Wild Talents finally hits my doorstep

And it looks fine. The production values are good (although the layouts are not quite as good as Godlike, the physical quality of the book seems a bit better), the art ranges from excellently evocative to "why did they buy this illo and put it here?" The game's mechancs are pretty much Godlike with a few tweaks learned through playtesting. So, if you liked the basic mechanics of Godlike, then you'll likely appreciate them here as well.

The world support material in the back seems reasonable. Ken Hite has written a long section for this book about creating a super-hero world. It's contents won't necessarily surprise anyone, but he has a handy way of putting a variety of interesting tidbits in one place, next to one another, and explaining things in a clear and cogent manner.

I'm a fan of Detwiller's projects, so I was willing to support Godlike (although it's highly likely I'll never actually play it). Wild Talents' more generic nature raises the chances that it'll see my table, but I can't help but wonder if Arc Dream has horribly missed their marketing window for this game. When Godlike first arrived and Wild Talents was a rumoured "next step", it might have found a niche to occupy.

But, of late, we seem to have an abundance of superhero games on the market: Champions/HERO (which Steve Long seems to be dragging into a golden age by sheer force of will alone), Mutants & Masterminds (wildly popular by all accounts, and pretty much "the game you play if you don't play Champions"), Truth & Justice (the comic book hero game for the small press crowd), Capes (a very interesting mixture of a rolegame, storygame, and a boardgame with no board), With Great Power (a Silver Age story game filled with angst-a-popping). Indeed, it wasn't too long ago that one could still get copies of Silver Age Sentinels (probably still some copies sitting on retailer shelves somewhere), Blood Of Heroes (DC Heroes mechanics re-presented with a quite badly done new background), even an Authority tri-stat game (probably somewhat harder to source at this point than SAS).

With all this existing choice, what does Wild Talents have to offer that's new and different?

The cruel answer is, I just don't really know. And the book itself seems a bit mum on the subject.

There was a fair bit of pent-up demand for Wild Talents in the Godlike fan community, but beyond that, I'm not sure anyone has this book on its radar.

Of course, Mr Hite will probably make mention of it in an Out Of The Box column at some point as, after all, he did contribute to the book. That might get the book some exposure. From all accounts of the playtesters, the One Roll Engine mechanics created by Greg Stolze are serviceable enough.

My pessimistic side believes that Wild Talents will probably vanish beneath the waves of time: I'm not even sure we'll see another print run beyond the run done to fill the pre-orders plus copies printed to fill out an economic batch printing size. Which would be sad, as a lot of care went into this game and it's a reasonably fine looking book (in the same way that old Pagan Press' supplements for CoC were obviously well-put-together labours of love). I'm just not sure it really has enough customer appeal at this point, despite its good qualities.

How many people will throw over their Champions, M&M, or T&J campaign to pick up this game? I fear the answer will be "not too many at all".

Wild Talents finally hits my doorstep

And it looks fine. The production values are good (although the layouts are not quite as good as Godlike, the physical quality of the book seems a bit better), the art ranges from excellently evocative to "why did they buy this illo and put it here?" The game's mechancs are pretty much Godlike with a few tweaks learned through playtesting. So, if you liked the basic mechanics of Godlike, then you'll likely appreciate them here as well.

The world support material in the back seems reasonable. Ken Hite has written a long section for this book about creating a super-hero world. It's contents won't necessarily surprise anyone, but he has a handy way of putting a variety of interesting tidbits in one place, next to one another, and explaining things in a clear and cogent manner.

I'm a fan of Detwiller's projects, so I was willing to support Godlike (although it's highly likely I'll never actually play it). Wild Talents' more generic nature raises the chances that it'll see my table, but I can't help but wonder if Arc Dream has horribly missed their marketing window for this game. When Godlike first arrived and Wild Talents was a rumoured "next step", it might have found a niche to occupy.

But, of late, we seem to have an abundance of superhero games on the market: Champions/HERO (which Steve Long seems to be dragging into a golden age by sheer force of will alone), Mutants & Masterminds (wildly popular by all accounts, and pretty much "the game you play if you don't play Champions"), Truth & Justice (the comic book hero game for the small press crowd), Capes (a very interesting mixture of a rolegame, storygame, and a boardgame with no board), With Great Power (a Silver Age story game filled with angst-a-popping). Indeed, it wasn't too long ago that one could still get copies of Silver Age Sentinels (probably still some copies sitting on retailer shelves somewhere), Blood Of Heroes (DC Heroes mechanics re-presented with a quite badly done new background), even an Authority tri-stat game (probably somewhat harder to source at this point than SAS).

With all this existing choice, what does Wild Talents have to offer that's new and different?

The cruel answer is, I just don't really know. And the book itself seems a bit mum on the subject.

There was a fair bit of pent-up demand for Wild Talents in the Godlike fan community, but beyond that, I'm not sure anyone has this book on its radar.

Of course, Mr Hite will probably make mention of it in an Out Of The Box column at some point as, after all, he did contribute to the book. That might get the book some exposure. From all accounts of the playtesters, the One Roll Engine mechanics created by Greg Stolze are serviceable enough.

My pessimistic side believes that Wild Talents will probably vanish beneath the waves of time: I'm not even sure we'll see another print run beyond the run done to fill the pre-orders plus copies printed to fill out an economic batch printing size. Which would be sad, as a lot of care went into this game and it's a reasonably fine looking book (in the same way that old Pagan Press' supplements for CoC were obviously well-put-together labours of love). I'm just not sure it really has enough customer appeal at this point, despite its good qualities.

How many people will throw over their Champions, M&M, or T&J campaign to pick up this game? I fear the answer will be "not too many at all".