This Monday is Miracle Monday, the Earth-wide fictional celebration whose origin is Elliot S! Maggin’s wonderful Superman novel of the same name. Something has happened, something that could literally have been Hell on Earth, but Superman saved the world and everyone in it. Not through brute strength or even through his alien, super-enhanced intelligence, but through his innate goodness, his moral upbringing by Jonathan and Martha Kent. The people of Earth remember nothing of those horrible days. They don’t know why they feel joyful. They know only that they do, as if some horrible evil has been lifted from them.

Shortly before four in the afternoon on the third Monday in the month of May, the people of the city of Metropolis learned the meaning of joy. They had no explanation for this feeling, and there were gaps in their knowledge of what had gone on in their lives so far that day. It was as though they were all waking up, or at least opening their eyes, for the first time in an awfully long time. The first thing many of them saw was the red-and-blue figure of Superman drawing a line across their sky, and he became the symbol of their joy. It felt like a miracle, though none could say why.

Miracle Monday is a wonderful book, a fine companion to Maggin’s first Superman novel, Last Son of Krypton. Very few authors have fully recognized how the innate goodness of Superman is essential to his nature. Maggin is probably the best of that very small number.

I have Miracle Monday on my calendar to remind me to search my experiences over the last year for something worth blogging about on that day. It ought to be related to Superman or at least to superhero roleplaying or fiction. But since I don’t play superhero roleplaying games any more, or read superhero comic books—in both cases more through lack of opportunity than through lack of desire—I often skip over it.

I have, for a long time, been considering a complete rewrite of Men and Supermen, my own superhero game written and played throughout the eighties and nineties. While I play fantasy most often, superhero roleplaying is probably my favorite; from the moment I first played Dungeons & Dragons in 1980, I set my sights on a solid ruleset for gaming in a comic book superhero setting.

It’s based on classic Avengers, classic Justice League, and a bit of classic (especially Gerber era) Defenders thrown in. A handful of the better team adventures based around World War II also influenced it: The Invaders from Marvel, and All-Star Squadron from DC.

Outside of my own, the closest game to my vision is probably early Villains and Vigilantes. It is very important, for example, that the powers in a superhero game be powers and not collections of effects. Players should always be able to come up with new uses for their powers based on what the powers are. Magnetism control is the ability to control magnetism; it is not a restricted collection of effects colored by reference to a vague magnetic buzzword.

It’s a bad sign when you’re working on the cover before the content. But what I want is a game that recognizes the sheer joy of superheroes.

Superhero powers in a roleplaying game should, in other words, be subject to the expansive imaginations of players, and not the tinkertoy imaginations of game authors.

Where Villains and Vigilantes falls apart is emulating the sheer joyful scope of what makes a superhero. V&V will never support a group where Superman and Wildcat are in the same team. But as I wrote in its introduction,

Men & Supermen was designed to allow variable power between heroes. In comics, it is perfectly possible for a god to fight alongside an average human. The game system of Men & Supermen allows for this, without losing the differences between powerful and less powerful heroes.

The book also contains the first version of my What is Role-Playing page that was linked to often in the early days of the net.

My redirect site for www.menandsupermen.com had, at the beginning of the year, the dubious distinction of being the only part of my site that remains outside of my CMS. It was still a bunch of Microsoft Word files converted into frame-based web pages by way of conversion software so old that I can’t even remember what it was called. In that sense, Men & Supermen almost belongs in Tractor Feed Adventures.

So when I decided, this year, to finally complete the update of the roleplaying files that have been sitting in a folder on my desktop since 2007, Men and Supermen was obviously one that I wanted to complete sooner rather than later. By looking at what I did before, I can more easily contemplate what I want to do next.

And what better deadline to set for myself than Miracle Monday?

Converting the Men and Supermen rulebook to a modern word processor was harder than I expected it to be. The differences between the 1998 technology I last wrote these files in and the 2025 technology I converted it to was enough to cause serious issues. Converting from Word to Nisus was the least of the problems. Nisus, after all, is very easy to use.

Some of the auxiliary files, however, were even older than Word, going back to Stylograph on OS-9 on the TRS-80 Color Computer, and image files in formats long since lost. The worst was when I looked all over my hard drive for the three sample characters, and could not find them. Had I accidentally deleted the character sheets for Seraph, the Rainbow Wizard, and the Sphinx sometime in the last couple of decades?

No, or at least not completely. I finally found the first page of each of the three characters, the front page of attributes. There were pages for powers and spells and other abilities, too… but they were blank.

Oddly, those blank pages also had a different format than the corresponding pages in the book, which, on a closer examination, had a different format than the front of the character sheets in the book. The second (and third and fourth, for Rainbow Wizard) pages looked like a classic Macintosh screen.

One of these days, I should probably scan my original draft. Do not hold your breath.

To describe it was to recognize it. They were printouts from a HyperCard stack. Technically I could have used the screenshots from HyperCardPreview in this new version, but the images in that stack weren’t particularly high quality to begin with. While I did keep the low-quality images elsewhere in the book, it made more sense to remake the sample sheets completely in Scribus. You can download the Scribus document with those three characters (Zip file, 378.1 KB) if you want a Scribus character sheet to store characters in.

You can also download the original blank character sheet from the Starter Kit.

To say that this was fun is an overstatement. The rules are not quite as bad as I remembered from the last time I looked at them a few years ago. But I have a suspicion that the only person who could really run this game well is the author, and I barely recognize that guy today.

For this reason, I made it a point not to fix or clarify the rules—I’m not enough in that headspace to be able to reliably know what the writer was thinking. I have fixed obvious typos—the random double spaces and double periods are gone—but I have left some less obvious typos in. They might have been there for a reason.

Similarly, I have tried not to alter formatting except as required by a modern word processor. I have, however, fixed obvious formatting errors, such as headlines having the wrong headline style, which in a modern word processor such as Nisus has the effect of putting subsections in the wrong section of the document.

The index is slightly improved, mainly because, again, it was difficult to adhere to the limitations of 1998. The only weird thing about the new index is that %Control and %Recognition are sorted under “C” and “R” respectively rather than under “%”. I don’t know how I feel about that in general, but in this case, trying to emulate the indexing of 1998 where even upper and lower case made for different entries, it’s slightly annoying. I’ve added them back in manually.

You can download the PDF—which now has a table of contents built in—or view the rules online. You can even, if you so desire, buy a printed copy.

And if you choose to run this at North Texas, I will definitely sign up to play it. But I have no intention of running it again myself.

Now, on to the Hero’s Guide! I will hopefully have that project finished by next Miracle Monday. It would be a Miracle, indeed…