Marvel Heroic Roleplaying: Character Generator

In the comments on my post about wanting too much from an RPG, I remembered that I had started working on a more sensible (to me) random character generator for Margaret Weis Productions’ Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game some time ago. The system already had a set of random generation rules, but I thought they were not so great. Much like the random chargen for the old TSR Marvel Superheroes RPG, the rules resulted in characters that were far too random. And so I had spent some time working out how to design a better random chargen for a superhero RPG, before ultimately forgetting about it. Well, I finally went back and finished that project, and I am making it available to anyone who is interested.

MWP lost the Marvel license years ago and had to pull all of their offerings, so this program is definitely a niche product. To add insult to injury, the application only runs on Windows! It’s fairly basic – there are two tabs and two buttons. The left button – “Generate Random Hero” – generates a new hero using MWP’s random tables. The right button – “Generate Themed Hero” – generates a new hero using a blend of MWP’s rules and a system that I came up with myself, which is based around power themes. The idea is that instead of getting a random grab-bag of powers that make little sense together, the random character would have a core suite of powers and abilities that fit the character’s overall theme. There’s still some randomness involved, though, so sometimes you’ll still get wacky results – just hopefully not as much! The data is pulled from an xml file, so you can mess around with that if you want to tweak the settings, or add new powers, or what have you.

There’s a tab that displays the hero in a form for easy editing, and another tab that displays the hero as rich text. You can make changes on the form, and when you flip over to the text tab it will be updated with any changes, so the program can also be used to make new characters, who can then be easily copy-and-pasted into Word or your editing application of choice.

The Crimson Avenger

As an example, I clicked the right-hand button and got a hero with some mystic abilities and a weapon of some kind:

Form View

Text View

I took about 10 minutes to fill in the blanks, and what I ended up with is probably not the hottest new character to dominate the sales charts, but he’s certainly playable. Theordore Eldritch is… the Crimson Avenger! A former Olympic fencer who discovered the deadly Red Blade, and sought training in the mystic arts in order to unlock the Blade’s true power! (which remains locked, for now) He’s flamboyant, he’s cocky, and he’s stylish! I also altered his Affiliations a little, so that he works best with a partner – preferably a more low-key person – that he can play off of. You can see how I took the generator’s suggestions for Distinctions and Milestones and fleshed them out:

Form View

Text View

If I was going to play this character, I would make some further tweaks – making the blade more important and more interesting, and downplaying the sorcery, perhaps. But that’s the fun of random characters, right? They can serve as a good starting point for a more fully-formed character.

The Random Hero Generator can be downloaded here. If you come across any issues, please use the Contact page to send me a message. And please include as many details as possible in what led up to the issue so that I can try and track it down.

Update: made a few minor bug fixes and found differently-colored dice images.