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Godlike
Godlike: Superhero Roleplaying In A World On Fire, 1936-1946
Released in 2002 to critical acclaim, GODLIKE is a superhero roleplaying game like no other. There is no bright spandex, no pulp machismo. In the face of the greatest conflict in history, ordinary men and women emerge with the Talents their times demand, but who are still as vulnerable -- and eventually as expendable -- as the ordinary troops in the foxholes.
GODLIKE features an intensively researched alternate history of World War II, the depth of setting and character for which award-winning author Dennis Detwiller (Delta Green) is famous, an innovative rules set by Greg Stolze (Unknown Armies), and a complete "D20" rules conversion by Mike Mearls. GODLIKE: You are larger than life... but the War is larger than you.
Hardcover
First published December 1, 2001
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January 22, 2022A Bundle of Holding around Arc Dream’s “One-Roll Engine” for super heroic games.
The bundle included (with * for books I also own in physical form)
-Godlike*
- Will to Power
- Black Devils Brigade
-Wild Talents
-This Favored Land
-Grim War*
-eCollapse
-Better Angels
The bundle didn’t include, but I also have
-Progenitor
-The Kerberos Club
Also included several freebies for ease of download, mostly adventures, quickstarts, and a horror frame called Nemesis, which is just the One-Roll Rules with a few notes on Cthulhu-esque monsters)
***
Godlike — a gritty game of WWII with superpowers
* In the intro, Detwiller notes two impulses that led to this game: (1) What would superpowers be like in actual history and (2) what would a game book that was complete be like? The result is a (1) a gritty and down-to-earth super-powered war where a sniper can kill you before you even show off your single power (as most people here only have one power); and (2) a very big book full of the whole history of WWII in this alternate world.
* Greg Stolze designed the one-roll mechanic to make things fast: you roll a pool of dice and see how many sets you can make — you want many dice to match of a high number, and that one roll dictates, say, your entire attack (success, damage, location). To me, the downside here is that everyone in a fight, say, is rolling a lot of dice. Reading an example of play makes me itch for some computer-assisted version, especially because there are so many people involved in a little skirmish.
* The game is really focused on war, and not just war in general, but the industrial nature of World War II; for instance, there is no “charisma” attribute, there’s “command”; and of course there’s a lot of pages about weapons of WWII.
* To keep the history somewhat on track, the game posits that (a) superpowers first showed up in ’36 and (b) superpowers are really an expression of will, so there’s only one source of powers, so (c) super-inventors only can create tech that works because they are willing it to (no industrial production of superguns), and (d) any super hero can negate any other’s powers by a contest of wills. (This also means that, say, when someone throws a fireball, you don’t have to have an ice power to combat it, as you would in a comic book, because again: this is a superhero game, not a comic game. That distinction takes some time to wrap my head around.)
* There’s around 100pp for rules and character creation — and I’m a sucker for rules about how to design new powers — and then there’s 170pp of history, background, the Talents who appeared (and often how they died)
* There’s some talk about changing some rules to emulate different genres, but the default here is “High Realism” and that really feels like the point of the game (see Detwiller’s comment on where the game came from). That also explains a lot of the art, which is either straight-up archive pics, or edited versions to add some super heroic action. (Or possibly this is Detwiller as an artist matching the style rather than editing existing archival works.)
* Will to Power is the guide to the Nazi war effort and superheroes, and it starts with a note from Detwiller that if you want to play the SS, you’re an idiot, which you would guess from his online persona. The rest of the book gives the somewhat usually detailed view of Nazi command structures and actions, with a veneer of alt history that doesn’t stop it all from being overwhelmingly depressing and bleak; luckily the back 3rd of the book is new rules (including air combat and lots of plane stats)
* Black Devil Brigade is a campaign of four adventures through Italy, and it really feels like a meat grinder, which makes me wonder if this would be a fun game. Like, do you want to play a game where so many adventures are “take that next mountain — ok, now take over that one”?
* The bundle included two freebie adventures: Battle of Jericho Bay (a dying talent teleports a bunch of Japanese soldiers to a small town in Maine, and the only way home is to save the town) and Glazier (a hunt for a talent who can turn metal to glass before the German army uses her to break through at the Battle of the Bulge).
