steelwulf99

Re: Yet another D&D to Fantasy HERO conversion Hi, I'd be keen to work on an updated document with a bit more flair. I originally wrote this document to bring an entire group of HERO novices into the game by simplifying character generation (as you know, once your character is made the game is actually rather simple to play). It did work in that regard, although the errors in the document have always irked me. Still, it was a success for the purpose I made it for. Give me a few weeks and I'll see what I can put together with regards to an updated one (yep Michael, with page numbers). Rune: to answer your questions. Arcane background is essentially the equivalent of a Wizard multi-class for my HERO conversion. It's intended to be overlaid over any non-Wizard template to produce a fighter/mage, rogue/mage, etc. Divine calling is the same concept, but for Clerics. Regards, Scott

Re: combat skill levels and bonuses to DCV

Kazei 5 book and .pdf review by Scott (steelwulf99) So, why should you trust my review? The short answer is that you shouldn't. You should check things out for yourself - not so hard if you're at your local gaming store thumbing through the book. Much harder online. Hopefully this review will be beneficial to those of you in the latter category. A note on my spelling - I am in New Zealand, so the Queen's English shall be the order of the day. Unsuspecting Americans, prepare to be ambushed by extra U's and a dearth of Z's in words! Physical considerations The book is made in the style of 5E supplements. That is to say it is black and white interior, printed on 80gsm paper. The cover is glossy colour and seems to be 300gsm paper stock. The book is perfect bound and my copy has no print or binding defects. The book itself is large, double the page count of the UNTIL Handbook HERO Games kindly bundled with it as a free gift. It's printed Letter sized, which is not surprising, but still nice. As a non-US native I have gaming books printed in both A4 and Letter and I believe that Letter dimensions make such books more pleasant to hold and use than the thinner and taller A4 dimensions. The cover I'm going to state right here and now that not only do I dislike the cover, but it actually put me off discovering this book. If I'd had known what the content of the book was like I would have purchased it the moment it was released. But I digress, so let's examine the cover in more depth. There's some cleanly done anime-inspired artwork of a sports car, a cat girl and a hot chick in tight clothing in a funny pose (it turns out she's an incredibly powerful psychic and she is floating just above the ground), all on an oddly contrasting background, with the book title, Kazei 5, and the tagline - animepunk roleplaying. After reading the book, the cover makes much more sense! However I still can't shake the sensation that the book would have been better served by a cover which is more representative of the general content - so for version three let's see a more dynamic cover with espers dueling, mecha/power armour bouncing around and all sorts of the usual cyberpunk suspects blazing away at one another. World Content This is the fluff of the book. It's the underlying theme throughout and the direction the book follows. There are sections on what the world is like, how it got that way, along with more detail of the Neo York area (transplantable easily into a generic Cyberpunk or even a Shadowrun-esque game), and a little on what could happen in the world. The last bit intrigues me - you see, the entire book is a labour of love for the author, Michael Surbrook, and clearly Kazei 5 started out as a campaign name which gained traction and now is a fully realised supplement. All throughout the book are little reminders that what is in your hands is the result of years of testing and tweaking. From the minor cues, such as the now outdated names in the glossary for espers, to bigger hints like the massive NPC roster, the book delivers a sense of being part of a living setting. So when I read about future timelines I'm not picturing in my mind how things could be, instead I get a feeling that somewhere on earth, some people gathered around a table and played out those events... that the events were so entertaining they were included in the book as ideas for stories and campaign arcs. Mechanical Content This is the crunch of the book - the templates, the prebuilt esper powers and the equipment tables. The book has been written with a view to being used alongside Dark Champions. As far as character templates go, there are templates for all of the concepts which Kazei 5 covers. You start with a racial base: Are you an unaugmented person? Maybe you are genetically upgraded, part of societies wealthy elite. You could be replaced with enough machinery to be called a cyborg, or you could even be a replicated (vat-grown) human. Let's stop the crunch overview and talk about replicated humans for a moment - these are one of the defining features of Kazei 5. That cat girl on the cover? Replicated human. What if you don't like cat-people? No problem. You can use the system as is, just changing any animal features to something like "neon pink hair". The complication is based on being distinctively vat-grown, so mix up the special effects to meet the needs of your own game. This is excellent metagame thinking on the part of the author, and it's stuff like this which makes so much of the content transplantable into similar genres. Back to crunch - after you pick your racial template, you can pick a professional template (should you desire it) and there is an appropriate spectrum of roles already costed out. The list is heavily influenced by games such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk - this is a good thing though. You flesh out the last few points of your character with cybernetics and/or skills, raid the equipment lists and off you go. The cyberware section is very good, it covers most of the hardware your PCs are likely to want, and you can always use the existing kit as inspiration for your own implants. My observation on the equipment lists: the list of firearms is good, and looks like it should be supplemented with something like a generic HERO equipment book. That's OK. What I really missed was stats for power armour suits. There's great artwork of power armour/mecha all through the book - but very little actualised and given form in the equipment section! It may be because in anime such suits (when used by heroes) tend to be rare and personalised, or it may be a page count consideration. Whatever the reason, I'd love to see a Kazei 5 supplement dedicated to equipment. Before I move away from the crunch and into the conclusion, I'd like to discuss espers. These guys are heavyweight psionics in the Kazei 5 setting, and Surbrook has cleverly come up with a blanket limitation on all esper powers, which themes them powerfully into his world view. Whenever an esper uses a power, there are uncontrollable side effects, which scale with the AP limit of the power used and the HERO mechanic used to adjudicate Psionics. The esper template in Kazei 5 uses a multipower pool for the psionic powers. Surbrook also discusses the use of variable power pools and I can see the powers would adapt well to a skill roll based system. You can work this into your game (or ignore it outright if you want pure cyberpunk), but the important thing here is that Surbrook hasn't dictated any single one right way. He gives you a rock solid list of powers, costed with AP & RP, but without frameworks, and he gives you that lovely side effect limitation. You're on your own for the rest, but your starting foundation is very solid. Conclusion This book will appeal to you if you like anime, if you like mecha, if you like Cyberpunk. If you wanted to play Shadowrun with HERO system, then get this book! You can use as much or as little of the anime stuff as you want, so this book could provide the foundation for a classic Cyberpunk game, or something as gritty as a Bladerunner inspired game. There are some minor typographic errors, but they really are minor (and all of my gaming books do have some errors in them, so no-one is immune). The art is variable in quality, but themed well. The book is well written. Surbrook isn't a full time game author and designer - but he should be.

