Pyramid Review
Capes
Designed, Written, & Art by Tony Lower-Basch
Muse of Fire Studio
160 pp. softcover, $20; or PDF, $10
In this era of thick and heavy superhero rulebooks, a slim little volume like Capes seems downright casual and cute. Don't be fooled. Capes offers a challenge unlike any in the comic book gaming niche, one which some players will take up with glee.
In Capes players are "cooperating to create a comic-book story" but also "competing to have the most influence on how that story turns out." At the heart of the game is this question: "Power is fun, but do you deserve it?" Go ahead and use your powers, but remember the price of telling your story your way is to help the other players get their stories told. "The other players" is a telling turn of phrase, for Capes sessions have no game master. The management of the story, not to mention the handling of all characters, is done by the players as defined under the game rules. The tools of this management are index cards, paper slips, assorted tokens, and oh yes six-sided dice.
Capes characters have no "power scales" or other objective comparators. Each character ability is ranked within its category (Powers or Skills, Drives, and Styles), but that ranking reflects only how important that ability is to the character (and by extension how strongly that ability might be used to manipulate the story). Of course Captain Cosmos can lift that planetoid, if he can persuade or manipulate the gameplay into agreeing. Characters can . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 21, 2005
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