Wild Talents
* The one-roll engine from Godlike stripped out for setting-neutral superpower action (so the Cool attribute that you used to stay cool under fire becomes Charm)
* The book has 166 pp of how to build characters and powers, including a lot of examples and advice, most of which is: we trust you to want to have fun rather than just break the game and if you do try to break it, we trust the GM to break it too to make it fun again.
* There’s some world-building talk that they break down into four axes (red: historical inertia, gold: social inertia vis-a-vis superheroes, blue: weirdness, black: moral clarity), and notes on different post-Godlike eras for alternate history and crisis points.
* In this post-Godlike setting, talents cannot cancel each other’s abilities out (that’s what makes them “wild talents”); with several campaign frames (superbrights ready to deal with unconventional technology, Cold War spies, the Korean War, colonizing Mars, alien invasion, etc.) It’s all fine, but I’m not sure what I’d want to do with it.
This Favored Land (2009)
* The Civil War with low-powered superheroes, who came into being after Poe died and a wave of dream-power went out. And dead superpowers might leave behind some ghostly presences.
* So much of this book is given over to general stuff, it feels unnecessarily long and not historically adventurous enough. Frankly, I think I like this better as a premise than as a fully-worked out game here.
Grim War (2009)
* Mutants and sorcerers exist, and there are different factions of them trying to … do whatever it is they are trying to do.
* This book also references a faction-oriented mechanic from a game called Reign, which I do not own.
* I enjoyed the diversity and realism of the factions (mutant supremacists, pro-sorcery legalization, etc.), but I don’t know what the focus of this game is supposed to be. I had vaguely recalled that there was a premise here about mutants vs. dark sorcerers, but that’s not really what this game is — it really feels like it’s supposed to be one of those morally gray worlds where every group is wrong.
Kerberos Club (2009)
* A gentleman’s club in Victorian England, full of adventurers exploring the rising tide of the Strange.
* I wasn’t gripped by the first few chapters — on the club life, Victorian culture, and a history of the Victorian world — but I perked up during the chapter on London since many locations were given adventure seeds or something for the PCs to actually do.
* There’s of course a lot of allusion here, and we’ve certainly seen “Victorian club of strangely-powered folks” before, but it’s done nicely here, with several good explanations (I particularly like the example of how a character’s convictions could come into conflict, generating both mechanical effects — willpower gains or losses — but also internal drama.)
Progenitor (2010)
* In the last half of the 20th century, superpowers are contagious (but only in a limited way — the first talent could make 10 other superpowers with a lot of power, each of them could make 9 more superpowers with less power, and so on). Oh, but that contagion can happen when someone is using their power on someone else, so you can get the comic book trope of “hero unwittingly creating their arch nemesis.” In fact, the first superhero involved herself in the Vietnam War, so there’s a lot of American and Vietnamese superheroes running around.
* This is a game very explicitly about historical forces, and what the “mood” of the world is, including a mechanic to check what forces are on the rise and to randomly find out what happens in that year. Which I really dig, because of course the PCs are superheroes who can theoretically affect the world — that’s the remit of the game, what if people had the powers of nations or even more than nations — but they aren’t the only people affecting the world.
* So much of this book is about the history and the characters that the writers have invented, which is fascinating — I like how they break down each year into “regular history” and deviations caused by superheroes. But with so many superpowered NPCs, I wonder what the PCs would really do? Or how close you could keep this history to what this book says will happen if you really give the PCs enough power to change history? (Which again is the remit of this book.) In which case, there’s a lot of history here that might or might not happen.
* There’s also rules for memes that change people’s behavior and gadgets that can be mass-produced (rather than Godlike’s “it only works because the Talent is paying attention to it” rules).
eCollapse (2010)
* An embattled and divided US, with cyborgs and biotech powers (all low-power).
* Written in a cyberpunk, snarky, conversational manner
* History presented as a series of themes, which is a smart way to keep things loose
* There’s a whole set of extra rules — really a whole system here — for acting like a hero, villain, or crux.
* Maybe it’s just the history around me right now, but playing in a divided US doesn’t feel like escapism nor like really digging into the topic.
Better Angels (2013)
* You’re supervillains, but your powers come from demons who want to corrupt you even more. Like White Wolf’s Wraith, there’s a whole mechanic where one player is the demon to another player’s human. Actually, there’s a bunch of fun mechanics here where different attributes are played off each other (cunning vs. patient, insightful vs. devious, etc.), so that if you gain a point in one, you might have to lose a point in the other. It’s an interesting mechanic for a lot of internal conflict.
