Fantasy Hero Grimoires

 

Just arrived this morning, a couple of PoD Fantasy Hero books from Hero Games.

These are full of spells and potions and what-not — magical shenanigans for a Fantasy Hero game.

There's nothing in either of them that any half-way competent GM or player couldn't come up with themselves, but it's handy having all the maths already done for you. The spells are designed for their Turakian Age setting, which is their bog-standard high fantasy roleplaying milieu, but there's nothing completely setting-specific there and they could be slotted into pretty much any fantasy campaign.

In truth, I have no particular need for these books, since I haven't run a Fantasy Hero campaign for many years, and to be honest it's not that likely that I will again. But they weren't very expensive, even with the swingeing postage the USPS charges these days, and they add more bulk to my Roleplaying Bookshelf of Doom. 

The Hero Games webstore for the 5th Edition stuff is at https://www.herogames.com/store/category/3-hero-system-5th-edition/

Renewal

 

Many, many years ago, about the turn of the century, I dismantled a couple of RPG sourcebooks because I thought it would be a good idea to put them in a 3-ring binder. Sheer madness.

Anyway, zoom forward to the present and I have rescued them and re-bound them. Their covers are somewhat more restrained than they used to be, and also they're now hardbacks instead of the softcovers they once were.

I thought I'd lost them, maybe loaned them to somebody and never got them back, and since I wanted to use them for an upcoming BRP space opera campaign, I ordered replacements from Hero Games' webstore, where they have them for cheap — twenty yankeebucks for the pair of them (PoD plus PDF), and about the same for postage. Naturally, the instant I ordered those, I found the originals.

So now I'll have two copies of each. Hey-ho.

Space Opera Revisited

Some years ago — quite a few years, now — I ran a space opera campaign using the Hero System Star Hero rules.

I put my house rules and some other campaign information, including some session journals, on my website at https://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/sci-fi/terranempire/campaign_notes/campaignindex.html. (There was another that I'd done previously, also using the Hero System, set in a slightly modified version of Jack Vance's Gaean Reach.)

Terran Empire cover

It was nominally run in the Terran Empire milieu, though in fact not a lot of that background ever made it into the foreground of the game. I think there were some hints of covert Vorgon interference in Terran space, and the party did a salvage job on a drifting Hzeel freighter, but that was bout it.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed that campaign, and the main reason it folded (apart from my usual mayfly attention span) was because I was getting pretty sick of the Hero System's constant pernickety accounting. I had a character generation app that helped a lot, but even so...

It occurs to me now that the generic nature of the Chaosium Basic Roleplaying System, along with the simplicity of its basic mechanisms, might suit me a bit better. I don't know the system very thoroughly, but one way to amend that might be to build a whole heap of stuff in it, and one way to do that might be to convert my old campaign to it.

So I thought I'd give it a go. Why not?

There is a pretty comprehensive BRP sci-fi horror game already in existence, New Horizon, but it is pretty massive, about a thousand pages just in the two volumes of its core rules, and I don't know that I have the endurance required to absorb that much milieu information when I already have a milieu that I'm somewhat familiar with.

Pulp Hero

 

This just arrived for me, a PoD product via DTRPG.

To tell the truth, I'm not really sure why I bought it. I don't use the Hero System any more, though I was very keen on it it back in the day.

It's a hefty tome — 432 pages — and it follows the same general pattern as other Hero System genre books. It includes a lot of background information on the Pulp era, including a country by country background of the world, which would all be very handy. Resources like travel times from here to there, and other milieu details, are presented in various tables. There's information and Hero stats for Pulpish equipment and Mad Science, and of course some sample Good Guys and Bad Hats.

I have run a little bit of Two-Fisted Pulp Action in the Hero System before, though the PBEM campaign against the Despicable Doktor DePravo didn't last for very long either time. Both times I tried to get it up and running, something awful happened in real life to derail everything.

Print-on-Demand is a great thing. It means that volumes like this, that would likely have been out of print and unavailable years ago, can still be had by nerds such as me, and it means that small concerns like Hero Games don't have to worry about keeping stocks of old books mouldering away in warehouses (or, more likely, somebody's garage).