OverPower Cards for Edgar Rice Burroughs Characters (John Carter, Tarzan, etc.)

[Karmanal of Zert]

Alllllllllrighty! I have all my ideas for John Carter of Mars ready to share with everybody. If you have your own ideas for John Carter (or other Edgar Rice Burroughs characters) OverPower cards, please share them! I am not quite as familiar with John Carter and ERB as I am with with Conan and Robert E. Howard, but fortunately I had a lot of ideas that were pretty easy to find official-OP equivalents of, so without further ado...

*** Disclaimer: These cards are meant to be played with modified rules that alter normally unusable cards to make them usable, so that there are more, better usable characters in OverPower. If you are playing with official cards and by official rules only, you will likely find that this character has an overwhelming amount of good, usable cards. For balanced gameplay, simply pick 1-3 non-OPD's and 1-2 OPD's you like, or whatever you think is fairest, and play with those. Or experiment with alternate rules that improve your favorite characters' most worthless Specials, and you may find them to be quite competitive with these home-mades. I put effort into making individual cards that make sense given characters' abilities and the precedents laid down by the several official OverPower Expansions while deliberately avoiding what I see as their pitfall of having made many, many worthless Special cards, which leads to the inevitable outcome of my characters having a much larger quantity of good/usable Specials than most official ones wound up with. It's up to you to decide the fairest way to integrate these cards into your house rules and playing styles and strategies. Above all: do what you want, and have fun playing OverPower! ***

John Carter: Warlord of Mars

3 Energy
6 Fighting
4 Strength
6 Intellect

The basic idea of John Carter is that he was a soldier in the Civil War who after the war (while hiding from Apaches in a cave) had a strange experience in which his soul departed from his body and was mysteriously, inexplicably transported to Mars, where it found and inhabited an exact replica of his Earthly body. He has a 6 Fighting for his war experience as well as his constant banterings about the "joy of battle" and how his "vocation" is "fighting". It's pretty over-the-top at times. And awesome. He has 6 Intellect because he eventually became the equivalent of the "king of kings" on Mars and by the end of the first novel about him (there were several) he has all sorts of knowledge about warfare as well as engineering and how all the ships and such function (and how to repair them, as detailed in The Gods of Mars). Which is a great segue into...

One-Man Flier - CC

Acts as a level 6 Any-Power card. May be used to attack or defend. May not be combined with Universe cards.

This represents John Carter's vehicle for which the card is named. Pretty self-explanatory. Orion has an Astro-Glider card which from the picture looks like the exact same thing, so this card does exactly what that card does. This one was easy.

Long-Sword -AR

Acts as a level 7 Fighting attack.

Not too much to explain for this one either. It's the type of sword John Carter uses and seems to prefer in all the novels I've read about him. One example of precedent for this card is Green Goblin with his 6 Strength Power Grid ranking and 7 Strength attack Special card. This was one of the more liberally applied cards by the original OverPower makers in my opinion, who seemed to just give it to whoever they thought it made sense for for whatever reason they thought made sense for that particular character.

Radium Revolver - AE

Acts a level 4 Energy attack. May combine with 1 Fighting card for a single attack.

This is one card that screams out "1912" if you didn't happen to already know when the first John Carter of Mars book came out. In the books (from what I've seen), a radium revolver's bullets explode once they're in their target. This is described by Edgar Rice Burroughs as a very commonplace weapon on Mars. Punisher got a card identical to this in Powersurge that represented his flame-thrower. The same idea applies to both cards in my mind: the weapon is the 4 Energy attack, and the Fighting attack it's combined with is the user's physical abilities making the weapon even more effective.

Woola - HY

Acts as a level 6 Strength attack. If successful, Target Character must discard 2 cards of opponent's choice. Cards may be placed or in hand.

Woola is the name of the "Barsoomian lion", or calot, that befriends John Carter. It has eight legs, is massive, and in addition to its incredible strength also has an exceedingly nasty row of teeth. I got the idea for this one when my brother was telling me about an official card exactly like this but Fighting that they gave to a team he was relatively familiar with for a character who was some kind of cat-hero with some nasty claws. Given that it seems obvious Woola would do as much or more damage to someone than such a character, I thought he/she (I'm honestly not sure) warranted this ability, and my brother agreed.

Dejah Thoris - HO

Acts as a level 6 Fighting attack. If successful, opponent -4 to Venture total.

If you don't mind chauvenistic phrasing, Dejah Thoris is John Carter's "woman". She is a princess, the daughter of the highest leader on Mars. She's also a warrior. The combination of fighting ability and royalty made me think of giving her this card, and when I told my brother about the idea he told me there's already an identical official card they gave to a team for a member (I think even a female) who was a warrior in addition to being royalty. These card ideas came to me much easier than most of Conan's, lemme tell ya!

Tars Tarkas - AS (OPD)

Acts as a level 10 Strength attack.

Tars Tarkas was one of the green martian men. You know, the inhumanly tall kind, with tusks and four arms? Anyway, this one goes against the grain of his culture by learning friendship from John Carter (a forbidden concept). They in fact become best of friends and always have each others' backs. And as I just mentioned his stature is rather intimidating as well as powerful. If you need any more proof as to why he warrants a 10 Strength attack, I implore you to read the books! It's been a year or two for me and honestly just skimming them to come up with these card ideas made me really want to read them again!

Barsoomian Friends, Barsoomian Virtues - IC (OPD)

John Carter: Warlord of Mars' "Woola" and "Dejah Thoris" become Any Character Specials for remainder of game.

