Norm

Needs work but playing with Hero Designer and the Vehicle Export sheets for 6th Edition. I need to work on the table layout and a few other things.
 

Shield Bus.pdf The V-Jet.pdf

I found the video on YouTube. 
 
 

Late to the thread, but ideal currencies need only to be durable, scarce, portable, and divisible.  And the last two are not hard and fast requirements.
 
As such, ammunition would make excellent currency, especially if there's a set conversion rate like four .22LR = two 9mm = 1 AR round.  It's also useful for other reasons, though currencies usually aren't--consider that gold is practically useless for anything other than decoration.
 
The other thing I can think of for post-apocalyptic currency would be medications, especially antibiotics.  But it has problems with durability and divisibility, and its value would vary greatly depending on whether you were currently sick or not.
 
The electricity idea posted upthread would be a good idea if it could be easily stored and exchanged, such as with some kind of ubiquitous power cell.  Otherwise what you have is Bartertown--political power, but not a monetary system per se.

Our group played Twilight 2000 (way back in the 80s and 90s) for several years. Our “currencies” changed several times, depending on location, local resources, and need. Barter and Trading became vital skills.

For a while, the players used ammunition - small arms, mortars, C4 - as the standard for trade. Then at various times vehicle parts, including bicycles, black powder, food, and medicines. Once they even ‘acquired’ several tons of gold, and found it was only as valuable as their trustworthiness. 

Eventually the true currency became skill sets. Horticulturist and farmer. Engineer, mechanic, electrician, and gunsmith. Tactician, trader, and navigator. Some PCs became so valuable, the rest of the party would throw themselves in front to take a bullet.
 
The mechanic was so protected that the player quickly got bored. So, we let her play a scout as a second character. (The player was indispensable. She would point out what could be salvaged from houses and vehicles and what could be made from the scavenged parts. Being an engineer at the Oak Ridge National Labs has unexpected perks.)

I found the video on YouTube. 
 
 

I found the video on YouTube. 
 
 

I found the video on YouTube. 
 
 

I'm not sure -- perhaps Dan S. or someone else removed it (or changed its "pinned" status) during a clean-up session. I'm still working hard on MH, trying to get at least a little work done on it every day, and more than a little whenever possible.

Nothing I want or need from this year's releases then.
 
Regarding a Patreon, as Norm said, it would depend on the content. There are an awful lot of Patreons now and only so much money. An Advanced Player's Guide III sounds vaguely interesting, but Martial World not at all.
 
Mythic Hero would cause me to sign up straight away.
 
 

Yes. As a matter of fact, that is how I uploaded the characters from Champions Complete and Champions Begins into Roll20 for the upcoming project. Here is a video link that shows you how to do it. Note, that you can now select the importer from a drop down in roll20 instead of copying the link. 

I'd love for there to e a Fantasy Hero version!

Honestly, Jkeown, only so far as Champions Complete and Hero System supports Fantasy Hero which is to say only "loosely". Hero Games is trying something new here, and if it goes well, we would like to propose to the powers that be following it up with a Fantasy HERO specific compendium like this project. We are early into this project still, so as we get further into it, we're optimistic that we will start having a discussion about what comes next. 
 
But, anyone interested in seeing a similar project for Fantasy Complete or Fantasy HERO, it's a good time to chime in and it may help with  deciding the next venture. 

I believe that's what the 5E Champions Battlegrounds book was intended to present -- a group of adventures which could be run separately, but which also had an overarching plot to tie them together if a GM wanted it.
 
Rather than the 4E and earlier adventures, it would probably be easier to update the Champions adventures presented in Digital Hero to 6E, and collect the majority of them (there were fourteen in total) into a single volume. They have the advantage of being ready to run, already having written up NPCs, and optional PC heroes in several cases, with artwork, plus most of them include maps.
 
DH also has seven Star Hero adventures, three for Fantasy, and a couple for other genres.
DH Adventures .doc

Personally, I am thinking that the Chimera project is not a wise expenditure of funds, when what Champions, or any of the sub rules need is something "big", that has almost a campaign sized adventure, a spray of adventure seeds, and a stack of written up villains, and monsters, for the adventure. Duke Bushido had something like this with an adventure  in one of the threads here.  What needs to be done is to produce more adventures with villains, and equipment.  We can't assume that all the GMs are Home Brewers like they have in the past. Because it's in the past, it's not in the way GMs do things now.

