Tabletop Game / Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game

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The Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game is a Tabletop RPG written by Matt Forbeck, designed to emulate the colorful heroes, dastardly villains, and larger-than-life stories of Marvel Comics for the role-playing game medium. The game's initial playtest version was released in 2022, and after a great deal of testing and community feedback, the final version was published in 2023.

Players can either choose one of the already existing Marvel heroes as a pre-generated character (as the rulebook has tons of profiles for classic characters), or design a new hero with their very own origin story and extraordinary abilities, selected from a voluminous list of hundreds of powers. With heroes selected, the players are ready to jump into fantastic tales provided by the Narrator, and protect civilians, face off against mighty villains, and maybe even explore the Multiverse itself.

More information can be found at the game's official website, and a free version of the game's basic rules, power descriptions, and other digital tools can be found at the game's Demiplane website.

Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game contains examples of:

• Action Initiative: Like many other Tabletop RPGs, this game makes use of an initiative system to track turn order. Surprising no one, the Super-Speed power set has a power that helps them roll amazing initiative checks.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: In line with Dr. Strange's trademark invocations of alliterated, eldritch names, many of the spells from the Magic power set follow the same convention, like "Bolts of Balthakk" or "Flames of the Faltine."
• Animalistic Abilities: While there isn't a dedicated power set for this per se, the Spider Powers set features a lot of stereotypically animalistic powers (like wallcrawling, super-leaping, pheromones, lightning reflexes, and a hyperagile fighting style) that could easily be reflavored to accommodate any non-spider animal.
• Arbitrary Gun Power: As it's heavily assumed by the naming and flavor of many of the Ranged Weapon powers that your character is using firearms (if not a bow or crossbow), and the game assumes that all heroes are incapacitating enemies without outright killing them, this trope is very much in effect.
• Astral Projection: The Astral Form power from the Magic and Telepathy power sets enables a character to project their psyche, to remotely view events in the material world or combat psychic threats hiding out in the Astral Plane.
• Barrier Warrior: There are many powers across multiple powersets, such as Telekinetic Protection, Elemental Sphere, and Shield of the Seraphim, which allow you to erect protective barriers of one sort or another. While the specifics may vary, these barriers all follow similar rules: they negate any attack which inflicts less than X damage, but shatter upon getting hit by any single attack that deals X damage or more.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: The X-Men Expansion lays out full rules and mechanics for running a psychic duel between telepathic characters.
• The Berserker: There's a couple of different ways to achieve this in the game, with either the Anger power (where you use a reaction to boost your melee damage, after being hit by an enemy attack) or the Berserker trait (where you have to succeed at an Ego check whenever you're injured, or else you uncontrollably charge at the attacker and receive bonuses to certain defenses).
• Bottomless Magazines: The rulebook flat-out tells you to not bother counting ammunition, for heroes with ranged weapons like firearms or bows.
• Bullet Time: Slow-Motion Dodge is a Basic power available to any hero, making it harder for enemies to hit the character with attacks that target Agility defense, such as gunfire or energy blasts.
• Character Class System: Averted, through feedback. During the initial playtest, the game attempted to enforce a loose version of this with heroic "archetypes" (like Blasters for ranged damage, Bruisers for tanking, and so on), but the system proved unpopular amongst playtesters, and was removed from the final version.
• Character Level: The game's ranking system is roughly analogous to the level system from other Tabletop RPGs, but with only 6 tiers to traverse, advancement happens much less frequently, and typically depicts an overall shift in the tone and scope of the story, as well as the magnitude of potential threats.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Some power sets, such as Martial Arts, Melee Weapons, and Ranged Weapons, are available to all heroes regardless of their origin, including heroes whose origin isn't supernatural or supersciencey in nature. That makes these power sets good matches for character concepts that are less overtly fantastical, like martial artists, mercenary soldiers, stealthy infiltrators, or street vigilantes.
