When I first published 3Deep in 2016, I intended to release the setting-neutral rules and follow it up quickly with splatbooks that tweaked the game to fit each setting and genre. I produced two books, one of which I wrote myself, and one was an adaption of No GM’s Sky by Todd Zircher. Ironically, supers was supposed to be the first book. Mt roleplaying education started with D&D B/X and then moved through Champions, Traveller, Runequest, and Rolemaster, and the real eye-opener was when we started roleplaying Steve Jackson’s Car Wars. That told me that any game that had a character could be roleplayed. All you needed were some rules for conflict resolution. If you are familiar with 3Deep, you may have noticed a healthy dose of the original Car Wars in those rules as well as some Champions and Traveller. Our early influences stay with us, or mine did. This book takes the core of 3Deep and introduces rule tweaks and suggestions to bend it to the Supers genre. The biggest addition is powers. The essential elements of superheroes are righting wrongs outside the system and the secret identity. Although plenty of heroes break those elements and are either publicly recognized, Ironman is an example, or have their own agenda that has little to do with righting wrongs, Batman Dark Knight strays into this territory. These are the exceptions, and they work because of the accepted norms. Every literary style has subverted its own established norms. I grew up watching The Lone Ranger, Zorro, and Commando Cody the Rocketman on Saturday morning TV. These were masked heroes with skills rather than superpowers, and the rocket suit could be worn by anyone. These heroes appeared superhuman, and they put themselves in danger to protect the innocent while protecting their own identity behind a mask. For real superhuman heroes, Marvel and DC comics were the ultimate source. These mixed influences from any genre, time, and culture. You could have an Amazonian fighting alongside an alien, alongside a magician, and it all just worked. Lone heroes were just as common as teams, and as a roleplayer who had discovered D&D, a team of heroes was about the only genre where a classic party of heroes was reflected in the source media. Most swords and sorcery books were about a single hero, the Conans and Elrics, but superheroes could be alone, in a team, or move between teams.
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