* That said, while I like the focus of the game (like: not a huge cafeteria of powers, but enough to get you going, and each tied to a different attribute), it starts to feel a little thin. Like, I guess the point of some of this is to mimic the over-the-top EEEEVIL of comic book villains, so maybe we’re supposed to play this in some generic comic book world; and there are several different metaphysics discussed as reasons (are they really demons or just hyper dimensional beings?), which I enjoy. And yet… I’m not itching to play this game.
The bundle included (with * for books I also own in physical form)
-Godlike*
- Will to Power
- Black Devils Brigade
-Wild Talents
-This Favored Land
-Grim War*
-eCollapse
-Better Angels
The bundle didn’t include, but I also have
-Progenitor
-The Kerberos Club
Also included several freebies for ease of download, mostly adventures, quickstarts, and a horror frame called Nemesis, which is just the One-Roll Rules with a few notes on Cthulhu-esque monsters)
***
Godlike — a gritty game of WWII with superpowers
* In the intro, Detwiller notes two impulses that led to this game: (1) What would superpowers be like in actual history and (2) what would a game book that was complete be like? The result is a (1) a gritty and down-to-earth super-powered war where a sniper can kill you before you even show off your single power (as most people here only have one power); and (2) a very big book full of the whole history of WWII in this alternate world.
* Greg Stolze designed the one-roll mechanic to make things fast: you roll a pool of dice and see how many sets you can make — you want many dice to match of a high number, and that one roll dictates, say, your entire attack (success, damage, location). To me, the downside here is that everyone in a fight, say, is rolling a lot of dice. Reading an example of play makes me itch for some computer-assisted version, especially because there are so many people involved in a little skirmish.
* The game is really focused on war, and not just war in general, but the industrial nature of World War II; for instance, there is no “charisma” attribute, there’s “command”; and of course there’s a lot of pages about weapons of WWII.
* To keep the history somewhat on track, the game posits that (a) superpowers first showed up in ’36 and (b) superpowers are really an expression of will, so there’s only one source of powers, so (c) super-inventors only can create tech that works because they are willing it to (no industrial production of superguns), and (d) any super hero can negate any other’s powers by a contest of wills. (This also means that, say, when someone throws a fireball, you don’t have to have an ice power to combat it, as you would in a comic book, because again: this is a superhero game, not a comic game. That distinction takes some time to wrap my head around.)
* There’s around 100pp for rules and character creation — and I’m a sucker for rules about how to design new powers — and then there’s 170pp of history, background, the Talents who appeared (and often how they died)
* There’s some talk about changing some rules to emulate different genres, but the default here is “High Realism” and that really feels like the point of the game (see Detwiller’s comment on where the game came from). That also explains a lot of the art, which is either straight-up archive pics, or edited versions to add some super heroic action. (Or possibly this is Detwiller as an artist matching the style rather than editing existing archival works.)
* Will to Power is the guide to the Nazi war effort and superheroes, and it starts with a note from Detwiller that if you want to play the SS, you’re an idiot, which you would guess from his online persona. The rest of the book gives the somewhat usually detailed view of Nazi command structures and actions, with a veneer of alt history that doesn’t stop it all from being overwhelmingly depressing and bleak; luckily the back 3rd of the book is new rules (including air combat and lots of plane stats)
* Black Devil Brigade is a campaign of four adventures through Italy, and it really feels like a meat grinder, which makes me wonder if this would be a fun game. Like, do you want to play a game where so many adventures are “take that next mountain — ok, now take over that one”?
* The bundle included two freebie adventures: Battle of Jericho Bay (a dying talent teleports a bunch of Japanese soldiers to a small town in Maine, and the only way home is to save the town) and Glazier (a hunt for a talent who can turn metal to glass before the German army uses her to break through at the Battle of the Bulge).
Wild Talents
* The one-roll engine from Godlike stripped out for setting-neutral superpower action (so the Cool attribute that you used to stay cool under fire becomes Charm)
* The book has 166 pp of how to build characters and powers, including a lot of examples and advice, most of which is: we trust you to want to have fun rather than just break the game and if you do try to break it, we trust the GM to break it too to make it fun again.
