Do you prefer DC to Marvel? It may be the grimmer tone that DC embraced earlier on, or iconic characters like Batman and Superman. Or, perhaps not!
What about on the tabletop? Marvel got back into tabletop RPGs with the Marvel Multiverse RPG (a candidate for a price drop this coming Prime Day), but has DC done anything new? You can still buy first editions of the 1985 DC Heroes TTRPG, but that’s hardly new.
Cryptozoic Entertainment has never sold a TTRPG before, having focused on card and board games; however, that may change. Last week, for example, Cartoon Network signed off on Cryptozoic’s Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game, and so we might imagine that it will reach backers before winter and perhaps appear in retail by 2026.
I’ve started with Cryptozoic Entertainment and their progress towards publishing a TTRPG, as the company also ran the crowdfunding project for the DC Heroes Role-Playing Game’s 40th Anniversary. The latest update on that project is that they’ve restored all the books created by DC for the tabletop game, which are now ready for production, but are awaiting final approval for some of them. This approval should be a formality since Cryptozoic isn’t introducing anything new and is merely remaking what was previously published by DC.
The Batman: Gotham City Chronicles – The Roleplaying Game is less than a year old and is sold exclusively by the French company Monolith.
Like Cryptozoic Entertainment, Monolith Editions is known for board games, but unlike Cryptozoic, Monolith did not conduct a crowdfunding campaign for its own DC TTRPG. The official Batman TTRPG was part and parcel of Part Three of the ongoing series of crowdfunding campaigns for the Gotham City Chronicles board game.
So, there you have it. DC superhero TTRPGs are out there, but you have to know where to look. None of them are currently available from friendly local game stores or Amazon.
There are other comic book publishers besides Marvel and DC, and these two have RPGs. There’s the Valiant Adventures RPG Quickstart, which is free to download and uses Mutants & Masterminds rules from Green Ronin. It’s not in a position of prestige, relegated as a sub-genre of “Miscellaneous,” but there’s a whole Superheroes Genre on DriveThruRPG.
Let us know what you think in the comments below, or visit a random superhero posted with this teleport link.