That is actually a great idea and one that would be useful, not only for experienced players but new ones as well.
 
While they achieved their objective in sanitizing everything down to the lowest possible building block, such as Secret ID being a social complication.  They forget that it is easier for players to just call it Secret ID. 
 
Not precisely the same thing as your thought, but close enough for this thread.
 
A book of "Talent" builds would be extremely useful for people who just want to play today and get into esoteric build theory later.
 

I like this idea.  I'd suggest only putting the Talent descriptions and the critical "how this actually works in play" information in the main part of the book.  The "under the hood" details of how the Talent was constructed from other Powers and such, I would put in an appendix at the back of the book (or maybe even put it in a free PDF download for folks who are interested, and don't put it in the book itself at all). 

Absolutely agree.
 
By the way, Extinction Event is such a product. I have not played it but it's the type of product that I would prefer to have from HERO. 
 
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/285180/Extinction-Event?term=extinct
 
Above, @Steve Long describes exactly the Danger International I do not want. Another genre/sub-genre book describing stuff from cavemen to modern. Not what I want. I want Danger International to be a game with a define context and setting, with a clear purpose where readers learn what the game is all about. Is the game about Bondesque/Bournesque spies or is it grtty and down to earth? Is it set during the Pre-War, the Cold War, the War on Terror, the Near Future? What are the stakes? Now, once DI establishes a base context/setting/purpose, I could totally see expansions covering the other eras and style. 

Bingo! 
This goes for all genre/theme/settings or what have you.
 
The only real way to learn Hero is to play Hero.  But having to design everything before you can play really eliminates the whole play thing before it even starts.
 
 

That is because I really have no clue about what the cities are.  I mean I have TA that I read 20 (?) years ago?  Maybe?  I can't remember. 
But I never circled back. To this day I cannot tell you what real world culture each "nation" is near to. 
All I can say is I have had far too much "mega-urban zone inflicted with political intrigue" inflicted on me to look for more.  I have yet to see a smaller city get a high production product treatment.   By high production I mean that the maps need to be better than what I produce for myself.   
 
But to my point. TA, just like many Hero products was not written from the "let's make this a easy for entry as possible where a GM can begin play within hours and then add more detail as they have time" perspective but from the "all real gamers will be able to dedicate as much time as as necessary to learn this because they are all either independently wealthy or have no other lives than gaming". 
 
For large fantasy cities I have a couple versions of Citystate of the Invincible Overlord and Waterdeep.  I pretty much ignore the "official" political and guild information, but the versions them I own made that pretty easy as separate chapters that can be ignored.  The big draw for me was the maps, enough detail to be useful, both to players and GM's, while not so detailed as to cage people in.  I have the old 1e (maybe 2e??) giant wall map of Waterdeep.  The one that looked great, not the newer bland all browns one.
 
I would love a smaller frontier town with the same level of production.  One that looks good on the table or wall and can get the players going. 
 

Well, just my 2 cents.  In a very broad sense, cities/towns have two types of details.  Physical and Political. 
 
Physical details are things like locations such as shops and such with any needed maps.  A short description of streets, sewers, and so with any illustrations or diagrams/maps.  A new GM can quickly assimilate enough of this type of information to begin a game and then read up on anything else they may need as required.
 
The other part, Political, sounds great but is the major reason that 99% of those kinds of products gather dust on the shelf. 
Most modern gamers hold full time jobs (40 to 60 hours a week) and then have to deal with family issues.  This leaves them MAYBE an hour a night, but not every night, to use for gaming.  Say 4 to 5 hours a 7 day week.  Indepth political intrigue of the type alluded to above is easy when you are making it up yourself,  but a grueling exercise when you are trying to commit to memory someone else's creations. 
 
Ask the question: can a GM read and understand enough to actually run the city in a game with a cumulative total reading time of 4 hours? If not it will be a niche collectors item and gather dust. 
 
TA was a great read as I recall from when I read it years ago.  But Hero has always written from a "coolness/let's be unique" angle instead of a "let's make it easy for a GM to use in a game" angle.  None of the nations or cultures ever stuck with me because they have no real world analog.  
A GM doesn't run a world, they run an area of a world, but trying to filter through the "oh God let's not make this easy" mode to locate an area that will fit the intended game becomes work instead of play.
 
Are there dwarves? Call them anything you want, but add dwarf in the description so they can be easily located. 
 
