P&P Ready
P&P Ready

Basics

Welcome to the Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition Quickstart! This Quickstart provides you with a condensed form of the rules for Prowlers & Paragons Ultimate Edition (P&P), a much improved version of our original roleplaying game that we spent the last five years revising, expanding, and play-testing. The P&P core rulebook has already been written, and includes not only what you'll find here, but also tons of additional material we couldn't fit in this book, things like…

  • Streamlined rules for creating exactly the kind of hero you want to play, from street-level prowlers to iconic paragons and everyone in between.
  • A simple and intuitive system for character advancement that lets you decide how quickly the heroes develop and ties advancement to reaching milestones in the story of the game.
  • A variety of optional rules you can use to make combat more high-flying and heroic, or to add a level of gritty realism if you want your games to have a darker, more serious tone.
  • A huge list of weapons, armor, miscellaneous gear, and vehicles you can use in your games, plus rules for gadgets, customizing your gear, and building your own headquarters.
  • Complete rules for dealing with Resolve and Adversity, the narrative currency of the game, including a mechanism for using Resolve to balance heroes of varying power level.
  • Guidelines for using the game's narrative ruleset to handle disasters, hazards, hostile environments, and other extreme conditions and situations in which heroes regularly find themselves.
  • A massive library of animals and extras, some ordinary and others less so, 15 fully fleshed out villains, and 15 ready-to-play heroes.
  • Loads of advice, tips, tricks, shortcuts, strategies, and suggestions for running a great superhero game that feels like a superhero game instead of a super-powered dungeon crawl.

And a whole lot more. Whenever possible, we've taken language and material directly from the P&P core rulebook. Occasionally, we needed to rewrite things or change how we presented some of the material in this Quickstart to make it easier to use as a stand-alone product. We hope you like what you see. If so, please consider supporting our upcoming Kickstarter campaign, which will go live on March 19, 2019. For more information, visit our Facebook Page, and thanks for your interest in P&P!

With that out of the way, let's get to it. Up, up and … well, you know the rest.

Glossary

In the spirit of the source material that inspired this game, we sometimes use comic book lingo in place common roleplaying terms. Other times, we stick with traditional roleplaying game terminology, or we use everyday words to mean something specific. Here's what we mean by the following terms. Extra: A character run by the Game Master that isn't an enemy to the heroes (enemy characters are called minions, foes, or villains, depending on how powerful they are). Foe: A henchmen, lieutenant, or minor enemy that poses more of a threat than a minion but isn't as competent or dangerous as a villain. Like all enemy characters, foes are run by the Game Master. Half: Whenever we refer to half of an odd number (or half of an odd number of dice), always round up, regardless of context. For example, half of 3d is 2d and half of 1d is 1d. Hero: A character — presumably a superhero — run by a player. A player might occasionally get to control other characters, but only their main character is considered a hero. Issue: A single session of gameplay. Just like every issue of a well-written comic, every issue of P&P should start with a bang and end with something that leaves the players hungry for more. Minion: Minions are generic enemies like gang members, ninjas, robot soldiers, or thugs, who only pose a threat to the heroes in groups. Like all enemy characters, minions are run by the Game Master. Non-Player Character: Any and every character run by the Game Master. Page: Often called a round or a turn in other roleplaying games, a page is a brief unit of in-game time that represents a few seconds of combat or any other fast-moving action scene. It represents roughly one page of a comic book or a few moments of an action scene in a movie or show. Scene: A variable unit of in-game time roughly equivalent to one chapter of a book or one scene of a movie or show. Scenes normally revolve around a specific action, event, goal, location, or task. Series: Often called a campaign in other roleplaying games, a series is a collection of related stories that typically involve the same heroes and unfold in chronological order. As in the comics, you can have a one-shot, which isn't really a series at all, a mini-series that involves a limited number of stories and a single overarching metaplot, or an ongoing series that can last for months or even years. Story: Often called an adventure in other roleplaying games, a story is a distinct tale in which the heroes participate that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Unlike in an actual story, the collaborative nature of roleplaying makes it entirely possible that the story that gets told over the course of the game will be very different from the rough outline the Game Master originally had in mind. Travel Power: A type of Power that lets you move faster than a normal person. Villain: A competent, dangerous, or important enemy that is at least as powerful as the heroes and is often much more so. Like all enemy characters, villains are run by the Game Master. Xd: This indicates a number of ordinary 6-sided dice. For example, if you have to roll 8d, you roll 8 dice of the ordinary 6-sided variety. Modifiers of +Xd or −Xd require you to add or subtract that many dice before rolling them. For example, a −2d penalty means you roll 2 fewer dice than normal.