• Combination Attack: The game calls these team maneuvers, and they come in one of three flavors: offensive, defensive, or rally. These maneuvers can turn the tide of an entire battle, and usually apply a special buff to the whole team at once. To balance their power, you can only use them once per fight.
• Combo Platter Powers: There aren't any rules to stop you from melding disparate power sets together in a single character, but heroes that specialize in a small number of power sets (less than their ranking) are rewarded with bonus power slots.
• Counter-Attack: There are several reaction-based powers that fall under this, like Riposte from Melee Weapons or Counterstrike Technique from Martial Arts.
• Critical Failure: Averted. Rolling a 1 on the Marvel die but not scoring high enough to succeed triggers a Fantastic failure, in which the action check doesn't give you exactly what you wanted, but you still get some kind of positive result in the fiction.
• Critical Hit: This game is unique in how often critical hits occur; so long as the Marvel die comes up as a 1 and you rolled high enough to succeed on the check, your roll qualifies as a Fantastic success, which enhances the positive result and can add double damage or status conditions to certain attack powers. If you roll two 6's and then a 1 on the Marvel die (as in Earth-616 from the Marvel Universe), this triggers an ultimate Fantastic success, which ignores roll penalties completely and creates a success of marvelous proportions.
• Damage Over Time: Being set on fire or receiving a bleeding wound has this effect, as well as being corroded or poisoned (from the X-Men Expansion).
• Damage Reduction: These effects work by reducing the damage multiplier of incoming attacks, sparing the target quite a bit of damage.
• Dimensional Traveler: The Omniversal Travel power set covers all kinds of interdimensional, chronological, and cross-multiversal travel powers, for all your universe-hopping needs.
• Elemental Powers: Represented by the Elemental Control power set, with an extensive list of available options, including fire, water, earth, wind, lightning, ice, metal, sound, Hellfire, force, or pure energy (with the X-Men Expansion adding corrosive chemicals and poison to the list). A wielder can shape their element into projectile blasts and protective shields, or even transform their body into the element completely.
• Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors: Mostly averted. There's different elemental energy types (see above), but the different elements typically only matter when they land a Fantastic success of some kind (and trigger their respective status condition), or the Narrator decides to have them narratively matter in a certain battle (like triggering a villain's Anathema trait). Most of the time, the elements are more for theming and flavor.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Averted. Some characters wield a "Signature Weapon" (via the corresponding tag), but as most heroes' attack powers are considerably stronger than the middling bonuses provided by wielding standard gear, this game focuses more on characters' abilities and powers improving as opposed to their equipment.
• Expy: Some of the power sets and a great deal of the power flavor seems to assume that players will want to design and play an Expy of one of the already established Marvel heroes.
• Fastball Special: As the inventor of the trope, it's little surprise that this makes an appearance in a Marvel RPG. This is one of the standard reactions available to all characters (so long as they're strong enough to lift the hurled ally).
• Flight: This is a Basic power available to anyone, which makes sense as it's a near-ubiquitous comic staple.
• Functional Magic: One of the broader and more versatile power sets in the game, Magic comes in three flavors: Chaos Magic, which warps the forces of probability and reality itself; Demonic Magic, which draws on dark energies or infernal bargains to fuel its destructive power; and Sorcery, the scholarly occult mysticism wielded by most of the famous Marvel sorcerers like Doctor Strange and Wong.
• Game Master: Referred to in this game as the Narrator.
• Grappling with Grappling Rules: Averted, thankfully. Grabbing enemies is relatively simple.
• Heal Thyself: Players can spend Karma, the game's narrative metacurrency, to recover either Health or Focus.
• Healing Factor: The trademark of characters associated with the Weapon X program, this Basic power gives a character the ability to regenerate from wounds and injuries at speeds much faster than normal humans.
• Healing Hands: Included in the X-Men Expansion, the new Healing power set gives a character tools to heal allies and cure status conditions.
• Improvised Weapon: So long as your character has the right powers or enough strength, they can pick up things like nearby cars or telephone poles to inflict some serious damage.
