You can stop a bullet with your steel-hard skin, but can you stop the roll of the dice? Arc Dream, creators of 1940s superpowered RPG Godlike, are bringing superpowers to the multiverse with Wild Talents, and we've got concept art.
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.