That is the sub-title to the fresh hardcover that winged its way across half the planet to reach my hands. Now as most know I don't buy hardcopies any more, for many reasons but just to name a few; Hardcopies have no search function other then your brain and eyes (bad deal there), hardcopies have a ability to be heavy and take up space on the shelf and are damn heavey when sifting house. pdf are very very sexy (just ask Denny).

Any way WT (Wild Talents from here on in) was not going o be published as a pdf but worse still the art work was only signed on for this print run - the limited edition. To start with the artworks is goob smackingly sexy, pure and simple unlike anything a Supers game has seen. and really shape the game into a dark and gritty world moving the genre away from spandex, capes and masks. It was this and the system that sold me on placing money down on a product that had been over four years in the making and at the time was unprinted!

Now I mentioned the system - this is the same system that was used for Godlike (Supers in WWII) and WT is the now/torrow of that world. The game is based on O.R.E "One Roll Engine", which in mine mind is a very clever use of dice and dice pools (storyteller, ShaddowRun) that allow the one roll to measure everything from success through to damage.

Now I can not give it the review that this book deserves so I'm going to do my usual copy and paste in the next post.

But before I do that I want to link three products that use the O.R.E system that has been devied to show off the system whilst being free.


See how the One-Roll Engine of Wild Talents handles Star Wars roleplaying! A free download for personal use only.


Kevin Pezzano adapts the One-Roll Engine of Wild Talents to the giant robot action of manga and anime.


A complete horror roleplaying game using the game engine of Wild Talents, by the authors of Wild Talents, Godlike, Delta Green and Unknown Armies.


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Part II

The Review.

Wild Talents Review PDF Print E-mail
Written by James O'Rance
Tuesday, 13 February 2007

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On Monday I received my limited edition copy of Wild Talents. It’s a beautiful hardcover book with 240 pages in full colour. I’ve had a PDF copy of the Wild Talents playtest document for a couple of years, so I knew what to expect from the basic rules.

It’s basically the same game as GODLIKE (WWII supers), ORE Mecha (giant robot combat), Star ORE (Star Wars), and Nemesis (Call of Cthulhu-style horror), most of which are available as free PDF games on the Arc Dream website. There’s also a fantasy game in the works (Reign) from Greg Stolze.

The Wild Talents Game System
Wild Talents The One Roll Engine is kind of similar to Storyteller – to attempt any significant action, you roll a dice pool of d10s equal to a stat + skill total (Body + Martial Arts, Brains + Cryptography, Cool + Stability, and so on). In order to count successes, you choose a set of matching dice. So if you rolled 3, 4, 4, 4, 7, 8, 8 you could choose a set of three 4s or a set of two 8s as your successes. A set of three 4s is “wider” than a set of two 8s, but the set of two 8s is “higher”. Both of these qualities is important in different ways.

This makes for some interesting choices, and some of the randomness is taken away by special dice types – hard dice and wiggle dice. These types of dice always represent super-powers of some kind; normal humans never have hard dice or wiggle dice.

Hard Dice: A hard die is a special d10 in a dice pool that always is a 10. If you have a dice pool with two or more hard dice, you always succeed (and succeed dramatically), because you always have two matching 10s. They’re abbreviated “hd”, so seven hard dice is 7hd. The downside of hard dice is that while they’re extremely powerful, they remain outside the realm of conscious control. Instead, they represent some type of nearly reflexive, unconscious ability.

Wiggle Dice: A wiggle die is like a wild card; you can assign it to any number after you’ve rolled the other dice in your pool. This is even better than a Hard Die, because any roll with a wiggle die succeeds, and if you have two wiggle dice, you can choose any level of success. They’re abbreviated “wd”, so six wiggle dice is 6wd. Abilities with wiggle dice represent a versatile, flexible super-power.

So by carefully choosing what kinds of dice to assign to your character’s stats, skills, and miracles, you can build a character whose special abilities are very reliable, very flexible, or both. A character with some hard dice in his Body stat would be superhumanly strong but unable to control it; he’d almost always strike with maximum force. On the other hand, a character with some wiggle dice in an attack power could choose to strike for greater damage, or greater speed, or in a precise location.

