A little Babylon Five, a little Deep Space Nine, maybe a dash of Outland?
You know, there is a setting in the official Hero Universe centuries in the future which has a lot of potential. From Terran Empire p. 88: "After losing their homeworld in the war against the Fassai, the [humanoid] Renghadi used rubble from their planet and a nearby asteroid belt to construct Renghadi Station, the largest known space station in the Milky Way. Big enough to house all the Renghadi plus millions of transients, it's become not only a source of pride to the Renghadi, but a major Galactic trading port. Far-traveling Renghadi traders bring goods from all over the Galaxy to the shops and warehouses of Renghadi Station, and their opposite numbers from other species travel there to buy from them in one convenient location. Whatever a person wants, he can find somewhere on Renghadi Station - even if it's not entirely legal..."
For most of the future Hero Universe time line there are no physical "superpowers" as we commonly define them, except for some features inherent in certain alien species. Psionics, however, are not uncommon and sometimes formidable, a la B5; and augmentation through implanted "cyberware" or "bioware" is far from unknown. After the year 3000, when magic returns to the Milky Way, true superpowers become possible again in humans and most alien species.
MONSTERS ARE REAL…
…AND THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE. Monsters are among us, and they might be standing right next to you. Muggers, Maniacs, and Murderers is a new series developed to expand your Cinematic Action RPG campaign. Pit your PCs against the worst that humanity has to offer. Volume One expands on Hero Games’ Hudson City campaign book and includes several new villains to challenge your PCs. Are you going to let Evil win? Included in this package is a 94-page PDF with 21 new adversaries for your Hero System Campaign, 26 Hero Designer Files for all included Characters and Equipment, Full Color Front Cover, 22 Full Color Counters, and 4 quality PNG Maps suitable for use in your Virtual Tabletop games. This bundle gives you everything you need to incorporate the villains into your campaign. Find out if your PCs are up to the challenge.
Author/Company: Haymaker and EZ Hero alumni, Deadman, is, after many years, breaking his public silence by starting Deadman Press. His first release is Muggers, Maniacs, and Murderers Volume 1, an Enemies tome for your Cinematic Action and/or Dark Champions campaign. Deadman Press hopes to follow this book with several other releases for the Cinematic Action genre. Deadman has been involved with the Hero System nearly since its inception and hopes to provide new, high-quality books for the Cinematic Action genre. Will other genres follow? Anything is possible.
Star Hero complete sounds good but my sense is that we need more adventures. Many, many more adventures. dozens of them for every genre. Tons of support.
For those of wondering about my sequel to Aaron Allston's Strike Force, (Strike Force Organizations) , it goes like this:
1) I have completed work on Alien Research Laboratories, which is what Aaron renamed M.E.T.E. to. Everything has been updated to 6e, including the NPCs (some of which have more modern designs thanks to finding select files in Aaron's notes), the base, the computer, and several vehicles.
I have completed work on the Blood. There are a lot more Blood characters than what appeared in Org Book 3. Several of them have character sheets while many of the original Blood NPCs have updated character sheets due to finding them in Aaron's notes. Also, Commodore has his base and vehicles included.
I am currently working on the Circle. I found updated character sheets for almost everyone, as well as detailed backgrounds. Thus, the Circle will be more lore 'heavy' than the other sections.
Current word count is around 60,000 words. Once I complete the Circle I will talk to Jason about adding additional groups or seeing about some smaller releases of (perhaps) PDF-only content.
Because it has only a fraction of Millennium City's population, I don't think Windsor itself would become a Canadian superhuman hub, except in relation to cross-border activities with MC; but that alone could justify some local heroes. Windsor had been the home base for Canada's mightiest superhero, Celestar, but events alluded to in Champions Universe might have prompted him to be more active farther afield, so there could be room for some lesser-powered heroes.
Windsor is the southern terminus of the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, the most densely populated and highly industrialized part of Canada. It's the most heavily trafficked border crossing between Canada and the US. It's a major center for Canada's automotive industry. It lies within but is administratively separate from Essex County, Ontario. With all those factors, and if it was rebuilt after a disaster as a symbol of the future, particularly in a comic-book world, I can think of only one word to rename it: Excelsior!
