Pow! I wrote Men & Supermen a long time ago. Unfortunately, I don’t play it any more; we play The Biblyon Broadsheet when we get together for gaming. Men & Supermen is a real old-school game; it’s so old-school I don’t even understand some of it any more. If you have questions about it, please write, and I’ll try to remember what I was thinking.
There was a brief period where I called it Brand X instead of Men & Supermen. Here’s one of the blurbs I used in a now-defunct zine called Silver, Swords, & Sorcery:
You want great story-telling, great action, great fun? You want Brand X. Brand X is designed to encourage freedom within the game system. Players have Editing Points they use to modify their characters’ die rolls. Players can exert control over the dice when it’s necessary. And if the player continually has to edit certain die rolls, the rules adjust the character’s skill: obviously, the character’s conception and numbers don’t match. So the numbers change, not the conception. Get into the action. Get Brand X.
- Men & Supermen Rules
- All of the rules for Men & Supermen are here, from character generation (make what you want or roll completely randomly) to the game rules. (May 20, 2004)
- The Brand X Hero’s Guide
- The rest of the rules tell you how to create a superhero, what your numbers mean, and the rest of that shit. This book gives you some pointers on how to play the damn game. Consider this a primer on the physics, sociology, and politics of a world with super heroes. This is a world where anything can happen, and, sooner or later, everything does. (May 20, 2004)
- Hero’s Guide
- Hero’s Guide PDF (842 KB)
- Hero’s Guide Rich Text Format (.gz) (298 KB)
- Hero’s Guide Monolithic HTML (282 KB)
- Men & Supermen Starter Kit
- This is what’s left of the starter kit: PDF versions of the character sheet, character creation outline, character creation worksheet, editor’s screen, and editor’s record sheet.
- Men & Supermen Character Sheet
- This character sheet is also a character gallery. Go to it cold and it will create the basis for a random character—including cool-sounding superhero name. Are you ready to meet THE SOUL THUNDER?
- A Taste of Jasmine
- Adventure in the mountains of West Virginia, protecting a strange teen-age girl and her supposedly dead father from even stranger menaces. (May 20, 2004)
- A Taste of Jasmine
- A Taste of Jasmine PDF (278 KB)
- A Taste of Jasmine Rich Text Format (.gz) (14.4 KB)
- A Taste of Jasmine Monolithic HTML (27.1 KB)
- The Snowman
- When Professor Leslie Jo Hutchinson runs to the heroes for assistance, her story sounds crazy: a mad snowman threatening to cover the world in ice? But what’s that storm spreading down from the arctic? (May 20, 2004)
- The Snowman
- The Snowman PDF (88.4 KB)
- The Snowman Rich Text Format (.gz) (7.27 KB)
- The Snowman Monolithic HTML (15.4 KB)