* There’s some world-building talk that they break down into four axes (red: historical inertia, gold: social inertia vis-a-vis superheroes, blue: weirdness, black: moral clarity), and notes on different post-Godlike eras for alternate history and crisis points.
* In this post-Godlike setting, talents cannot cancel each other’s abilities out (that’s what makes them “wild talents”); with several campaign frames (superbrights ready to deal with unconventional technology, Cold War spies, the Korean War, colonizing Mars, alien invasion, etc.) It’s all fine, but I’m not sure what I’d want to do with it.
This Favored Land (2009)
* The Civil War with low-powered superheroes, who came into being after Poe died and a wave of dream-power went out. And dead superpowers might leave behind some ghostly presences.
* So much of this book is given over to general stuff, it feels unnecessarily long and not historically adventurous enough. Frankly, I think I like this better as a premise than as a fully-worked out game here.
Grim War (2009)
* Mutants and sorcerers exist, and there are different factions of them trying to … do whatever it is they are trying to do.
* This book also references a faction-oriented mechanic from a game called Reign, which I do not own.
* I enjoyed the diversity and realism of the factions (mutant supremacists, pro-sorcery legalization, etc.), but I don’t know what the focus of this game is supposed to be. I had vaguely recalled that there was a premise here about mutants vs. dark sorcerers, but that’s not really what this game is — it really feels like it’s supposed to be one of those morally gray worlds where every group is wrong.
Kerberos Club (2009)
* A gentleman’s club in Victorian England, full of adventurers exploring the rising tide of the Strange.
* I wasn’t gripped by the first few chapters — on the club life, Victorian culture, and a history of the Victorian world — but I perked up during the chapter on London since many locations were given adventure seeds or something for the PCs to actually do.
* There’s of course a lot of allusion here, and we’ve certainly seen “Victorian club of strangely-powered folks” before, but it’s done nicely here, with several good explanations (I particularly like the example of how a character’s convictions could come into conflict, generating both mechanical effects — willpower gains or losses — but also internal drama.)
Progenitor (2010)
* In the last half of the 20th century, superpowers are contagious (but only in a limited way — the first talent could make 10 other superpowers with a lot of power, each of them could make 9 more superpowers with less power, and so on). Oh, but that contagion can happen when someone is using their power on someone else, so you can get the comic book trope of “hero unwittingly creating their arch nemesis.” In fact, the first superhero involved herself in the Vietnam War, so there’s a lot of American and Vietnamese superheroes running around.
* This is a game very explicitly about historical forces, and what the “mood” of the world is, including a mechanic to check what forces are on the rise and to randomly find out what happens in that year. Which I really dig, because of course the PCs are superheroes who can theoretically affect the world — that’s the remit of the game, what if people had the powers of nations or even more than nations — but they aren’t the only people affecting the world.
* So much of this book is about the history and the characters that the writers have invented, which is fascinating — I like how they break down each year into “regular history” and deviations caused by superheroes. But with so many superpowered NPCs, I wonder what the PCs would really do? Or how close you could keep this history to what this book says will happen if you really give the PCs enough power to change history? (Which again is the remit of this book.) In which case, there’s a lot of history here that might or might not happen.
* There’s also rules for memes that change people’s behavior and gadgets that can be mass-produced (rather than Godlike’s “it only works because the Talent is paying attention to it” rules).
eCollapse (2010)
* An embattled and divided US, with cyborgs and biotech powers (all low-power).
* Written in a cyberpunk, snarky, conversational manner
* History presented as a series of themes, which is a smart way to keep things loose
* There’s a whole set of extra rules — really a whole system here — for acting like a hero, villain, or crux.
* Maybe it’s just the history around me right now, but playing in a divided US doesn’t feel like escapism nor like really digging into the topic.
Better Angels (2013)
* You’re supervillains, but your powers come from demons who want to corrupt you even more. Like White Wolf’s Wraith, there’s a whole mechanic where one player is the demon to another player’s human. Actually, there’s a bunch of fun mechanics here where different attributes are played off each other (cunning vs. patient, insightful vs. devious, etc.), so that if you gain a point in one, you might have to lose a point in the other. It’s an interesting mechanic for a lot of internal conflict.
