Godlike: Superhero Roleplaying in a World on Fire, 1936-1946 (Hardcover)

~ Dennis Detwiller (Author), Greg Stolze (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

GODLIKE ultimately succeeds because it successfully and believably integrates superheroes into the war.... Our Pick: 'A'. -- Ken Newquist, Science Fiction Weekly (SciFi.com), March 11, 2002

Godlike ultimately succeeds because it successfully and believably integrates superheroes into the war.... Our Pick: 'A'. -- Ken Newquist, Science Fiction Weekly, March 11, 2002

Not only an excellent World War II RPG, but an excellent superhero game as well. -- Matthew Pook, Pyramid, March 8, 2002

The world is richly super [yet] delightfully bleak and war-torn.... Look, up in the sky -- and take cover. -- Kenneth Hite, Out of the Box, February 24, 2002

Product Description

Released in 2002 to critical acclaim, GODLIKE is a superhero roleplaying game like no other. There is no bright spandex, no pulp machismo. In the face of the greatest conflict in history, ordinary men and women emerge with the Talents their times demand, but who are still as vulnerable -- and eventually as expendable -- as the ordinary troops in the foxholes.

GODLIKE features an intensively researched alternate history of World War II, the depth of setting and character for which award-winning author Dennis Detwiller (Delta Green) is famous, an innovative rules set by Greg Stolze (Unknown Armies), and a complete "D20" rules conversion by Mike Mearls. GODLIKE: You are larger than life... but the War is larger than you.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Impressions Advertising & Marketing (March 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971064202
• ISBN-13: 978-0971064201
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 8.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,086,740 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Godlike, a great WWII super-hero game, November 27, 2002

By	Judd Karlman (Ithaca, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Godlike is a game set in World War II that manages to play with and break most previous super-heroic conventions.

If you want to play 4-color All-Star Squadron type WWII capes and cowls, that option is there but the default setting for the game is a gritty and brutal world where the players don't wear costumes to show their powered status out of fear of enemy snipers taking them out.

The game probably owes more to George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards or Saving Private Ryan than standard super-hero comic books.

The book is self-contained and while supplements will be coming out, none are necessary to break the book out and play a successful campaign. Furthermore, in an alternate history game, a supplement is only a library (or an Amazon.com) away.

The system makes combat fast and brutal. Their O.R.E. (One Roll Engine) gives damage, hit location, and initiative in one easy to-hit roll. The character creation is also quite simple, a nice change from past super-hero systems with mind-numbing number crunching.

All in all I can't recommend this book enough, it is a great role-playing game.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Solid Game, May 4, 2003

By	"zuckus-5" (Arlington, Virginia) - See all my reviews

One of the best superhero games on the market. Uniquely simple, the Godlike system allows for fast and easy play. There are some flaws in the system, namely hard dice, but no system is perfect. The setting is great and the book does a good job of developing the World War II era. My biggest problem with the book is that many original copies had poor binding. Luckily, the producers of the book will allow you to send it back and get a new book with good binding.
If you are a fan of superhero gaming, this is the game for you.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing Take on Superhero RPGs, August 31, 2008

By	Rodney Meek (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've been a bit of a fan of Detwiller since picking up some of his Delta Green material awhile back, so I thought I'd take a look at his version of a superhero RPG. Godlike was originally released in 2001 through Pagan Publishing and is now supported by EOS Press, although there's only been one major supplement in the interim, "Wild Talents" in 2006.

This book introduces Detwiller's take on superheroics, which is basically that life is nasty, brutish, and short in wartime. The uber-legendary Talents amongst the cast of Allied and Axis NPCs top out at 150 building points--PCs generally will start with 25. This means that they'll have one pretty cool power, but with major limitations. Maybe you can lift a jeep, but you're as vulnerable to a round through the head as anyone else. Or perhaps you DO have the power of invulnerability to weapons fire--but only if you see it coming, which does you little good when a sniper's got a scope on you. Or you stumble into poison gas. Also, there are certain Talents (so-called Zeds) who suppress everyone's abilities just by walking into range. Even if that weren't a factor, when Talents battle each other, they tend to interfere with each other's powers and make them more difficult to use, so random bystanders can pick them off with a few carefully placed shots.

This is in keeping with Detwiller's overall intent--a consideration of why, if superheroes existed, they didn't just end WWII in four days on their own. In the Godlike world, the Talents are seldom powerful enough to have a chance to make really significant impacts. And there are literally tens of thousands of superpowered individuals, so whenever one of them might start wreaking havoc somewhere, a half-dozen opponents will quickly show up to stop him or her. Overall, the life expectancy of the average battlefront Talent is not good at all.

The game uses an interesting dice pool mechanic based solely on 10-siders. (Vaguely reminiscent of the d6 approach of West End's Star Wars RPG for you old-schoolers.) The higher your attribute or skill, the more dice you can sling. You want to get matches to succeed--the higher the pair (or trio, or quad...), the more awesome your success. Often, you only need a single match of any kind to succeed, but in other cases you have to get at least, say, a pair of sixes. So, a matching pair is critical, but as important is getting as many of a kind as possible, because that determines how fast you perform your action. So, if you roll five d10 and come up with a pair of 9s, you succeeded really well...but you didn't go as fast as the guy who rolled three 3s. This becomes important in combat situations because the faster guy can mess with the slower guy's roll. Depending upon your character build, you may also have paid building points at the outset to ensure that for a given skill or power you will ALWAYS have a pair of 10s in your pool, or you can always deploy a wild die to expand a matching pair into a triplet so you go faster.

The book includes plenty of stuff on how to create your character with attributes, skills, and powers (plus flaw if you need to cheapen the cost of desired builds), a list of equipment, weapons, and vehicles (but not in nerdy detail where the author feels compelled to expound on the virtues of the German Tiger II tank versus the Soviet T-34), background details on how the various combatants treated and deployed their Talents, and a huge section that goes through the entire war to list major battles and developments and the roles played by assorted Talents. Scattered throughout this last are sidebars about prominent Talents--when they manifested, what side they're on, what their powers are, what kind of background they have, and what they did in the war and, if they survived, in civilian life afterwards. (Ten of these NPCs are fully statted out toward the end of the book.) Memorable Talents are the Immortal, who is, well, immortal, to the point where his body reconstitutes itself even if completely destroyed; Lord Yama, apparently also immortal and evidently some kind of minor Indian god with the Word of Command who ends up founding his own nation of Assam; "Super-Man", who became ultra-powerful but vehemently anti-war, and who ended up with a lobotomy for his troubles; Aesgir, who could break nearly anything, was nearly invulnerable, and who could ferry entire groups of people through the pocket dimension of Valhalla (essentially a walking-speed teleport); and of course the out-of-control and completely mad Baba Yaga, who manifested through vile Soviet experiments on their own citizenry and who turned into a large hut on pincered tentacle-legs with enough strength to casually toss tanks around.

Detwiller brings an interesting authorial voice to this work, especially in his introduction, which is unusually frank for the industry. This particular work may not be to the taste of everyone, especially those who want their PCs to start out with powers at least in the Iron Man range, but for those who have been yearning to mix WWII squad-level combat with low-level gritty superpowered heroics, this'll be just the thing.