zslane

I don't really think you need to model it at all.  It's just Running without bothering to take the easiest path.  It's Running, with the SFX of occasionally falling through a shed roof or into a dumpster.

Most of it could be covered with Acrobatics. Adding, "Usable As Leaping" to Running should handle the rest.

This looks good. I would add in RSR-acrobatics. And maybe a small limitation-Parkour. Iow the character can still only leap to places that cinematically only a Parkour could get to.

4th edition with a few bits cribbed from 5th.

In a world where magic exists, probably yes.

That's the thing I hate most. Figured characteristics worked perfectly well for me for 35+ years, I see no reason to change.

HPL's At the Mountains of Madness is worth examining in this light. Physically, the Antarctic "Old Ones" are incredibly alien. At first they seem monstrous, too. After all, some of them dissect the humans who discover them. By the end of the story, though, the narrator admires their courage and says, "They were men."
 
Now, at no point does the narrator personally interact with any Old Ones. He knows only that some individual Old Ones have scientific curiosity,and he infers courage. (And dissecting some humans was fair. After all, the human explorers had dissected one of the Old Ones, thinking it was dead.) From the illustrations he's seen of the Old Ones' history, he can infer a few other points of potential resemblance between how humans and Old Ones think and act. Beyond that, he's probably projecting. But one of the points of the story is that moment of feeling a connection with something that first seemed wholly alien. And it's awe-inspiriting, because Lovecraft first took the trouble to present the Old Ones as so convincingly alien.
 
The Great Race are another instance where creatures that physically seem outrageously alien turn out to have aspects of thought and culture that humans can understand and empathize with. And also some that are not so empathetic, such as how they plan their species' mental survival across billions of years and from planet to planet by swapping minds, sometimes forcing entire other intelligent species to die in their place. The alien-ness of the Great Race lies their perspective as much as their appearance. But an SF campaign with the Great Race at its center, with characters hopping from body to body across eons and planets, interacting with other human epochs and other species, could be incredible.
 
Dean Shomshak

I started with 2nd edition, which was a huge revelation to me at the time in terms of game design. Loved it to pieces.
 
3rd edition was a nice improvement, and HERO System really started to come into its own with the other HERO System games released at the time.
 
4th was wonderful. It brought everything together under one set of covers.
 
5th was OK. It fixed some things, and had some nicely crafted supplements.
 
5eR was too much of a good thing. To this day I still haven't read through the whole thing, cover-to-cover.
 
Same for 6e, only more so. But they're beautiful books!
 
Champs Complete is fine, and was a sorely needed return to marketplace viability in terms of rulebook size.
 
But 4e will always be my sweet spot, and the one I return to (albeit with some good ideas from 5e).
 
(I'd back a Kickstarter for a bugfixed BBB -- or even HERO System Rulesbook -- in a heartbeat.)
 

4th edition with a few bits cribbed from 5th.

There were some pretty dramatic shifts in mechanics after 2nd edition. By 4th edition power effects were no longer multiples of a characteristic, but a linear offset instead (e.g., EGO + 20 instead of EGO x 3). Many of the abilities--and the mechanics associated with them--went through dramatic changes as well, especially Martial Arts. So while the essence of the game remained pretty much the same, a lot did change from 1st to 4th editions.

Big Blue Book FTW! I just take Megascale and Change Enviroment from 5th and remove bonuses from taking Packages and I am good to go...

Exactly. 4th with bits of 5th like megascale.
 
I didn't feel like there was a clean transition from 1st to 2nd to 3rd so it made interpreting some published characters a little awkward. But 4th was a clean break and I felt it did a good balance of cleanness vs complexity.
 
When I'm thinking up characters, I think of them in 4th then have to adapt them to 5th or 6th (much the same way that someone who has English as her native language might think in English then have to translate that thought into French or Italian before communicating in those languages).
 
When I'm a player, I really like utility belts and figured characteristics. 6th lets you have one but not the other, which I see as a problem.
 
I started picking up HERO stuff the year it came out. It took me several years to find Adventurer's Club #1 after they started publishing it. Then I randomly found two copies of it at a used book store out of state, which makes that my favorite random RPG find ever.

4th and 5th are neck and neck for me. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd are fine too, I played with them for a long time and liked them very much. 
 
[Dr. Banner] You don't want to hear my opinion on 6th. You wouldn't like my opinion on 6th.[/Dr. Banner]

The old FTL 2448 sci-fi RPG from Tri Tac Games gave me significant inspiration for creating unusual aliens back in the day. It's a rather clunky and quirky game system by today's standards, but it does provide a wide range of aliens as playable PCs, many of them radically non-humanoid. The universe setting it describes has some intriguing elements. I also appreciate the range of starship designs it presents, technically and visually.
 
https://tritacgames.com/FTL.htm
 
I also want to give a nod to our official Hero Universe aliens. While the majority fall into the general humanoid and bipedal animal categories, there's a fair number of much more radical configuration, composition, and mindset.

