Monday, February 18, 2013

Supernatural & Smallville

One of the BEST games I have ever played at Gen Con was a Supernatural/Buffy/Charmed mash up.  Characters were characters from the various shows and the system was the Buffy Unisystem game.  There was another version of it that was run the night before using the Supernatural version of Cortex.

It was a lot of fun.

So it is kinda sad to note that Margaret Weis Productions is closing shop on two of their popular game lines, Supernatural & Smallville.

It's not a surprise really, licenses like this come and go all the time.  But you only have to the end of this month to get books from either system.

I spent a lot of time with Cortex over the last few years.  You can follow those insights (and baseless opinions) here, http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/search/label/cortex

Supernatural is closer to the original cortex rules and more similar to Unisystem.  So close in fact it is pretty easy to use ideas from one game in the other. Willow and Tara (and Vampire Tara) converted rather nicely I thought.

Smallville is the first of the "Cortex Plus" games.  The conversions here are more concept based than actually crunching numbers.

In both cases these are fun games and if you haven't picked them up this is your last chance.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder how many of these books will show up on sites like ebay in the future...and be priced as hard to get for their customers...

Timothy S. Brannan said...

The print eds have been out of print for a bit and they are going for a big markup in after-market sales.

I would be nice if the authors (both friends of mine) were getting a cut of that.

Anonymous said...

I really like Supernatura, but I was always hesitant to pick up the RPG because, with the show still ongoing, it seemed like the RPG would likely become out-of-date in the face of the show's progression.

E.g. the material in the RPG is likely not going to be updated for what we're just starting to learn about the Men of Letters.

Maybe that was silly, but it was enough to put me off of the game.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

@alzrius, Yeah I was not able to keep up with the show for various reason (none of which has anything to do with the show itself, just bad timing) so for me the game is complete! ;)

Not sure if the other books in the series update it all or not. Certainly none will update it to the next season.