is a game where
>Spider-Man and Superman could fight each other and have it come out the
>way it does in the comics.

You mean, "Spider-Man can't hurt Superman at all, but can almost but
not quite dodge a swat from Superman?"