• In a Single Bound: Super leaping is available in both the Super-Strength and Spider Powers power sets, for characters that jump onto rooftops in a single bound.
• Intangibility: The Phasing power set contains all kinds of incorporeal abilities, useful for scrambling electronics, escaping through solid walls, or becoming intangible to avoid enemy attacks.
• Keystone Superpower: The Power Control set certainly qualifies, as it allows a hero to mimic the abilities of other powered characters. There's also a particularly versatile spell from Chaos Magic, Powerful Hex, which can effectively replicate any other power in the entire game, on command.
• The Leader: The Tactics power set is meant to emulate the ability of a team leader to call out orders to teammates, instructing them to advance, focus fire, or rally around the leader for one of those quintessential cover-page Team Shots.
• Leap and Fire: The Slow-Motion Shoot Dodge power from the Ranged Weapons set is designed to simulate this; the hero makes a ranged attack against one or two opponents, and then right up until their next move, they're harder to hit with ranged attacks. As soon as they move, they fall prone, completing the dive.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: Players can spend Karma, the game's narrative metacurrency, to reroll one of the dice from an action check, or force an enemy to reroll their dice if the enemy succeeds at something.
• Mana: The game calls it Focus, the intangible reservoir of stamina, willpower, and/or internal spirit that fuels a hero's flashier powers and special attacks.
• Mana Burn: Certain attack powers and energies (such as Hellfire, or specific spells or telepathic attacks) have this effect.
• Master of Illusion: With the Illusion power set, a character can conjure lifelike holograms, conceal themselves with invisibility, or trick enemies with illusory duplicates.
• Meta Power: Powers that affect other powers get their very own Power Control set, enabling a character to amplify, disable, or copy the abilities of another superpowered character.
• Min-Maxing: The game doesn't hold up to this terribly well, as certain power sets (and by extension, powers) are just indisputably better than others. As is often the case with superhero Tabletop RPGs, Narrators should guide their players to build characters around a fun or exciting concept, instead of just grabbing up all the most mechanically useful powers into a thoroughly optimized, but narratively nonsensical blob.
• Mind Over Matter: The Telekinesis power set covers all the classic psychokinetic abilities, such as grabbing or crushing enemies with invisible force, or protecting oneself with a personal, telekinetic force field.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Additional Limbs is a Basic power available to any hero, outfitting the character with extra arms or a prehensile tail for extra offensive power.
• Multi-Directional Barrage: Some of the Ranged Weapons power set's high-ranking attack powers are essentially this, like Dance of Death or Orchestra of Overkill.
• The Multiverse: In line with the game's name, part of the core rulebook details the many fictional universes that make up the Marvel Multiverse so you can decide which one makes a good tonal match for your game, or plot out destinations on a multiverse-spanning journey for the players.
• Non-Health Damage: Certain attack powers (usually psychic or supernatural in nature) can deplete a character's Focus, instead of their Health. A character becomes demoralized upon losing all their Focus, and suffers penalties to all rolls moving forward. If the character accrues even more Focus damage equivalent to their maximum Focus, they become psychologically shattered, and are effectively incapacitated.
• Omniglot: The Translation power set from the X-Men Expansion gives a character different abilities to understand any and all languages, even including body language or secret codes.
• Pinball Projectile: Both the Elemental Control and Shield Bearer sets come with powers that let you ricochet your blast (or shield, thrown as a projectile) from one opponent to the next.
• Power Levels: The game ranks all Marvel heroes (and characters you might create) on a ranking from 1 to 6, with 1 representing normal humans and 6 representing cosmic-grade heroes that combat forces which endanger the galaxy or the multiverse itself. While their official version of some heroes' rankings are sure to cause some debate, the game justifies the rankings by reminding readers that heroes of a certain ranking are better equipped (and better narratively justified) to deal with villains of a similar ranking (such as street-level heroes and crime bosses, or cosmic-level heroes and galaxy devourers), so no one should end up feeling weak or underpowered.
