GoCorral

I got the new Marvel Multiverse RPG for Christmas and have absolutely ripped through it. Finished it in a week and a half. It’s got good writing, decent organization, an easy to understand concept, and LOTS of amazing art from the decades of comics to draw on for in book illustrations. I think very little original art was made for the book actually, which is kind of cool. One piece that stood out to me as original was near the beginning of the book with The Thing DMing behind a DM screen for Beast, She-Hulk, Nick Fury, and Captain Marvel.

The main mechanic for the game is rolling d616. If you don’t know, Marvel has different universes and retellings of stories that each get a numerical designation. The main universe is called Earth-616. Thus rolling d616 is a witty little joke that they actually designed the whole game around. It’s pretty simple, roll 2d6 and 1d6. The 2d6 are normal, but the extra 1d6 is your Marvel die. A 1 on the Marvel die counts as a 6 and represents a Fantastic Success (critical). Add up all 3 dice and add your relevant stat to get the result. Compare that to a target number and if you met or exceeded the number you succeed. Hurray!

The game also uses a simplified bonus system. Bonuses are referred to as Edges. Each Edge you have on a roll lets you reroll one die and choose to keep or exchange the result. Penalties work the same way and are called Trouble. Having Trouble forces a reroll and the DM chooses to keep or exchange the result.

The six stats have a similar witty setup. They match up to the traditional D&D stats, but with different names so the first letters can spell out M-A-R-V-E-L.
Melee is your Strength stat.
Agility is your Dexterity stat.
Resilience is your Constitution stat.
Vigilance is your Wisdom stat.
Ego is your Charisma stat.
Logic is your Intelligence stat.
Unlike D&D, stats are just straight numbers in Marvel Multiverse. If you have a 5 in Melee then you add 5 to your Melee rolls, simple as that.

Characters have a set of Traits and Tags that describe different things about them. Traits have a mechanical benefit while Tags simply inform roleplaying for the character. With Peter Parker/Spider-Man as an example, he has the Combat Reflexes, Free Running, and Inventor Traits among others and the Obligation: Aunt May, Poor, and Secret Identity Tags. The Traits provide very small bonuses, often giving an Edge in a specific situation.

There is a huge power list that covers pretty much every Marvel hero and villain. I couldn’t really think of anything they left out. The powers are not all created equal, but the system does acknowledge and warn you about that. Ant-Man’s growth power seemed the strongest to me, but it doesn’t have as much benefit if the villains are inside. The book’s organization annoyed me though. The powers come in sets with stronger powers requiring weaker powers within the set to be taken first. Telepaths need to learn to read minds and subtly influence actions before they can fully dominate people. With that in mind it would be nice if all the Telepath powers were grouped together with a diagram showing that progression. The diagram exists, but all the power descriptions from different sets are put together in a big alphabetic list. It becomes much harder to get a grasp on the specifics of a power set because you have to keep flipping between different pages. It’s such a glaring flaw that I’m surprised the other layout wasn’t used.

And with that we come to the flaws of the book. There were a few small editing problems in the book. Many of those were fixed in errata, which is fine. It’s strange that Marvel wouldn’t try to be closer to flawless since I found some errors that weren’t fixed in the errata. The author, Matt Forbeck, is also an experienced game designer with over 30 years of experience in the industry, so I don’t know how these slipped by. Maybe there just aren’t good copy editors for RPG rules?

Continuing with what’s wrong with the book, there are very few rules or guidance for out of combat roleplay. That’s not shocking given what superhero comics feature though. The DM section is quite limited in general, with a questionable rule on how villain monologues work that actually encourages players to interrupt. That’s the exact opposite of what you want happening in a melodramatic superhero game, so its definitely a rule I’ll ignore if I run the system. The DM section gives a VERY broad overview of the setting and encourages readers to get a Marvel Unlimited subscription if they want to learn more about the setting. I feel those sections might have been included with a business executive of some kind looking over Forbeck’s shoulder. There’s also a six page intro adventure on the website that wasn’t included with the book’s printing for some reason? They couldn’t spring for an extra six pages to make the system easier to use right away, but they could include one hundred pages of Marvel character profiles from Abomination to Wong.

When I put Marvel Multiverse on my wish list for Christmas, I was most interested in the Multiverse aspect of it. I got the Timewatch RPG for some time travel adventures in my D&D campaign world. I loved the system and wanted to try to write my own supplement for it. One idea I’m working on is additional rules and ideas for high fantasy time travel. Another idea is a supplement for time travel within the Marvel Multiverse. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is currently in the middle of a story arc with lots of time travel and alternate universes. Endgame, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Ant-Man, Multiverse of Madness, Quantamania, Loki, and What If…? all dealt with time travel and the multiverse. Timewatch is all about that kind of roleplay with elegant rules for handling paradoxes and other issues that crop up from violating the rules of causality. Marvel Multiverse has only a paragraph or two about Kang and the Time Variance Authority but just from a narrative standpoint. There’s no rules for what happens, no guidelines for what occurs with those characters, and no stats for Kang or the Time Variance Authority agents. The book was clearly written for just normal Marvel stories and the Multiverse portion in the title was added as a misleading afterthought.

There are supplements for the system coming out soon that might have additional details for multiverse time travel fun. The Cataclysm of Kang is a full length campaign that released at the same time as the base game that undoubtedly has more information about Kang. There’s a player and DM supplement coming out in Summer 2024 for the Spider-Verse. Unfortunately it looks like it won’t really have rules for the multiverse either, just a bunch of Spider-Man stuff. I’d guess that Marvel doesn’t want to lock down how the multiverse exactly works in case they want to contradict that idea in a future story. Which is a little frustrating, but there we are.

I think Marvel Multiverse is a good superhero RPG. It’s licensed so there are plenty of available tools to place your story in the Marvel setting. The huge amount of powers makes it work for almost any character design. Simple action resolution with frequent criticals makes the system quick to learn and fun to use. There isn’t much for out of combat rules, but that’s just what the genre is so I wouldn’t say that’s a failure on the system’s part. There are the obvious organizational problems I mentioned, but it’s easy enough to move past that. My main issue with the book is that it doesn’t really address half of the title. Lots of rules for Marvel stuff, but not much for Multiverse. I’ll probably turn to Timewatch‘s sister system, Mutant City Blues, next and see if I can create some sort of combination between the two that gets what I’m looking for.

If you’re interested in Marvel Multiverse it’s available through Amazon and other retailers. The official website has more information.