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Godlike is, in short, a fantastic game.

There’s been a substantial spike of interest in World War II ever since Saving Private Ryan came out. I have a number of problems with Saving Private Ryan – there’s something creepy about the way that it fetishizes the martyrdom of American G.I’s – but I can acknowledge that it’s had a profound affect on the zeitgeist, as it were. Godlike basically asks the question "How much would World War II be affected if there were superhumans?" and answers it "Not a whole lot."

Talents, as superhumans are dubbed in this setting, have superhuman powers, but those powers are frequently limited by the seemingly self-imposed limits that Talents have. It’s fashionable to say "You may be able to perform mighty feat X, but that won’t stop a bullet"; I’ve fortunately managed to avoid the temptation, especially since dying from a stray bullet is a profoundly obnoxious anticlimax in any story.

It’s difficult to describe Godlike’s tone, really. If you pushed me, I’d say that it’s a World War II game about the instability and insanity of war; not so much the "my best friend is spaghetti sauce" sense, but the unsettling nature of being around somebody who has an invisible dragon named Mr. Chips that’ll knock you on your ass if you’re unpleasant to Lieutenant Moore.

The superhuman powers that people manifest aren’t the product of radiation or cosmic manipulation; they’re the result of a will strong enough to make the world act according to the way that they want it, even if that will is unconscious. The system here is a marvel, easily busting MacLennan’s first law (which, of course, I’ve been pimping every chance I get.) You roll ten-sided dice and look for matches, the more, the better. If the numbers matching are high, then you perform it quickly; if low, slowly. It also allows, UA-style, to determine whether the shot hit, where, and how much damage you did in a single roll. It’s a little tricky to get used to, and I’m not sure that I would have slaved speed of task resolution to the "height" of the roll, but it’s a simple system, and it manages to be both quick and easy to resolve.

Of course, as an extra thumb in the eye of the first law, there’s d20 rules in the back anyhow, capably written up by Mike Mearls. You have to love that they’re so confident in their own system that they throw in d20 just as an afterthought, letting you make your own decision about what system to use.

The powers system is neatly done. While the book does give you a perfectly good system for building your own powers from scratch – using a point system – there’s also a cafeteria-style selection of common powers that you can use without much alteration, including benefits and flaws that you can use to personalize it. Actually, the way that powers work in this game is one of the things that makes it so unique. Almost all of the Talents listed in the book have only one power, making them very useful in a limited field but offering no special benefit otherwise – Cien can create gigantic hands which can crush via telekinesis, but has to have his shadow touching the object to be manipulated in order to do it. Jumping Johnny can jump seven miles at a time, but crushes whatever’s underneath him whenever he lands. Le Sumner can become invisible, but only if he closes his eyes, and so forth.

The standard high-realism campaign allows players about twenty-five points to play around with, which is about enough to get one fairly strong power or, say, two weak ones, which forces players to streamline their characters down to the core concept, rather than taking a big-ass plate of whatever’s available; characters that spread themselves too thinly will wind up with a broad selection of very weak powers.

You can, however, decrease the cost of a power by taking a weakness with it - maybe your invisible friend only shows up at night, or maybe your flight power means that you never, ever touch the ground for the rest of your life, and so on and so forth. By the same measure, you can also boost a particular power, and there are specialized extras for some of the more common powers, like adding an area effect or armor penetration to the Harm power. (Harm’s also got two of the better penalties attached to it; Gruesome, which blows up enemies in a spectacularly ugly manner - shades of Fallout’s Bloody Mess perk - and Jumpy, which means that your Harm power goes off if you’re startled. Wake with caution.) There’s also rules for Goldberg science, which lets you jury-rg inventions to simulate any power you want, but at a mondo point cost, and at the expense of tying up Will in static devices.

