I remember when I first discovered the Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game back in the mid 80s. It was shortly after I'd been bitten by the comic book 'bug', which sort of grew out of my addiction to all things G.I. Joe. Those lousy Joes got me into comics, you see, an easy task since I was already hooked on the toys and the cartoons. And then, once I was enjoying the Joe comics, I wound up picking up books with folks I remembered from those still-to-this-day amusing Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends cartoons (I always thought Cyclops was cool). Who knew that G.I. Joe was a gateway drug?

I was vaguely familiar with the idea of role playing games, what with the various religious fanatics going to war on Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and a former friend of mine always talking about his 'GURPS' business. Which at first sounded like he needed to see a doctor about something, but I digress. I thought the idea of playing out super-heroic adventures was pretty keen, so I got ahold of both the Basic and (soon enough) the Advanced Marvel boxed sets, and subjected some of my friends to a random adventure when we were all bored one night.

It was an utter train wreck, as I recall. My friend Chris had to play Wolverine, and since I'd set the stage in a Manhattan bar (where else would Wolverine be spending his down time?), Wolverine was intent on getting drunk... I think to prove he could. This took plenty of time, but an irrational amount of alcohol and a rampaging 'giant radioactive dinosaur' later, the bunch of us seemed hooked on the game. Which I found amazing, since I'd felt I did a horrible job running the show. I guess I was entertaining enough, however - my friends kept making me run more adventures.

I didn't get to play all that much myself, aside from when some other friends would attempt to get a D and D or GURPS or Cyberpunk thing going on, but I slowly felt that I got better at running the whole heroic adventure thing over the next decade - particularly the invention of my own stories / plots / etc. The trick was, exposure to some other games, as well as some of the train wreck incidents at the local gaming conventions (before most of them petered out due to internal drama) I started to see how things could go better. Not just in running games, but in making my own game worlds.

And especially in the creation of my own 'rules' for handling events in the game. So all through high school I found myself writing and revising my own custom Marvel rules, a task made worlds easier once I'd gotten access to the computer lab and a convenient word processor - the first 'version' of all my stuff was done on paper, and ... making changes was a really big pain in the butt. The Mac lab we used really helped me get my act together back then, since they had (for their time) awesome word processors, and I lost many an hour after school, 'till they threw us out, churning away at stuff.

Over the years since, I've made repeated attempts to fine tune my stuff, and have gotten closer and closer of course. This was helped greatly by my discovery, once I'd gotten into this 'internets' thing, of a mailing list for the folks who still played the Marvel RPG - by this time, the original had ceased to be published, and the Saga version hadn't been concocted yet, but here all these folks were who were still into the thing. I figured I'd add my two cents to the many things floating around there and fling my Quirks and Manual of the Psi (the latter being on its third incarnation) into the wild.

It seems a lot of folks like the ideas in general, as I still find the Quirks stuff all over the place, figuratively speaking, and the Manual itself can be found on a few sites. Thus encouraged, I figured it was high time I got the rest of my business in order, and started on that in earnest. My Textbook Character Cookbook (which had liberal borrowings from Marvel's Ultimate Powers Book) was moving along nicely, I was slowly gelling the Book of Magic into something I felt stood apart from previous Marvel magic text - and how - and my basic rules were shaping up to finally be coherent.

I sort of ran out of steam for a while though, and after a few years of not working on all this, I'm seeing vast room for improvement on my previous works once again. The ultimate idea holds - to build the Marvel RPG into something that people can use to engage in all manner of freaky weird adventures, whether in the comic book universe of their choosing or one of their own design - but it lacks a central coherence at this time. I have some finished work that relies on the core rules that for all intents and purposes are still 'vapor ware'. Well, I intend to change all that once and for all.

Having been heavily inspired recently, I've decided to finally get back on the horse and begin fleshing out rules again; I suppose I've been so wrapped up in my character modeling work (and real life, of course) that I haven't really thought about this stuff. I knew what I was talking about, after all, and assumed that was enough for what little bit of work I was doing of late. This simply doesn't cut it any longer, though, and in order to progress the center, the very core of my custom game, needs to be solidified - or else I may as well give up. And I'm no quitter; I may procrastinate, but I don't give up easy.

So here, a good twenty years after I first started, is the culmination of all my weirdo ideas: the Universal Heroes Role Playing Game. A heavily customized version of ye olde Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game, that is intended to introduce a plethora of new ideas into the system, but at the same time streamline everything - and allow you to use bits you like for your Classic Marvel RPG while discarding the stuff you don't. The hope is to breathe new life into the game as a whole, but whether or not that is the ultimate result here remains to be seen.

I do have to give credit where credit is due, however. My former Marvel group was invaluable in the creation of all this stuff, as I'd experimented on them mercilessly over the course of ten years - and they went out of their way to point out flaws here and there by building ridiculously powerful characters that exploited every loophole they could find. Hooray for min-max power gamers, eh? But if it weren't for these guys, I'd have wound up releasing a much shoddier project for your use (or misuse, as it would've turned out). So here's some thanks, to the following folks:

Thanks to Bil Lockwood (yes, he spells it with one El), for putting up with likely thousands of hours of rambling and subsequent loss of sleep while I bounced ideas off him, and of course proofreading everything last time 'round. Thanks to Chris Acers, Corey Poulsen, Aaron Ortiz, John Skidmore, Jim Treat, Chris Horn, and Darrin Freeman for all being obstinate troublemakers who had a knack for making fun characters that could foil my most nefarious schemes. We've gamed with many more folks over the years, but these folks here had the most positive impact on this project.

At any rate, once I'm done with all of this work, I can at long last take stock of things, and perhaps get rolling on an all new project I've had in mind. Because I really need more to do, or something. Should be an interesting ride, hope you stick around to see how it ends.

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