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What have you used Hero for?


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The Hero system, being one of the first - and the best - generic gaming systems out there is incredibly flexible and can run just about anything very well.  What kind of campaigns and settings have you used it for?  Here's what I've done or played in over the decades:

 

Vietnam War

Fantasy of various types

Superhero settings (High powered, low powered, school for mutants, vigilantes, and much more)

Pulp era adventures

Wild West

Sci Fi (space opera)

Post Apocalyptic

The Viper sourcebook (4th ed) idea of superbeings running the world and the PCs rebelling by finding an old Viper base.  Only one session, sadly :(

Miami Vice

Terminator

Supernatural Western

Robin Hood setting

Japanese Fantasy variant

 

These are campaigns I want to run:

 

1) Continue my Golden Age Champions campaign, now on hold, at least up to Pearl Harbor.
2) Pirates! Based on the antics of Captain Morgan and set in that time period, still not sure how to handle the PCs and what their rank would be.
3) Super cops, police with low level superpowers who join the force and eventually others learn about their powers and a super-cop branch is established and built up around them
4) Colonial Defense Marines. Sci Fi game where PCs are grunts in low end military force to protect colonists on strange worlds.
5) Continue rebellion using Viper gear

6) Villains game where the PCs play viper agents and work their way up through the system to run their own Nest.

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Many of these were back in the GAS days.

  • Four color superheroes
  • Somewhat deadlier superheroes
  • Wild Cards
  • Teen superheroes
  • Many Fantasy Hero games
  • Fantasy Hero game based on FGU's Bushido
  • Fantasy Hero game based on Robert Asprin's Myth series with a distinct Star Wars flavor
  • Several different translations of Battletech to Hero
  • Generic giant robots (Robot Warriors)
  • Old West
  • Paranoid/gonzo conspiracy a la Illuminati
  • Modern military action adventure
  • Translation of WW's Vampire (that itself started as a modern day with magic game a la GURPS Technomancer)
  • Space opera
  • Pro wrestling
  • Something odd we called "Death Wish", essentially 10 point characters, no powers or disads, dropped on a map and forced to fight to the last man.
  • Weird dimension hopping uhhh...weirdness
  • Ninja Hero (I was one of the Hiro Brothers)
  • I missed out on the Ghostbusters game, but wanted to do one myself.
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• Superheroes (in the CU)

• Superheroes (in my own universe)

• Spies/Espionage

• Super-Spies (in CU)

• ESPionage

• Traditional Fantasy

• Star Hero (in my own universe)

• Robot Warriors (anime-ish)

• Robot Warriors (Transformers-ish)

• Western Hero (alas only one session)

• Justice Inc./Pulp Hero

• Fighting Tourneys (w/ Ninja Hero/HS Martial Arts)

• Horror Hero (only one session, though others have been plotted out)

 

I'm sure there have been a few others... I know I had thought about doing a TMNT-like game in Hero as well...

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Muppets

Toy Story toys

Roger Rabbit era classic cartoons (Warner Brothers and Disney)

Sci-fi and fantasy movies (Terminator, Highlander, Shrek, etc.)

RPG company cliches (Magic User, Brick, Werewolf)

Company mascots (Cap'n Crunch, Mrs. Butterworth's, Mr. Clean, etc.)

Post-apocalpyse talking apes (like PotA with sorcery)

Giant monsters on Nightmare Island

Giant statues (Sphinx, Statue of Liberty, Easter island head, etc.)

The Scooby Doo gang

GI Joe

 

...and a variety of superhero, sci-fi, modern, and pulp campaigns over the years.

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Space Opera (originally a Star Frontiers homage that morphed into a homebrew)

Fantasy (original homebrew setting )

Fantasy (epic, vaguely Norse meets Spawn-verse homebrew setting)

Fantasy (low-powered, homebrew setting based roughly on the concept of a New World discovered in the 7th Sea universe with heavy Lovecraftian elements)

Pulp (an off-shoot of the Space Opera campaign wherein the characters were forced to explore their character's ancestors' lives in an altered reality or perhaps a mass hallucination)

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Fantasy and Champions

Also, the 5th ed book and a dictionary was used to prop up my (then) infants bed so that it was on an angle. Which means of course that 5e was best as a reflux cure :)

I joked with my wife that he was resting on knowledge and gaming, so that he would hopefully absorb both by osmosis.