Villains who have been captured and processed no longer have a Secret ID, at least not most of them. It would be difficult to run the fingerprints of Plasmus, for example. Characters whoe develop physical characteristics that cant be concealed- well, they aren't going to easily handle Secret IDs, either. As an example, Rook (former player's character now an NPC in the youth group's universe) is a brick who, like many bricks, developed immense stature and musculature. She is eight feet tall and wider across the shoulders than most doors and is seventy-two years old. She couldn't maintain a secret ID if she wanted to.
Still, those sort of chracters are a minority of characters (at least, those who aren't bricks, who seem to receive physical grotesquery at a disproportionately high rate).
But again: the majority of villains who get even a little bit through processing are never going to have a points-worthy secret ID without completely changing their villainous ID, and in forty-four years of Champions history, I don't believe I have stumbled across one of those in any official product.
Still,like LL, I have occasionally enjoyed letting the villain's secret ID assist the PCs on a case- in one case, I had a villain's secret ID who became a regular go-to Contact with the PCs-- to the point of eliminating four of his alter-ego's competitors, celebrating each victory with the heroes, ingratiating himself into their lives until they finally figured him out (caught him rifling through some,of their files on other "competitors" and after trying to figure out what they had in common, the high-tech HERO recognized the architecture of some spyware left behind in their systems--
The players were genuinely surprised, and genuinely felt taken in, and they somehow managed to both be furious and hurt by it as well as love it as a plot twist that they had fallen to, hard.
They were _thrilled_ when they finally took him down: it was very personal for every one of them.
unfortunately, it also cemented in their minds that they should never reveal their own secret IDs, even to each other (which was always a problem even before that camoaign, and this made it worse), so we have an entire battery of various Bat Signals in use....
I remember years ago, I was helping another forumite who wanted to run a game artifact-hunting scenario inspired by The Maltese Falcon, brainstorm the Champions villains who would fit the role of the antagonists to the PCs. He wanted to use Cateran as the analogue to Brigid O'Shaughnessy. He also wanted an art expert villain as the Joel Cairo analogue, so I suggested Jos "Tartarus" Terhune. We rounded out the cast with Slun for Sidney Greenstreet's Gutman, and Pulsar as Gutman's overconfident gunsel Wilmer.
If Medieval art treasures are involved, the heroes might consult the art appraiser Jos Terhune, a.k.a. Tartarus of the Devil's Advocates (CV2). Or hey, bring Walker, Terhune, and Professor John Black together, none knowing who the others are! That should be good for a few laughs, as well as a brawl.
I've thought that many published villains don't deserve the 15 points from Secret Identity, because they don't show any sign of trying to maintain a life outside their villain activities. In some cases, this would even be impossible. For instance, Radium (CV1, in Project Sunburst) has Secret ID even though he lives in a bright red containment suit that keeps him from killing everyone near him thorough radiation exposure. Yes, his pasty is hidden: Finding that he used to be a soldier named Jason Matthews takes a Skill Roll at -10. But his entry doesn't say why this information would matter OK, so his connection to the military Project: Sunburst matters. It's an enormous secret waiting to explode (heh) into a scandal that might ruin people who are still alive and in government. But that is a different kind of Social Complication.
I've always tried to work some element of a villain's Secret Identity into my uses of them. One of the easiest ways I find to do this is for PCs to unknowingly consult the villain for their SID's expertise. For example, perhaps the above mentioned Black Paladin has been committing crimes related to artifacts, histories, or motifs from his past life as a knight. Heroes might seek the advice of Prof. Allen Walker of Millennium City University, an expert on medieval history and culture... who also happens to be the supervillain Basilisk. (Champions Villains Volume Three).
Speaking of the Basilisk, his character sheet in CV3 includes a KS: Wine. Perhaps Walker is a connoisseur and/or collector of fine wine. He might be found incognito at a wine tasting event, or bidding on a rare vintage bottle... which if he fails to buy it, he may try to steal as the Basilisk.
