Invincible RPG: Reviewing The Quickstart With A Comic Artist & An Author

A tabletop roleplaying game based on Invincible by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley is crowdfunding on Kickstarter. Skybound Entertainment and Free League Publishing are partnering to translate the Invinciblecomic book series and Amazon streaming series into Year Zero Engine RPG. In the first part of this series, I reached out to comic book artist Steven Cummings and comic book author John McGuire to talk about Invincible the comic and their experiences with superhero RPGs. In this article, we’ll review the Invincible engine and the Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying Quickstart.

INVINCIBLE – SUPERHERO ROLEPLAYING QUICKSTART​

To support their Kickstarter, Free League launched the free PDF Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying Quickstart at DriveThruRPG. Designed by Adam Bradford of D&D Beyond and Tomas Härenstam, lead designer on the ALIEN RPG, the Blade Runner RPG, and Dragonbane, this book gives you a 36-page sample of the setting, characters, and gaming engine to get a feel for the world and enjoy a short Invincible adventure. Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying uses the d6 dice pool variant of Free League’s Year Zero Engine. When attempting an action, gamers roll their dice pool. Rolling a single 6 is a success, additional 6s provide stunts to improve the result. If the gamer fails their action by not rolling any 6s, they can push and re-roll their dice. When they push, they get to re-roll all dice with 2s, 3s, 4s, or 5s and keep the new results. For each 1 on a push, their character takes a point of stress, which reduces their resolve (non-physical hit points). In addition, the character will pick up stress through combat and other challenges. Hit points and resolve measure the character’s health, and reaching zero in either measure can break the character.

In order to understand how these rules compare to other superhero RPGs, I asked John McGuire (author of The Crossing and The Gilded Age as well as In Our Dreams Awake, of which I am co-author, and the third issue is on Kickstarter now) about his experiences with the Year Zero Engine versus other roleplaying engines:

“I think all the games have something good about them which lends themselves to the genre. Champions feels very crunchy, which means you can really get into specifics about how your powers work, what kind of hero you may want to play, etc. Marvel Super Heroes Role-playing Game has some of that, but I also remember the push/pull of their experience system which made you want to use it in combat versus saving it for gaining new powers (stunts, I think they were called). It could be a little clunky as you had to constantly check the big Yellow/Red/Green chart to determine if you succeeded, and how well that success actually was. Aberrant used the d10 White Wolf [Storyteller] system which I’m a big fan of and while it wasn’t completely flawless in how things worked with the powers, for the most part I felt like challenging the characters with either villains or death traps worked pretty well.

Having played lower powered characters and higher powered characters in the ALIEN and Tales from the Loop games, [the Year Zero Engine] feels like a great match with your hero. In comics, we see these powerful moments of Spider-Man or Batman having to summon up the last of their reserves in order to overcome whatever the villain has thrown in your way. Of course, the problem becomes when you never have any down time and are never able to deal with your stress. The bad guy cannot be overcome in this encounter and so you have to retreat, lick your wounds, and come up with a new game plan while you recover.”

The quickstart rules address actions, powers, and elements of the adventures, but they do not cover character creation. Despite that, the book provides enough detail to understand how characters work. Characters take one of eight roles – Blaster, Brains, Brawn, Controller, Defender, Leader, Striker, or Wildcard. There are six attributes – Fighting, Agility, Strength, Reason, Intuition, and Presence – with ratings between 1 and 12. For rolls, you’ll chose an attribute or a power and roll the number of d6s based on the attributes rating, which can be modified by the GM. As mentioned, 6s are successes and re-rolls risk stress.

For gameifying actions and powers, I asked Steven Cummings (freelance comic book illustrator on Marvel Comics titles like Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Star Wars: Ahsoka, and Champions, and Image Comics for Wayward comic book series with author Jim Zub as well as tabletop roleplaying games like Palladium Books’Rifts® and others) about the innovations of one of the earliest superhero RPGs, 1984’s Marvel Super Heroes Role-playing Game:

“The thing that stood out about it was that the system had a mechanic built in to allow characters to hit above their power brackets and so a character like Spider-man actually would have a slim chance against someone like Thor due to the way you can shift columns and do power stunts. Another thing that made the system great was the way it represented Marvel characters and the Marvel comic book world so faithfully, and how TSR was publishing updates to the characters and setting that reflected the realities inside the comic books.”

CONCLUSION​

Invincible’s core comic book series ran for over a decade. The animated series based on the comic is scheduled to run for at least five seasons. Both versions of Invincible have been nominated for awards. Free League and their Year Zero Engine games have won so many tabletop roleplaying awards, it’d be a separate article to list them all. With well-received source material and a beloved game engine, Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying is already a hit on Kickstarter. Based on the quickstart, the game will live up to the potential of the series. But why play a superhero roleplaying game? John McGuire chimed in:

“When I was younger, the big appeal of the TSR Marvel game was exactly what you said: be able to play characters within the existing sandbox of the Marvel Universe. To be able to build a character and see how your hero measured up to Spider-Man or Wolverine. The old ‘my guy could take Captain America in a fight!’ mindset. So for something like Invincible, the first thing might be ‘let’s build a group of heroes who might have a chance at taking Omni-Man down!’ Past that, I would hope that the guidelines the book(s) provide would also encourage you to use them in your own world. Maybe it ends up being something completely unique or maybe it is a dark version of the Invincible world. At the very least, a good, robust system would help you in creating (reskinning) villains for your heroes to overcome.”

Steven Cummings summed it up this way:

“There is something really appealing about stepping into the world of a famous comic book and adventuring, not to mention getting the chance to rub elbows with canon characters. I think that is what makes superheroes so unique.”

Check out the Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying Quickstart on DriveThruRPG. The Kickstarter for the Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying from Free League Publishing and Skybound Entertainment runs until October 16 2025 3:00 PM EDT.

Egg Embry worked with John McGuire and Steven Cummings on different comic book projects. Egg participates in the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, Noble Knight Games’ Affiliate Program, Kobold Press Affiliate Program, and is an Amazon Associate. These programs provide advertising fees by linking to DriveThruRPG, Noble Knight Games, Kobold Press, and Amazon.

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