I'm new and a old hand at Justice Inc.

[zslane]

I probably wasn't explicit enough in describing the approach I'd like to see. I don't think Hero Games should bother with genre books anymore. We don't need them. We have all the genre books we can use already, IMO. What we don't have are product lines built around strong settings.

 

I've harped about this in other threads around here, but in my view, setting is king. You can build a viable, sustainable product line around one. You can't really do that with a genre book, and decades of Hero Games publishing campaigns have proven that. Champions was a genre book that would have gone nowhere had it not expanded to become the "Champions Universe", with all its (officially/commercially) published villains, organizations, and adventures (the "Ultimate" splatbooks were an attractive product category back when splatbooks were all the rage, but I'm not sure the marketplace has the appetite for those anymore). I can't think of a Hero System genre that expanded beyond a book or two of further generic stuff (again, superhero splatbooks notwithstanding). Fantasy Hero provided a bestiary and a grimoire, but that's about as far as it was ever going to go without providing a setting (which it eventually did).

 

We don't need more generic Pulp Hero material. What we need, IMO, is a specific setting with a very particular tone and a focused style of adventure/play. The whole point of a product line like Relic Hunters would be to bring a narrow focus to one genre from the pulp era and make a detailed campaign setting out of it, sort of the way Call of Cthulhu did with pulp-era horror.

 

That's not to say that Relic Hunters couldn't borrow heavily from many genre-appropriate sources like Indiana Jones, The Mummy, Doc Savage or what-have-you. But the idea wouldn't be to toss a bunch of loosely related ideas on the table and make players build a campaign out of them on their own. The idea would be to create a compelling world of play with all those details already worked out so that readers would have a usable framework to jump into the moment they put the core Relic Hunters book down. Of course there should also be plenty of wide open space for customers to insert their own ideas and expand the campaign setting in directions they like, but I'd rather give them a full-blown setting (ala Forgotten Realms) than Yet Another Genre Book (ala Pulp Hero World Traveller).