I agree that a spillover of the destruction in Detroit to Windsor would be simple to justify, just a permutation of Dr. Destroyer's satellite death ray. I would consider it unlikely that either the United States or Canada would allow the two cities to amalgamate on either side of the border, let alone form an independent city. It's one of the world's busiest border crossings, far too economically important to let go independent. The investment in rebuilding, and the symbolic value to each nation in rebuilding "their" city, would make it untenable to relinquish them without heavy negotiation at the federal and state/provincial level.
If there were extensive rebuilding on both sides of the Detroit River, I would expect it to emphasize tying the two communities more closely together economically. Expanded bridges, more or bigger iterations of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, probably companies with offices and manufacturing facilities in both communities. Law enforcement, particularly in regards to "super-crime," would probably be more trans-border cooperative.
Windsor's economy depends to a large extent on manufacturing, so I'm sure it would embrace government and private investing in high-tech facilities just as Millennium City has. However, Windsorites are proud of the natural parks, hiking trails, and so on that are integral to their cityscape and a significant contributor to tourism, so I would not expect them to go as overtly and publicly technological as in MC.
It would not be that unreasonable to expand the destruction to both Windsor and Detroit. You can look north across the river from Windsor and see Detroit. If it were not for the international border, they would likely be one city already.
A high-tech city in two countries would make for some interesting politics.
Pursuant to my reference to Lovecraftian monsters, Hero Universe has its own source for such creatures, the Qliphoth, a concept that author Dean Shomshak adapted from Kabbalah for the setting (from his own games). Following are descriptions of a score of horrors which either hale from various Qliphothic universes, or were warped by contact with those universes. The list doesn't include unique, godlike monsters such as the Kings of Edom, unless a particular type of creature is closely identified with one; nor any of the individual humans who have been altered by the touch of Qliphothic forces. Those could support discussion threads of their own.
The main in-print source for Qliphothic creatures -- with detailed descriptions, Fifth Edition Hero System character sheets, and illustrations -- is Arcane Adversaries, by Dean Shomshak. Dean created much of the magic cosmology for the Champions Universe, including the Qliphoth. Most of the current material was transcribed verbatim from two earlier (Fourth Edition) Champions books by Dean, The Ultimate Super Mage and The Super Mage Bestiary. Those books offered an even wider selection of monsters from the Qliphoth, and since the lore from the two editions matches so closely, I feel justified in adding the descriptions of the ones which weren't reprinted. Other creatures were taken from the Hero System Bestiary; from Tatterdemalion Terrors which describes monsters associated with that particular dimension of the Qliphoth; from Book Of The Empress which deals with other dimensions in the CU "multiverse"; and from a book for the sci-fi future of the official Champions Universe timeline, Scourges Of The Galaxy.
Angler: Anglers are one of the strangest servants of the Kings of Edom. They appear as tangles of zigzagging, shimmering lines extending in more than three dimensions. They are completely colorless. At any given moment, an angler will have 3-6 “legs” of interlacing, crooked lines extending from its body. This is the closest they have to recognizable limbs or organs. Unlike most Edomites, the Anglers are not grotesquely hideous — just incomprehensible.
Although anglers fill a volume of space equal to a man or large dog, their open structure makes them very hard to hit and almost massless. An angler’s one-dimensional body cuts through anything made of matter, sliding between the very atoms.
Anglers can walk on any flat or angled surface regardless of gravity, but cannot cross a curved line or surface. If an angler stands at an angled surface (such as the corner of a room) it can instantly travel to any other angle within 30 meters. The angler seems to stretch out like lazy-tongs and re-compress at the other angle in a split second. Finally, anglers can move between dimensions: they can go to any dimension in which anglers already exist. If one does not destroy or exorcise an angler quickly, other anglers may appear on their own.
Brain Beast: A cunning predator with psionic abilities, the brain beast resembles a massive grey bulldog whose head has been replaced with a huge human brain. This "brain" opens vertically to reveal a mouth filled with razor-sharp, needle-like black teeth. Though it lacks any visible sensory apparatus, a brain beast can see, hear, and smell using alien senses beyond science's comprehension.