I will point out that the system isn’t as flexible as I would have liked; or, more specifically, you’re going to have to work with your GM in order to come up with the appropriate points cost for a power. The first Talent that I created, John "Superkraut" Williams, was supposed to be an infiltration Talent who would slip behind Nazi lines, then projects an illusion of himself as a powerful German Talent who then sends the local Nazi troops into prearranged deathtraps and ambushes, with Hypercommand as a chaser. However, the Projected Hallucination Talent doesn’t really allow you to create an "anima banner", to steal a term from Aberrant, and the cost of such a power is almost prohibitive.

Now, to be sure, Projected Hallucination is a powerful Talent, but I only wanted it for a single, narrowly defined situation, and the discounts offered in the book don’t really cover how to determine the points cost of something like that. At the standard outlay of 25 points, I could only pick up a few dice in Projected Hallucination, which I didn’t feel gave me enough dice to safely pull off that trick.

The same occurred with a Russian trooper that I tried to build, Piotr "Vysh" Straganovich, who could turn himself into a carpet of human lice, sneak behind German lines, then reform and commit acts of sabotage before returning to his own lines. There’s a Transform power available for that, but it makes you purchase more dice for becoming smaller and smaller. Since each dice you have adds an extra dice to your dodge pool, that’s fair, but it didn’t really provide an option for turning my character into a swarm of smaller creatures, rather than one creature. I think that the game’s standard solution is to simply have the player and the GM work together to find an appropriate cost for the Talent that you’re selecting - and the game does provide a neat engine for doing so - but there’s a lot of GM handwaving and compromise involved even then.

Working by yourself, you almost have to guess at the appropriate result. It would have been nice to see a limited option for each power, so that you can take a nerfed version of the power really cheaply, then buy up its power under a very specific condition. I should also note that some of the book’s signature characters have flaws and merits that aren’t mentioned or defined within the book - for example, Cien has the ability to use telekinesis whereever his shadow falls, but also has a skill called "Shadow Positioning" that determines how many dice he can throw for his TK skill. An option to slave a particular power to a skill, however, isn’t listed in the main rules. (To another power, yes; skill, no.)

Hyperstats and hyperskills also merit some explanation. Both are measured by dice – hard dice grant automatic successes, while you can set wiggle dice to whatever number you want, which in turn gives you more freedom to pick the result you want. It’s a neat way to tweak the system to make hyperstats useful without breaking the rest of the game. To boot, it’s entirely possible for Talents to simply cancel out each other’s powers just on sight; so while it’s possible to have superhuman slugfests (which we get on Omaha Beach, in the "Ten Minutes of Hell") it’s also possible for your powers to be abruptly cancelled in Talent vs. Talent combat by expenditure of will, or by an interference Talent. It’s easy to go from flying across the sky to scuttling for the safety of a foxhole after the anti-aircraft starts up. The PCs can’t use their powers to escape the stress and the grit of combat. They will still die if they’re shot at the wrong time. They still have to use their brains, rather than their powers. It’s that kind of vulnerability that makes Godlike really unique, rather than just another supers game.

The majority of the book’s tone is derived from the titanic description of World War II as it’s affected by Talents, ranging from the first appearance of Der Flieger, an Aryan flier, to the emergence of Israel as a world power thanks to its Talent-based League of Five Thousand. Every entry that involves Talents winds up with a bullet hole next to it, but there’s almost no major event that’s changed by the appearance of Talents; Stalingrad is still a boiling cauldron of bullets, frost and lice, Pearl Harbor occurs as planned, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still nuked and so forth. There’s still Talent influence, of course. Hitler’s corpse is incinerated by a Talent, rather than by kerosene, and the Arizona survives thanks to a precognitive dream; the Battle of the Bulge is replaced by the Twilight of the Gods, which involves the world’s first major battle between superhuman armies. There’s events which are entirely fictional, like the temporary reclamation of Prague by a teleported partisan army, or the establishment of a new country by an extremely powerful Talent, but they don’t impact the war as much as you’d think.