Re: Fantasy Hero 6th book question Just to jump on the bandwagon here - if anyone is wondering if they should get this book for their 6E collection and they have even a passing interest in fantasy, then snap it up. You will not regret it.

Check it out... Credit where it's due: 1. None of the art is mine, I don't know where it came from (my rpg pics folder) but at least one of the pictures looks like a copyrighted WotC image from D&D 3.5 2. The condensed rules are not my work either, there is some slight modification on my part. For the original work see this thread: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/77944-Hero-In-Two-Pages-Complete 3. Derived sources are D&D 3.5 + D&D 4E (the bits I liked), adapted for HERO Thoughts: 1. Design intent was to divide packages into bits and let players pick and mix between them. 2. There's scope for more backgrounds but I want some time out for backslapping before I think about adding them in... 3. Not all the spell points costs calculate perfectly. Not all spells from 3.5 are present - I went for a representative scope rather than an exhaustive reference. There are still over 360 spells! 4. The packages are a little light on skills... but hey, I can live with that. But I am contemplating adding in a skill package segment too. Maybe I can replace the base class selection with skill package selections... hmmm... 5. A note on formating - I laid it out to be printed on A4 paper (letter is close enough for all y'all Americans out there ) - 2 pages printed to a sheet. Hence there are a couple of blank pages in what appear to be odd places in the document. This was just done to help me keep things in order. Ultimately this document was written to bridge my players into HERO. They're very familiar with D&D, hence why I chose this format. It's going to be flawed, but for what it's worth, take a look

My gaming group is a good bunch of diverse people and not all of them find rules easy to grasp or follow. Some people in my group struggled with the open nature of HERO when I introduced it to them. The solution for them (in terms of character generation) was for me to invest greater structure into character generation - limiting options to a selection of predetermined attributes. I allowed more freedom with XP spends once they were more comfortable with the system. It helped at that stage that they already had a character framework in place which they could then plan to enhance according to their individual desires. For this reason I was delighted to see the character generator at the back of the Champions book. It's absolutely *fantastic*. I understand it is ostensibly intended for NPCs, but it had enough choice and flexibility to keep the more mechanically savvy players happy with the options, and enough structure to help those with a clear character picture but poor grasp of mechanics locked firmly on target. So big kudos to whoever did all the legwork on that thing. Is this a standard sort of thing we can expect to see in other genre books? So for example when 6E Cyber HERO comes out will we be able to open to a page of archetypes and use those template/frameworks?