When not actively moving from one place to another, a brain beast clings to a wall or ceiling using its long, black claws. It then merges into the substance it's adhering to, becoming effectively invisible as long as it doesn't move. An incredibly patient hunter, it can remain motionless for weeks at a time while it waits for prey.
When a target finally presents itself, the brain beast unleashes a powerful "cerebral stun" that usually leaves its victim unconscious, or at least dazed and unable to move quickly. It then pounces with incredible accuracy, knocking its prey to the ground where it can rend and devour its flesh at leisure.
Carrionite: Carrionites are semi-undead, roughly humanoid creatures whose appearance is something of a “patchwork”; a strange, mystical melding of a living being and an undead being whose form possesses attributes of both but is never entirely fixed. Their melding of living and unliving flesh frequently shifts, changing the creature’s size, rough shape, color, and other attributes. A carrionite’s unusual body also makes it difficult to hurt, allows it to heal with great speed, and lets it walk on walls by molding its flesh to the surface.
A carrionite looks something like a hairless, paleskinned, sharp-toothed humanoid — most of the time. Its body frequently shifts shape in disturbing ways, making it taller, shorter, huskier, longer-limbed, differently colored, or the like. Most disturbingly, it grows and then loses various natural weapons such as fangs, claws, horns, and spikes on its body. Just looking at one is enough to make most humans faintly nauseated.
Claynull: The claynull is one of the more powerful and dangerous Qliphothic monsters. Its touch drains away the energies which hold matter together. That is how it feeds. Anything it touches is reduced to a heavy, frictionless fluid—the atoms have lost their ability to combine in molecules or interact with anything else. It isn’t even really matter in the normal sense anymore.
While a claynull can feed off any matter, it is especially attracted to energy rich forms such as radioactives, explosives and corrosive chemicals. This may include superbeings with energy manipulation powers. It will pursue such matter even into harmful situations, although it will then try to grab the matter and retreat to safety as it eats.
This creature is nothing but a big flowing blob of clear, pale silvery ooze, with no internal structure. Actually, the creature itself is invisible, but it's covered with a very thin layer of transmuted air. It forms pseudopods with which to attack. Anything touched by it starts dissolving. The claynull is highly resistant to nearly all forms of damage and wounds seal up almost instantly.
Darque: Darques are strange creatures from the Qliphothic plane called The Shining Darkness. (Hero Universe lore often refers to all the Qliphoth by this name, but it properly belongs only to one cosmos among the Qliphothic universes.) They appear as large knots of shimmering black streamers floating in the air. They feel ice cold and filmy.
Darques attack by wrapping around victims and absorbing their life force, leaving the victim weak. They can also project an aura of darkness around themselves. They can see through this darkness just fine, and so can people they’ve wrapped around. Such a person will also see the world as darques see it: dark areas seem lit with silvery radiance, while well illuminated areas seem dark. Light sources are cores of blackness radiating obscurity.
Being insubstantial, darques are unusually resistant to normal sorts of damage, but bright light shocks and evaporates their substance. Naturally they try to stay in dark surroundings as much as possible.
Foul-Skinned Man: A Foul-Skinned Man is a humanoid being whose body, mind, and soul have been warped by its time and experiences in the Qliphoth, the touch of one of its kind when it was still normal, or some combination of the two. It “eats” by corrupting other humanoids — or, in a pinch, consuming raw flesh. Its very touch corrupts an ordinary humanoid both physically and spiritually. It emits a digusting stench that may weaken its foes.
A Foul-Skinned Man is horrifying to look at or be near. Its flesh looks something like that of a dead, rotting body, though when touched it’s as firm and strong as living tissue. A sickly, dark green light shines in its eyes, signalling its evil and hunger.
Hand of Deizzhorath: Among the mightiest and most alien of the Kings of Edom, Deizzhorath is also called "the Dissolver" because its touch utterly annihilates all matter, and it appears to desire to do so. The Dissolver isn't made of matter even in the Qliphothic sense, but of energy and mathematics; but when it was defeated its essence was spread across space and time, so it can't focus its consciousness on any one point.