D&D is still dominant because it gives people what they want, not what they say they want.  Playable supplements that are easy to absorb in small bite sized morsels. 
 
TA is like Midgard.  A cool book that we simply didn't have time to actually use. 
 
A book about Aarn could be great.  But if running Aarn requires making sense of (begin ridiculously overly large examples) 32 political factions with all 2317 nobles fully stated out with agendas. Well doorstop it is. 
 
Ask the question, how many fantasy large metropolises are currently out there? I Don't know exactly, but I have 7 on my shelf. 
 
How many fully realized small towns suitable for beginning parties (1st thru 3rd level in D&D speak) are there?  Ones that are not Built around some bizarre "the author thought this was cool" concept. I can't answer that one because I have yet to find one.  I do have a few partially completed small towns. 
 
Give people the COMPLETE physical layout of the city, town, what have you, and then an overview (high-level overview) of the political arena with some suggestions.  But make the political stuff easy to separate and ignore such as a separate chapter that will not impact the rest of the book if ignored.
 
Have great ideas for a politically driven game, that is called an Adventure Module. 
 
Want to show gangs and guild territories on the map.  DO NOT put them on the main city map.  Add a smaller scaled low detail map with the territories shown. The GM may want to toss the them for his own creations.  Which is hard if they are printed everywhere.
 
The long and the short of it is too much detail is just as deadly to a product as too little.  And a city is not a location for the writers campaign, it is a location for the purchaser to build their campaign.
 
Aarn looks to be a popular choice.  Built to be digested in small bites. 
 
For myself, I have come to the conclusion that a simple small town will never happen, so I am building my own in my painfully slow way.
 
 
 
 

A smaller city in Vestria.  Large enough to have resources a party of adventurers need, but not large enough to rival 20th century metropolises.  The prevalence of those in fantasy RPG's is a real turn off.
 
A smaller city that new players can be introduced to without requiring them to expend more effort to read the background material than some do getting a degree. 
Enough info and locations (inn's, stores, weaponsmiths, magic related shops, etc.) to be helpful, but light on politics and the nobility.  It is far easier to build intrigue and factions from scratch than it is to digest pre-existing nobility, family lines and plots.  To name the influential houses is one thing, but adding all the past and ongoing feuds and bickering is an obstacle rather than an aid. Too much information is actually worse than not enough. 
 
Maps.   MAPS.   A real map of the city.  If the Inn is named it the book then include a usable map.  No map, no named inn.  Maps.   MAPS.   A real map of the city.   This will keep the locations to something useful, rather than just another block of text that get s ignored.
 
Somewhere with the frontier feel and room to actually explore in the surrounding region.
 
A city that a beginning group can actually base out of and have a plausible level of influence.
 

YES!  This is the organization that I threw at my gaming group after a couple of small adventures.  Interrupting a kidnapping or two brought the party to the attention of the local group of the Red Talons.  The party started to investigate some more and was getting an idea that this was a larger group than they thought.  Suddenly DNCPs/contacts/family/friends were threatened/investigated/kidnapped by the Guild to distract them.  Fun for all.
 

I agree that Hero needs adventures and even campaigns, but they are a different subject from Hero Powered games. 
At least I think they are. 
 
I have several adventures I'd love to put in the Hall of Champions if I could.  But all the ones I have (superheroic type) made use of many existing Champions villains.  My initial plans was to use stripped villain sheets that just have the needed stats with zero build information and very abbreviated backgrounds with a referral to the source book, in this case Conquerors, Killers, And Crooks.  But in order to bring them now I have to completely redesign the villains and perform full playtests.  It is hard enough to create viable pre-gens.  Redesign the villains and you have to redesign the pre-gens too. 
 
I have a fantasy project in the works with two possible directions.  Once I get far enough along for it to be viable I will need to run it by the powers that be to see which direction is best. 

Well there are a few in depth campaign settings.   But they are too in-depth for easy entry.
 
From a players perspective on character generation, if an item is included as a selection then it is significant.
 
If a game includes 8 "races", 8 "cultures", 4 "archetypes", 10 "vocations" and 32 "backgrounds", then they will all need to be read and understood before a player can start to build a character.
 
If you use "cool names" for things instead of just calling a dwarf a dwarf if increases the difficulty and time required. 
 