Characters in Wild Talents have six stats, and a wide variety of skills (you can create new skills not present on the list if appropriate). Superpowers are categorised as Hyperstats, Hyperskills, or Miracles (whioch can do almost anything you can imagine). Wild Talents provides guidelines for designing Miracles from scratch (“gourmet” Miracles), or you can choose from one of the 43 “cafeteria-style” Miracles in the book. There is a braod range of Extras and Flaws to customise your Miracles (and again, you can create your own Extras and Flaws).

As an exercise in building characters using the Wild Talents rules, I’ve written up Wesley Dodds, the Sandman. The Sandman is basically a masked investigator who relies on his training to solve mysteries, but things are complicated by his sleeping-gas gun (which puts victims into a hypnotic trance) and prophetic dreams. I’ve built the Sandman as a 250-point character, which puts him between a powerful human and an average superhuman in power.

Wesley Dodds, the Sandman [250 points]
Sandman Source: Paranormal [0 points] (first Source is free)
Source: Technological [5 points]
Permission: One Power [1 points]
Permission: Super-Equipment [2 points]

Damage Location Table
Roll * Hit Location (Wound Boxes)
1 * Left leg (5)
2 * Right leg (5)
3–4 * Left arm (5)
5–6 * Right arm (5)
7–9 * Torso (10)
10 * Head (4)

Stats [100 points]
Body 3d, Coordination 3d, Sense 4d
Brains 4d, Command 2d, Cool 4d

Base Will 9 [default + 3; 12 points]

Movement
Running 12 yds Jumping 4 yds

Skills [74 points]
Bluff 1d (5d), Climbing 2d (5d), Criminology 3d (7d), Dodge 1d (4d), Education 2d (6d), Endurance 1d (4d), Escape Artist 3d (6d), Firearms [Pistol] 2d (5d), First Aid 1d (5d), Interrogation 2d (4d), Intimidation 2d (4d), Language [Chinese] 2d (6d), Lie 2d (6d), Martial Arts [Aikido] 3d (56d), Meditation 3d (7d), Sense Motives 2d (4d), Stability 2d (6d), Stealth 3d (6d).

Superpowers [4 points]
Precognition 4d (Defends, Useful Outside of Combat)
(Flaws: Dreams Only, -2/4/8)
Defence: Incoming attacks must beat Precognition's width and height
Cost: 4 points

Focus: Gas Gun [52 points]
Accessible Focus
Harm [Knockout Gas] 4hd (Attacks, Robust, Useful Outside of Combat)
(Extras: Daze, +3/6/12; Multiple Targets 3, 24)
(Flaws: Depleted, -1/2/4; Focus, -2/4/8; Obvious, -1/2/4; Shock Only, -1/2/4)
Damage: Width in Shock
Cost: 40 points

Hyper-Interrogation 3wd
(Flaws: Attached to Harm, -1/2/4; Focus, -2/4/8)
Cost: 12 points

The Sandman is basically a skilled human with solid stats. He doesn’t have any superhuman abilities (Hyperstats or Hyperskills) apart from his prophetic dreams, and the abilities granted by his gas gun. The gas gun grants two abilities. One is a basic ranged attack (Harm) that does Shock damage with a Daze effect (representing a sleeping gas) and can affect up to four targets simultaneously. Because the Harm power has only hard dice (which automatically roll 10s), it is almost always successful and always affects the head.

The other is a superhuman level of the Interrogation skill, but one that can only be used against a target that has been affected by Harm first. This combination allows the Sandman to gas his enemies, knocking them unconscious or dazing them, and then interrogate them with his four normal dice plus three wiggle dice.

Superheroic Histories
This chapter, written by RPG and alternate histories veteran Kenneth Hite, is one of the best parts of Wild Talents. It provides a discussion of creating your own superhuman setting with an internally consistent history, public attitudes towards superhumans, and the importance of morality (black and white, or grey?) described so that there’s no confusion between the GM and players. These are described as the hyperfoundations of a superheroic setting.

