Lowell Francis and I do a podcast series for Open Hearth about the history of Supers RPGs called Roll for Origin. We talked about Wild Talents on an episode, and I mentioned it's a game I'd like to run again. Rich Rogers said, " Let's do it.”

Three sessions in, I'm ready to talk about it.

This is the first of what I hope will be a series — a working AP journal from the GM's seat, published as we go. If you're prepping ORE, or curious about it, or just here for the X-Men deep cuts, I'll try to make it worth the read. If you're one of my players and you're reading this: some of what follows will feel familiar. Some of it will be me processing after the fact. All of it is true from where I'm sitting.

Wild Talents is a superhero role-playing game from Arc Dream Publishing, currently in its second edition. It uses the One Roll Engine (ORE), a resolution system originally developed for Godlike — a WWII-set game about superhumans in the trenches. Dennis Detwiller, Greg Stolze, and Kenneth Hite are the names most associated with the lineage. Wild Talents extends the ORE beyond Godlike's WWII frame into a full modern (and any-era) supers toolkit, letting you build characters from street-level to god-tier using the same underlying mechanics.

The ORE is what makes it interesting. You roll a handful of ten-sided dice. You look for matching sets. Each set has a Width (how many dice match) and a Height (what number they match on). Width is speed — the widest set in a combat round resolves first. Height is quality — a higher Height is a better outcome, and in combat determines where on the body the attack lands. The system is fast, brutal, and pretty decisive in a way d20 combat isn't. A single well-rolled set can end a fight. A single well-timed attack can strip the dice from someone else's action before they land, causing the attack to fail entirely. This is called the dodgeball rule, and it is the most important thing to understand about running Wild Talents.

There's more — Passions and Loyalties as narrative mechanics, Miracles as configurable powers, Hyperstats, Hard dice, and Wiggle dice — but I'll get into those as they come up in the sessions.

The tool we're rolling with is Mad-Dice.com, which recently added ORE support. It handles Width/Height calculation, Hard and Wiggle dice, and the odd math the ORE demands. Zoom for the table, Mad-Dice for the rolls. It's been working well.

Schedule: Wednesday evenings, planned for six to eight sessions, @2-3 hours running on Zoom. We're three sessions in.

The Krakoan era is over. The Hellfire Gala happened. Resurrection protocols are offline. The institutions that once defined mutant heroism — the schools, the nations, the teams — are scattered or compromised. What's left is people. You.

You did not choose this team. You were collected. Some of you by circumstance, some of you by someone with a plan you haven't fully figured out yet. You have a working vehicle, and two names — one the world gave you, and one you gave yourselves.

The Daily Bugle ran the headline first: "X-HUMED: WHO BURIED THESE MUTANTS, AND WHO DUG THEM UP?" Every one of you has been buried, in some sense, and come back. The public calls you X-Humed now. Some of them sneer it. Some of them pray it.

Old Man Creed gave you the other name. He used to run with a wetwork crew that took the contracts no one else would. Most of them are dead. The name went into the ground with them. He doesn't talk about why he's offering it to you now, but the offer stands. Inside the team, between yourselves, you call yourselves what he called his old crew: the eXorcists.

The two names mean different things. X-Humed is what was done to you — dug up, brought back, walking around against the natural order. The eXorcists is what you're trying to do, for each other and for the world: get the thing out that shouldn't be in. Every one of you has something inside you that doesn't belong — a possession, an alteration, a piece of someone else's work, a hole that black magic is filling. The team is, among other things, a mutual exorcism society. You are each other's priests.

The world sees what was buried. You see what you're trying to expel.

You take the jobs no one else will. You answer the calls no one else picks up. You are very good at this, and almost no one is grateful.

The roster:

Every one of them has been buried, in some sense, and come back.

Session zero. Character talks, expectation-setting, first mission.

I had a bunker prepped. A former Weapon X black site in northern Wisconsin, defensible, forgotten. Old Man Creed had reason to know it. AIM was inside with a Jaime Madrox (AKA Multiple Man) workforce, a captive scientist, and a vault the team would spend the session cracking. I had it laid out. Three-layer biometric lock. Extended contest. Stasis pods at the end. All of it ready.

The players picked a ship instead of a bunker... as players do.

Within about five minutes of table conversation, the Weapon X bunker had migrated three states east and become a decommissioned Weapon X mobile asset, mothballed at the naval yard in Philly. I did the fastest re-skin of my GM career! And the ship is better. Tighter geography, more claustrophobic, huge space, and — critically — a derelict the team can eventually claim as their HQ. I didn't create that, we did.

The rest of the session ran roughly to plan, with adjustments. Session ones are always about getting used to the real people at the table, especially if we haven’t played together before, and getting used to the core system mechanics. The team infiltrated the ship. They fought a couple of AIM agents on the bridge. The AIM scientist — Dr. Helen Pell — ran deeper into the ship rather than staying to fight. Session ended with the team on the bridge, one Madrox captured, and the scientist somewhere below decks trying to reach the comms room.

We did Stars and Wishes at the end. I recommend you do too! This is where a GM can see what the players are interested in and what they’re digging. I heard: Questions about post-Krakoa resurrection protocols. Wanda, Zaladane, Alex Summers, Sinister's Hellions, the Soul Dagger, the Dark Childe, AIM and Madame Masque, Blink. Every one of those is a thread, an arc we can run down. I didn't have anything much planned behind this first session; you'll see me pull many of these wishes into the game’s future sessions.

