Worst...Supplement...Ever...

[winterhawk]

Originally posted by Starcorp Man

Umm there's nothing there.

 

!@##$% Ya-Hell

 

I will mail anyone who wants to see the pages.

[Doug McCrae]

I liked Bad Medicine For Dr. Drugs a lot. It follows somewhat the X-Men concept of superheroes-in-training but emphasises the school aspect even more, and is in the spirit of 80s movies set in high school or college. I particularly like the player handout 'The Unwritten Code' which describes how school kids, even superpowered ones, must act if they want the respect of their peers. No squealing, for example. Good for getting across the distinctive feel of the setting.

 

It says at the start "The real fun of this scenario is in playing teen-age heroes who have just come into their powers". They're not the Justice League, they're not the Avengers. They're highschoolers. The one with the Matter-Eater Lad power is called 'The Masked Avenger'. He is based very much on the John Belushi character from Animal House and IMO makes a really entertaining PC personality-wise, though his power is a bit stupid. It should be pointed out that the rest of the team have perfectly sensible powers like speed, psychic powers, force fields, etc.

[Guest Champsguy]

Re: Re: Re: Worst...Supplement...Ever...

 

Originally posted by Doug McCrae

You are so right. I can't stand to read those books because of the drawings. One of the few examples of a product that has been made a lot worse by adding artwork. The Sidekick supplement actuallly has even more of the crap.

 

Yech. That was a wretched piece of Fuzion, if I ever saw one. Great system, lousy artwork, vomitous example characters.

 

I've been threatening to run a campaign where the PCs "accidentally" get transported to that world.

[JohnathanChance]

Re: Worst...Supplement...Ever...

 

Originally posted by Blue

It's frivolous opinion time!

 

My vote (and this is fairly obscure): "Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs", an adventure with teenage heroes in high school, made for both Champions and Superworld.

 

You know I actually have this adventure....and I must agree it was truly horrible..

[keithcurtis]

IIRC, Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs had a decent map of a high school. I don't think it was as bad as some are saying, but I could be looking back with nostalgic glasses.

 

Keith "I got nothin' here" Curtis

[Super Squirrel]

Originally posted by keithcurtis

IIRC, Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs had a decent map of a high school. I don't think it was as bad as some are saying, but I could be looking back with nostalgic glasses.

 

Keith "I got nothin' here" Curtis

Ah, nostalgia glasses! I remember when I was young and I thought Mysterious Cities of Gold was decent. Now I look at it... and there is a flying shark?!? What the heck?

[nHammer]

I would rate Enemies: The International Files along with Eurpean Enemies.

[Derek Hiemforth]

Originally posted by keithcurtis

IIRC, Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs had a decent map of a high school. I don't think it was as bad as some are saying, but I could be looking back with nostalgic glasses.

Yeah, I didn't think it was all that bad, either. (Especially considering that it came out during the heyday of Marv Wolfman and George Perez's work on The New Teen Titans, when young hero comics were the craze.)

 

Heck, Aaron Allston credits it as an inspiration for his excellent GURPS Supers adventure, School of Hard Knocks, so it can't be all bad.

[Alibear]

Europeen Enemies made me laugh at least, especially getting countries names mixed up. Very shabby indeed!

 

Foxbat Unleashed was shocking and wins my vote! BTW I told someone on the boards that I would "gift" them the book if they sent me the price of postage. I sent the book thjey did not send the cheque! No wonder they call me Billy Hunt!

[TheEmerged]

RE: Secret Page. Email is stranger894@yahoo.com

 

Thank you for the offer and the time.

 

RE: European Enemies. I hate this book with barely-bridled passion, but it's not entirely the book's fault. See, not long after I'd started playing HERO my friend and I tracked down an out-of-town gaming store that said they had HERO stuff. I was totally unprepared for the amount of material they had, though, and had only brought enough money for a few products. I seem to recall this is when I picked up Ninja HERO too, for example.

 

What does this have to do with EE? Well, the other products I had purchased left me with enough to buy just one product, and my decision came down to EE and another product. However, the other product looked very specific to its own campaign world, so I figured EE would be of more immediate use to the campaign I was running. Besides, my buddy and I had already resolved to come back the next week with more money...

 

Naturally, the other product was gone when we returned. It was a few years before I realized the enormity of my mistake.

 

The punchline? The other product was Strike Force

[Tclynch]

I remember seeing the guys from Pulsar Games with the "New" Blood of Heroes at Origins a couple of years ago. While they were trying to sell it to me I was flipping thru it, giving it a pretty good once over...man, the art almost made my eyes hurt...I placed it back down on the table and never went back.

[lemming]

Hmm, I see nobody has mentioned Enemies III. That was the first Hero book that made me think "Why did I spend money on this?"

[Glen Sprigg]

I never saw Enemies III, as I didn't get into Champions until the BBB jumped out at me from the gaming store shelf and threw itself into my backpack.