That’s actually one of the major strengths of the book as written. There have been innumerable books written about World War II, each of them focusing on a specific part. All you need to fight the battle of Stalingrad with Talents is an evening to read about Stalingrad - I’d suggest William Craig’s Enemy At the Gates over Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, but both are good - and some thought on your part, and you’ve got a campaign sitting right there in your hands. Just for example, imagine a Russian Talent who’s able to dissolve his body into a horde of lice (lice were nearly omnipresent in both armies, especially when the Sixth Army was trapped by the Soviet advances), or a German whose regeneration talent has made him a mobile feast for fellow German prisoners-turned-cannibals.

I should also note one of the game’s more interesting ideas, that the powers of Talents are frequently limited only by their sanity. One of the game’s most powerful and terrifying Talents is Baba Yaga, a Russian Talent who manifested after weeks of torture in a program Stalin created to forcibly create Talents. If it has limits, the book doesn’t say, and the single illustration of it - a house walking across tundra on dozens of crustacean tentacles - is one of the creepiest in the entire book. It feels like an attempt to bring some of the horror of Call of Cthulhu into the game, and it’s a good one.

There’s also mad Talents on the Allied side, too – one of whom believes he’s Jesus, with the powers to back it up, and another whose idealistic view of himself as Superman results in him killing his own side’s soldiers own for firing on the Japanese. It’s a fascinating idea, and one that’s due for exploration in one of Godlike’s sequels. (Please, please, please…)

Actually, speaking of the artwork: The artwork that Dennis Detwiller does is excellent, although his compositions are sometimes a little stiff. However, much of the book’s art are archival photos from World War II that have been Photoshopped to include some kind of superhuman activity – a little human silhouette in the sky behind a picture of a tank, or above the Reichstag, or hanging above the street.

The problem with these photographs is that the digital artist involved didn’t realize that the photographs had been taken by experts, and so had a specific focus. Instead of the original composition intended by the photographer, you’ll have, say, a trio of soldiers running towards a building while a jeep hovers in the background, or a tiny little human silhouette in the distance. It spoils the effect of the photograph, since all of your attention is diverted from the focus of the picture and onto the jarring detail that doesn’t fit. There’s a pretty decent section on the culture of the United States, the law as it applies to Talents, and so forth – for example, captured enemy Talents are threatened with deportation to the Russian front if they don’t behave, and uncontrollable Talents are either lobotomized or kept under sedation.

The section on racism and sexism are a little iffy. I agree with the characterization of American society as being racist at the time, but the author’s description of American women as not being trusted with tasks of any great importance is completely loopy. I mean, Jesus Christ, the women of America were trusted with building the planes and tanks that the men would drive to war against Hitler; if that’s not a "task of great importance", I don’t know what the hell is. For that matter, that’s what caused the entry of women into the American workplace; if Rosie the Riveter could put a tank together, then she should be able to sell real estate. There were also a number of military organizations which allowed women to serve – WAACS, WAAFS and so forth. There is, to be sure, a wide vein of maddeningly piggish sexism running through that era, but women were doing a lot on the home front, more than the book credits them with. Women in the United States weren’t allowed to fight, true, but there were plenty of French and Soviet partisans who were women.

Anyways. It is unfortunate that the book doesn’t describe life during wartime for France, Russia, and so forth – I’d love to see more detail on how Talents are treated in Russia, or how the French resistance handles recruitment of new Talents – but I imagine that’s being left for a future book. (Again: Please, please, please…) The book rounds itself out with a description of a standard TOG Talent squad, where you see more of the fantastic imagination put into Talents mixed in with the average combat squad – a cocky smartass who can make explosives detonate by giving them the finger, a quiet smart guy who can see guns through solid objects, a flier who’s got a phobia of heights, a guy who can throw objects – but not lift them – and so forth.

It’s difficult to give Godlike the praise that it deserves, to be honest. The entire book works together, system with setting with fluff, to create a really excellent RPG. It’s not necessarily going to be of interest to those who are looking for a superheroes game – Mutants and Masterminds is a better comic-book sim – but it’s pretty much a must-have for anybody who likes the best of what role-playing has to offer. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

-Darren MacLennan

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