A Night With Supernormal by Ursidice

Last night, my group was down a couple players but still wanted to have our game night. So we each pulled out our libraries of one-page one-shots and looked over what sounded interesting. We pretty unanimously landed on Ursidice’s one-page rpg Supernormal. The premise is that the players are members of a superhero team that are off for the day and just trying to enjoy their day off incognito. No worries and no work.

Character Creation

There are no numbers to think about with character creation, you name your superhero and their alter ego and you pick three specific superpowers they have.

Mechanics

Supernormal uses a d6 mechanic. Whenever you take an action that interacts with the world around you, you roll a number of d6s depending on how you’re doing the action. If you’re trying to blend in and be subtle, you roll 3d6; if you’re showing off or being especially dramatic, you roll 2d6; and if you’re brazenly using superpowers without a care for who sees, you roll 1d6 and also mark one point toward your cover being blown.

If your roll is 1-5, the action works just as you described it and nothing goes wrong. If the roll is 6-11, there is a glitch with the powers, and you roll on a chart to see what the glitch is. On a 12+, there is a “Supercharged” glitch, where you roll for one glitch effect and the GM picks the second effect at their whim.

These glitch effects were amazingly fun in play. They range from putting more force in than you meant to unintentially activating one of your superpowers.

When you activate a glitch, you mark an experience, which grants you a situation in which you get to roll your dice twice and take the lower result. You also mark one point toward blowing your cover.

Game in Play

As you create your characters, you also plan the perfectly mundane thing you are trying to do that day. There are two activities picked. The supers then try to get through their day without blowing their cover.

As is probably pretty clear from reading the mechanics section, your supers will eventually blow their cover. There are a pair of lists of who shows up each time your supers (as a group) mark 15 points toward blowing their cover. These range from alien invasion to time travelling dinosaurs to representatives from an insurance company. Plenty of material to work with.

Our Experience

I forgot to write the full name and superhero name of one of the players in last night’s game but the cast was:

Norman “Norm” L. Gai, with the power of Super Vision and Super Speech (command)
Jacob, with the power of being a Lovecraftian horror a la Gluttony from Fullmetal Alchemist.
My Character, Connor Cormorant, aka Captain Condor, with the power of flight, animal friendship, and a transformation sequence resulting in turning into a seagull.

We began our day off having brunch in a Denny’s. Jacob immediately starts our cover-blowing by blowing up one of the toilets while using it as his entrance to the building. He compounds that by literally wringing the dirty water out of his being on the way out of the occupied bathroom.

Captain Cormorant arrived by landing among the seagulls on the roof, then descending the ladder, whereupon he was seen by a child and added his own mark to the cover tally.

Our supers then decide to have breakfast and get their orders in, just in time for some villains to decide to try and rob the wrong Denny’s.

Norm L. Gai tries to check whether the guns are loaded and accidentally combusts the powder in every round, incapacitating one villain. Then commands the fleeing accomplice to “Stop” whereupon she freezes perfectly in place.

Captain Cormorant walks non-chalantly to the door and calls out, in seagull, to the attendant flock to come get these bozos, and the flock bodily moves both villains out of the building. This action was seen as “brazen” and resulted in more notice. Which, fair.

Our group left an entirely too large tip behind to cover the damages, and left to our second event, a coming of age for a robot which was termed a “bot mitzvah”. Captain Condor ran off to get the gift he had forgotten, which was achieved with no issues.

Jacob and Norm shared a cab to the Technical College where the party was being held. Jacob then has a glitch when he tries to grab cash from his “pockets” resulting in his flesh not closing quite so neatly. Additional money was retrieved to pay off the cabby, followed by Norm commanding the cabby to “forget everything.”

Forgetting everything was perhaps a smidge too broad and Norm leaves the cabby catatonic, requiring a call to “Deus Ex Machina”, a robot super who Norm had called in the past for just this sort of mishap.

Meanwhile, Jacob had run off to the bathroom with a bit of indigestion from a villain who’d he’d stuffed into his “pockets” a couple days before, he called for an army of rats to help dispose of the evidence, then had to shush a janitor as he closed off a restroom until they were done.

And then the party barely even got started before the Insurance Company showed up to speak with us about damages. Norm lets loose what is either the most opportune or inopportune “Fuck”, and accidentally activates his command powers. And there the night ended with uproarious laughter.

Thoughts

I really enjoyed this one. The way that tiny things can introduce complications which you then try to fix but complicate things further and just snowball the awareness points was a hilarious mechanic. It reminds me of so many “Day Off” filler episodes of anime and superhero shows.

Because the game is seriously weighted in favor of complications happening if you try to be subtle and you automatically gain awareness if you’re not.

I’m printing this one off to add permanently to the GM binder I keep filled with adventures and games to play at a moment’s notice. I really enjoyed it and would love to share it with other groups.

The only downside is one that is common to one-page RPGs, you will likely have a better time if you are comfortable “Yes, anding” your table and making the whole thing up on the fly. Other than the situations, there’s no additional material provided for the GM. It just doesn’t fit on the one page. But if improv doesn’t scare you, this one is a whole lot of fun, and will steer you straight toward absolute chaos in the best and most fun way.

Where to Find

Supernormal is available from Ursidice as a “Pay What You Want” at the following places:

The featured image for this post is the promotional image for SUPERNORMAL from its page on Itch