Some servants of the Kings of Edom use magic to conjure small bits of the Dissolver to attack their enemies. These "Hands of Deizzhorath" look like a swirling globe of colorless filigree fronds erupting from a bright point hanging in space. A Hand exists in more than three spatial dimensions, and is intangible without extraordinary means; but anything touched by one of its fronds dissolves into inert golden flakes which eventually vanish into nothingness.
Hands of Deizzhorath sometimes take seemingly random actions, despite what a summoner wants them to do: pursue a random person, trace elaborate geometric designs in the street, demolish a building, anything. An attack which actually harms a Hand has a good chance of causing it to try to kill the attacker.
Mind Thief: Mind Thieves are one of the most insidious of the Edomite horrors. A mind thief looks a bit like a very large spider and a bit like a crab, but with the addition of a huge, fanged mouth. A mind thief is physically weak, but has the ability to desolidify, crawl into a victim’s brain, and take control of him. A mind thief can call on all its victim’s skills, knowledge, and powers, although because of its alien mentality it isn't very good at pretending to be a human being.
Ultraviolet light, X-rays, and other forms of energetic radiation are the greatest weakness of mind thieves. A mind thief can take damage from irradiation despite hiding in a victim’s skull. Even the ultraviolet light in sunlight irritates a mind thief, although it cannot cause actual harm. Intense UV light or radiation can drive a mind thief out of its victim’s brain. The treatment had better be quick, strong, and a complete and terrifying surprise to the mind thief. If a mind thief has the time before it leaves, it will eat the victim’s brain completely, leaving a corpse with no external sign of damage.
Necheshiron: The necheshiron (Hebrew, “Snaky”) are hardly the most powerful of Qliphothic entities, but they are among the most feared and hated by magicians. Necheshiron “eat” magic, either gulping down spells aimed at them or siphoning away the enchantment from magic items and continuous spells. When necheshiron feed, they make more necheshiron, who go looking for more magic. An out-of-control population of necheshiron can strip an entire world of magic.
Necheshiron are not very intelligent, but they do follow some simple pack tactics. Some will guard the others by interposing themselves and deflecting spells cast at their fellows. Others try to grab and squeeze any opponent who has found some way to hurt them. A few might wait to bite grabbed opponents, but would prefer a chance to eat spells.
Necheshiron are absolutely black. From every angle, a necheshiron looks like a flat silhouette of a huge snake with a spiny crest on its head that runs down its back. They radiate invisible waves of negative energy and sense their surroundings from the reflections.
Oron: Orons are invisible to most senses, but to those who can perceive them they seem to be composed almost entirely of fanged mouths, although their bodies are dotted with many eyes allowing them to see in all directions at once. Their bodies are semi-corporeal, part matter and part something else, making them very resistant to damage. They move by some form of levitation.
Orons tend to be solitary, but as they're very intelligent, they sometimes join forces in groups of up to a dozen to accomplish a common objective, which could be hunting for food, or some inscrutable grander purpose. Their preferred food is the flesh of sapient beings, but if necessary they’ll eat any sort of meat.
Pthaarkin: The King of Edom named Pthaar is also called "the Phantast" due to its great facility at projecting mind-warping illusions, even up to materialzing quasi-solid minions out of psychic force. These "Pthaarkin" normally look like a fusion of snake and toad, with batlike wings and a nest of tentacles around the mouth, suggesting this may reflect Pthaar's true appearance; but the Phantast can project avatars that look like anything.
Pthaar was imprisoned at the core of a planet, now called Sinnuris, in a dimension much like Earth's. The Sinnurians, a sapient race not too different from Humanity, worship Pthaar, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of their fellows to it every year. They construct weirdly-shaped stone fanes whose non-Euclidean geometry allow the Phantast to materialize Pthaarkin outside its prison.
It's conceivable some of Pthaar's followers might travel to a world or dimension potentially holding a key to freeing their god from its confinement -- Earth, for instance.
