Issue 15 - YZE Invincible?!
2025 #2: I love most of Free League's RPGs. I adore the Invincible comic Robert Kirkman authored. Is this a match made in heaven?
Hi everyone, welcome back to Harrigan’s Hearth.
I’d been debating my next Substack topic1 when some news broke from Free League today. Some news that… kinda floored me.
A YZE SUPERS GAME?!
Swedish RPG powerhouse Fria Ligan, better known the world over as Free League Publishing, has acquired the rights to make a roleplaying game based on the Invincible comic written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley.
This excites me. This excites me a lot. I’ll explain why.
The Stockholm-based company, in business since 2011, has produced some of my favorite RPGs of the last decade and a half, including Coriolis, Symbaroum, Tales from the Loop, Forbidden Lands, Alien, Vaesen, Twilight 2000, Blade Runner, and The Walking Dead. Many of these games use the “Year Zero Engine” (YZE) underpinnings first seen in Mutant Year Zero, and while some of the publisher’s early efforts need a bit of spit polish to really shine, most of their recent works have really hit the mark for me.2
Mechanics of the YZE games aside, Free League’s art, editing, writing and book quality3 is practically without peer in the industry. The Invincible Superhero Roleplaying game will be a quality product, of that there is little doubt.
And on the other side of the fence, the intellectual property (IP) in question is so freaking good. I don’t collect comics these days, but I have about a hundred issues of the 144 issue Invincible run that Kirkman & company did earlier in the millennium. It is superhero action, drama, art and story at its finest — and is now in its second season of adaptation on Amazon Prime. Along with a surprising amount of gore4, Invincible had extremely likable characters, super high-octane action, and above all, heart. It’s one of my favorite comics, and I say that as someone who has read many thousands of comics over the span of his life.5
Superhero stories weren’t the only comics that I read, but they were my bread and butter until I was about fifteen — when I discovered RPGs. AD&D was first, but as soon as I saw Marvel Super-Heroes on the rack6, I knew it had to be mine. And then, from the moment Spidey talked directly to me in that game… it was all over. I’ve been a hopeless fan of superhero RPGs since then, and own dozens of the things, in print and PDF.
I played the crap out of Champions. Experimented with GURPS Supers and Silver Age Sentinels. Reluctantly ran7 and played in a bunch of Mutants & Masterminds games because for a while it seemed like that’s all anyone played. I tinkered with BASH!, I messed with Heroes Accelerated, Icons and other Fate-powered games. I played Masks. I settled on SUPERS! by Simon Washbourne (of Barbarians of Lemuria fame) for many years and still dearly love that game, and its follow-up, the Revised Edition. I’ve tinkered with various Cortex games, OSR-powered superhero games, indie supers RPGs, minimalist supers games… the list goes on.
Current favorites include Hit the Streets: Defend the Block for lighter weight, high-drama games focused on young and struggling supers, and Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition for more straight-ahead, four color play. Many games have been described as the spiritual successor of the cornerstone supers RPG Champions, but P&P UE really seems to be exactly that. I’m liking it more and more the more I play it.8
So that’s all to say… with all these games in my library, and with YZE d6 dice pool mechanics9 kind of known for being swingy and punching players in the mouth at the worst times, why bother with this new supers RPG?
Setting aside the IP, which I’ve already said I dig a great deal, I think there’s the potential for a great game here — if designers Adam Bradford10 and Tomas Härenstam11 get it right. But therein lies the rub, as I personally think a lot of superhero RPGs miss the boat in some key areas.
Here’s what I’m hoping to see, and not see, in the game.
DO…
Stick with the d6 dice pool version of YZE, gang. Nothing says super to me like a fistful of six-sided dice.
And, critically, allow players to leverage extra successes! Make an attack armor-piercing, indirect, or area affect! Nail a second target, hit harder, make the power last longer! Extra successes can power so much.
Use the Stress Dice from Alien and The Walking Dead.
Specifically, use the improved ones from TWD. Then fine-tune them for super-heroics. Think about how a ‘1’ on your Stress Die might represent collateral damage, your Angry Girlfriend gauge increasing, your rival showing up, your enemy tracking you down, the dog eating your homework…
And imagine this for a moment. What if these Stress Dice were actually Power Dice, and represented how much effort the hero or heroine was willing to put into the power use? With me? Now we’re modeling the super potentially over-doing it. Losing control, burning down a school, punching a baby, injuring a bunch of blind nuns — because you chose to roll a big handful of Power Dice, needing to succeed. I don’t know that I’ve seen this comic trope modeled very well before… but it’s right there for the taking with Invincible.12
Include a mechanic that measures Reputation / Fame.
Include ‘success at cost’ and the other modern fail-forward takes seen in Vaesen.
Include mechanics for bases, vehicles, and gadgets.
