Just a Hello...

[toolgawd]

Howdy,
I am new to the board and partially new to the HERO system, most of my time spent at Hackmaster these days. However I was looking into running a HERO game/campaign and needed a little help. I'd like to run either Star HERO or Fantasy HERO, and I was wondering if I would need to purchase the Genre books to run the game, or can I just run it from the main rulebook?

Thanks,
JJ

[Lord Liaden]

Hey hey, Tim Tailor is a roleplayer! Talk about your "powergamers." ;)

Welcome aboard, toolgawd. You're in for quite a ride. :)

To answer your question, you absolutely do not need either of those genre books to play the game - all the system rules are included in the one Fifth Edition rulebook (nicknamed "FREd" around these parts). However, both Fantasy HERO and Star HERO are jammed full of good advice on roleplaying those genres in general and using the HERO ruleset in particular, as well as lots of readymade stuff to save you time and generate ideas. They would make your job as GM easier, but if you're confident in your ability to run a sci-fi or fantasy game then you wouldn't need them.

Something else that you might find useful, though, would be "The HERO System Genre by Genre," a free PDF file which gives advice on how to run various genres using the system, plus sample characters for each of the major genres. You can download it from here:
http://www.herogames.com/FreeStuff/freedocs.htm

[toolgawd]

Thanks, I will check out that .pdf file.

JJ

[zornwil]

If your players know HERO pretty well and have some likelihood of having genre books, it will save you some grief if you're familiar with them. Of course in that event you could just borrow them. If you really are into world-building then you could forego the genre books, but they're good enough to have for reference/ideas in my opinion regardless of how much you like to tweak on your own. If you're into world-building and rules-tweaking both, you should enjoy the perspectives of the genre books whether you implement anything from them. As stated earlier, yes you have to have the 5th edition rulesbook.

[toolgawd]

Actually, starting off I plan to run a few adventures at my local Weird Pete's convention for Halloween. Hopefully I'll have something prepared by then, if not then I can always fall back on Hackmaster and continue to work on my SH or FH game.

JJ