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Hero Campaigns I've run:

  • Fantasy, assorted
  • Superheroes, 4-color
  • Superheroes, gritty
  • Supervillains (Necessary Evil setting)
  • Time travel (based on Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks)
  • Urban Fantasy-Monster Hunting (pre-MHI)
  • Sci-Fi, space opera (unfortunately short-lived)

 

Hero one-shots/demos/convention games I've run:

  • Superheroes, 4-color
  • Superheroes, Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • Superhero kids (PS238)
  • Superhero grand melee (all combat, multiple characters per player)
  • Fantasy, low
  • Fantasy, high
  • Fantasy, epic/divine (1000 point PCs (and no that's not a typo!))
  • Fantasy, Barsoom (ie John Carter of Mars)
  • Fantasy, offbeat ninja-pirate mashup
  • Sci-fi, pulp space opera
  • Sci-fi, military action
  • Sci-fi, western (ie Firefly before they released the RPG)
  • Post-apocalypse, high-power
  • Post-apocalypse, low-power
  • Pulp
  • Urban Fantasy
  • Urban Fantasy-Monster Hunting, non-MHI
  • Urban Fantasy-Monster Hunting, MHI
  • Cross-genre pop-culture hero mashup

 

Whew! What campaigns would I like to run someday?

  • At present I have a cyberpunk/superhero mashup rattling around in my brain.
  • I'd like to take my Divine-level fantasy game and expand it to campaign length.
  • Someday I'd love to try the Revelations 1001 setting from Post-Apoc Hero.
  • And one of these days I'll get to scratch my Grand Space Opera Babylon-5-meets-Farscape-via-Blake's-Seven itch!
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The only one I've tried that didn't work for me was Horror Hero; Call of Cthulhu seems to work best for that kind of setting for me at least.

We had trouble with Horror Hero too, tho I think that was more that my GMing style isn't well-suited to horror. (After 2 sessions it morphed into "We Need Bigger Guns" monster hunting, and everyone was much happier!)

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I never ran a Horror Hero game but have the book. It seems to me as a genre you really need the players fully on board with it to make it work.

That's true with any horror game regardless of the system. If the players aren't fully on board with CoC it's just that dumb game where you go crazy and the GM kills you all the time.
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So far I gmed or played in:

1) Superheroes (regular four-color Champions, street-level supers, Golden Age, anti-heroic Dark Champions)

2) Fantasy Hero (regular fantasy stuff (one in the Western Shores, one in the Palladium RPG setting, one in the Kingdoms of Kalamar), low-powered, low-magic stuff in the Grand-Duchy of Karameikos, and one Stormbringer conversion)

3) Star Wars

4) Western Hero

5) Pulp Hero

6) Victorian Hero (we called it HERO 1880)

7) Space Gothic Hero (a conversion of the German dark sci-fi Space Gothic Game - think Aliens meets Dystopian Future meets Space Crusaders with some mutants thrown in)

8) Cyber Hero (only one adventure - not my cup of tea)

 

Seems like not much, but we really played a lot of Champions and Pulp back in the days and after that Fantasy mostly.

 

The systemn works best with Champions and Pulp IMHO. Space Gothic and Star Wars were the worst - EBs and even RKAs are simply not deadly enough for the setting. You regularly end up witha lot of unconscious stormtroopers with one heck of an headache - not very genre-like.

 

Western and the Victorian setting were okay, too.

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Yeah I could use some more players in my group.

Try out a local game convention; by definition everyone there has at least some time for the hobby, and there are always people looking to join a new group. And you get to play a few one-shots with them first to get a sense of if they'd be a good fit, both socially and in terms of style of play. Almost everyone in my current group I met that way.

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True. I just meant that most of the issues with "horror Hero" apply to any other horror game if the group isn't invested in that type of game.

I want I meant was with Hero system by default most people don't think that their character are going to be seriously harmed/die whereas other games this is already figured into the games premises.

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