I know the Marvel Heroic RPG was well received. I own it but have barely read it, as supers games are generally not my cup of tea. Still, I found this post from MWP to be surprising:
And in Marvel news… the economics of licensing a tie-in product is always something we have to weigh carefully. We brokered an admittedly ambitious license with Marvel. Our first event, CIVIL WAR, was successful and well received, but it didn’t garner the level of sales necessary to sustain the rest of the line. We’ve learned from this and are taking a very different approach with the other licensed properties we’re bringing out to you in the next three years. We believe we created a great game. Those of you that have supported us have been terrific, and we appreciate you. But, unfortunately, we will not be bringing any new product out under the Marvel line. We know this affects our customers. Those that have pre-ordered Annihilation will receive a full refund or a credit worth 150% of their Annihilation order to use on existing or future product.At least we have Firefly coming down the line...
The MWP people are really nice and friendly, but they've never had any real success with licensed products (Supernatural petered out before the final book, Smallville also hasn't seen its final book appear, I'm not sure if Leverage even made it to print, Battlestar Galactica died after one book) - thus I thought they were being rather ambitious when they announced their multi-book plans for Marvel the other year.
ReplyDeleteI liked MHR, but my tastes in supers are more DC and my tastes in mechanics are more M&M. I didn't even pick up Civil War myself.
ReplyDeleteFrankly I liked Supernatural and Smallville. Leverage was also good.
But I am not even remotely interested in Firefly.
I was with you on everything but Firefly. That is the shining light in this darkness (even if I am tempted to hack it for Cowboy Bebop instead).
DeleteFASERIP needs to return! That was the best version of Marvel EVER!
ReplyDelete"Basic game" was a bit of a misnomer. Unless you're familiar with playing with dice pools, the mechanics would take a lot of studying and getting used to. I have to agree with Eldrad; they would have been better off licensing the original Marvel Super Heroes rules from WotC.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Eldrad!
ReplyDeleteSee my post from last year, here:
http://rendedpress.blogspot.com/2012/06/more-material-for-your-old-school.html
They released the Annihilation supplement on pdf last month, I'm hoping this decision was made before they sent it off to the printers.
ReplyDeleteI heard positive stuff about this game. I wonder if they should have started off with a different campaign, I know I would have picked up a Age of Apocalypse book, but the Civil War storyline? no thanks.
ReplyDeleteYeah FASERIP would be awesome to see back. I was just re-reading the White Dwarf that reviewed it for the first time.
ReplyDeleteThe Civil War story arc was crap, with a crappy ending, it boggles the mind why they would not just create a series of books that support the universe and allow folks to create their own stories.
ReplyDeleteERIC!
I was skeptical of the Event structure as well, but it really grew on me. As to Civil War, it wasn't one of my favorite storylines, but it's a consistent seller for Marvel, both in the initial comics, the collections, and the digital versions of the comics.
ReplyDeleteAs to making your own characters, it's really easy to do. It even follows the old school tradition of "screw balance, here are the mechanics to make a character do what you want them to do," very much like Marvel Superheroes did back in the day.
Well, at least they got stats out for (most of) the Runaways.
ReplyDeleteI picked up the $20 core rules which was enough to tell me that the system was aimed squarely at the indie/alt gamer crowd and not my Joe Average Gamer neck of the woods, so yep, no surprise here.
ReplyDelete