Re: So how did you guys learn the system? That was great, Lucius My Pulp HERO story has dragons though... komodo dragons (rawr). I have attached my episode one document if anyone is interested (it's light on details - mostly because I tend to improv stuff as we go). It may not take them four sessions to handle the adventure but here is how I see it playing out. Session 1. Cover the basics of the rules briefly, run through the characters and tell the players they can flesh them out personality-wise/background wise as they desire. Dump the PCs in Darwin and let them look for leads. Everyone they talk to tells them a blind search in the region would be senseless and unlikely to give results, so naturally that's what they're going to decide to do. The beauty of which is that it'll be their plan *wink* and not me telling them it's their plan. This session is setting and story driven - creating the scene and establishing the PCs role in it all. Session 2. They check out some boring islands, they check out some potential islands (all from the air). Then they have an in-flight incident over an interesting island in the Banda Sea. They end up on the island and it has lots of fun distractions mostly involving firing guns at things to slow to do much about it. This one is a combat driven session and serves to introduce them to the combat rules before the set-piece combat which ends the story. Session 3. They find the right island, somehow manage to infiltrate the lagoon of fire and formulate a plan to eliminate the threat of the hidden submarine base. This is primarily a skill driven session, which also has some stealth-based combat in it. Session 4. They put their plan into motion, it stirs up the hornets nest and then the volcano errupts (hooray!) - loads of fun and should finish up the story arc. They might crack it in three sessions (which is OK) and it may take longer (but I don't expect it will). Oh... and we play fortnightly so there is recap time at the start of every session - I make a different player do the recap each time. It's positively fascinating finding out what they liked and what they remember (and what they care about).

It was a long wait (last batch of international orders) but it was worth it! My books arrived just before Christmas (and a three day trip to the in-law's family farm). Weird though - I'd got the .pdfs too as part of my purchase... I'd even printed them out and I still wasn't prepared for just how big the books are! I originally had a conventional campaign planned for my local group, but two sessions of (still incomplete) character generation has lead me to understand that players who are intimidated by mathematics struggle to make characters for this system. Well no problems there. They're a good bunch, I can live with them not wanting to tackle things like how to build powers in 6E just yet... but I ended up rethinking how I wanted to approach introducing the system to them. I've decided to run "Close Encounters of the Sixth Kind" a genre-hopping collection of short stories, with no character persistence between stories. The only link to continuity I will have will be at the start of each new story in the introduction narration. Things like a PC or major NPC turning off a television showing the highlight of the last story and muttering to himself about how far fetched modern entertainment is getting (or a wizard and a crystal ball, a dream sequence, etc). Each story will run for 4-6 sessions. I will pregen the characters, write the story, advertise it to the dozen or so local gamers I know, take the first to apply for the spots and then run the game. It's kind of railroading but it serves several purposes: 1) I can introduce new rules in a new story, rather than dropping them into a campaign. This means I can deliberately keep the rules simple to begin with and when I introduce new rules I don't need to justify why. 2) It spares them the rigours of character generation. Lucky for them I like things like this. Lucky for me I like things like this. Lucky for the game I get the perfect party composition for the story. 3) Pregenerated characters need less building - no need to fully rationalise complications, for one. I just add in whatever seems good for the characters and write the appropriate hiccups into the story and call it done. 4) It introduces a bunch of genres. I plan to spend some time in familiar territory (Star Wars, generic medieval fantasy) as well as explore some other cool genres that some of them may not be used to. The ultimate goal is for them to pick a genre they love and want to go back to. Then we can spend some time building people their real characters and dive into it from there... ideally at that time we'll have a bunch of players who know the system, like it and (this next one is for me) want to run a game of their own in it some day. We shall see... Anyway... now I've nattered about my plans, how did you guys learn? Did you have players who weren't quick at grasping rules? How did you accomodate them? Any tips? Suggestions? Stories?

Re: Brand new to HERO & finding my feet Cheers again guys, I bought a copy of the 5E Equipment Guide .pdf and it is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

Re: Brand new to HERO & finding my feet Awesome, thanks for the responses guys (particularly the one about locating my feet - it's like they were there all along ). The advice on books is much appreciated and KillerShrike's site looks fantastic. Cheers!

Hi folks, As the title suggests I am very new to HERO system. I've been playing Champions Online and (being a tabletop RPG fan) that made me curious to check out the HERO system. I made the plunge and got the mega bundle - I have been looking the .pdfs while I wait for the books to arrive. All I can say is wow! It's like a whole new world here (and it looks so good). I've been wanting a generic system I can use for my group to learn and use for all genres... what a find! Anyway, I've tried building a few heroic characters to learn the basics of character construction. I've also built a few powers and tackled multipowers (which I think I have a handle on). I was (selfishly, I know) wondering if there are resources out there like equipment lists for various genres which might already have powers, advantages and limitations calculated with a final real cost, such as the Dagger or .45 Handgun from the 6E book? Do the various setting books have things like this in them, or are they ideas books? Are there any particularly good web resources for players and GMs? Thanks for any help you can offer