etherio Posted April 26, 2004 Report Share Posted April 26, 2004 Hey...I've been sort of nostalgic for a while about the old supers game "Golden Heroes." I thought it was great for comic-book-style gaming. As far as I can tell, it's been totally out of circulation for years. Anybody have a copy? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug McCrae Posted April 26, 2004 Report Share Posted April 26, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Yeah. You can get copies relatively cheaply on the British ebay. I'm actually playing in a Golden Heroes campaign right now. It's bizarrely popular round here, though the random power gen tends to annoy me. Our game is set in the Golden Age. I wrote up a new random rolls table to simulate the GA power distributions which I could post if you like. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
etherio Posted April 26, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 26, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Sure...please post. Actually, my buds and I preferred a sort of negotiating process to the random rolling. What I loved about the system were the "comic-panel-based" timetable and the rules for character improvement. (I think they were called 'DPUs' or something like that.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Delthrien Posted April 26, 2004 Report Share Posted April 26, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Wow! I thought I was the only person in the US to have actually picked this one up! I also liked the "comic panel" combat. I was never really a fan of the random character generation, but the few that I rolled up were playable. I kind of liked some of the characters as well. "Fanatic" was one that I translated into a champs game (o so long ago...). The most prominent of his disads was "Berserk for no readily apparent reason" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JMcL63 Posted April 26, 2004 Report Share Posted April 26, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Golden Heroes was the first supers rpg I gm'ed. It had its good points, eg. the 'panels' based combat system, although I still feel that 4 panels weren't quite enough to give the right feel for superheroics. Other bits I didn't like were the random powers generation, and the utterly puny energy blasts. With the standard rules you simply couldn't get a proper energy projector character. Still, the very mention of the game gives me a real nostalgia buzz. Oh, and one of the designers- Pete Haines- now works for GW on their 40K range, so he's come in from the cold, so to speak. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohnOSpencer Posted April 26, 2004 Report Share Posted April 26, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... IIRC, Golden Heroes is still around, though now called Squadron Uk. I think you can even download the rules online. John Spencer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Major Tom Posted April 27, 2004 Report Share Posted April 27, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Wow! I thought I was the only person in the US to have actually picked this one up! I also liked the "comic panel" combat. I was never really a fan of the random character generation, but the few that I rolled up were playable. I kind of liked some of the characters as well. "Fanatic" was one that I translated into a champs game (o so long ago...). The most prominent of his disads was "Berserk for no readily apparent reason" I have Golden Heroes as well (the second superhero RPG that I got my hands on after V&V); I also have been looking at the Fraternity as a potent- ial project to see how well characters from GH convert into HERO. I'm looking at some of the other GH characters as well, especially those that are close parallels to some of the current Champions characters. Major Tom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sketchpad Posted April 27, 2004 Report Share Posted April 27, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Mr. Spencer is correct ... here's the link: http://members.aol.com/squadronuk/SquadronUK/ Not a bad version ... I played GH a few times back in high school ... but we were always more Champions/V&V/DC Heroes/MSH players Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
etherio Posted April 27, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 27, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Awesome, guys... I'm stoked that there's an existing, generally-unaltered version of this innovative game still circulating about. Of course, it doesn't even pretend to compare to the universal flexibility of HERO, but there are some very interesting, comic-style mechanics to the game that reflect supers very well...especially in character improvement, Advantageous Backgrounds, public standing, and detective ratings. Many thanks for the help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pattern Ghost Posted April 27, 2004 Report Share Posted April 27, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... I used to have a boxed set way back when I was trying to collect every supers game made. Sold it a while back, though. I thought one of the best features was the random power generation, b/c you had to rationalize any powers you wanted to keep. That idea always seemed fun to me, though I never did play the game, so I'm not sure how it'd work out in practice. Could cause some player/GM conflict, I suppose. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
