I've been looking for a good superhero RPG based on the Apocalypse World engine. Luckily, there have been quite a few in the past couple of years, with this and Masks releasing. I've only gotten a chance to try this game out very recently, but I have to say that I'm sad that I missed the opportunity to play this sooner.

I'm going to skip the discussion of the Apocalypse World Engine proper. You can read any review of Dungeon World or Apocalypse World itself to get that. What I will say is that the moves for Worlds in Peril are pretty tight. Push is an awesome way to further develop your powers in play, as commonly occurs in superhero stories. And you can see from the way the moves are structured that the writer was taking a direct page from Apocalypse World itself... Takedown and Seize Control are not just reminiscent of Go Aggro and Seize by Force, I'd argue that they are more concisely written than the first edition versions of those moves. The only move I have complaints with is Aid or Interfere, but I'll get to that later.

The biggest spot this game shines is in how powers are handled. The Power Profile is one of the best ways that any supers game has handled superpowers, period. It's far more flexible than Masks, and much more narrative and less restrictive than games like ICONS and Mutants and Masterminds. That powers continue to expand during play thanks to the Push move is awesome. The four categories of Simple, Difficult, Borderline and Possible go a long way to defining what is and isn't easy through your character's abilities. Impossible defines hard limits to your power. This is great, because it emphasizes what makes the Engine so wonderful; description is often more important than numbers are.

Drives and Origins are a neat replacement for the playbooks that other PbtA games have, and they work out really nicely. Drives replace character advancement mechanics from other games by making so that your characters motives, and how they push to fulfill those motives, give them the means to increase in power elsewhere. Advancement seems a bit slow in this game (as you need to be moving towards resolution of your drive moves to gain Achievements; nothing for failure, using a highlighted move, or any of the other sort of things that might gain you experience in other such games), but since powers develop naturally through the Push move anyways, it's not so debilitating... your character still matures, just not as broadly.

Conditions are also a great way to detail injury in a superhero game, and I'm glad that Worlds in Peril used them. They're much more flexible than the tag-based damage system from Masks, and such flexibility is necessary when dealing with truly bizarre supers concepts; an undead hero probably won't be as hampered by a broken arm as Spider-Man would, for example... so it would make sense that one character's minor condition might be another's moderate or critical condition. This was my favorite part of Venture City, and it works just as great here.

Now the bad part: Bonds.

Bonds in other games tend to portray something about your character in relation to other characters. Apocalypse World's Hx represents how much your character knows another character; bonds in Dungeon World represent debts or motives your character wishes to resolve in regards to another character; strings in Monsterhearts represents emotional leverage your character has on another character, and so on. All such things represent something about YOUR character, in relation to another one.

Bonds in Worlds in Peril represent another character's feelings about your character, and this inversion of the relationship complicates the game needlessly for multiple reasons. The obvious being that players at my table often were confused about the values on their sheet; it was very counterintuitive that they had to reference someone else's character sheet in order to find out whether they liked that character or not. They would often find themselves almost acting out of character and aiding someone they apparently detested, and not realizing it until the other player pointed it out. Furthermore, Aid and Interfere's effectiveness is entirely based on whether the character likes you, not whether you like the character. One superhero can easily help a character he detests, as long as that character is in love with them. In the opposite, you'll have a hard time assisting someone you love if they can't stand you. All in all, this very much detracted from play. I ended up having to houserule out the Bond mechanics and steal Hero Points from M&M and Hx rules from AW to fill the gap.

One last problem I had was not with the game itself, but one of the documents: the epub version of the book has a CSS glitch that makes it unreadable on my mobile device. The CC version of the epub works fine, it only seems to be problematic on the final version.

Overall, Worlds in Peril is an amazing supers game with some excellent game mechanics and a rich structure for superhero play. The one mechanic I found not to work does not reduce this in the least, as it would be a shame to skip past the amazing Power Profile mechanic, or the Drives and Origins. Hopefully there will be a second edition, or a major revision to the game to address this. That said, don't be afraid to give this game a chance.

I haven't ever played Apocalypse World, but I have loved Dungeon World. I loved how it turned everything I kew about role playing on its head and making it really really fun in the process. When I saw that there was a super hero game with the same game engine I bought it.

