Scott Ruggels

Maybe  use Lord Liaden's Rule of X? criteria? Starting points, is a good baseline, but there has to be a  mention about Defenses, Maximum DC, Highest allowable speed, and that sort of thing. Maybe disallow powers like Clairvoyance, or Megascale Teleport? Again, because there is no class system, power level kind of has to be back calculated.  The Original Adventures were made for 250pt. Heroes and 10DC for the adventures up to 4th Edition.
 
 Agreed. to make the editing easier, we will need a set of guidelines. What structure thought?  Comics?  Television? Movies?  Sandbox?  What? 
 
 
In other projects I have worked on, and also the book covers I have worked on as well, has set "cover dress".  They are a set size.  and are usually made, and provided from  The Art department, and are set up so that it makes pre-press easy for the printers, and for the artists to keep things within spec. These will usually contain the cover graphics, a space for a title, with a font specified, and a place for the ISBN Bar code, and/or the Price.  These REALLY Help for layout. 

Inside the format should be specified. One  or two column.  Illustration size. illustrations border, or borderless,  fonts, and numbering.   In broad terms a format for presenting the material should be worked up, as well, so that authors can work from an outline, and then fill it out. I suppose follow a Paiso-like approach once again, as that seems to work.

But the page count needs to be very limited, again to keep things short and expenses low. Sound good?
 
I guess in out case was that the GM would not allow buying up attacks, or defenses. If we saved our XPs, we could buy another power, or buy off disads, but 10 dice was 10 dice.. But getting more skills was very helpful as was buying more and different defenses.

After further consideration, I'm not sure that a new version of Champions Complete is a good idea... the store shows 29 physical copies left in stock (is this something that can feasibly be re-printed?)  I'm going back and re-reading it; if a new, edited version were made, what would be the major differences?
 
As for the rest of it; yes, I'm thinking a new city (possibly the one Mark Rand is considering) with explanation of where all the levers are set (a playable game, rather than a toolkit) and ready-to-play scenario or two, with enough to transition into a longer-term campaign.  Then thin adventure books.

Exactly.

Besides Australia doesn't exist, right?

There is no reason why the fantasy genre has to lick anyone's boots, other than cultural expectations built up over time. Kind of like why we expect superheroes to wear colorful costumes and use catchy code-names -- it's what most of them have always done, and what we're used to. Tolkien's and D&D's popularity have made their elements part of the cultural zeitgeist, so there'll always be people who want and expect them.
 
For Tolkien's Elves in particular, there's no doubt he created them out of love for their concept. These are the firstborn Children of Iluvatar, and some of them studied and played at the feet of the gods. But you also should remember that the era of the War of the Ring was the final chapter in their very ancient story. In the youth of the world, described in The Silmarillion, Elves could be as selfish, greedy, wrathful, cruel as any Men. But those still lingering in Middle Earth in the Third Age had endured millennia of suffering, failure, and loss, much of it of their own making. Their wisdom and nobility was hard-earned, at a great price. And it's led to weariness with the world and the desire to be done with fighting battles that never seem to end.
 
Now, as to multiple non-human races generally, I agree that strictly speaking, they aren't necessary to fantasy. But folklore around the world has populated it with all manner of creatures, spirits, gods, demons, ghosts, talking animals, sapient plants, hidden folk in wood and water and earth... it's a near-universal human instinct to want our world to be filled with such wondrous things. There's various explanations as to why we do that, but most people don't think about the why. Many people -- not all, but many -- just know that they want their fantasy to include things other than and different from themselves, that don't exist in reality.

So we don't use the "dodgy" parts, or modify anything that we do want to use. We're discussing a more tightly-focused, "starter" campaign setting, deliberately not including everything right away.

So, then we are agreed that we should put  out thin adventure books around a loosely defined campaign background that Hero Already owns, and that is after a highly edited version of Champions Complete? so as to fill in things in small, easily digestible chunks over time? This seems plausibly achievable. Anything else? Am I missing anything?

Harn is being run on the Hero Discord Server, using Hero, 8pm Eastern, on Saturdays.

It had a third problem that was pretty large and one that was shared by several games/settings that never took off. 
 
It attempted to have it world be too unique.  Games that go out of their way to be too unique requires players to STUDY the setting in order have enough information to do anything. 
 
All I really remember of Empire of the Petal Throne was too much weirdness and too little explanation.  We went on to other games. 
 
Tolkeins Rohirrom (sp?) can be described loosely as plains dwelling horsemen with a culture that resembles Viking/Norse/Celtic and no ships. 
 
100% accurate? No. 
Enough so that a new player can create a character? Yes.
 