Barsoom is what the natives of Mars call their planet, and since their world is a war-stricken post-apocalyptic wasteland they have pretty sincere values when it comes to such things as loyalty (especially in the context of a fight). I think in any realistic plot where John Carter was allied with super-heroes, his friends would continue to fight on in his name and for his honor after he died. So for that reason I decided to give him this pretty darn good but much under-used (by the creators) OPD which officially only went to Green Goblin and Dracula (for obviously varying reasons). This one doesn't have as much precedent as it seems to just make sense. It took me awhile to come up with a decent name to go with the concept of the card and although I'm still not all that pleased this is the best I've come up with so far. Me deciding to give John Carter this card was the deciding factor as to whether I was going to give him a 6 or a 7 for his Fighting Power Grid ranking (since both cards that become Any-Characters are good cards).

Immortal Virginian - NY (OPD)

Play during battle. On your turn, after John Carter: Warlord of Mars is KO'd, discard this Special to move John Carter: Warlord of Mars from Defeated Characters Pile to Reserve. Play as normal.

One of John Carter's weirdest (and most inexplicable) character traits as portrayed by Edgar Rice Burroughs is his...immortality. He's always been around 30 years old, doesn't remember having a childhood, and stays the same age while he watches his family (this is back on Earth) be born, grow old, and die. There's also at least one instance (pretty sure there are more) in which John Carter "dies" at the end of a book, only to at the start of the next one explain simply that when he died his soul transported back to Earth...and then back to Mars again, reviving his replica-body. When I told my brother all this I had no card idea for it at all, but he pointed me in the direction of a Goblyn Queen OPD which I took directly to make this card. I added the "Virginian" thing in there because that's where on Earth John Carter is from and he likes it when Dejah Thoris calls him "(her) Virginian".

As usual, please let me know any thoughts you may have on these cards as well as any card ideas you might have for John Carter or other Edgar Rice Burroughs characters! As far as actually making these, I still plan on making my Conan Hero card first but these will be next, so it shouldn't take too long. The next new thread I'll be making (probably after all the aforementioned cards have been made and posted in their respective threads) will be for Star Trek OverPower card ideas, in which I'll cover first the original crew (Spock, Capt. Kirk, etc.) and then The Next Generation. Don't hesitate to share your thoughts!

[Karmanal of Zert]

There are variants of a few cards because "John Carter: Warlord of Mars" was beyond the allowed number of characters for a character's name on a Special card with my brother's OverPower card-maker beta software. It was WAY harder to find pictures that made sense for these cards than the Conan ones, contrary to what I expected. As you can probably tell, for about half of them I had to go skimming through my John Carter: Warlord of Mars collection from the Marvel series of the mid-late 1970's. In the end though, I have to say I think they look great especially printed in color. If you try to print them and they come out the wrong size, just send me an email or a PM and I'll send you a Microsoft Word document with 4 to-scale cards per page which is very convenient for printing these cards out. So without further ado...


art by Frank Frazetta


art by Mike Vosburg & Ernie Chan


art by Frank Frazetta


art by Mike Vosburg & Ric Villamonte (this is probably my favorite John Carter card of mine, the pic just SCREAMS OverPower card)


art by Frank Frazetta (really didn't want to resort to b&w, but this was just SO much better than any other option)


art by Carmine Infantino & Rudy Nebres


art by Carmine Infantino & Rudy Nebres


art by Frank Frazetta


art by Mike Vosburg & Ric Villamonte (it was hard or impossible to find one that made sense for John Carter's immortality, so I just went with something bad ass...like him swinging a support column of a building...makes a bit sense more sense if you know the character...but just a bit)


*** Disclaimer: These cards are meant to be played with modified rules that alter normally unusable cards to make them usable, so that there are more, better usable characters in OverPower. If you are playing with official cards and by official rules only, you will likely find that this character has an overwhelming amount of good, usable cards. For balanced gameplay, simply pick 1-3 non-OPD's and 1-2 OPD's you like, or whatever you think is fairest, and play with those. Or experiment with alternate rules that improve your favorite characters' most worthless Specials, and you may find them to be quite competitive with these home-mades. I put effort into making individual cards that make sense given characters' abilities and the precedents laid down by the several official OverPower Expansions while deliberately avoiding what I see as their pitfall of having made many, many worthless Special cards, which leads to the inevitable outcome of my characters having a much larger quantity of good/usable Specials than most official ones wound up with. It's up to you to decide the fairest way to integrate these cards into your house rules and playing styles and strategies. Above all: do what you want, and have fun playing OverPower! ***

Please feel free to share any thoughts you may have on my card ideas, or contribute your own card ideas for this or any other Edgar Rice Burroughs character(s) you happen to be a fan of!

[Karmanal of Zert]

Also forgot to mention I'm considering giving him the IA: May play any level 7 Fighting or Intellect Teamwork card

Which I think makes perfect sense for the character, seeing as how he went from being no one to Warlord of the entire planet. 

[gameplan.exe]

So, they're making a John Carter movie! I was already interested in reading, because of the above post, but now I think I'll def' have to read so I can also see the movie. Good call, Karmanal of Zert! 

[The Dude]

I actually have a homemade Tarzan that I played for the first time two weeks ago and he ended up being a friggin beast. (I was playing a Pulp Heroes homebase and he was by far the mvp of my team).  The funny thing is I got the hero card from someone else but no specials so I just whipped like 5 or 6 specials to move him along and I ended up with an all-purpose monster.