Qliphothic Hound: So called because it's usually conjured to track down and slay someone, a qliphothic hound is a man-sized, vaguely dodecahedral-shaped being, but on which none of the sides are quite the same size or shape. It has no apparent eyes or sensory organs, but is somehow able to "see" in all directions around it at once, including in spectra not visible to humans. Four flattened tentacles with sharp, bony ridges on the tips project from its body at odd angles, able to reach up to four meters. It moves by a form of levitation faster than most humans can run.
The ecology of these creatures is a mystery. No one knows what they eat, or even how, as they lack any external orifices. Their behavior demonstrates high intelligence, but their motivations are inscrutable to humans.
Thanks to its heightened senses (including the ability to track victims by sight or smell), a qliphothic hound is a superb hunter and scout. Once it catches up to its prey it swoops in to attack with its bone-edged tentacles. If badly injured it flees, but may return to attack again after it heals, weeks or even months later. A summoned qliphothic hound will remain until it performs all the services required of it by the summoning spell.
Qliphothic Hunter: The true appearance of these creatures is unknown. They're always invisible; in fact they cannot be perceived by any commonly-available means, even magical ones. Even when they die and their invisibility fades, all that can be seen is a mass of rapidly deliquescing greenish-yellow slime with no limbs or features of any sort. They do appear to have some form of "claws" with which to attack, strong enough to rend most sorts of protective armor.
Evil spellcasters summon qliphothic hunters to serve them as assassins. Once unleashed against a victim, a qliphothic hunter pursues him without stopping until the victim dies, it dies, or someone banishes it back to the Qliphothic planes. It's anyone's guess what they might do if they entered this universe on their own.
Raven of Dispersion: The Harab Serapel (Hebrew for “Ravens of Dispersion” or “Ravens of Death”) are among the more powerful and mysterious of the Qliphothic entities. Their dimension, the Pale Cathedral, is the last stop for aging, decaying universes before the final abyss and total annihilation. The Ravens are older than anyone can imagine. They know from whence the Kings of Edom came, for they were already ancient when the home dimensions of the Kings were born.
By rights the Pale Cathedral should have fallen to oblivion eons ago. The Ravens of Dispersion, however, learned how to stave off that final plunge by stealing energy from other planes, pulling the other dimension a little closer to destruction in the process. Stealing small amounts of energy is easy, but each theft only sustains the Pale Cathedral for a short time. To gain whole ages of extra time, the Ravens must pull entire worlds into oblivion — which they do.
Although the Harab Serapel have great power, even they cannot destroy an entire world all by themselves. They can, however, achieve such a feat with the help of other beings. The Ravens of Death mentally search the Multiverse for sorcerers who are corrupt, insane, or foolish enough to call on the powers of the Qliphothic planes. They teach such wizards through dreams and visions, increasing their power and madness until the mage can open a Gate to the Final Abyss. Unless such a Gate is closed quickly, it can expand out of control as the world’s energies pour away.
A Raven of Dispersion looks like a human skeleton topped with a bird’s skull. Their obsidian wings wrap around them like the husks of dead, dried-out beetles. They mutter and squawk to themselves in querulous voices as they shuffle about the Pale Cathedral and conduct their deadly rituals.
Interestingly, the most ancient occult lore names the Ravens as part of the alliance of great powers which defeated and imprisoned the Kings of Edom. Why they chose to do so is unknown; perhaps they simply didn't want the world-destroying competition.
Skeinripper: Skeinrippers are strange humanoid beings of unknown origin; some scholars speculate that they’re the creation of a powerful mystic entity, but no one’s found any proof of this. They feed on the destinies of sentient beings, sucking away the beneficial aspects of fate for them, leaving them to live miserable lives.
Skeinrippers look like emaciated humanoids with ochre-colored skin (though their forms tend to fill out, and even become plump, after they “feed” enough). Their arms and legs are long and have two main joints. Oddly mis-shapen claws tip the ends of their long fingers. Their eyes are large, black, and pupilless; they have no external nasal structure; and their mouths seem far too large for their heads (but they have no teeth).