The way powers are defined in Worlds in Peril is so awesome. You basically define what the power is in general and then list what is easy for your character to do, what is difficult, more difficult and what is completely beyond their abilities. Characters can also try to do things with their powers that they haven't done before by pushing their powers and may even gain new abilities.. this system is so much fun, and it really works, but most of all, it seems to feel the ways powers work with comic book superheroes.

Another interesting aspect of the game that I would like to point out is your ability to burn bonds. Bonds are characters relationships, the higher the bond, the more than person or orginization likes you. This can of course be useful for things like getting the police to help you, or maybe you just have a girl friend. But when push comes to shove you need to spend those bonds to impreove rolls. The result is a very Spiderman / WB superhero. When I first read the rule I didn't much like it, but when you realize that the whole point of the game is to tell a cool story, and for that this mechanic really works.

This game is good, unfortunatly, it could have been amazing. The game suffers from what I can onlu guess is a lack of play testing. There as lots of rough areas. The new stats that Worlds in Peril uses as well as its consequence system (the way damage is handled) don't really work too well.

Overall if you like the Dungeon World/Apocolipse World and superheroes, I'd say give it a buy. For all the things in this game that don't work the game itself does. After ever season of this game I am amazied at how much fun I had despite some rough patches in the rules.

Beautifully presented with comic-book quality art throughout, this is a product that does everything it can to immerse the reader in the genre from page 1. While the writing style may feel rambling and excited at times, and a few elements could use clarification (character creation in particular), this only served to ramp up my enthusiasm for the game, as I often get this way when describing a new system to friends. And what a system it is! Taking its' cues from the wildly (and justifiably) popular Apocalypse World, Worlds in Peril presents us with a world of heroes & villains locked in physical battles for the streets of the city, and mental and personal battles with the life behind the mask. Very few games have successfully touched upon this element of the genre, and fewer still do it with such class and effortlessness as WiP. This is a game where you genuinely can be torn between taking down the villain or saving the hospital his goons are terrorizing, because that's where the villain put your girlfriend during his last attack! In my opinion, as with AW, a lot of trust between the GM and the players is required to make this work, because of the emphasis on narrative over number-crunching, but if you're one of those lucky people, like me, who has a group he's been playing with for years, they'll eat this up with a spoon. I run my first game next week, and we're already excited. I'm looking forward to seeing where this system, and its author, goes in the future. I predict great things.

Worlds in Peril is surprisingly well done, with rules that help emulate all sorts of superpowers without needing a ton of specific rules describing each and every power (and modifiers that change how those powers work.) It’s elegant, and focused more on telling a good tale of do-gooders punching bad guys than emulating physics by any stretch.

Character creation is a breeze, mechanically, but may trip up a few people who aren’t used to building specifically from a concept. As a game built around the Apocalypse World rules, the mechanics are a simple 2d6+Stat roll with results based off a chart depending on which Moves your character is doing. It’s very different from the games I’m used to running, so the ease of play took me by surprise.

My biggest concern about the rules would probably be the Limitations. The way that they are used is simple enough to understand, but I had to work very hard with my players to get them to understand how Limitations to a character work and how they work with Bonds. Aside from that, the rest of the rules run well.

Worlds in Peril looks great, with wonderful art and good, readable layout. There are a few bits where the writing could be clearer, but after a few re-reads and a one-shot or two I was able to get everything else in order in my head.

If you’re looking for an easy to learn (and fun to play!) superhero game, and you don’t mind a rules-lite approach, definitely give Worlds In Peril a try.

Very nice! Been a while since I've been this interested in a superhero game! Thanks to Runeslinger for the heads up in his video on this.

I own several supers games and I am happy to add this one to that list.

The art is well done and reminds me of several comics from the seventies and eighties.

Apocalypse Engine Games are becoming more common and this is definitely an excellent adaptation and iteration of that system. The incorporation of the Bonds mechanic adds a lot to this game and emulates social conflict in the comics genre quite well. Using bonds as in game currency integrates the "Choices have Consequences" and "With great power..." concepts seamlessly.

The Basic Playbooks, Special Playbooks, and Villian/Threat creation section seem to cover a very wide range of character and setting elements.

I look forward to a more in depth reading of this one, and using it to build nasty, nasty villains to threaten the very world..

You get the idea.