Lord Liaden

Personally I love the detail of the setting, because I love immersing myself in a world. I always treated it as elaboration on a subject if I wanted to know about that subject. If I didn't I don't have to use it. If I want to play in Champions New York City I can learn enough about it in twenty minutes to use it from the Champions Universe setting book (assuming I already know something about real NYC, which today is very easy to find). If and when I want to bring in more elements they're there. But from a marketing perspective I can appreciate the point Spence is making.

Even Milgrom still knew how to tell a story.

Absolutely, and it's a pretty solid book IMO. Nice diversity of concepts, most of them unlikely to take too much spotlight away from PCs. None of them are from the current official setting, though. Several other 4E and 5E books include varying numbers of NPC heroes, although there have been no additional books dedicated to them since. For the current official setting, the most concentrated sources of full write-ups, with complete background/history and 5E character sheets, are: Champions Universe: News Of The World, which details the rosters of the Sentinels, the Justice Squadron,

I was around during the lean years between Hero Fourth Edition published by ICE, and the launch of the Fifth Edition line after the Hero IP acquisition by DOJ Inc. The game was considered functionally "dead" then, and your revival scenario is exactly what happened. The precedent is there.

As you say, 5E books have a smattering of NPC heroes in them drawn from the current official setting. If you like we could point out the books which have the most concentrations of them. But I can assure you that no book dedicated to them is planned from Hero Games (see below). Various reps from Hero Games during the DOJ era, including Steve Long and Darren Watts, have repeatedly asserted that hero-based books don't sell nearly as well as villain books, and have offered the same rationale as you gave, Duke. So it looks like your instincts are on point.

Indeed. But artists today have much greater legal control over the profits from their own work. Resale is profitable.

Besides the stories, I find what passes for artwork in most contemporary comics very disheartening. The art of graphic storytelling is dying. Most artists create what amounts to collections of splash pages. There's no action flow, no shifting perspective, no support of the narrative through-line. What I hear among criticisms of the industry, is that artists today focus on creating imagery they can sell on a poster or t-shirt, rather than serving the story.

AOC Among Us: progressive firebrand to join NDP leader for online gaming sesh Friday

Symptomless and spreading, South Korea battles surge in silent COVID-19 cases

Kinda looks like you might have eaten enough already.

Who's the hero?

Donald Trump has motivated and mobilized the diseased underbelly of American society. They now feel united and not afraid to say what they feel. That may be Trump's worst but longest-lasting legacy.

Maybe Trump has helped remind us that those qualities weigh for more than individual political policies. If a leader starts from a position of compassion and competence, the details can be worked out.

When you're talking about political/social "conservatives" in Canada, you usually have to walk back a ways from what the word implies in the States. But Alberta is a part of the country that tends to skew to the right the most often and strongly, and where the American anti-mask etc. sentiment has leaked across the widest. It doesn't help that there are long-standing issues between Alberta and the federal government, particularly their two current respective governing parties. The former seems to see political points to be scored in resisting the latter's pandemic measures.

"Territory," actually, not "province." Canadian territories don't have Constitutionally-guaranteed powers like provinces -- the federal Parliament delegates authority to them in various areas. Nunavut's population is a little over 39,000, so 132 cases isn't negligible.