For those of you that speak language of Legalese, Marvel Super Heroes is a © and ™ of Marvel Entertainment, Inc. - or whatever current name their company is going by (it changes with some frequency). Luckily for the task at hand, I have no intention of using the name of Marvel or any of their characters in my description of the Universal Heroes system. The only use of the term I am perpetrating is in mentioning that my work is based on the old rules for the original Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game (or MSH RPG).

Now, the actual rules for the MSH RPG are a copyright of the company that is currently Wizards of the Coast, Inc., itself owned by the rather large corporate entity that is Hasbro. However, I do believe I have no need to worry about them, for in the past the people in charge of the Marvel Saga web site specifically linked to my own work in the past. This tells me that they were not only aware of what I was doing but had no specific intention of stopping me (that's why Marvel sues everyone, you know, to protect their trademarks).

So I persist! I have no intention of claiming any of the work they produced as my own, I am simply enhancing the system the folks at TSR (back when it was TSR) put together in '84 or so with my own custom rules, made in the years since the game has been introduced. And the idea is, by the time all is said and done, to have practically made a whole new game, a 'third edition' of the MSH RPG if you will, that is based on the original game but at the same time a massive pool of new gaming material that people can use to further fuel the original system.

On the other hand, while I'm not claiming the original text, I am claiming all of the original material I'm writing for the system. Not that I'm being stingy with it; the idea of putting it online for free is to share my innovations, such as they are, with the gaming community. The only purpose for making a 'claim' is so that if someone grabs the material and puts it on their own site, they at least give me proper credit for such (and don't proclaim that they've written the stuff - not that such claims usually hold much water in the Google Age).

Mind you I'm not taking the 'blame' for inventing things that are in the common gaming lexicon - you know, powers like telekinesis and so forth, so much as the 'flavor' of my rule books as well as some of the weirdness within - like my technopsis, deionicists, and what have you, to continue that brand of example. The original material I will be presenting will be available in a series of books, all of which will build off of the first, that being the Universal Heroes Core Rules (Book 1 - the ground rules). From there everything else is bonus material. And a whole lot of it.

Said material includes Creative Campaigning (Book 2 - Judging and world building), the Textbook Character Handbook (Book 3 - standard-style heroes), the Technical Manual (Book 4 - an all new means of making high tech heroes), the Book of Magic (Book 5 - an overhaul of Magic in the system), the Manual of the Psi (Book 6 - for all things psionic), the Deioninomicon (Book 7 - probably to be renamed but a huge deal on immortal folks), the Combination Character Cookbook (Book 8, mixes of the previous), and the Denizens of the Multiverse (Book 9 - covering aliens).

That's the planned extent of my Universal Heroes project, and I do believe each component can only add significantly to the original MSH RPG materials. Though I can't help but cover some common concepts in the perpetration of my new materials (see the telekinesis example above), the hope is that there is enough original and off-kilter ideas, or at least drastic rethinking of existing notions, to give your game a serious injection of fun. I hope you enjoy everthing I'm offering for your MSH RPG game, and may it breathe new life into your campaigns!

- Denny Hill 2, also claiming the name Firebomb (firebomb@technohol.com).