 

I do have pretty much every 4th edition book, as well as a few earlier ones, and as I said earlier, Road Kill was the worst (New Kids on the Block? Ugh). Invaders From Below didn't have much to recommend it, but the cover art (homage to FF 1) was almost worth the cost of the book itself. I've used a few characters from European Enemies, especially the heroic ones. I also ran a combat between Despoiler and Borealis, just 'cause. It's a good thing the Northwest Territories are sparsely populated...

 

I liked Scourge of the Deep, and I've used it as an origin story for an aquatic hero. I admit some of the characters were, to say the least, cheesy as hell, but it's a comic book, cheese is mandatory. The Mutant File should have been named 'The Campaign Overkill File,' and Hi-Tech Enemies had the Weasel, a character who would make the Harbinger of Justice think, 'I'll take the night off tonight...' Alien Enemies was too much of a mediocre thing, although I liked the Olympians. Zeus should be built on a thousand points or more; he's a god! Superheroes don't fight him, they listen respectfully and do as they're told! (Yeah, right...)

 

Glen

[Kevin Scrivner]

I never bought many Hero System supplements but the ones I did get were generally pretty good. I tend to buy supplements used (regardless of game system) to glean ideas from. Two of the weakest were actually for Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes with stats for Justice Inc.

 

Raid on Rajallapor -- An espionage adventure set in India. The art was cartoony but fit the genre, and there were good maps. But the supernatural twist the author tried to spring in the end was goofy rather than eerie. Never used it.

 

The Adventure of the Jade Jaguar -- At one point I saw a fanzine article on how to run this as a GM'd scenario instead of a solitaire scenario. Wish I'd saved it. I think it would have been a more coherent product that way. Tried to run it for my players but it was too hard to dope out all the permutations.

 

Border Crossing -- Lots of detail, and maybe the storyline was good after all, but the presentation was unattractive. And my players weren't into realistic espionage stories.

 

From the Casebook of Nick Velvet -- For the Ellery Queen Game. Looked like an intriguing quartet of mysteries but again it was written for solitaire play and was heavily dependent on maps included with the main game. If I worked hard enough on it, maybe it would be useful but I haven't had the opportunity yet.

 

The Official Two Worst Supplements:

 

Omegakron and The Horn of Roland, both for the Lords of Creation RPG. No coherent plotting, just random encounters with a bewildering variety of opponents of varying power levels. Very much a dungeon crawl with Doctor Who sensibilties. Horn of Roland sort of had an excuse since the PCs were being shuffled between two or three dimensions, but it was if the writer strung three unrelated scenarios together. Omegakron was disappointing because it didn't give a unified setting. You had talking animals in once section of the city, robots in another, human slaves in another. No wonder the game bombed.

 

On the other hand, the scenarios for FGU's Daredevils were wonderful pulp novel re-creations and the two adventures I've found for TSR's Gangbusters are pretty solid and easy to run even if you don't have the parent game.

[AlHazred]

To be fair, I have bought a lot of Hero supplements, and the few old supplements I don't have (Wings of the Valkyrie) I've at least seen and paged through. None of them are really that bad.

 

Before I get anyone's dander up, I feel compelled to remind people of the Bad Old Days of gaming, when product quality standards were nonexistent, and anybody who had a photocopier, a pen, and some paper thought he had all that it took to put out a gaming supplement.

 

Hero's come away easy. You think Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs is bad? Ask a Glorantha fan about Eldarad or Daughters of Darkness. Ask a GURPS player about GURPS Wild Cards or Billy the Axe. Ask an old-time D&D player about the old Dimension Six products.

 

All that being said, I really didn't care for Cyber Hero. But some of the art's okay. And it just inspired Mike Surbrook to do a better job with Kazei Five.

 

----------------------------------

"Look on the bright side. Dying is the next best thing to living." -- Sgt. Strict

[Koshka]

I don't have European Enemies, though I know people who refer to it as "Plan Nine From Hero Games". I own Foxbat Unhinged, though, and found it very disappointing.

 

I can't recall the title offhand, but there was an enemies book for Dark Champs where everything was written as the personal notes of the Master of Crime -- I junked that one in a hurry. Anyone recall the title?

 

Actually, if we're expanding the list to include non-Hero stuff, we can toss AD&D modules into the mix. I never could see the point of Lost Temple of Tharizdun, for instance.

[Guest Keneton]

Bad Editing

 

I never liked the poor editing of chracters in the enemies line of books. They were so full of errors. I'm glad most of these old characters are out of circulation.

 

The major difference in todays products is the quality of editing. There were plenty of great ideas back then, but not much in the way of Good Mechanics. Old Hero was purely fun, but only one step above Judge's Guild for quality of Art and editing.

[winterhawk]

Originally posted by Koshka

I can't recall the title offhand, but there was an enemies book for Dark Champs where everything was written as the personal notes of the Master of Crime -- I junked that one in a hurry. Anyone recall the title?

 

Underworld Enemies or Murderer's Row?

