Stuperpowers!

STUPERPOWERS is a role-playing game where you play a super hero with really, REALLY stupid and useless powers. My friends and I self-published the game in 1997, in the format of a 32 page comic with minimal rules and all the silly powers each getting their own illustration. The text of the first edition of the book was written by Fred Van Lente and Carson Jones, and it was illustrated by Steve Ellis, Jamal Igle, Stew Noack, Lauren Rabinowitz and myself. All of us and most of our friends at the time -including Gretchen Van Lente, Crystal Skillman, Sarah Oleksyk and Donato Giancola- helped come up with ideas or helped play-test the game.

In 2001 we partnered with Wingnut Games to do a revised and expanded 112 page rulebook - Stuperpowers Deluxe! Fred ended up re-writing that book entirely from scratch, with Steve writing 2 included adventure modules, with another adventure was written by Al Zatkow and some additional writing from me and Jamal. We kept the same 50 powers from the first edition but added 50 more. Steve, Stew, Jamal and I drew all the new artwork in the second addition, which was a LOT.

It was a lot of silly fun, but it ended up being a lot more work that we anticipated and none of us made any money at all. In the end we’d discovered we'd all rather make comics instead of role playing games, so we all went right back to doing exactly that immediately.

I guess we did something right because Stuperpowers still managed to gain a cult following in spite of us all but abandoning the project. In fact, people still play it! It will probably never get reprinted but Stuperpowers Deluxe is still available as a downloadable PDF right here.

It makes me so happy knowing that there are people are still carrying the torch for this silly little game my pals and I made for a laugh in our 20's.

Long live Stuperpowers!

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