Saturday, November 11, 2017

Superhero '44 Second Edition Revised - Update

UPDATE: I'm naming my effort "Superhero '44 Second Edition Revised".  I'm over 100-pages of written material so far and I'm still adding to the background setting. On the Moh's Scale of Science Fiction Hardness I've decided to make the initial genre be harder; about a 2.5 or 3.0 ... still not as hard as GURPS Transhuman Space or Traveller which I'd rate around 4.0. I've also added some crunch to support that hardness so that it falls somewhere in the middle of GURPS | Hero System | Mutants & Masterminds.

The Maps

Every RPG enthusiast like maps, right? So, one of my first things to do was rebuild the maps for the original Superhero '44 game. I'll show them in order of relevance for the fans of Superhero '44.

Patrol Areas of Inguria. This is key to the Weekly Planning sheet.


Inguria with terrain. This is the sort of map that inspires people like me to play a game; all of the little "points-of-interest" make for prime material to conduct memorable games.


Melanesia near Inguria. I decided to place Inguria between Fiji and Vanuatu at a spot on a submerged ridge at 11°51'41.0"S 173°53'22.6"E. This also allows Inguria to be in an ideal location for commerce between two fairly populous island nations.

Oceania near Inguria. I'm still work-in-progress to convert this map into something I purely own, but currently it is an adequate hack of Oceania showing the nearby nations. Inguria is at the center. The purple areas are "radioactive fallout" zones where most life has been destroyed. People still inhabit areas around it and society has rebounded since the Six Day War, so I guess a thermonuclear holocaust isn't so bad.

The World of 2044. I've decided that the Six Day War took down all of the first world nations of 2003, but things got better! These 48 nations listed and numbered above are patron nations guarding or supporting minor nations with less infrastructure. World population dipped from 6 billion in 2003 to about 4 billion in 2008, but has since risen back to about 6 billion by 2044 if I presume a 1.2% growth rate per year.

The Play Aides

I'm still working on these as I solidify the rules. These are sort of teasers I suppose, especially because I'll need to refactor them once the I get more of the system into place; a lot can change.

This is the Weekly Planning Sheet. I intend to have a Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly variation as well. The thinking I'm pursuing is that each game session starts with a "Time Planning" activity where the Referee and Players perform "time skips" in order to quickly advance the story. These time-skips also allow training, research, and construction to proceed quickly.  Anyhow, the Weekly Planning Sheet above has little circles to identify Moon phases just in case it matters for espionage events, Lunar lunatics, and that sort of thing.


This is the front page of the character record sheet. I decided to do like all other modern RPGs and separate the character sheet from the other materials; the original rules had them together. What you can see here is that I've been working on how to organize information on the page, and to provide clear arrangement of "crunchy data" in places that can be quickly referenced. Look at the right-hand side and you'll see a character outline. This is not my art and I intend to replace it soon though I realize that in the digital age there's a lot of resources demonstrating better than anything I could provide. The idea is that there will be about a dozen such character outlines, and the players just pick the ones the want. At the very minimum I'll have one for male and female characters.

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