Villains and Vigilantes
Revised Edition Cover
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| Designer(s) | Jeff Dee, Jack Herman |
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| Publisher(s) | Monkey House Games |
| Publication date | 1979 (1st Edition), 1982 (Revised Edition), 2010 (2.1 Edition) |
| Genre(s) | Superhero fiction |
| System(s) | Custom |
Villains and Vigilantes (abbreviated as V&V) is a superhero-themed role-playing game which competed primarily with Champions and Superworld in the early to mid-1980s.
Villains and Vigilantes was the first role-playing game designed by Jack Herman and Jeff Dee and featuring illustrations by Dee. Fantasy Games Unlimited published the first edition of Villains and Vigilantes in 1979. The second edition of Villains and Vigilantes was published in 1982 with significant rule revisions. In 2010, Monkey House Games published a new edition of the game although the lawsuit filed in U.S. Federal court, Arizona District, (Case no. 2:2011-cv-02036) asserts that Monkey House Games had no legal right to do so. That lawsuit has since been resolved and a settlement agreed upon.
Characters in Villains and Vigilantes reflects the unique nature of the rules. Instead of playing a completely fictional character, players are encouraged to start the character-creation process with a version of themselves (presumably as the superhero's "secret identity.") V&V then uses random die rolls for the origins of superpowers (i.e., mutant, space alien, etc.) number and type, sometimes resulting in odd combinations. A further quirk of the system is that while players advanced in levels and hit points, superpowers did not, lending a different feel to characters at low, middle and high power levels.
Another notable feature of the system is its approach to combat: a table outlines the effectiveness of the attacker's superpower (for example, an energy blast) against all of the defender's powers, reflecting the interplay of attack and defense powers.
The first edition was created by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman and published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1979. This book was followed by an adventure published in 1981, "Break In at Three Kilometer Island", and a pair of adventures in 1982 designed specifically to be playable with the original ruleset, but to begin to introduce players to the revised second edition which was published later the same year. These two adventures are particularly notable for being authored by Bill Willingham, most recently famous as the creator of the Fables comic book series. Willingham's adventures also used characters that would later appear in his Comico comic book series, Elementals.
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