• Psychic Link: This is a foundational power from the Telepathy set; several of the set's powers only work if you've established a telepathic link with the target first.
• Put Their Heads Together: This trope is one of the attack powers for the Martial Arts and Super-Strength power sets, allowing you to attack two enemies at once.
• Random Encounters: The X-Men Expansion provides supplemental rules for this, for situations when the heroes are adventuring across large, potentially dangerous terrain or settings.
• Rubber Man: The Plasticity power set contains all manner of metamorphic and stretching abilities, allowing a character to contort their body into the shape of a protective sphere around their allies, a flattened sheet to bounce back attacks, or a coiling spiral to entangle enemies.
• Seers: The Sixth Sense power set from the X-Men Expansion grants a character many different kinds of extrasensory sight, such as precognition, postcognition, and the ability to detect other superpowered entities.
• Shield Bash: Unsurprisingly, in a game where it's intended for you to play as Captain America or an Expy, there's an entire Shield Bearer power set for using a shield, both as a defensive tool and an offensive weapon.
• Signature Team Transport: The X-Men Expansion has rules for how to handle and build your own group vehicle.
• The Six Stats: This game has them, though reflavored to fit a Marvel acronym:
  • Melee (Strength)
  • Agility (Dexterity)
  • Resilience (Constitution)
  • Vigilance (roughly analogous to the alertness and perception components of Wisdom)
  • Ego (Charisma)
  • Logic (Intelligence)
• Sizeshifter: The Resize power set covers both shrinking and growing powers, giving a character the power to become as small as subatomic particles or even larger than the universe.
• Skill Scores and Perks: Partly averted. The game employs neither skill scores nor conventional perks; "traits" are the closest thing to perks, but they're often as simple as "Receive an edge when rolling in X circumstance," and they don't form skill trees or unlock new powers.
• Soft Martial Arts Style: The Reverse-Momentum Throw power (from the Martial Arts power set) seizes an enemy who missed a melee attack against the user and throws them prone to the ground, dealing half as much damage as the enemy's attack would have if it had succeeded.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Some of the Telepathy powers allow a hero to psychically communicate with an animal and/or a taxonomic group of animals, or borrow their senses.
• Spell Crafting: The rulebook admits that while the game comes with an ample supply of powers, it's impossible to cover every power imaginable. For situations when you feel like the game's powers aren't cutting it, there's a portion of the Narrator section that walks you through how to create a power of your own, using already existing powers as models.
• Spider-Man Send-Up: The game effectively assumes someone in your group will want to play one of these. There's an entire Spider Powers power set, with all of the classic powers: web-swinging, web-shooting, wallcrawling, and so on.
• Stance System: The Martial Arts power set has a simplified version of this: there's Attack Stance for landing more damaging blows, and Defense Stance for being more evasive.
• Status Effects: A whole bunch of them, ranging from your standard-issue stun and paralysis, to flashier ones like being mentally shattered or set on fire.
• Status Infliction Attack: Lots of attack powers become this if their attack roll lands a Fantastic success; blunt weapons can stun, sharp weapons can inflict a nasty bleed, and the different elemental energy types inflict a whole spectrum of thematically appropriate status conditions.
• Stock Superhero Day Jobs: The player selects their occupation as part of character creation, which is the hero's day job when they're not fighting crime or stopping supervillains.
• Story-Breaker Power: As the X-Men Expansion covers Marvel characters with game-breakingly strong powers (such as infinite self-duplication or being literally incapable of losing any conflict), the book groups all of these abilities under the Narrative power set, with a recommendation that these should be reserved for non-player characters only (as these abilities are closer to plot devices than conventional superpowers).
• Super-Senses: These are covered by the Heightened Senses powers from the Basic power set, giving the character bonuses to notice small details and penalties to enemies attempting to sneak up on the character. Higher levels give a character a functional sonar sense, and the ability to detect lies by sensing changes in heart rate.
• Super-Speed: The Super Speed power set endows a character with extraordinary agility, allowing them to run across the surface of water, catch bullets out of midair, and dodge enemy attacks as a speeding blur.