To play an RPG a player must have enough information to be able to create a character that fits in a setting. 
 
 
 

Mediocrity should have no place, period. What we need is to meet the current market expectations for a quality product. And that means quality COLOR art. no B/W, as , well, you aren't the main demographic of the market any more.

Canned tuna, fresh tuna, they are still both fish, and I want beef!

Okay, so let's look at some rough history.
 
Paizo began, publishing Adventures for D&D 3.5.  But decided to go off on their own, and use the D20 license to publish their own system, we now know as Pathfinder. The product was a very Publishing adventures was supposed to be a losing proposition, but they made enough money to put out a magazine.  These magazines would put out Adventures that were linked to the Next issue of the magazine, and after a year, they would publish the adventures in a hardbacked book for $50, and start the next year's adventures in the magazine.   This has resulted in a very lush game world (Golarion) for Pathfinder, and a lot of material.  I do not know how well Second Edition is working out for them, but I would assume that since the stats in both editions are similar, if not the same, then the current published material should work. 
 
Now it has become evident, that the quality of computers has increased in capability since the early 2000s, pushing more work and productivity onto the rank and file worker, and sucking up vast amounts of time at home with ever more capable games.  So Marc W. Miller's  lament, that people don't have time for imagination seems apt.  IF we remember, both Traveller, and Hero were conceived as generic systems for running what ever you wanted to, but in Traveller's case, the player base became dependent upon published material, either modules, or magazine articles. Like Paizo, some of those magazine articles became collected into books.  Today you can see the fruits of that productivity in https://travellermap.com/, where the planets from  all the published Traveller material can be accessed on a single large, scalable, continuous map of all the Traveller sectors and subsectors.
 
Hero had a magazine for a while, but it went defunct with one of the sales, and did not continue.  Very little of that material was collected into separate books and adventures, but I also9 think Hero was a bit too early in the cycle to change the assumption that it was a system for home brew.  However there are a lot of questions on the Hero Discord about the original Champions Superhero group, and Millenium City, that there is interest in the published materials.  What was once true, that Adventures do not sell, is no longer the case, and that I would suggest something like the Paizo model be taken up, but in PDF form.  Adventures published in chucks, and then gathered at the end of a scheduled time period into a whole.  People don't have3 the time to Homebrew any more, and those that do, could help out by writing it down and publishing a PDF through Hero.  Somethi9ng like Champions Begins is a great start, but there should be a money making product for the company that helps the Novices along, after CB.  These are just my suggestions, but I would like to hear other ideas.
 

I was running a sci fi game, setting based on the Master of Orion computer games.  The Antareans had almost extincted the Humans before vanishing, so things were rebuilding from near-zero but climbing quickly.  Recovery and growth was teh constant goal, and the PCs were an elite special operations crew.    They had enough hometime to see the effects of advancement - a crewmember with a prosthetic arm was transplanted a cloned arm, the farmer planted a field of the new high yield grain, etc.  
 
Targetted genetic sequencing was discovered, a way to repair flaws or weaknesses (as 10 XP of bonus CHA) was announced, and one character's special needs daughter was approached to be an early adopter.  PC said no, and that was mildly surprising but understandable.  The discovery goes mainstream and the military wants all its soldiers to benefit from the improvement, so of course, they want to start with their elite special operations crew.
 
Except that they all refused, to the point of resigning from service.  I was so dumbfounded, I couldn't backtrack orfix things.  It killed the campaign.
 
Chris.

I am not sure of the ownership of all the adventures that were in Digital Hero and Adventurer's Club, it probably would be good to lock down that info first.  Then it wouldn't be hard to pore through them and do updated versions of them in a collection.  In fact, given the nature of superhero writing, tying several together even if they are absurdly unrelated isn't that tough a job.

I can't speak to AC, but when I wrote for DH the terms were very clear that the published article became the property of Hero Games.

I once ended a session by having the PCs find a letter that contained vital information.  They had spent the whole session looking for it, felt good they had found it, and one Player transcribed the letter as they were certain it had more clues than were obvious.

The next session they formed a plan to act on their new information & I had a NPC interject to remind them of an important thing they were overlooking (I didn't want to waste a session with them going down a blind alley).  They insisted that *wasn't* info that they had.  I insisted it was in the letter they had just worked so hard to get.  The players all looked at me in silence & the one who had transcribed that letter held up her notebook page & proved that info *wasn't* among the info they had gotten from the letter last session.
 
Knowing I had screwed up & left out a vital point, I (rather lamely) had the NPC declare there was "a hidden fold" in the letter that contained the information.
 
