Here's the concept art for Wild Talents, in which you can create superheroes and supervillains with amazing powers, using a "one-roll engine."

io9 contributor Ed Grabianowski reviewed the game over at Robot Viking:

The creators of the highly acclaimed RPG Godlike are taking the superhero genre on a trip through alternate timelines and parallel dimensions, and it all starts here with the core rules. Wild Talents: Essential Edition features all the rules you need to create a wide range of superheroic characters and astonishingly villainous enemies, including the innovative One-Roll Engine. It's a sleek and expandable role-playing system that can take you from gritty, street-level Power Man and Iron Fist type action to galaxy-spanning cosmic adventure on par with Green Lantern or Silver Surfer...

He describes the game's one-roll engine, using a ten-sided die, and then adds:

These dice pools are further modified by hard dice, which always come up 10s - this sounds great until you realize that always punching as hard as you possibly can, for instance, causes some serious problems. There are also Wiggle Dice, which act like wild cards and can be matched to any other die you roll. Wiggle Dice are the most powerful in the game, but I really wish they had a different name. It just doesn't sound very imposing. "I unleash my ultimate…Wiggle Dice!" Might I suggest, "Flex Dice"?

Here's concept art for another Arc Dream role-playing game, Monsters And Other Childish Things. Which is just what it sounds like:

And some art for other Arc Dream projects:

Grabianowski also reviewed Arc Dream's other superhero title, This Favored Land, which puts superheroes into the U.S. Civil War:

This Favored Land posits an alternate history in which strange dreams portend the arrival of bizarre powers, giving abilities most people see as sorcerous or even Satanic to previously ordinary humans. The Dream and the Gift are tied together. In this world, you don't randomly get weird powers from swimming in radioactive waste. Some higher power seems to be granting these abilities, and they always reflect some aspect of the grantee's life or personality. Sometimes it's ironic (someone with a water phobia gains the power to control water and breath in it); sometimes it seems more like the granting of a wish (a slave who has spent her entire life under the control of others gains mind-control powers).

Alternate history superheroes are often the best kind, and this sounds like a great opportunity to explore both the wish-fullfillment and "be careful what you wish for" aspects of superheroic storytelling.

MSG is a decidedly different sort of RPG created by some of the minds behind White Wolf's various supernatural-themed game systems. There is no randomness of any kind, and not a D20 to be found. Players play the roles of company Reps who all work for the soul-crushing Company in service of the Brand. Each player takes a turn playing the part of the company and throwing some kind of bizarre situation at the Reps, possibly incorporating some of the backstories the players came up with about themselves at the beginning of the game. Then the Reps decide what to do, try to earn points by working corporate buzz-words into their plans, then attempt to outbid the Company by taking a Risk with their reputation. Whoever wins the Risk narrates the outcome.

If it all sounds a little vague and confusing, keep in mind that this isn't a "Only 45,000 more XP until I can wield my Holy Avenger +19!" type of RPG. The point is really to make a mockery of soulless corporations and their often ruthless strategies, not to mention the soulless drones who do their bidding. At the same time, it mocks our own willingness to worship these brands and submit to the will of these companies, all while creating ludicrous scenarios that are maddeningly interconnected with the stories created in the previous round. Maybe this excerpt from the rule book explains it best:

Brainstorm for a couple of minutes until you come up with a name for the Brand [that all the players work for]. If some of you hate it — or, better, all of you hate it — that’s brilliant, because it means you’ll understand a little of what it is to work for an organization that makes you cringe every time you look in the mirror and see the Brand logo they tattooed on your forehead.

MSG (I'm not really sure about the title - it just makes me think "Madison Square Garden") is stuffed to the gills with black, black humor. In fact, it is clearly heavily inspired by the classic Paranoia RPG. Instead of living in a domed city with the Computer, you're stuck in a boardroom with the Company. You can beat the other Reps, but you can never beat the Company. If you're looking for a change of pace for your weekly game night, this game is worth a look. You can order it over at lulu.com, and you can even download it for free in pdf format (but only until Nov. 25). Image by: johnheronproject.

The phrase heard most often at the press launch for The Old Republic was "We can't tell you that yet." Questions about the gameplay, scale, price, delivery system and release date of the game were all answered with those frustrating words, but at least BioWare's Gordon Walton acknowledged how frustrating he knew it was:

A lot of the things we're not talking about is not because we're teases or because we don't know yet, it's because it's not settled... At this point of time, [anything we tell you about the release date] would be a lie. It's all about the quality, and until we get close, we don't know yet. We don't want to overhype [the game]. No games are overhyped like MMOs are overhyped, and a Star Wars MMO may be hyped the most of all.

So what do we know about the game? Well, it'll be a cross-platform MMO. taking place 3,600 years before the movies — and 300 years after the Knights of the Old Republic games — where players will decide upfront on what "faction" their character is. (The only two were were told of were Jedi or Sith, but others were promised. "Not everyone's fantasy is to be a Jedi," said lead writer Daniel Erickson). You'll also decide on your character's class and race, as well as whether you're good or evil.