I was rusty and lazy on the mechanics. The ORE has enough moving parts — Hard dice, Wiggle dice, Gobble dice. Width/Height rules for both combat and non-combat rolls, the dodgeball rule interacting with combat resolution — calls I made at the table that I later realized were wrong. Small things. Powers with dice pools don't get Stats/Skills added to them —for instance, the pool is the pool. I'm reading through the book for reference between sessions. On the table is how I learn best — I can't wait to read for perfection; I get enough in to overcome the initial inertia.

Madrox Machinations and letting the players drive

On the bridge of the USS United States, Madrox woke up on the floor at the start of the session and immediately tried to negotiate. His pitch: he wasn't actually with AIM, he was a Madrox dupe embedded in the operation, and if the team would hear him out, he could tell them what was really going on. They listened. They asked questions. Jaime Madrox told the eXorcists about Madame Masque. She was brokering the ship's "Black Vault" contents.” AIM had to secure it all first; he was hoping to get to it before AIM. The team split up and caught Dr. Pell before she could send out any communications. Old Man Creed killed another Madrox dupe below decks at the vault.

The vault was prepped as a three-layer biometric lock, with an extended contest and stakes: force it, and you destroy the contents. Old Man Creed put his hand on the scanner without hesitation — which was a huge character beat. His player didn't try to bluff or work around. He walked up, pressed his palm to the pad, and let the team watch the light turn green. And in that moment, the whole team understood that Creed knew this ship inside and out. He'd been here before. He didn't say much about it all.

We play 2-3 hours per session. I like to wrap around 2-2.5 hours and reserve the 3-hour sessions for big sessions. So we were nearly out of time... Polaris wanted to rip the vault doors apart; I said yes and abandoned my prep. Inside the vault: Three stasis pods. Monet St. Croix. Alex Summers. And another Madrox, sans goatee.
Worth abandoning my vault puzzle prep for the players’ reactions! 🤩

Breathing room for tangents and other weirdness

Session three opened a few days later than the previous issue. M was in the ship's medlab, barely alive, having survived Old Man Creed's slash extraction from her stasis pod. Havok and Madrox couldn't be extracted the same way — Polaris had run the math and confirmed it would kill them. The two of them remain in stasis, kept alive by pods the team can't currently disable. I announced we'd use flashbacks to handle anything players wanted to do before the 'fast forward'. I feel jumping ahead creates breathing room and breaks up the day-to-day, keeping it from becoming a slog.

The team was having a moment in the kitchen, talking, making lunch. Dr. Pell walks by the galley, only she's supposed to be locked up...and Creed realizes she doesn't smell like Dr. Pell; it's a scent he doesn't recognize. It's an N'Garai scout; it led Mimic and Creed away from the kitchen galley so it could snatch Pixie alone! And it almost worked!! The dice favored the players, but it was three rounds of exchanges before they put the demon down.

Madelyne Pryor. The Goblin Queen. Currently ruling Limbo. She'd felt the N'Garai die on Pixie's ship and had come to investigate. While on board, she felt Alex Summers in his stasis pod, and that's where the Pixie discovered Madelyne watchingAlex. She wanted two things. Who killed the N'Garai and to take Summers back to limbo with her. Great RPing conversation that came down to a Creed vs Pryor Intimidation contest. Creed lost. Madelyne seemingly conceded and left without taking Alex —that’s the move I love. You lost the dice roll, and you get what you asked for! GM Fuckery! 🤘🏾

Calvin took M's telepathy. He'd declared the intent at the end of session two — the tactical reasoning was that the team needed a telepath and M was incapacitated. In session three, he did it. I needed him to say it, though. And not just copied the power — Calvin scanned her memories while she was incapacitated...she was waiting for him there, in her memories, and attacked him. When he ran, she promised to beat his ass when she woke up!

Old Man Creed got a flashback. He's on a lower deck, alone, going through the stuff he took off the fallen AIM agents. He finds a message on a device:
They're hunting all of us. There aren't many of me left. If you got this, find the others on the list. Trust the kid in the helmet. Don't trust the cat."
On the list is Blink (crossed out), Pixie, Hank, ?, [Player's Choice]
Creed is keeping secrets.

Three sessions in, running on Zoom on Wednesday nights, rolling on Mad-Dice.com, learning the ORE at the table one mistake at a time. The players are giving me deep-cut Marvel references, Welsh accents, thoughtful engagement with post-Krakoa canon, and choices I didn't prep for. The ship instead of the bunker. The Madrox alliance instead of the Madrox interrogation. Calvin's telepathy grab.

Some observations I want to leave here, for other GMs and for me later:

ORE Dice: I'm a fan of Declare, Roll, Resolve type mechanics. Very gamey, and tense when supported by in-game fiction! The roll does double duty of resolving sequence and effects. I've figured out a flow that works for me. Announce NPCs’ 'sense' stat for declarations. PCs with lower ranks will declare first. The dice rolls in Mad-Dice.com are visual enough to figure out at a glance who's going first.

Prep changes at the table, that's OK. The bunker became a ship in two minutes of player conversation. The slow-burn Madrox reveal compressed to a single fight. The Marauder team I'd statted for session zero is now on the shelf for later. The vault puzzle got dropped. The structure has held. The content has bent. I like how it all turned out.

Rustiness heals with reps. I got some mechanics wrong in session one, got them right in session two, and got confident with them in session three. The system is deep, but still trad enough. You learn it by using it. If you're thinking about running Wild Talents and worried about the mechanical load: run it anyway. Your first session will have errors. Your fourth less so.

Lean into the Soap Opera! We’re picking and choosing canon as we go. Nothing is sacred there. But the Soap Opera is everything!

Make Comic covers!

We have three to five more sessions to go, depending on how the arcs play out. Some threads I know of and like to see more of:

If you're another GM prepping this system or thinking about doing so — drop me a line. Especially if you've run ORE for a while and want to correct anything I said above. On the table is how I learn best.

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