Space-Eater: These Qliphothic creatures feed on the integrity of space itself. Their mere presence in an area causes space to warp until it rips, opening spontaneous wormholes to other dimensions. The space-eaters themselves are not especially dangerous, but their wormholes can cause terrible harm. Even if no horrible things come through from the other side, a wormhole might open to an environment that is poisonous, superheated, in vacuum (sucking away a world’s air), or worse.
These irritable creatures cannot do a great deal of damage all at once to an opponent in combat, but they always do at least a little damage when they hit. Their claws cut space itself. They only fear fire: even if they are getting massacred by some other form of attack, space-eaters will not retreat.
Space-Eaters look something like large crabs or spiders made of shards and tendrils of black and silver mirrors, shimmering as they scuttle along the floor, walls, or ceiling. They have no visible eyes, but quite visible claws. Slender spines jut from their bodies. Space-Eater bodies are about a foot across, not counting their spindly legs.
Spawn of Vulshoth: Also known as "the Eye of the Void," Vulshoth is one of the more powerful and infamous Kings of Edom. It appears as a globular mass of hundreds of slimy, greenish-black tentacles over four hundred feet across. Five huge ruby-red eyes surround an enormous parrot-like beak.
Vulshoth can create smaller copies of itself (six to ten feet in diameter) to further its interests. These Spawn of Vulshoth are physically powerful, have formidable mind-affecting abilities, and their touch can drain the life-force of beings from positive universes. They move by levitation in disregard for gravity. A Spawn's tentacles can extend over great distances to seize prey, by reaching through holes in space.
The Void's Eye can guide its worshipers to build special non-Euclidian structures to amplify its power so it can materialize a Spawn of Vulshoth. Alternatively, a dozen or more worshipers of Vulshoth who willingly surrender their will to it can be merged and transformed into a Spawn.
Spined Horror: This Edomite monstrosity looks a little bit like a gigantic, spiky crab, only it has no claws, or eyes, or even a front or back. It does have eleven legs scattered around the rim of its carapace, and a huge, constantly chewing, three-lobed mouth set in its bottom shell. Its chitinous armor bends into countless rigid spines over the creature’s entire body. It is possible to punch the creature, but if the attacker isn’t careful he or she will hit a spine. Anyone who strikes the creature with their entire body will surely impale themselves on several spikes.
A spined horror normally attacks by stabbing with its pointed legs. If it can maneuver so it stands over an opponent, it will squat and bite; it will certainly try to do this to a knocked down opponent.
Spined Horrors have two main uses. One is as a simple juggernaut of destruction. The other is as an assassin: a spined horror can track designated victims both by mundane clues and by mental emissions. There are few places it cannot go, and few barriers it cannot smash down, given time.
Squrm: This oozing horror looks like a huge squid flying on slimy, membranous wings. Squrms are black, streaked with putrid yellow, green, and brown. They have a single, twin-pupiled eye. Despite a squrm’s bulk, their constant looping, twitching, twirling movement means they are no easier to hit. Squrms never move in straight lines in any way.
Squrms are one of the more intelligent sorts of Edomite. They have formidable quasi-psychic powers. By waving their tentacles in complex designs, squrms can move objects through space, make solid matter crumble, create entangling webs from thin air, or hypnotize unfortunate humans. They can also simply grab at people — several at a time — and bite with a parrotlike beak nestled amid the tentacles.
Since squrms have no legs, on the ground they can only wriggle. They have an entirely rational fear and hatred of anything that can keep them from flying. They also stay away from wide, smooth, flat surfaces such as glass-sheathed skyscrapers or flat, level roads and parking lots; touching such surfaces causes a squrm pain and can eventually kill it.
Zodiac Beast: Zodiac beasts are predators said to be made of the stuff between constellations, who inhabit dark places (including, legend has it, “the darkness between the stars”). They have animal intelligence and motivations, but with a sinister tinge. They seem to yearn to spread their darkness into the minds, eyes, and hearts of sapient beings, who sometimes seem to become a little like them after their attacks.