Do something with metacurrency, beyond pushing mechanics. Give the players a little more control over high-stakes outcomes, without just giving them a win button. This might just be a variation on stress dice — power dice, effort dice, hero dice, gumption, guts — or a new and perhaps rare currency that lets the PC really grab the spotlight.
Develop a system for modeling the “real-life,” masks-off drama so common in comics like the early Lee-Ditko Spider-Man, or, indeed Invincible. Model Troubles, Real Life Complications, Weaknesses and the like… and include a system that makes them come into the foreground or fade into the background in each issue. Make them dynamic, able to improve and get worse depending on what the PC does, ignoring or addressing them. Blowing off that homework, job, boyfriend, or worried parent so you can swing downtown and fight The Flea? Amp up the Complication Level and make it more likely to come to the foreground of the issue.
I’ve been half-heartedly designing my own supers systems for years, and it includes mechanics for exactly this. Come on, Invincible, nail this so I don’t have to feel bad about not finishing the project!
DO NOT…
Offer up giant lists of super powers, modifiers, limitations, advantages and so on. Don’t make it point-buy. No one needs this. We have six hundred other games doing this.
Use the Condition-based pushing mechanic from Tales from the Loop and Vaesen. It feels bad in those games, and it’ll feel far worse in a superhero game.
Use Conditions at all. They’re lame and I’ll eventually write a blogpost explaining why. Go with the Health track from TWD and add one for something like Mental Fortitude or develop a Consequences system as seen in Fate.
Just have a straight death mechanic for heroes and heroines. Set it up with some interesting outcomes — lasting injuries, replacement limbs, changed drives and outlooks, coming back as a ghost or clone, you get the idea. Longshot City, a heavily flawed but kind of wonderful supers game based on Troika! does this in spades. I mean… check this shit out:
That right there is gold, Jerry. Gold!
WRAPPING UP
Alright, enough of my salivating about what might be with this forthcoming superhero RPG. I have high hopes based on Free League’s track record, and while Härenstam is not my favorite designer in that cadre of talented Swedes, he’s still solid and I think is improving with each game.
Tune in next time for my experiences at Genghis Con 2025 in Aurora, Colorado. Spoiler: It was a great time, and the games were universally excellent.
Cheers, and if you see a supervillain, punch a supervillain!
Was contemplating a deepish dive on Outcast Silver Raiders, which I am about to run a campaign of… or covering my (great) experiences at Genghis Con 2025 in Colorado, where I ran O.S.R. and played Call of Cthulhu, Outgunned, and a couple of games of Savage Worlds. Stay tuned for a future issue if these things are of interest.
Coriolis and Forbidden Lands especially could use second editions in my opinion. Twilight 2000 (T2K), The Walking Dead and Blade Runner are all works of RPG art. Robert Kirkman, of course, also penned The Walking Dead comic. So — there’s the connection that I’m sure led to the coming Invincible RPG.
Printed in Lithuania, their book construction, paper quality, binding and durability is just stellar. Holding one in your hands is a joy.
Invincible doesn’t shy away from what would happen if regular people went up against the likes of Superman. It’s gloriously gross and gory at times.
Comics were utterly formative for me as a kid. Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, World’s Finest, The Brave and the Bold, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Ka-Zar, Justice Society, Legion of Super-Heroes, X-Men, Iron Man, Avengers, Thor, Hulk, Archie, Casper, Uncle Scrooge, Richie Rich, Unknown Soldier, Sgt. Rock, Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos, Haunted Tank / G.I. Combat, Weird War — I devoured it all. And when I got back into comics in the 90s, wow. Image, Malibu, Vertigo, Dark Horse — the new printing technologies were incredible, and books like Hellboy, Astro City, Savage Dragon, Tom Strong, Preacher, Sin City, Atomic Robo, Invincible and so many more made a big, big impact on me — and, I think, on my creative processes.
I missed Villains & Vigilantes, early versions of Champions and other foundational supers RPGs. Also, while I owned MSH — I couldn’t get my players to play it!
I’ll note that I hated d20 games so much at this point in my RPG ‘career’ that I switched to a 2d10 resolution mechanic for M&M. Worked great.
Talked about it a bit last issue, in fact. I’ll likely continue to bring it up. It’s good.
Most YZE games use a d6 dice pool where you bounce a bunch of Risk dice and look for a six to succeed. A couple (T2K, Blade Runner) swap in d8s, d10s and d12s, but tweak things so that the odds remain about the same while the overall number of possible successes is limited.
A D&D Beyond guy? I think? (A 5e guy, I’m not.)
One of the co-founders, lead designers and head honchos at Free League, Härenstam has designed the rules for Forbidden Lands, Alien, T2K, Blade Runner, Dragonbane and more. Quite a resume.
Please let me know if you know of a game that nails this!
Very interested in your take on conditions.
Just as a point of clarification, Invincible is now on its third season on Amazon Prime.