d20 Modern TTRPG reboot licenses Rambo, The Crow, Pacific Rim, and more

Back in 2002, d20 Modern helped to breathe life into third edition Dungeons & Dragons, expanding the tabletop role-playing game into a far more contemporary setting — less swords and sorcery, more ninjas and automatic weapons. A new game based on the open-source version of the 5th edition D&D ruleset will go a step further. With the help of d20 Modern‘s co-creator Jeff Grubb, Everyday Heroes will let players step into the shoes of classic action movie heroes. You’ll soon be able get to Mars with Douglass Quaid and rescue war prisoners as John Rambo. Then you can take your Jaeger to battle against the Kaiju.

Where the original d20 Modern merely offered generic action archetypes for its classes, Everyday Heroes is bringing in famous licensed characters and settings. Polygon can exclusively reveal the first batch of hard-won licensing partnerships negotiated by developer and publisher Evil Genius Games. They include Highlander; John Carpenter’s Escape from New York; Roland Emmerich’s Universal Soldier; Rambo: First Blood, First Blood Part 2, and Rambo 3; Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall; The Crow; Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim; and Kong: Skull Island.

While actors like Kurt Russell and Sylvester Stallone won’t be making an appearance on the pages of the final retail product, the iconic characters they made famous will be there, and Evil Genius isn’t done with its reveals quite yet. But the breadth of the films involved illustrates the breadth of gameplay that will be available in the final product. Expect everything, from gritty military dramas and mind-bending science fiction epics. There will also be some robot-versus-kaiju action. Owner, serial entrepreneur, and author David Scott says fans can expect even more announcements once a crowdfunding campaign for Everyday Heroes goes live on May 17.

“Everyday Heroes is an action game set in a modern setting,” lead designer Sigfried Trent said. “The theme, the setting, the mood, the feeling of d20 Modern; the rules, the simplicity, and the modularity of 5e; merge those things together and you get Everyday Heroes. Throw in a dash of a lot of action movie tropes and ideas, then creativity from myself and Chris ‘Goober’ Ramslay, the other lead designer. Then season with wise, sage advice from our good friend Jeff Grubb and others in the game industry. That’s Everyday Heroes in a nutshell.”

The launch lineup will include a core rulebook (which will be available both physically and digitally), with six character classes and 18 subclasses, 50 new professions and backgrounds, and 100 feats. The new rules will include expanded firearm rules, revised chase scenes and armor/cover mechanic rules. It’s the gunplay, Scott says, that really makes the game feel different from D&D.

In a gunfight, the mechanical design of Everyday Heroes aims to keep players focused on cinematic action, not necessarily on fetishizing weapons and armor. However, there are some exceptions. High-powered rifles can penetrate brick walls. Heavy weapons can also provide suppression fire that helps the heroes move towards their goal. However, players’ ability to move will determine how difficult they can hit.

Everyday Heroes‘ cover mechanics mean that the equivalent of a players’ armor class — a number on the character sheet in D&D that rarely changes — will be determined in part by what they’re standing or crouching behind. As characters and enemies move around the battlefield in Everyday Heroes, that defensive value will be constantly in flux, making maneuver far more important. Body armor? Much less so.

“You don’t see John McClane running around in body armor all the time,” said Trent. We wanted to create a realistic system. If you’re running a scenario and you have armor on, you want it to do what it’s supposed to do [in the real world]: stop a bullet, or deflect a sword if it’s a more traditional kind of armor. What we did is we made up a system where, if you’re going good in combat, you don’t really need your armor. It’s a failsafe.”

If a player’s hit points go to zero, they’ll need to make an armor saving throw. How easy or difficult the save will be depends on the type of armor and damage dealt. That should also help to bring more narrative and character interaction into every battle.

“When you go to the movies, people spend a lot of time dialoguing while in cover,” Scott said. “That’s where the romance and the story happens. [That way you’re not] just standing there shooting at each other. […] You’re using each step strategically to maximize your cover hunting. It’s just a completely different game than D&D.”

The stakes are also highly customizable. If a final blow is required to create a new character, or to knock out a player completely, game masters can make that call.

Supplementing the core rulebook will be what Evil Genius is calling Cinematic Adventures, and each will focus on an action movie or a well-known franchise. Six 100-page supplements will be available at launch, available individually or as a bundle. Each Cinematic Adventure will have one half dedicated to home campaign game mechanics. The other half will feature an adventure inspired by a film that puts characters into the shoes of well-known Hollywood heroes.

Most players, however, will opt to create their own characters from scratch. Here Everyday Heroes hews very close to the original d20 Modern mechanics. There will be rules for strong-based Strong Heroes and dexterity based Agile Heroes. Every type of character will be able to interact with the world in its own unique way through their skills and feats. Grubb is most excited for Smart Heroes who have the ability to change the story using Genius Points. Grubb says that this is where he has spent the majority of his energy during the most recent playtest.

“Smart Heroes [would be] a little boring if they’re just very good at the investigation skill,” said co-designer Ramslay, who developed the Genius Point mechanic. They need something that is both powerful and exciting. What I ended up giving them is something that resembles spell-casting mechanically.”

Essentially, Genius Points allow Smart Heroes to retroactively change the narrative of the story, improvising on the spot how and why their superior intelligence is able to save the day — a system not unlike the critically acclaimed supernatural heist game Blades in the Dark, but balanced for the rules of 5th edition D&D.

“One big example would be knowing the layout [of a building],” Ramslay said. You [the player] don’t know where to go, how many guards are there, or what floor you are looking for. You are a genius. I looked up the blueprints for this building last night.’ [Or] they’re so smart that they know how buildings are built. They are able to reposition guards. They just know so much about everything, that they could predict those things.”

A lot has been written, here at Polygon and elsewhere, about the incredible renaissance of tabletop role-playing games. None right now are more successful than D&D, which is an integral part of Wizards of the Coast’s recent $1 billion year. Many rulesets are being developed based on D&D’s open-source software. Suddenly the marketplace for 5th edition spinoffs is looking very crowded.

Auroboros: Coils of the Serpent, from a team led by former Blizzard Entertainment executive Chris Metzen, is expected to launch later this year. Skyraiders of Abarax is also being developed by Tracy Hickman and Laura Hickman, the creators of Dragonlance. Meanwhile, Wizards itself is also branching out, launching a new Dragonlance adventure later this year and bringing back the fan-favorite space-fantasy setting known as Spelljammer in 2023.

With so much action in the 5th edition space, why is now the best time to bring d20 Modern out of retirement for one more job? It’s all about the same design problems that made that game such a great success the second time.

“It’s been 20 years since the original d20 Modern has come out and game design has evolved,” Grubb said. “It’s not so much duplication as it is inspiration; basically taking the same things that we face [while making] d20 Modern and saying, ‘OK, how do we handle it with this modern situation? What can we do to deal with today’s world. How do we handle it with today’s mechanics?’ It’s a great opportunity to do for traditional D&D role-playing what d20 Modern did for the D&D of its age.”

Everyday Heroes is still in active development, with more than 600 playtesters around the world putting it through its paces. A quick-start guide and a “lookbook” showing off all 18 subclasses are available to download now on the official website. You can also sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter campaign goes live.