* That said, while I like the focus of the game (like: not a huge cafeteria of powers, but enough to get you going, and each tied to a different attribute), it starts to feel a little thin. Like, I guess the point of some of this is to mimic the over-the-top EEEEVIL of comic book villains, so maybe we’re supposed to play this in some generic comic book world; and there are several different metaphysics discussed as reasons (are they really demons or just hyper dimensional beings?), which I enjoy. And yet… I’m not itching to play this game.
August 9, 2022
I loved this RPG book. I was just going to thumb through the copy my neighbor lent me, but I was enjoying it so much that I decided to read it cover to cover and to buy my own copy.
My only criticism is that there is a handful of typos and errors; they generally don't affect anything, but sometimes, the wrong page number is referenced, which can be a little annoying. Okay, maybe an appendix that had all the tables for weapons and whatnot would be helpful, too. Okay, it might also be a little hard to find certain sections, even with the index. With those out of the way, I turn to the good things:
Mechanics
+This was my first exposure to the One Roll Engine (ORE), in which a dice pool is rolled and matching numbers dictate success, speed/turn order, hit location, damage, etc. It is fairly simple and elegant. As new concepts were introduced, I was able to predict how they would be handled, which speaks to the logic of the system.
+Abilities can also have "hard dice" (always 10s) or "wiggle dice" (the player can choose what number it shows) so you can choose to have more control over powers (at a cost, of course).
+The author gives explicit changes to the mechanics/rules to fit different styles and genres of play.
Setting
+I love the concept of "How would the presence super-powered individuals have affected WWII? Not much at all."
+I usually skip the little bits of prose that are supposed to paint a picture of what the setting is like, but I loved them in this book. They are well-written and show the humanity and struggles of the characters.
+There is a detailed timeline of the WWII depicted in this world, and--very helpfully--fictional events are distinguished from the real life events.
+I love how powers/talents are handled. Nobody knows how or why they exist, and the powers are really all the same: a strong man isn't really unnaturally strong, but he can warp reality to lift heavy things in the same way that someone else could fly or freeze a bullet.
+There is thought given to the language used (both during the era and relating to Talents).
The Book Itself
+The author directly addresses the reader several times to make recommendations, to give permission to tinker with certain aspects, or to explain why a certain decision was made.
+I respect that the character creation section starts with who the character is rather than starting with the stats, and that emphasis on the person rather than the numbers is consistent throughout.
+It's almost 350 pages, and it has everything you need (the author wisely decided to keep this book mainly from the perspective of the U.S. because it would be too much otherwise).
My only criticism is that there is a handful of typos and errors; they generally don't affect anything, but sometimes, the wrong page number is referenced, which can be a little annoying. Okay, maybe an appendix that had all the tables for weapons and whatnot would be helpful, too. Okay, it might also be a little hard to find certain sections, even with the index. With those out of the way, I turn to the good things:
Mechanics
+This was my first exposure to the One Roll Engine (ORE), in which a dice pool is rolled and matching numbers dictate success, speed/turn order, hit location, damage, etc. It is fairly simple and elegant. As new concepts were introduced, I was able to predict how they would be handled, which speaks to the logic of the system.
+Abilities can also have "hard dice" (always 10s) or "wiggle dice" (the player can choose what number it shows) so you can choose to have more control over powers (at a cost, of course).
+The author gives explicit changes to the mechanics/rules to fit different styles and genres of play.
Setting
+I love the concept of "How would the presence super-powered individuals have affected WWII? Not much at all."
+I usually skip the little bits of prose that are supposed to paint a picture of what the setting is like, but I loved them in this book. They are well-written and show the humanity and struggles of the characters.
+There is a detailed timeline of the WWII depicted in this world, and--very helpfully--fictional events are distinguished from the real life events.
+I love how powers/talents are handled. Nobody knows how or why they exist, and the powers are really all the same: a strong man isn't really unnaturally strong, but he can warp reality to lift heavy things in the same way that someone else could fly or freeze a bullet.
+There is thought given to the language used (both during the era and relating to Talents).
The Book Itself
+The author directly addresses the reader several times to make recommendations, to give permission to tinker with certain aspects, or to explain why a certain decision was made.
+I respect that the character creation section starts with who the character is rather than starting with the stats, and that emphasis on the person rather than the numbers is consistent throughout.
+It's almost 350 pages, and it has everything you need (the author wisely decided to keep this book mainly from the perspective of the U.S. because it would be too much otherwise).
January 4, 2011
Amazing alternate reality with solid game mechanics. Simply brilliant
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