As a lifelong fan of comic books I have always felt like I was born at the wrong time. Older fans in the hobby can talk about seeing the medium itself being born anew as superheroes started taking over from pulp action heroes. They can speak to the beloved icons like Superman, Batman, Spider-man, and The Incredible Hulk being created and refined over time. They can talk about the unabridged heroics of certain characters with fondness and the nuanced takes of being a hero that more relatable if flawed characters portrayed. Beyond all of that, it felt like I was talking to people who got to witness the start of something brilliant, when my own experience was the opposite.

I was born just as deconstruction fully sank into the medium. I became aware of these amazing heroes and their tales just as every author who thought they had some point to say about the pointless cruelty of the world sought to bastardize and tear down these icons of heroism. I road through that wave but even when authors tried to write heroes again, it was almost as though they forgot what made things heroic, what made people feel wonder at seeing Strength, Beauty, Wisdom, and Courage. Everything felt undercut by some needless cruelty, some needless statement that there is no perfect Good. In the pursuit of making everything relatable, it felt like authors forgot that some heroes needed to be unrelatable, unobtainable paragons to show us what we're even trying to be. I was born to a comics industry that felt like it had lost it's way and was dying before I even got to enjoy it.

Ascendant is one of the few comics that have shown me that the medium of the Superhero Comic book is still alive. That there are still brilliant authors and artists working to produce the kinds of stories that produce awe and wonder. If mainstream comics learned the wrong lessons from the deconstruction era, Alexander Macris clearly learned the right ones, and not only modernized takes on classic heroic archetypes, he crafted them in ways to not only incorporate the justified criticisms of the deconstruction movement, but to make sure that at the end there was a proper reconstruction of the things we loved about that era. This book gives me hope, that in thirty years I'll be able to speak as fondly about watching the birth of this era of the comics book industry, as older fans used to speak about it's mainstream contemporaries.

The image that comes to mind when most people hear "Simulates the physics of a comic-book world" is one of a book that is impossibly complex, full of math that no one would want to use at their table, and reduces the amazing and fantastical worlds to something dull. Almost like a physics textbook. The brilliant mind behind ASCENDANT has managed to make sure that's not the case. Not only is the action as high paced and spectacular as any comic book, the actual play is as smooth of a system as I've ever seen. ASCENDANT addresses the common criticism of effects-based games by grounding every effect in the physical reality of the world, such that a fire blast and a cryoblast are equally easy to run but do distinct things both in the direct resolution of the blast and in what kind of other abilities you can Power Stunt off of them. It's a game where meticulous care was taken when choosing the baseline numbers so that the actual play consideration of things like, "How much damage do I do when I throw a car at an enemy" are effortless to adjudicate, and the tools dedicated to answering various Saving the World questions like "How do I disarm a bomb", "How do I deal with a natural disaster", and the classic, "How do I stop a meteor that's hurtling towards the earth" are robust, easy to follow, and rapidly become second nature for any GM or player. Important to understand is that while there are rules for most things, it is so that if you want a consistent answer that fits into this well crafted system, you don't need to be able to pull the system apart and understand all of the underlying maths to get an answer, Alexander has already done the work for you in most fields that will matter. Your game might never wonder what the relative difference in pungency of wine is versus garlic, but in a courtly intrigue game with someone with supernatural senses, these questions might come up. They say that what you dedicate the most rules space to is what your game is actually about, and with the amount of space dedicated to high quality rules for powers and superheroics, it's plain to see that ASCENDANT is the next best contender in the Super Heroic Gaming legacy.

With half a year to reconsider this review through weeks of playing, I can only say that I'm extremely excited for the future of this game. The community engagement is exceptional, the amount of work done and explanations being written for any questions that come up is fantastic, and gems have been being created in the patreon. I never thought I'd see a time travel power done well, and Ascendant continues to prove me wrong. This game and it's community are amazing and anyone picking it up should also head over to the discord to get to experience it.