The Players all laughed for about 10 min at my weak save & from that point on if I ever tacked something on to an ongoing info dump someone would mention that "there must have been a fold".
 
This has been a running joke now for 25 years.  I married one of them.  The woman with the notebook was our Maid of Honor.  In the years since I've gotten christmas cards that say "Merry Christmas! and a >obvious fold in the card< "Happy New Year".  I texted my wife 4 things to pick up at the store a couple weeks ago, then remembered something else 10 min later & got a text back "was there a fold?"
 
I try to take it with good humor......

When I started my Ravenswood game I heavily cribbed from the recommended guidelines in Teen Champions and gave all my players this:
 
Teen Superhero
Base Points 300
Matching Complications: 60
In this Game all characters should take Social Complication: Secret Identity with values depending on who would care (Frequent/Major is the common value)
Everyone effectively has Social Limit: Minor, Under age 16 but gets no points for it (it’s a campaign standard)
 
Teen Characters should have:
Characteristics    10-30 average, exceptions if that high stat *is* your power.
Spd    4-7 (5 is average)
Combat Value    4-8
Standard Damage    6-14 DC (8 DC standard, anything over 10 DC should be a "special" that has barriers to use)
Active Points    40-60
Typical Skill Rolls    8-12
Def/rDef    10-18/4-8
 
Most characters should have 1 "main" power with any other powers being related.  The Main power should have a minimum of -1 in limits associated with it, at least for any power at or above 40 Active Points
Most characters should be capable of a main attack in the 7-8 DC range
In some cases a particular power that is unreliable or dangerous can go as high as 14 DC
Skill levels (combat or otherwise) require special character concepts
Teen Heroes do not get TF: Common Ground Vehicles or PS: Hobby as everyman skills but may buy them normally if their concept permits

Otherwise Teen Hero Everyman Skills are as follows:
Acting 8-
AK: Home Area 8-
Climbing 8-
Concealment 8-
Conversation 8-
Deduction 8-
Language: Native Idiomatic, Everyman, Literate
Persuasion 8-
Shadowing 8-
Stealth 8-
 
The Power skill represents a familiarity with the characters power that is usually not appropriate for Teen characters
 
In my mind, a discussion of this sort of Campaign Guidelines should be in the core rules and specific versions of it should be at the front of any setting. 
 
There should be a set of guidelines like this for the Champions Universe "default" of PCs living on Earth and dealing with Viper, baddies from the Enemies books, etc and any adventures that come out for the system that use "Champions" as the defaults need to be built around those guidelines.  (As opposed to "Dark Champions, Cosmic Champion, etc, that would also have sets of guidelines and might appear as the default on other adventures)
 
I know there sort of are guidelines like this now but they aren't explicit enough IMHO and way too many sample characters and "basic" supervillians ignore them
 

Mediocrity should have no place, period. What we need is to meet the current market expectations for a quality product. And that means quality COLOR art. no B/W, as , well, you aren't the main demographic of the market any more.

Its always a line; some requests for revisions are reasonable, but some are just nitpicking, pointless, or an overcontrolling editor.  He seems prickly in general, really.  I could not get him to respond on Twitter sadly, because I would have loved for him to do a cover for Champions Begins for old time's sake.
 
I am all for crowdfunding something but it would have to be someone who knows how to do it well, has the time, energy, and drive to do it, and has lots of access to social media.  I know that IPR does crowdfunding sometimes, so its worth considering but it not only is tough and time consuming but you really have to know what you are doing to do one successfully.  I have considered it a couple of times and came to the conclusion each time that it is not for me.  Especially since by the time I'm done with a project I'm pretty well wiped out.

To be fair, I have never had an issue personally with splitting the party, even when I was trying very hard to convince myself I liked D and D.  The flack comes from two sources:  the general community hates it-- it may well be a holdover, but mention doing it with any sort of regularity, or allowing it to happen because one player announces "my character is going to to x place and do y," and you'll get ten condemnations for every curious inquiry.
 
The other source is the players in the group that isn't rolling dice right now.  Not all, to be fair, but there is a particular caliber of player who just assumes that whatever group he is with is the group that is going to get all the action.  Sure; I try to make sure both groups have something to do, and even-- because everyone likes it-- a chance to roll some dice.  But as soon as it is time for the other group to roll a die or two -- "Man, this sucks!  We should be there, too!  Why aren't we doing anything?"  Uhm...  you are.  You just finished doing a thing, and as soon as these guys do their thing, you'll likely have another thing to do.  Alternatively, you could split from your splinter group and wend your way back to this group, but they'll be done by the time you get here, and the guys you left will be doing something, most likely.  "This sucks!  Why did you do this to me?!"
 

