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IMPORTANT: This review assumes you are familiar with the terms and concepts introduced at http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com, in the essays "System Does Matter" and "The Nuked Apple-cart." Also: my ratings are highly subjective and have nothing to do with anyone else's priorities. I only include them because they are required.

Stuper Powers is exactly what I think an RPG, as a physical object, ought to be. It's slim, only 32 pages, and attractive and classy in appearance. It offers precisely what you need to understand its premise and run a fun session with no crap to wade through. First I'll tell you what's in it and how it worked, and then I'll tell you why I think there's an economic lesson here for us all.

Here's the premise: you're a superhero, and you want to fight crime, and you want to save the day, and indeed, the villains are up to no good... and your powers really, really suck. Good luck!

Those who've seen the movie Mystery Men will recognize this situation instantly (actually, the game pre-dates the movie, although not the original mysterymen comic by Bob Burden). The game's rules are hysterical to read, especially the powers, many of which involve bodily functions. I'm not going to list them, 'cause you can see it all at their website. My favorites include Prehensile Nipples, Induce Vietnam Flashbacks, and the truly brilliant Street Sign Power. There's some good RPG and comics satire scattered throughout as well.

All that said, I'm usually not interested in very comedic RPGs. They often don't play too well, certainly not as well as they read. What matters to me is whether the game actually plays. And in Stuper Powers, to the authors' credit, they realize that the burden falls on the GM to make a play session interesting as well as funny. They offer the very best, most important insight into super-powered role-playing of any kind: the hero must be out-classed, and victory must depend on some combination of understanding and out-witting the villain. In Stuper Powers, you just happen to be out-classed by a wide margin.

For our session, instead of using the suggested "Stuperworld" setting (which is basically as if Mad Magazine were to slam Marvel real good), I decided to use villains with pretty good classic comics powers, which meant Our Heroes were guaranteed to be stomped immediately in any simple face-off. And glory be, the players rose to the occasion and sure enough out-thunk, out-smarted, and out-geeked the bad-asses to save the day. Even with powers like Sweaty Palms and Bake a Pound Cake in 30 Seconds. So this game gets high marks on being good solid RPG material, even if it's funny.

How about the system itself? This is an unabashedly Narrativist RPG, with absolutely no concessions to Gamism or Simulationism at all. · One's character is defined as the actual "you," which harks all the way back to one of the first supers RPGs, Villains and Vigilantes. This may be nothing more than a quick way to bypass a more complex system, but it works reasonably well. · Powers are assigned by rolling dice, the only time these objects are used. In practice, I also had the players make up a new powers each and assign them to the player on their left. · The powers-rules are very clear and perfectly playable for those of us who really don't care much about range, area-of-effect, duration, and all that stuff. · The resolution system for any chancy outcome is the (as they call it) Binary Variable RPG System, also known as flipping a coin, or alternately, rock-paper-scissors. I found these a little too simplistic, in terms of generating story events during play, in that I like my Fortune methods to include some gradation of competence. The players seemed to like it, though. · Another plus is the Unstoppable Productions website, which acts as an ongoing supplement for the game, with regularly updated adventures, new powers as submitted by players from all over, and plenty of art.

Stuper Powers offers an important economics lesson to any visitor to the Forge. They began back in 1995 or so with the classic, usual distributor-to-retailer model of RPG publishing. They wrote, illustrated, and printed up the copies of their game; they spent just as much or more on advertising and promotion. Due to dishonesty on others' parts, the game got very poor distribution and was slammed economically; the authors (publishers) basically ate the loss and sat on a huge carton of unsold games. Last fall, though, they opened up their website to sell the game direct, and according to my inside info, they have already recovered their production costs.

Is this not clear as the limpid blue gaze of a newborn babe? What it means to me, anyway, is that direct web-based sales work, and the usual book-publishing, distributor-based system doesn't. Unstoppable Productions is doing it right, and maybe the rest of us can learn from their experience... and not go down that expensive, ultimately useless detour offered by the distributor-retailer system in the first place.

All right, polemic's over -- the bottom line for the review is that Stuper Powers is a steal for its price. It's for role-players who know how to take a premise and run with it. If your role-playing preferences match with mine to any extent (as evidenced by my other reviews), then this game is highly recommended.