• Super-Strength: Represented by its own power set, Super-Strength allows a character to jump in mighty leaps, smash the ground to cause seismic shockwaves, and throw grabbed enemies as impromptu projectiles into other enemies. If you're looking for general enhanced strength without all the typical superstrong attack tropes, there's the Mighty power from the Basic power set.
• Superhero Origin: The player establishes their origin story as part of character creation. The game offers a number of common origins for you to choose from, each with their own traits (mechanical bonuses or penalties to certain checks) and tags (narrative keywords to give the character more texture within the story):
  • Alien: The hero is an extraterrestrial life form, and their powers stem from their alien biology or mind.
  • High Tech: The hero wears, has equipped, or simply is technology that confers their powers, such as a suit of powered armor, cybernetics, or robots.
  • Magic: The hero's powers come from magic spells, occult mysticism, eldritch artifacts, or some other supernatural source.
  • Monstrous: The hero is or is descended from a creature historically viewed as evil, such as a werewolf, demon, or vampire, and wields the powers of their unholy lineage.
  • Mutant: The hero's powers are encoded in their very DNA from birth, by way of a genetic mutation that deviates from the norm for their species.
  • Mythic: The hero is empowered by, descended from, or simply is a god or goddess of myth or legend.
  • Special Training: The hero was subjected to intense physical and/or mental conditioning, pushing their capabilities to the very limit of human potential.
  • Unknown: The hero genuinely has no idea where their powers come from. They may have lost their memories, or are unaware of their superpowered bloodline. The player and/or the Narrator may be aware of the origin, but are waiting for a particular plot point to reveal it.
  • Weird Science: The hero received their powers in a fateful incident involving experimental radiation, particles, or chemicals, which has proven difficult or outright impossible to replicate.
  • There are a number of other origins that pertain to fantastical species and various creatures that appear specifically in the Marvel Universe, such as Eternals, Inhumans, or symbiotes.
• Superhero Packing Heat: While the rulebook says that the Ranged Weapon power set can also be imagined as a bow and arrows or throwing weapons, it's pretty clear from the power names and flavor ("Headshot," "Suppressive Fire," "Weapons Blazing") that this trope is what they were primarily going for.
• Superhero School: The X-Men Expansion has rules for an alternate advancement system, designed to mesh with a campaign that features young heroes learning how to use their powers at a school.
• Tech Tree: Some powers unlock the availability of other powers, in a "feat tree" kind of structure.
• Telepathy: The Telepathy power set equips a character with an arsenal of psychic attacks and abilities, such as reading minds, editing memories, or implanting hallucinations.
• Teleportation: The Teleportation power set is not only useful for moving from place to place instantly, but also gives a character a number of cinematic defensive tricks, like rapid-fire teleporting around an enemy to throw off their attacks or teleporting through a projectile's trajectory to avoid it.
• Time Master: Time powers are a subset of the Omniversal Travel power set, and include fan favorites such as time portals, instant-rewinding a failed roll to try again, and freezing time for your enemies while you continue to move freely.
• Turn-Based Combat: Like virtually all Tabletop RPGs, this one has it too.
• Virtual Training Simulation: The X-Men Expansion has rules for how to run heroes using the Danger Room, the X-Men's famously combat-oriented version of a holodeck.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: The Disguise and Shape-Shift powers from the Basic set allow a character to take on the appearance of anyone or anything they wish.
• Weather Manipulation: The Weather Control power set allows a character to flood the battlefield with many different kinds of inclement weather, such as fog, rain, or thunderstorms to hinder their foes and limit ranged attacks.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: Included in the X-Men Expansion, the new Luck Control power set gives a character abilities to generate better rolls for themselves or their allies, or jinx their enemies' rolls with bad luck.
• You Fight Like a Cow: Combat quipping is actually represented with mechanical heft by the Wisecracker power, in which a hero can make a sassy remark at an enemy to deal Focus damage or potentially stun them.