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. Origin Villains and Vigilantes was the first role-playing game designed by Jack Herman and Jeff Dee and featured 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 a lawsuit filed in U.S. Federal court, Arizona District, (Case no. 2:2011-cv-02036) asserted that Monkey House Games had no legal right to do so. That lawsuit has since been resolved and a settlement agreed upon with both parties producing their own material. Mechanics Character creation in Villains and Vigilantes reflects the unique nature of the rules. Instead of playing a completely fictional character, players are encouraged to start the 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 advance in levels and hit points, superpowers do not, lending a different feel to characters at low, middle, and high power levels. Character stats in the first edition of the game are strength, endurance, agility, intelligence, and charisma. Another 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 the defender's powers, reflecting the interplay of attack and defense powers. Publication history 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 were authored by Bill Willingham, 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. The second edition of Villains & Vigilantes, created by the same authors and also published by Fantasy Games Unlimited, was released in 1982