A zodiac beast looks approximately like some sort of predatory animal (most often an ursine or feline one) made of blue-black shadow, with lines of blue-white light inside its body like a skeleton and “stars” of the same light at the joints and other important places — almost as if it were a living, sinister, constellation from an artistic astrology book. Their claws, fangs, and eyes are the same blue-white color. When they move they can run through the air as easily as over the ground.
Zodiac beasts hunt alone or in packs, using their weird “constellation eyes” to follow the auric traces left by living beings (particularly sapients, their preferred prey). When they find a victim they prefer to torment them with their darkness powers, sometimes even letting them go after that. But usually when they’re done enjoying themselves they rip the hapless being apart with their claws and fangs, in the process devouring their auric essence.
The Robin Hood Campaign Classics book is by far the best of the series, if not the best sourcebook ever printed for FH. There's an incredible amount of detailed lore about life in England in the Middle Ages, including folklore and mythology. There's FH stats that were actually developed by someone who knew FH (as opposed to just converting the RM stats). There's even--gasp--adventures, in defiance of the ban on published modules for FH. Even the art and layout are top notch.
It really stands out because it's the one book that shows what Hero is capable of at the lower end of the spectrum. (Robin Hood himself comes out to 80 points IIRC.) And it actually makes you want to play low fantasy. Ultimately, though, that is the book's one fatal flaw--it's low fantasy when the rest of the world is playing D&D video game fantasy. But if you can get hold of a copy, do so; it's worth it even if all you do is read it.
Personally I like to do it using continuous uncontrolled (requires attack roll every phase, ends when attack is successful). You make the attack, pile in the amount of END necessary to keep it going multiple phases and it will keep attacking until it actually hits or runs out of END.
Not discussing wich is the best, I'm here just to tell I played a campaign in 6th century Europe, from Byzantium to the Vandal Kingdom to the Persian frontier in Armenia, with the Blue and Green hippodrome factions fighting in the streets, Huns still menacing, conspiracies, spies, and a gold mine. Years 519-535, a long run.
Something I'm playing with in historical and other low-magic settings is keep clerical magic but get rid of wizards. At least one TSR campaign book, Charlemagne's Paladins, offers this as an option. I tried this option in my solo Middle-earth campaign. I renamed the clerics "healers" and treated their turn undead and spells as skills rather than than actual magic. It's still a work in progress.
Since the Mongols have come up repeatedly in this discussion, I want to mention that I've often mused about what would have happened to the world's history if there had been one minor change -- the death of Temujin, the future Genghis Khan, as a boy. That was a very possible development. His tribe, the original Mongols, were defeated and scattered by their enemies, and Temujin became a hunted refugee for years. He could easily have been caught and killed in that time. Temujin eventually gathered his tribe, and brought the other nomads of the Gobi Desert region under his banner, apparently through his personal charisma, genius, and force of will. There's no reason to believe that unification would have happened without him.
The possible ripple effects of that change are profound. The Mongols united the rival states of China, which remained unified ever afterward. OTOH they crushed the Russian principalities, among the most prosperous and progressive in Europe, holding back their development so the momentum of civilization shifted westward. The powerful Khwarizmian Empire dominated Central Asia and the Muslim world for only a few decades before the Mongols utterly defeated it in a mere two years. The Mongol peace across their vast empire opened new safe trade routes which spurred European contact with the Far East, like the Polo expedition. That in turn fueled Europeans' desire to find a shorter, more direct route to the Orient, which led to the discovery of the New World. Subsequent notable imperialists such as Timur and Babur declared themselves descendants and successors of the royal Mongol house, which may have inspired them and was used to add the aura of legitimacy to their rule.
Because of the wonderful flexibility of the HERO system, I once had a character who played an intelligent sword. He was basically the demonic force and personality of the weapon and would use mind control powers to obtain new sword bearer minions who would carry him around and wield him in battle.
It was a high-magic game set in the Planes and worked out surprisingly well.
Steve reacted to Lord Liaden in I'd like to see a Dark Champions 3000
Steve got a reaction from Lord Liaden in The Brain Trust