 
 
And, as noted, I find it absolutely _mandatory_ in a supers game, lest Mechanon just decide that Crusader is aesthetically unpleasing while fighting some Superman pastiche.
 
 
 
 
 
 
GIven time, I could dig through my AC magazines and find it, but let's just say-- while it is _far_ beyond anything I could do, all the improvements you've made since might be blocking it from your recall. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Nope; just honest.
 
You have quite a talent, and should preen on occasion.   
 
 
Now I can't find the post to quote it, but referencing your comment on the Traveller artist with the hauntingly beautiful artwork---
 
give me a day or two, and I can probably come up with it.  I kept an interview I stumbled across some years ago simply because his artwork was discussed (remember, I have spent my whole life trying to develop two talents that just never happened-- drawing is one of them.)   I loved his art, too, and it _looked_ so simple, so do-able, but damn do you have to have a rare ability to decide what the absolute minimum amount of drawing yields the maximum amount of impact.  And the early days-- when the books were just black and white with a splash of red?  I can't think of anything else that would have made his art look as phenomenal as it did.
 
 
At any rate, I kept the interview because one of the parties was a friend of his, and he commented something akin to this:
 
Yeah; he said all he ever did was get an idea of the type of face he wanted, then he drew the eyes.  He would spend hours on the eyes.  He said once the eyes were done, they told him what the rest of the face would look like, and it took him just a few minutes to draw the rest of the face.  After that, he was just whipping his pencils around and done.  He said the face was the key to everything: if you could read the face, you knew everything you needed to know about the background.
 
I found that to be rather profound, even beyond artwork.
 
 
 
AH!
 
Does Craig Farley sounds right to you?
 

Tekumel's problem was two fold. It had a background, that unfortunately was not Tolkeinesque, and shared more with the Maya, than it did with Northern Europe. The second problem is that it was saddled with a terrible combat system, unless one used the Mass Combat rules.  THe individual Combat system was similar to the first examples of D&D, but was quite lethal, and klunky. It would be a good candidate for a "Single Book" Hero conversion 
 
I have heard the same.  But I do remembher there were several companies that produced Traveller  materials, and there was one group out of Alaska, or their Illustrator was from Alaska, that had just some of the most achingly perfect artwork of any of the Traveller materials. I wish I remembered that Illustrator's name.
 
 
They had two maps. One was a blank, 25mm Hex Map.  The other was a 25mm Hex map with a couple of terrain features printed on it. I think it was two sides of the same sheet of paper, folded into quarters, so it could fit in those  booklets, all of which was wrapped inside a plastic bag.  Advanced Melee / Wizard, was a magazine sized book that came out later, with a bit more background and more information, but not a lot. Like I said, Magazine sized.
 
 
Which Space Opera?  The one by FGU?  Geeze I think there were two books on that, A set of Miniatures Rules, and an RPG sort of background thing?  I was happy with the Third Imperium stuff.  But I played in a Traveller game, that had a Homebrew Background and slightly different tech, run by Paul Gazis.  He published a fair amount of material in the APA The Wild Hunt. 
 
Again, it's a time issue.  The "Modern Gamer" has little time for imagination or prep work, what with jobs and such. One could produce material in little packets, but in the end, there should be a large overall world and a plan to release and support it, with adventures much in the way Paizo has done for Golarion.
 
 
Golden Age: From  Action Comics issue one in 1937, until just after the end of WW2.
 
Silver Age: from the First Issue The Flash, as Barry Allen(?), though some Mark it from when Timely Comics changed its name to Marvel Comics, this until Spiderman dropped the Comics Code Authority.

 Bronze Age: The Rise of the Direct Market and the first wave of independent Publishers, like Pacific Comics, and Comico,  until  the Publication of The Dark Knight Returns, and The Watchmen.
 
Iron Age: The Publication of The Watchmen, when everything got Dark and gritty, until the end of the 1990's.
 
There have been comics published continuously since the mid 1930's  so these blocks of time are not representative to all comics published. Some companies like Archie, changed very little until quite recently.
 
 
They hated comics?  Or , did they hate the comic stores? If it's the stores I understand that.
 
 
Sounds like they are solid Silver Age fans. This is very much the same sort of reading material that spawned Champions originally.
 
 
Sounds like late Bronze and Iron Age were not to taste.
 
 
Unfortunately, A lot of the current output from The Big Two are marketed to those that exist on Twitter. No one seems to understand that the Twitter Audience is a small and extremely self referential audience, that does not share tastes with the general audience, so the general Audience is dropping their reading habit. The Pandemic should have fostered and environment of more reading, but people were turned off, and dropped the habit of buying American Comics, and have instead moved to reading translated Manga. The Comic industry is currently shrinking and dying, but not quite dead, but only valued as an IP farm by their corporate masters, as they are not bringing in the profits that they used to.

