Read-through Review of Wild Talents by Dennis Detwiller et al.

I got my special preorder edition of this in the mail a couple of weeks back. It's a gorgeous full-colour book, great layout and fantastic art by Christopher Shy and Sam Araya.

The system is solid. It's the same One Roll Engine as Godlike and Nemesis, probably here in it's fullest and most polished form to date. It's basically a general superhero game, with an emphasis on fairly gritty superheroes in worlds with a lot of super powered people around.

The introduction states up front that they aren't providing any 'how to roleplay' advice, as they expect only experienced gamers to buy a copy.

After that, it dives right into the resolution system, character generation and power selection. All good stuff.

Next is a chapter by Ken Hite on building cool alternate super worlds. The discussion focuses on different aspects of superhero stories and how to design the game world to fit the ones you want to be important.

There's then a sample timeline for the default setting, one that builds on the world of Godlike and takes it through to 1992. It's a good setting, with cool stuff in history all the way and a interstellar threat and brand new world government forming in response. The Talents of World War Two have been superceded by 'Wild Talents': also humans with powers, but without the same limitations that the Talents had.

Finally, there's a sample adventure. It's set in the 1970's and has a cool street-level super-vigilante feel.

Overall, it's a good supers system for what it is. There's little beyond the effects of superpowers, combat and basic task resolution system in the book. The willpower rules give a little bit of psychological mechanics, but it's even simpler than the Call of Cthulhu sanity rules.

I'm looking forward to playing this, for the mayhem and danger of it. Nice.