Godlike: Superhero Roleplaying in a World on Fire, 1936-1946 (2001)

From the back of the book:

You are larger than life. But the war is larger than you....

In the beginning, there was only one. He flew into the Berlin Olympics of 1936 to light the torch, then landed beside Hitler to proclaim the triumph of the Aryan will.

By the end of the war, there were two hundred thousand of them. They came from Poland, from Finland, from England, and from France. They came from besieged villages and from the halls of academia, from the devastation of Stalingrad and from the corn fields of Kansas.

Their powers were both great and small, and they died by the thousands for the sake of the people they loved.

This is their story....

Godlike is a superhero roleplaying game unlike any other.

No bright spandex, no pulp machismo. In the face of a world on fire, ordinary men and women emerge who possess the talents their times demand - but who are still as vulnerable, and eventually as expendable, as the troops in the foxholes. You can be faster than a speeding bullet, as long as you don't step on a landmine. Backed by an extensive historical timeline, players take the roles of Talents committed to the greatest challenge of the twentieth century. Possessed of powers you barely understand and struggle to control, you fight the forces of darkness both within and without - for defeat is a state of mind, and if you lose faith in yourself, you will never become Godlike.

This rulebook includes:

- An entire timeline of the war, covering the years 1936-1946 in detail

- More than sixty dossiers of Axis and Allied Talents

- More than forty Talent powers, as well as the rules necessary to create your own powers

- A "field manual" covering more than 200 weapons and vehicles from all sides of the conflict

- An innovative dice-pool mechanic - a single combat roll determines initiative, success, damage, and hit location

- Options for different play styles - such as high realism, cinematic, or four-color - and the rules tweaks to run them

- A complete campaign background

- And an open-source rules conversion for game systems that use a standard twenty-sided die