Pyramid Review
Truth & Justice RPG
Published by Atomic Sock Monkey
Written by Chad Underkoffler
Cover by Greg Holkan
Illustrated by Greg Holkan, Scott Kane, & Randy Milholland
133-page PDF document, $13
133-page b&w softcover; $25One of the most interesting roleplaying games of 2004 was Chad Underkoffler's Dead Inside: The Roleplaying Game of Loss & Redemption, detailing as it did the loss and eventual regaining of its protagonists' souls in the dream-like Spirit World. He has since followed it up with the surprisingly deep but nevertheless zany and knockabout Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot RPG, based on the Origins-Award-nominated board game of the same name. The third of his titles tackles an altogether more traditional genre, that of the superhero comic book.
Commercially this is already a crowded market, but unfazed by such pressures Truth & Justice is not just a complete roleplaying game but also a platform from which Chad can cast his eye over the genre. This is evidenced in the opening chapter, which describes and analyses each of the genre's elements, forms, and eras. Both an interesting read and an excellent good introduction to the genre, this is intelligent and informative and about as dry as you would want without being scholarly. Pleasingly, this explanation comes right up to date in including the animated version of the genre, best typified by Batman: The Animated Series.
But before all this analysis, the author explains what Truth & Justice is all about: the struggle to . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: February 24, 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.