etherio Posted April 27, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 27, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... ...I thought one of the best features was the random power generation' date=' b/c you had to rationalize any powers you wanted to keep. That idea always seemed fun to me, though I never did play the game, so I'm not sure how it'd work out in practice. Could cause some player/GM conflict, I suppose.[/quote'] No more so than in any decent Champions campaign, I s'pose. BTW...I had that boxed set, too...before I discovered Champions. We were playing Justice Inc. for a while before we found out there was a supers version. I can still clearly picture that GH cover...blue and yellow costume with the pointy collar on that dude. (Sigh)...makes me wanna be a teen again. My greatest worry at the time was stalling my mom long enough till she fell asleep, so I could game all night...slaying fire giants, hacking our way through the Barrier Peaks, charging a Killbeast with a gyrojet pistol in each of my Dralasite's four hands, spending fourteen hours playing out fourteen seconds of Car Wars time, endlessly debating conversions of the X-Men into V&V, and all the while imagining how my favorite PCs would look if illustrated by the great Jeff Dee. Those were the days... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug McCrae Posted April 27, 2004 Report Share Posted April 27, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... I thought one of the best features was the random power generation' date=' b/c you had to rationalize any powers you wanted to keep. That idea always seemed fun to me, though I never did play the game, so I'm not sure how it'd work out in practice. [/quote']Random rolls have their place as a source of inspiration, coming up with power comboes and concepts you'd never have thought of otherwise. But I found it a bit frustrating having to play characters with abilities I just didn't enjoy as much. One time I got a magic guy when I'd played a magic-user in my previous two campaigns and really, *really* wanted to do something different. Didn't much like the rationalisation idea either in terms of genre simulation. A lot of comic book superheroes powers don't make any sense whatsoever - spider sense, for example. So I can't be arsed having to justify em from a unifying concept POV when the real justification is genre-simulation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gysin Posted April 28, 2004 Report Share Posted April 28, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... (Sigh)...makes me wanna be a teen again. My greatest worry at the time was stalling my mom long enough till she fell asleep, so I could game all night...slaying fire giants, hacking our way through the Barrier Peaks, charging a Killbeast with a gyrojet pistol in each of my Dralasite's four hands, spending fourteen hours playing out fourteen seconds of Car Wars time, endlessly debating conversions of the X-Men into V&V, and all the while imagining how my favorite PCs would look if illustrated by the great Jeff Dee. Those were the days... Standing too close to the tail end of a Fireball... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
etherio Posted April 28, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 28, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Standing too close to the tail end of a Fireball... Heh...yeah...nothing like getting incinerated by your own buddy while thousands of vege-pygmies are swarming all over you. What were they thinking anyway, in some of those old D&D modules? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theron Posted April 28, 2004 Report Share Posted April 28, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... I just sold a copy a few weeks ago. Lovely game, but it was lonely since no one had played it in twenty years or so. Still, you had to love a game where you could roll "God" as your character's origin and then had to roll for his weekly salary. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug McCrae Posted April 29, 2004 Report Share Posted April 29, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Here's my Golden Age superpowers table which should hopefully be available as a Word attachment. The most important change is that Sidekick is 7 times more common. As it stands, the table is really only half way complete. I'd really have liked to do a Gadgets power to replace Cybernetics full of GA stuff such as black light rays and dissolvo rays but I couldn't manage it in the time I had. I'd also have really liked to find a way to do underwater characters like Namor and Aquaman but again, couldn't come up with anything workable in time. At present GH allows a player to select Energy Immunity/Reflection if he rolls Energy Attack. I think this sort of complementary system should be greatly extended. For example Strength could allow you to choose Leaping and possibly Tough Skin. A potential Swimming power would let you select Environmental Survival - Breathe Underwater and so on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vorsch Posted April 29, 2004 Report Share Posted April 29, 2004 Re: Golden Heroes... Thats what the Marvel Ultimate super powers book did, instant SFX related charcaters Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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