Stuperpowers!

STUPERPOWERS is a role-playing game a bunch of my friends and I self-published in 1997 where you played a super hero with really, REALLY stupid and useless powers, all 100 of which were fully illustrated. Here are some of the ones I did:

We even made some comic strips!

The artists that worked on the first edition of the book were Steve Ellis, Jamal Igle, Stew Noack, Lauren Rabinowitz and myself. Fred Van Lente and Carson Jones co-wrote the 32 page 1997 edition, and ALL of our friends at the time helped play-test it (usually while under the influences of any number of substances). In 2001 we partnered with Wingnut Games to do an expanded 112 page rulebook - Stuperpowers Deluxe!

Fred ended up re-writing that book entirely from scratch, with Steve writing 2 included adventure modules, and another adventure was written by Al Zatkow and some additional writing from me and Jamal . 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 just putting together the rule books almost killed us and we all totally lost money on the entire thing. We never made any of the supplemental materials like adventure modules that these kinds of games require to be successful, and in the end we’d discovered we'd all rather just keep our own jokes, stories and characters to craft into our own comics and creative projects rather than just put them all in a game.

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! 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!