Publisher TSR | System Marvel Super Heroes | |
Thunder Over Jotunheim is a role-playing game adventure published by TSR in 1985 for the Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game.
Contents
Contents
Thunder Over Jotunheim is a solo scenario featuring the "Magic Viewer" system whereby secret information is revealed to the player who reads it through tinted lenses. Thor goes on a quest to the land of the giants, where he must foil a plot by Loki to conquer Asgard.
Thunder Over Jotunheim is a solo module starring Thor and villains such as Loki, Geirrodur, Ulik, and the Executioner. It includes a large fold-out map of the Asgardian wilderness with area encounters, depicted as hammers, and linked by lines along with Thor can travel. As Thor lands on an encounter space, the player turns to the descriptive booklet to see what happens. The module features a system involving obscuring the secret paragraphs with red dots; a tinted piece of plastic is enclosed which when placed over the dots makes them vanish, allowing the player to read whatever is underneath. In the plot, Odin has vanished, leaving Thor to handle the crisis in Asgard. Loki has taken a magical sword that belonged to Frey. Thor is told that without the sword, Asgard is extremely vulnerable to sudden attack by hordes of Giants, Trolls and others. Thor is given a gift by Karnilla before setting out to retrieve the sword, and there are six gifts to choose from.
Publication history
MH6 Thunder Over Jotunheim was written by Jeff Grubb, with a cover by Jeff Butler, and was published by TSR, Inc., in 1985 as a 16-page book, a large map, a viewer film, and an outer folder.
Reception
Rob Nott reviewed Thunder Over Jotunheim for Imagine magazine. He describes the module as "a cross between an RPG and a board game, similar in style to the old SPI game John Carter of Mars". He calls the magic viewer system an improvement over TSR's prior "system of Magic Marker pens which entailed long periods of whacking away at obscured text to render it readable", making it "Quick, simple, and it allows others to use the module when you've finished." He noted that Karnilla providing Thor with six possible gifts "provides a variable element to the adventure" as "each of which can create a different story, so in theory one player can use the module six times before exhausting the possibilities". He continued: "There are lots of encounters, albeit rather simple ones, and plenty of opportunities for accumulating KARMA. I managed to get quite a nice stack of it before having to hit anything." Nott concluded by saying: "Overall, I found the module an interesting experiment with solo game design, though not really very challenging in a role-playing sense. If you enjoy solo games, though, I think you'll find this one of the better ones around."