Last time I did a sci-fi campaign, we created a rather alien race.  They were plants, specifically shrubs, psionic shrubs.  In Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand near the end of the book the (friendly) aliens bring in a telepathic analyst; its name was Dr. Mrm'mmlrr or something like that, and that is probably the initial germ of the idea.  We postulated the shrubs had initially evolved to broadcast a faint aura of psionic fear around themselves to repel animals like deer, and their intelligence and psionic toolkit got better as the species evolved.  Their thinking and psionic tissues were in the roots.  They had multiple semi-intelligent client species, the most important to the game being evolved from weasels; these weasels had functional hands, a spoken language, and were the shrubs' manipulators and muscles.  (For the native-form shrubs, the most important clients were a species of ants, whose purpose was to prevent infestations of root nematodes and parasites below ground; the tissue-tank individuals -- see below -- didn't need those.)  While the weasels had metalworking tech, the shrubs preferred biotech: they had a couple of species of fungus and trees whose growth habit they controlled, and they'd developed a strain of fungus that could survive continuous contact with the deep space environment (so their spaceships' hulls were literally wood and tough fungus, grown to desired configuration).
 
Shrubs are not motile, of course, but they had some individuals who could be moved as they were in pots, and they had achieved a tech where fully functional individuals lived in tanks of nutrient fluid which looked pretty much like refrigerators.  As a species they had a real horror of fire.  While they had evolved both themselves and their clients that they could, at need, override a client's mind completely and take full control, doing that was rarely done because it was so difficult; the shrubs could get very little more and the barest, coarsest emotion read on humans.
 
Interstellar and interplanetary drives could be done with a psionic element that some of the shrubs had.  Their distance communications used some handwavium thing that modulated broadband infrared (wavelength out near 10 to 100 microns) well enough to be comprehensible in their psionic sensorium.

Same here. However, most discussions with regard to proposed new editions/versions/variations of the system/rules tend to focus on what would be best for newcomers and drawing in new blood. I tire of those discussions, not because they don't apply to me, but because they are utterly pointless.

I assume every Lovecraftian horror is larger than a football stadium until shown to be otherwise.

I don't think her Regen would have been fast-acting enough to eliminate his influence, something he had to "refresh" every 24 hours. And since she was in his presence nearly 24/7 during her "thrall" phase with him, I don't think her healing ability would ever have been able to overcome the constant infusion of his virus/pheromones. Killing Reva caused a psychological break that instantly made her immune (she was able to walk away from him that very moment). I don't know if there's a clean Hero System game mechanics explanation for that, but the meta-explanation is that she spent XP on the necessary power(s) (and for the tv show, the writers simply made it so).

I think the only point of concern with regard to Ruby Rose should be her acting ability, or lack thereof. She has a great look, but it remains to be seen if she can act well enough to pull off the role convincingly. Her real life sexual orientation is, and should be, utterly irrelevant. If fans really want to complain about anyone "not being lesbian enough," then they should wait until the Batwoman show airs (assuming it even gets greenlit as an independent series), see how she's portrayed, and then complain to the showrunners and WB if they aren't satisfied. Ruby herself will have little say in the matter, so aiming SJW cannons at her is pointless.

Nyarlathotep can take pretty much any form he wants, so any drawing of him is going to challenge the notion of canonicity in any case.
 
One thing I find bemusing is that in the board game Arkham Horror, you will often find your investigators fighting dholes, which given their size is absurd. But hey, it's just a dumb board game, right?

Wow, those are all amazing!
 
I just wish the human reference silhouette was on all of them.

I think the only point of concern with regard to Ruby Rose should be her acting ability, or lack thereof. She has a great look, but it remains to be seen if she can act well enough to pull off the role convincingly. Her real life sexual orientation is, and should be, utterly irrelevant. If fans really want to complain about anyone "not being lesbian enough," then they should wait until the Batwoman show airs (assuming it even gets greenlit as an independent series), see how she's portrayed, and then complain to the showrunners and WB if they aren't satisfied. Ruby herself will have little say in the matter, so aiming SJW cannons at her is pointless.

I think the only point of concern with regard to Ruby Rose should be her acting ability, or lack thereof. She has a great look, but it remains to be seen if she can act well enough to pull off the role convincingly. Her real life sexual orientation is, and should be, utterly irrelevant. If fans really want to complain about anyone "not being lesbian enough," then they should wait until the Batwoman show airs (assuming it even gets greenlit as an independent series), see how she's portrayed, and then complain to the showrunners and WB if they aren't satisfied. Ruby herself will have little say in the matter, so aiming SJW cannons at her is pointless.

"for someone I just stabbed through the torso, you're sure not bleeding much"
 

They had what we would call "shout outs" and "call backs" to one another but I don't think it rose to the level of a shared universe.
 
Lucius Alexander
 
Riding a palindromedary from Arkham to Aquilonia?