[Susano]

Originally posted by AlHazred

Before I get anyone's dander up, I feel compelled to remind people of the Bad Old Days of gaming, when product quality standards were nonexistent, and anybody who had a photocopier, a pen, and some paper thought he had all that it took to put out a gaming supplement.

 

Two words: JUDGE'S GUILD

 

Hero's come away easy. You think Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs is bad? Ask a Glorantha fan about Eldarad or Daughters of Darkness. Ask a GURPS player about GURPS Wild Cards or Billy the Axe. Ask an old-time D&D player about the old Dimension Six products.

 

GURPS Wild Cards isn't bad at all. It does cover the series up until Vol... 6(?) and was written by on the the WC authors. And it had more useful character ideas than European Enemies.

 

All that being said, I really didn't care for Cyber Hero. But some of the art's okay. And it just inspired Mike Surbrook to do a better job with Kazei Five.

 

Thank you.

 

IMO, European Enemies takes the prize. Sure Scourge of the Deep had lame-as-heck character, but at least it had the useful underwater rules and notes in the front. EE had nothing. None of the characters had anything going for them, and many were painful stereotypes to boot. Want to see and know more? Go here: http://www.devermore.net/surbrook/revisedhero/herorev.html

 

Enemies: The International File actually had some nice ideas, and some ideas that would be workable once you revised them a bit. I liked Villany Unbound as well, for the same reasons. High-Tech Enemies wa, IMO, terrible, with not much to offer in the way of new of inventive applications of powers. And the power levels were absurd. Oh, and lets not mention The Weasel, who would kill virtually every PC I ever made with ease (and most of the NPCS, too).

[Hermit]

I kind of liked High Tech Enemies, the Destruction Co. especially. Didn't think much of the Wormhole gang though.

[TheEmerged]

I didn't use High Tech Enemies much; I purchased this one during the Great HERO Drought (translation, when I and the rest of the local gaming group was obsessed with Magic: The Gathering) and so it never affected my campaigns.

 

That, and the book lost me in the introduction when the author tried to excuse the "Defender Exploit".

[Jhamin]

Originally posted by Hermit

I kind of liked High Tech Enemies, the Destruction Co. especially. Didn't think much of the Wormhole gang though.

 

The Destruction Company are some of my favorite long running villians. They had style.

CyForce was Ok.

 

The rest of the book was pretty bland. Not bad, just Bland.

[assault]

My thoughts:

 

I didn't buy Bad Medicine for Dr Drugs, but I enthusiastically seized it when a friend was giving away some of his older and less useful RPG stuff. My opinion of it is that it is a "cult classic" - you either hate it, or you have a sneaking fondness for it despite its weaknesses. I like it. Then again, I also watch Plan 9 every chance I get... I wouldn't list BMfDD as the worst.

 

I didn't buy European Enemies, and have never read it.

 

I didn't buy Wings of the Valkyries, but fairly recently got to borrow a copy. It sucks. It sucks in ways that annoy me more than the ways that BMfDD sucks. It's just - contrived. The whole thing is a terrible exercise in railroading the PCs into a set course of action. Bleah. But I'm reluctant to call it the worst.

 

I would have to give The Mutant File a dishonorable mention, too. It's ridiculously overpowered characters really bug me for some reason. Sure, it would probably work really well if you toned down the characters a lot, but, still... It probably doesn't help that I'm not a big X-Men fan.

 

For overall badness, though, I can't really bring myself to say that I actually regret buying (or "inheriting") any of the products that I have bought or "inherited". I'm more likely to wish that I had been able to buy every single Hero system product that has ever been produced.

 

Worst? Actually, there's none that isn't of some value or interest. None are useless, and none are therefore "worst" in my book.

 

Alan

[The_Hero]

As someone who bought darn near EVERY Hero product through the 80's and 90's...

 

Heroes from the Deep - decent water rules.

 

Bad News from Dr Drugs - decent High School rules and a good map

 

Eye for an Eye: Lots of good write-ups...

 

Olympians - couple good pics I used for Greek Heroes

 

Mutant File: Good template for Mutant characters which I still use. Other write-up blew chunks though...

 

EE, Road Kill, High Tech Enemies - All bad! My friends and I would joke about characters in it. "Hey, let's take a snowshovel full of points, chuck them at a piece of paper and see where they stick!" Esp...EE. Went to Origins one year and talked to the Hero booth about it, they were less than pleased, I think they thouhgt they did a GOOD job with it.

[misterdeath]

Hero product: European Enemies. Hands down. Bad character math, bad power construction, bad geography, bad ideas.

 

Non Hero supers product. the MSH game's Alpha Flight adventure. Ever been in a session where nothing you do matters, like clockwork the next element of the plot is going to happen, whether you do anything about it or not? Well, TSR wrote an adventure that works just that way.

 

Non Hero semi-supers product: Synnibar. The world of. Yeeks. Overpowered and Underpowered character classes. Confusing rules, strange random elements. Some good ideas, but hard to glean the wheat from the chaff (more apt analogy, finding the needle in the hayloft).

 

D