Capes, Cowls & Villains Foul

Capes, Cowls and Villains Foul is a pen and paper roleplaying game about comic book style superheroes and their adventures, developed and published by Parsons, Kansas-based Spectrum Games. It officially debuted in the form of an illustrated 13-page PDF document released for free, called the Quickstart Preview in 2010. A full rulebook was released in 2012. It was written by Barak Blackburn, and uses a significantly modified version of a rules system that was first introduced in Cartoon Action Hour: Season 2 in late 2008.

Capes, Cowls and Villains Foul, abbreviated as CC&VF or CCVF, adapts the narrative and open-ended trait system of Cartoon Action Hour: Season 2 to the genre of superhero comics, and aims to make each roleplaying game session feel as much as possible like writing and editing a comicbook. Conceptually, it operates on the edge of the narrative school of game design, aiming to make characters and their abilities as flexible as possible while still maintaining its own system and dice roll mechanics. It is arguably among the most versatile superhero games that do not completely forgo the elements of dice, tables, or numbers. Tim Kirk's Hearts & Souls and Chad Underkoffler's Truth & Justice, both written for the same genre, share similar goals and design features, but are unrelated publications that came out about five years before CC&VF.

While Cartoon Action Hour and CC&VF are closely related systems, both are de facto independent rules frameworks, and the texts in either are written from scratch to reflect the chosen genre, and the “parent medium” emulated (animated cartoon shows for CAH, printed comicbooks for CC&VF). For CC&VF, the popular references to cartoon series, action figures and pop culture of the 1980s were cut in favor of terms and references taken only from the printed comic book medium.

Unlike other games by Spectrum Games, CC&VF does not use a default time period, location, or style of superhero stories, but the majority of its illustrations and a few hints and allusions in the flavor text suggest a tribute to superhero comics of the early to late Silver Age, and maybe the Bronze Age. The author himself has mentioned on forums and blog entries that he is a big fan of Marvel comicbooks of the 1970s.