I like superhero comics.
As a trans woman, I feel a particular affinity with the X-Men’s mutant metaphor. I had a few random comic books as a kid but I began a serious collection during 2020; as the pandemic began, visiting the local comic shop was an excuse to leave the house once a week. Coincidentally, this aligned with the late 2019 relaunch of the X-Men line, and I got in on the ground floor of the “Krakoa era“. Jonathan Hickman painted a beautiful new world where mutants were finally respected, where they were able to build their own culture and identity. It was an incredibly hopeful story and I stopped writing this post for a solid 20 minutes because I got pissed about its ending again. I digress.
Astral Frontier has been making a superhero ttrpg called Breathtaking Comics. When he proposed playtesting it for our holiday Meet The RPG sessions, we jumped at the opportunity. I was particularly excited to live out my X-Men dreams, as superhero games are somewhat uncommon.
breathtaking comics
The neat part about Breathtaking Comics is that it is published online under CC BY 4.0. That means if you want to read the rules for yourself or play it, everything is right there.
Mechanically speaking, the game is a GM-less storytelling rpg with a narrative framework based around comic books. Individual sessions are called “issues”, and scenes are broken up into pages and panels. Each panel is an atomic moment where one or more heroes are taking action. While some panels require a dice roll to see whether the story takes a turn for the worse, “Open Scenes” are freeform and allow players to narrate the story as desired.
Players take on the role of individual heroes with five traits. Four of these traits (Position, Past, Personality, and Powers) have a die rating from d4 to d10, which changes over the course of the game. Resolving an action with a trait lowers its die rating, while invoking a trait’s downside raises it. The fifth trait, “Problems”, is sortof an overarching set of downsides that you can invoke to raise any trait’s die rating.
Crisis and challenge scenes are where most of the action happens. The former are designed for fights and opposition, while the latter are used when the heroes attempt complex or difficult tasks. Both types begin by establishing a list of drives, which act as pseudo-goals during a scene. They are “things that the players care about”, so they can range from “capture the villain” to “public opinion”. Drives might not be known to the characters themselves, but they are the focus of the narrative during the scene. Each drive is either “green” or “red” depending on whether it’s going well or not, and players can change the state of any drive when they take action in a panel. Rolling their trait die determines how many drives they get to flip and in which direction (lower is worse, higher is better).
That’s pretty much the long and short of it. It’s an extremely compact game with very little moving parts. You very much get exactly what you put into it.
narrative by committee
I think that Breathtaking Comics is a great game, but it lives and dies by how much you lean into it. You have to taking a running start and embrace it or the story is going to die on the ground. There is no GM there with a built world or scenarios. You don’t even get to wield the authorial pen long enough to establish the details of something, because it’s all shared.
You might be picking up on the fact that I dislike GM-less games. This is mostly because I’m a control freak and I like to feel like I have ultimate agency. There are GM-less games which achieve this by passing the authorial pen rather than sharing it: Microscope is a great example of this. Players take turns becoming the mini GM and having full control over the narrative for a brief moment in time.
Breathtaking Comics is not like that. It asks you to trust your fellow players and have a lot of vulnerability with each other. Sometimes you pitch an idea and nobody likes it. That’s just how it goes when the game is a simulated writer’s room. The rules are written from the in-character perspective of a comics editor, asking you to create a new comic book. Fully embracing that role as a comics writer is where the game really shines.
It took me two hours to get comfortable with the system, and I didn’t feel like I mastered it until the second session. With that said, I loved playing it. We made some really heartfelt characters and achieved a critical mass of plot threads that had begun to weave into a cohesive superhero story. I felt excited by the imagined arcs for each of our heroes, and a part of me wanted to see where those stories would go. If you’re looking for a rules-light superhero story game, I think Breathtaking Comics is an excellent framework to channel your inner comics writer.
(comic by waiting for the trade)