There is SO much I'm supposed to be, need to be, doing. phone calls, household chores, appointments, emails, social engagements to rsvp, birthdays to acknowledge, ... but when Thymewind asked me to look over the FoxCon website, I saw that 'DoddNK' (my GMing Sensei) was running a superhero rpg at the Con that I didn't recognize. 'How could this be? Would DoddNK try something newfangled? Could something old exist I didn't know about by now?', says I, and google it. "The 4C System" turns out to stand for 'four color' and it's an open source retroclone (no, seriously, that's a word; a movement, even) of the original Marvel Super-Heroes Roleplaying Game. Yes, someone *paraphrased* the rules to create a version of the game that you can legally make supplements for, decades after the original company-owned version went out of print. (The original game rated success on a color-coded scale, but changing those colors into the four ink colors formerly used to print all comicbooks was a touch of genius. Likewise, 'column shifts' become 'row steps', which means the same with fewer letters.) This is so cool, in an unexplainable geeky way. It makes me want to write an adventure scenario entitled "Crisis on Earth-Red" (positing four parallel earths, wherein Yellow is Golden Age, Blue is Silver Age, and one of the other two is Dark Age.) However, despite its open source nature, my attempts to download a free e-copy of the 4C rules all fail, and I remain unsure about buying something I technically already have, just in different words. Maybe if it were cheap enough.
Anyway, in surfing about looking, I find out that Steve Kenson, the creator of M&M, has created _Icons_, a rules-light fast-playing generic superhero game inspired by old superhero rpgs, notably MSH, but with Fudge-inspired narrative mechanics. So, it's like my Marvel Fudge game, except ever so more so; those ideas, more fully developed, and made more stand-alone. There are times when I see someone else succeeding with a project based on ideas like mine that I haven't followed through on and get depressed; but there are also, perhaps more often, times when seeing that success find an audience vindicates my ideas and tastes and instincts, and I say to myself not "that could have been me." but rather, "That could be me, next time." Maybe if I can make Chicagoplex into something viable and self-supporting,* it could find an audience, too. In the meantime, I really want to snag a copy of _Icons_ and see what else he's done with those ideas.
[*or the Hudsucker Inception, or the All-Star Project, or any of the other fifty half-finished projects piled up in the workshop in the basement of my mind. It's looks like my grandfather's workshop did, but with more paper and clutter. maybe a blackboard.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