A setting’s hyperfoundation is detailed on four axes of design, each of which is listed as a colour (thus, every setting is a “four-colour” setting!). These axes are Red (historical inertia), Gold (Talent inertia), Blue (how much weirdness is in the setting), and Black moral clarity or ambiguity).

It’s a robust method for describing the basic underpinnings of a setting – if a setting is Blue 2 (low weirdness), then players will know not to expect too many alien invasions, giant monsters destroying Tokyo, and mythological entities living very public lives in American cities. A world set at Red 1 (broad changes to history) will deal with the social impacts of what superhumans do, whereas in a Red 5 setting you can assume that the U.S. won WWII, lost Vietnam, and is currently mired down in Iraq despite the existence of Superman.

A World Gone Mad
This is the default setting of Wild Talents, taking the history of the Godlike RPG and bringing it forward to the 1990s. It’s interesting reading and provides a broader setting than just the Second World War, with a “historically realistic” approach to the existence of superhuman beings (similar to Watchmen). Technology, society, culture, and world events are all shaped and changed by the presence of superhuman Talents. In the original Godlike game the effects of Talents essentially cancelled each other out, thus the course of WWII was similar to that of the real world. In the ensuing years, however, the impact of Talents on human history quickly grows.

The Limited First Edition
Wild Talents is an attractive hardcover book featuring art by Christopher Shy, Sam Araya,, and Todd Shearer. The artistic style is the slightly surreal photo-realism that Christoper Shy is known for, rather than something that might have come from the pages of a mainstream superhero comic. This was a good design decision, in my opinion; if you want to run a game that doesn’t feature capes and spandex costumes, then the art in the rulebook won’t reinforce the wrong images.

Subsequent printings of Wild Talents will have different art.

Overall
Wild Talents has been in production for a very long time (I remember emailing Greg Stolze about a sequel to Godlike in late 2002), and it shows. The rules are tight – balanced, easy to understand, detailed where needed without being complicated, and able to design just about any superpower you can think of.

This game is an ideal “generic” superhero game system. While it does come witha default setting, this is confined to a single chapter and does not impose itself on the game system in any noticeable way. Indeed, the game system is a toolbox for defining how superhumans exist and operate in any given setting. You could easily use Wild Talents to run a game set in the Marvel or DC universes, White Wolf’s Aberrant game, or one of your own devising.

If you like superhero games you should definitely take a look at Wild Talents. Check out the previews and excerpts on the Arc Dreams Publishing website, and if you like what you see buy a copy while the limited first edition lasts. Even if you already have your own preferred supers game system, the Superheroic Histories chapter by itself is great reading and will prove useful in running other supers RPGs as well as Wild Talents.

I think that this may be the only new RPG that I bought last year (I prepaid before it went into print). I have a lot of RPGs in my collection, and I feel like there’s not much reason to buy any new ones while old RPGs remain unplayed. But Wild Talents was worth it. Highly recommended!




The other plus to this game is it not a product of D20, offshoot or otherwise. Now I know M&M is great and has reached levels that standard D20 never got too but it's D20 - fair and square.



Lord Abaddon of Wormwood



Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

I loved the Godlike setting (but the harback was a bit "soft" after I read it it seems a bit loose...physicaly speaking...the cover and the pages seems like they where "wet" and I don nothing with them appart of reading it) but the concept and the story captured me...and I remember the "coming soon" of wild talent...i also remember the plea to pay to get it before it's release a few year back..but never done it...now you made me green in envy... Maybe some day in pdf or ebay...
good review thanks !

Edited the first post to add the url of WildTalents's homepage (silly me). Bayushi this product is still current - it only got released in December last year. Again I will point out why I bought the book, WildTalent = no pdf.

For the Supers gamers this system is the bomb, for almost any other style check the forums they are prolific kitbashes. Oh, fantasy O.R.E is coming by the name of .

By the way these are the preview pages from the Home site, browse and drool - I did.


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood