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Fantasy Hero


Steve Long

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Here's our back-cover text describing FH:

 

WONDROUS WORLDS OF FANTASY!

 

Daring swordsmen, wise wizards, noble knights, deadly dragons, and mythic kingdoms — all these, and more, are part of the wondrous worlds of Fantasy. Fantasy Hero discusses and describes the Fantasy genre for gaming, and shows how to create characters, campaigns, spells and magic systems, worlds, and other elements of Fantasy with the HERO System rules. It includes:

 

—a complete review of the Fantasy genre, from the most mundane Low Fantasy and Urban Fantasy tales to wondrous and bizarre High Fantasy and Epic Fantasy sagas, with guidelines and suggestions for simulating each part of the genre using the HERO System rules

 

—an extensive section on creating Fantasy characters in the HERO System, including over five dozen Templates for major character races, backgrounds, and professions

 

—Fantasy-specific combat and adventuring rules, including expanded rules for weapons and mass combat

 

—a detailed chapter on magic, describing how to create magic systems, spells, and enchanted items, with dozens of examples to get you started

 

—discussions about Fantasy civilizations and cultures, with guidelines for economies and currencies, travel times and methods, government and law, religion, and much more

 

—a comprehensive chapter on gamemastering Fantasy games

 

Whatever type of Fantasy game you like to play, and however you like to play it, Fantasy Hero helps you make it even better!

 

 

ISBN: 978-1-58366-129-1

SKU: DOJHERO1200

Price: $44.99 US

Hardcover, full color

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  • 4 months later...

Re: Fantasy Hero

 

Review of Fantasy Hero, 6th edition, Hardback

 

Opening Notes about Hero System, 6th edition:

While this is not a review of Hero System in general, it should be noted that the Hero System 6th edition Core books are needed to make full use of Fantasy Hero. This includes two $40 books: One for character creation, and the other for game-play rules. Hero System is a point based character design system allowing nera infinite character and setting options, but with little in the way of hard guidlines for beginners.

 

Overview of Fantasy Hero:

Fantasy Hero is a 480 page hardback, in 7 chapters. These chapters are listen in the Chapters section of this review. Chapters are easilly paged to due to color "tabbing" along the edge of the book that makes the chapters easilly visible even when the book is closed. An index in the back of the book offers easy access to just about any term in the book.

 

Chapters:

Chapter one deals with Genre conventions common to Fantasy settings.

Chapter two character creation guidelines and some common templates for classes and races.

Chapter three discusses fantasy combat, ranging from how combat works, to armor and weapons, and even mass combat rules.

Chapter four examines magic and how it might work in your campaign.

Chapter five advises on how to develop your own fantasy worlds, including geography, demographics, and the civilizations it contains.

Chapter six guides gamemasters on how to run fantasy campaigns, including how to deal with special environments and villain design.

Chapter seven ends with sample characters and works of fiction to help drive your imagination.

 

Final thoughts:

Overall, this book is a series of guidelines for building your campaign world, or converting one to hero system from another system. It does this quite well, but offers no coherant world of it's own. At no point does this book lain to be a setting book, but most RPG rule sets offer a default world for the game master to work from, so it feels slightly odd for it to be missing. On the other hand, Hero System has ALWAYS been a toolkit system for players and game masters to make their own settings, so the book does it's job quite nicly without such trappings.

It does include a nice selection of racial and class templates, allowing a standard fantasy setting to be assembled much faster. It also offers several magic systems that your setting can use, including not only spell systems, but magic item creation. Samples are spread throughout the book, offering samples of eveything from weapons and armor, to spells and magic items.

 

Scoring:

Organization: 10 out of 10 (I can say nothing bad about the organization. It just works.)

Crunch: 10 out of 10 (that's pretty much the point of the book.)

Fluff: 5 out of 10 (It does have a ton of setting options, and quotes from dozens of books.)

Physical Quality: 10 out of 10 (It's a hardback, good paper, good binding. Pretty much the apex of being a book...)

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