Smallville Roleplaying Game

Life Paths

This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Character generation in the Smallville RPG is a collaborative process, with characters going through their lives together step by step and deciding how their histories are woven together. The process starts with their

values

(Duty, Glory, Justice, Love, Power and Truth), their relationships, and their powers and resources accordingly. This process involves creating the most important NPCs and locations in the setting as far as the characters are concerned, and indicating how strongly the various PCs value them.

Each value and each relationship (with another player character or non-player character) is given a replacement statement whenever the value is changed, as well as a value. Two characters with equal values on Power are very different if one has the statement "Power is a means to my ends" and the other has "I need Power to keep myself safe". The gamemaster (known as Watchtower) is encouraged to create sessions through a process of "Wedging" — creating adversaries that will put characters at odds with each other through their values or relationships.

System

Smallville was the first iteration of

The most powerful move can make in the Smallville RPG is to challenge either one of their relationships, or one of their values. This means that the other players think that other player was wrong and are coming to a new understanding. The players get to roll the dice three times rather than once in own dice pool but are using a smaller dice for the rest of the session.

Supplements

There have been two published supplements for the Smallville RPG before Margaret Weis Productions lost the license at the end of February 2013: Smallville: The High School Yearbook (for playing high school characters using the Smallville system) and Smallville: The Watchtower Report.^{[citation needed]}

Reception

This section contains too many and overly lengthy quotations. Please help summarize the quotations. Consider transferring direct quotations to Wikiquote or excerpts to Wikisource. (July 2020)

The game won a Judge's Spotlight Award at the 2011

When it was produced the reception was positive but surprised, with RPGamer declaring: "The Smallville RPG is perhaps the most peculiar release of this year. Everything about its cover screams 'mediocre at best' — the cable television series license, the Margaret Weis productions and Cortex System logos, even the studio promo picture recycled as cover art would have led to plummeting expectations. ... But this volume proves that one should never judge a book by its cover. You should instead judge a book by its inside cover, which features a crew of up-and-coming indie designers in the main credits and laundry list of Evil Hat veterans in the special thanks section. If covers aren't enough a read-through, will reveal that Smallville is a great story game ideally suited for teen drama that has been cunningly disguised as a cheap TV tie-in".[6]

io9 was equally surprised: "So I'll admit that when I saw the Margaret Weis Productions booth at Gen Con stacked with Supernatural, Smallville and Serenity RPGs, a small voice in the back of my head was saying, 'These could be pretty bad'. I have tied the small voice up securely and locked it the trunk of my car, because it was very wrong. The Smallville RPG is a finely crafted game that understands the quirks of the show and the things about it that its fans love, then wraps the game around those core values rather than tying them on as window dressing".^[2]

See also

• Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
• Leverage: The Roleplaying Game
• Cortex System
• Monsterhearts

References