From there, the players will get to explore new worlds, complete tasks and — unusually for an MMO — experience a story. As BioWare's Co-CEO Ray Muzyka explained, the addition of a story to the MMO format is a groundbreaking — and, in his eyes, necessary — move, adding "emotionally compelling storytelling" to create something unique. (Lead writer Erickson agreed, saying that story was a central concept of "every RPG until we went to MMO-space, and then something fell off the truck").

While staying unsurprisingly cagey about the amount of work that's already gone into the game, BioWare's lead designer on the project, James Ohlen, admitted that the game is the equivalent to not just one sequel to Knights of The Old Republic 1 and 2, but several; "[The Old Republic] is the equivalent of every other BioWare game ever released, combined," he explained.

The game will offer players the chance to travel between worlds and interact with AI-driven companion characters as well as other players. ("What would Han be without Chewbacca?" said Muzyka when asked about the role of companions in the game. "What would Luke be without R2?" But don't worry; you can kill them if they annoy you). You can also choose between following the light or dark sides and, maybe most importantly, have awesome lightsaber battles.

Ohlen said that BioWare and Lucasarts' aim with the game was to "allow players to carve out their own epic stories - and that's important, because Star Wars is all about epic stories." Muzyka perhaps put it more succinctly:

We're going to allow you to experience the great moments of Star Wars... What are the cool things that you've seen in the movies? If you can do it in the movies, we're trying to do that in the game.

This takes us onto the Physical and Mental Mutation tables, full of exotic adaptations to the new brave new world ("Quills/Spines", "Pyrokinesis" "Multiple Body Parts"), and the occasional dark side of genetic damage ("Hemophilia," say, or "Epilepsy").

When it arrived in stores in the early 1980s, Gamma World was announced like this:

The first world is lost in the mythical past, the second was destroyed by apocalyptic energies, and now a whole new world awaits you - GAMMA WORLD!

...or would we!? Because maybe we'd still be around, and everything would be messed up in a cool way. When I was playing Gamma World in junior high, it seemed vaguely plausible that in a few years we'd have tattoos, and cool rubble to climb around on. There would be tribes!

Gamma World's principal architects were Gary Jaquet and James M. Ward - the latter of whom must be touched by some visionary quality, since his name is on Metamorphosis Alpha and Deities and Demigods. It's patterned more after science fantasy than science fiction proper - the creators cite The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss, Starman's Son by Andre Norton, Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier, and Ralph Bakshi's marvelous Wizards, a post-apocalypse subgenre boiled down and codified into 56 pages of narratively generative charts'n'tables.

Players set out into an America remade as a country of mutants, rural communities, and the mystery-shrouded ruins of a prior civilization. Robot farms, nomadic tribes, ancient spaceports, mutated forests and radioactive desert dot the landscape as well as the Cryptic Alliances, crackpot factions contesting for the fragments of what used to be.

As a context for storytelling Gamma World gets full marks. Gamma World's crazy mix of high-tech and ruined-garden aesthetics is still my preferred vision of the post-Reaganite era. In Mad Max, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the post-nuclear world is a humorless burned-out husk, but Gamma World is lush and green, a hothouse full of unwholesome life - like dropping the bombs just kicks everything up a notch.

It combines that neo-tribal waste-land adventure with a Riddley Walker, Motel of the Mysteries vibe - familiar artifacts become strange to us, the present day world we walk around in becomes a strange and distant past, a lost technological climax instant for the human race. Poignant and thrilling at the same time.

But Gamma World never caught on in a big way. Some X-factor was missing - maybe it lacked D&D's potent fantasy urtexts. Or maybe it was in the game design? GW's character creation lacks the hard-wired archetypal structure of D&D's class system - sure, mutations are fun, but it doesn't bring the ready-made type-casting of fighter vs magic user vs thief.

And the reward schedule isn't there. You don't go up levels - in Gamma World your base stats go up, and you can find artifacts, and there's a thin chance of further mutation (here I consult the Radiation Matrix), but you don't find that steady treadmill of advancement that keeps D&D and WoW players grinding onward and opening up new areas in the game mechanics.

And of course the nail in the coffin is the post-Reagan New World Order itself, which let the air out of our collective investment in a grim post-nuclear endgame.

But Gamma World keeps being remade, even unto the Sixth Edition. Cormac McCarthy, along with Jericho, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and even Al Gore, show that the devastated future Earth still has a place in the contemporary imagination. I like to think McCarthy would appreciate the final pages of the 1981 manual, a 100-item treasure table full of poignant relics as "57. Jungle gym - fair condition, used," or "1859 Swiss Infantry Sabre - excellent condition, well polished blade." Gamma World is a future with a past that includes the world we see around us, which ought to mean as much as a bunch of halflings.

And, seriously, as futures go, would you rather the boring old Singularity, or Gamma World? Do you really want to float around in space chatting with Farsc4pe_Guy_21 or do you want to explore a secret bunker shattered by nuclear fire, to learn the truth of our elder civilization? Leporinoid art by David Trampier.