Narosia is a cool setting, but it didn't double down on cryptic, it bazillioned down.  Every reference to "race" uses the new name rather than the common name plus new.  Making it difficult for anyone to identify the race with out STUDY.  And STUDY is the enemy of a game.  In Narosia a dwarf is a Tsverg, but the game does not actually say that.  I think they believe that using anything that even looks like a traditional RPG convention is evil so they deliberately obfuscated things.  So instead of making the entry Dwarf [Tsverg] or Tsverg [Dwarf] so the reader could easily understand and locate what they wanted.  We have 62 build elements (templates), with 16 of them deliberately obfuscated, that the players have to understand before they can begin building a PC. 
 
The initial book of a settings character design part, or initial part if you can break the book into Basic and Advanced sections, has to present an very short list of character options (race/class/archetype/etc) that will allow new players to read and make informed choices during ONE session. 
 
I have over 40 RPG books similar to Narosia in my collection.  Beautiful, well thought out and highly detailed games that you never see anyone actually play because in the time needed to actually learn all the options and then teach them to the players in order to reach the point where you can start, you could have bought, learned and completed a campaign in one of the dozens of other games. 
 
D&D and other similar games learned this years ago.  They start with a short list of options in the first book.  And then add more in later OPTIONAL books. 
 
While I am a big fan of Hero books, I love the Pulp Hero book, Hero and people that write material for Hero tend to go too far overboard in to the realm of unplayable due to far too much information.  And games powered by Hero tend to spend so much energy trying to make their settings not include anything that might be recognizable that they make the entire game unplayable. 

Especially with Hero branching out to try new things, I really think we need a "game powered by Hero" which takes the above into account.
 
Let's assume Fantasy because that is where the market starts.  What does the game need?
 
It needs to explain the stats.  Maybe not all of them.  Maybe we actually build some as combined stats.  Maybe STR comes bundled with some STUN and some PD and CON comes bundled with some END, REC and ED.  Perhaps everyone gets 10 BOD and 3 SPD by default.  Those need not be the choices, but choices are needed.
 
It needs to provide some races, cultures, archetypes, vocations and/or backgrounds.  62 (above) seems like a lot.  Let's say 4 human cultures and 6 non-human races (you select one of the 10 choices), 12 vocations (segregated into 4 archetypes such as "Warrior", "Mage", "Devoted" and "Rogue" (you pick one) and 15 Backgrounds (pick 1).  If we got to 12 backgrounds and were out of great ideas, stop.  if we had two more great Cultures, add them.  But the number of choices must be manageable.
 
Now, let's make each Race/Culture cost 50 points, each Vocation costs 100 and each Background costs 25.  That's your 175 starting points.  DONE.  Within each, we might have choices (e.g. select 5 skills from this list; select 3 Prayers from the Orisons list and 2 from the Miracles, Minor list).  
 
Now we need to describe the skills, those mechanics taken up in the abilities gained through Vocations and the game play rules.  That's our Rules section.  Too many rules to fit the page count?  Cut something, and take all abilities related to it away. 
 
Now, let's pick a setting.  Maybe this will be a Turakian Age game, or perhaps we start from scratch.  Pick a location in the broader world and provide enough detail to make it a "home base".  MAYBE provide some broader info on the bigger world, but that's space permitting.  We can have a full world book, or new region books, later.  They can even have new races, cultures, vocations and/or backgrounds.  Provide some monsters and some short starting adventures.  Provide an xp system, but all they can do with xp is increase stats, buy new or improved skills or buy new picks from their race, vocation or background.  Don't even offer the option of buying from other cultures, backgrounds or vocations.
 
Get the adventure rolling, and map out a broader "adventure path" surrounding it.  If it sells, we can make Book 2 - more adventure, and some more character options for more powerful characters.  We left room for Miracles well past Minor, and should do so in all "vocation powers" structures.  They want to custom-design abilities and powers and new gear and new monsters and and and and?  Buy the Hero System.  Unlike most games, you can look under the hood and customize the game using the same toolbox the designers worked from.  Want more pre-designed stuff?  If you keep buying the books, we'll keep making the books!
 
But make and sell a game.  Not a "here is the huge system and an enormous list of options for what you can do to build a game within it".  A game already built from that huge system, pre-selecting the options for the gamers.  Is that for sure what they want, and it will fly off the shelves?  Nothing is for sure.  Is it similar to other gaming products, some of which pull in a lot more sales than Hero has in the recent past?  I hope so because that was the idea.