Short V&V Reviews – Chances to be Superheroic

Villains and Vigilantes is one of the oldest superheroic roleplaying games out there and it has recently been revised by the original authors and available from Monkey House games.  As V&V is a fairly direct system, conversion to another superhero system should not be that difficult for any of these works.

Each of the V&V books comes with a set of full color counters of the characters and bystanders (and sometime more) that can be printed out for game use.

Attack on the Poseidon Line involved the heroes on a cruise ship which is threatened by pirates but a much deeper plot is being played out.  It is a functional enough scenario but as structured it involves a lot of civilian deaths and not a lot of discussion on how the heroes can mitigate that, which strikes me as a serious flaw in a superheroic scenario.  It does have excellent maps of a cruise ship, submarine and supervillain base which could be useful for a variety of games.

Great Bridge is a collection of Japanese supervillain from the files of Department 88.  Primarily is it a source of anime/magna inspired supervillain and as such, it succeeds in it design goals.  However, that is all it does, none of the characters are particularly innovative in mechanical design or background, which there are a few clever lines scattered the descriptions it does not do much to distinguish itself from any other such sourcebook.

Signs of the Zodiac presents the Zodiac Syndicate, a group of diverse supervillain who have banded together for their mutual benefit, not world domination, but profit.  Each of the Zodiac members is fully written out and has an android assistant as 12 members are a bit unwieldy, they often function as 3-person teams built around the elements tied to the various Zodiac symbols, each team’s basic dynamics and tactics are covered.  Two full scenarios, along with additional superpowered characters, are included along with several scenario ideas.

Disclosure: As a featured reviewer for RPGNow/DriveThroughRPG, I received my copy of this product for free from the publisher for the purpose of this review.