I do not disagree, but for the stuff to sell, it has to stand shoulder to shoulder with WOTC and Paizo on the shelf, with full color art, No more B/W ink line art. THis is why I have pursued digital painting in that vein, so as to be "competitive" in that  sphere, plus use 3D assets to reduce the time to produce such works.
 
 
 
 This could happen with a high enough crowd funding campaign.  The items that are going to cost the most is  the art, and professional level editing, and layout.  Sure it can be released as a PDF, as all modern game publications are, but most Crowd funding patrons would prefer something printed as well.
 
 
 
Agreed.
 
 
Actually, they aren't, if you know where to look. Most of them have an Instagram, and some also have Twitter.  They solicit for commi8ssions a lot of the time as a side business, though the top of the top, are too busy and have shut down their social media, but it's not impossible. THose that have professional representation are also not hard to contact, though it is slower.
 
 
I had to revisit this again, because we need to look at costs, where a cover painting can be around $2- $4,000, and interior illustration, fully painted can be anywhere from $500, and up.   A young Newcomer is an option but unlike being a cantankerous procrastinator, they will often misjudge the time necessary to produce the art, and may get prickly if the project lead requests some changes. Pat Zircher has himself become a bit prickly about revisions in his D.C. work.  So it may just be the artists, but it is something to think about. That newcomer may have to learn to become comfortable with a lot of sketch revisions and color roughs before comitting to the finished piece, which also takes time. But even Pros have their problems, We had Craig Mullins paid for some work that he basically phoned in, and used color shifted and distorted photos found on Google to do the work for the game company I worked for at the time. Step ack and do some research, or if there are those talented newcomers, start perusing the pages of Art Station (www.artstation.com) for some up and coming, but not cheap talent.

I've said this before and I stand behind it; character creation is complex, the actual play of the game is not.  As evidence, look at Champions Complete - the character creation rules are 118 pages, the combat rules are only 18 pages!  Okay, that's not entirely fair, as Actions and some other items are not in the combat section, but still!
 
Tangent:  Mighty Protectors (V&V 3.0) unified a lot of the mechanics and put in a point-based character creation system.  It's a lot less charty, and a lot more like Hero System.
 
 
After thinking about it some more, I think having a stripped down location (Millenium City?  San Angelo?) is a good idea - new player, you like this city?  There's an entire existing book dedicated to it!
 
 
I went back to Champions Complete and looked at the 6E Champions.  Only Kinetic has Powers with more than two Modifiers:  Super-Running (Megascale, Reduced Endurance, Only In Contact With A Surface) and Supersonic Finger-Snap (NND, No Range, Gestures).  Defender doesn't have any Powers without Modifiers, but his whole thing is that he's Iron Man a power armor hero and thus bought through OIF.
 
New thought:  maybe have two character sheets, build and play.  You don't need the points displayed on the playing sheet.  That saves a bunch of space.  When I run convention games, I have character sheets that state what the game effects are (example:  in a Pulp Hero scenario [Nazi Death Zombies of the Congo!, available on *this very website*!] the Great White Hunter character has an elephant rifle.  Player doesn't care about the build (or if he/she does, I have the build sheet available and can share it), player cares about, "Good range.  Hits *really* hard.  Has two shots.  Takes time to reload, so make those two shots count."
 
 
Yes, make it easy.  Champions Skills - Defender looks overly complicated to my eyes.  Sapphire and Kinetic could be simpler.
 
 
Good ideas here!
 
 
The entire purpose of this proposed product is to bring in new players.  Lower the barrier to entry.  How do we craft a product that does this?
 
 
I think "like a very meticulous tax audit" is an invalid criticism (however, it *is* a criticism and does need to be addressed).  I do agree that combat can and does take a long time; my group has had a combat or two where even we (who do enjoy both the system and superhero combat in general) were dragging.  But the actual play - "Okay Diamondback it's your turn." "I jump on the giant ape and punch it!"  "Okay it's the giant tiger's turn.  It swipes at Professor Polar."  The combat system *is* detailed (and IMO, simulates comic book battles very well) and I don't think that can be fundamentally changed without being not-the-Hero-System.  Some folks want less crunch, and Hero System will not appeal to them.  There are, of course, options to make combat more or less crunchy and these options are already discussed in existing books.
 
 
Lower the barrier to entry for new players.  Get new players in Hero System.  Live Long And Prosper.  I think a book that sets all of the toolkit options to a certain Supers genre and provides a setting and campaign will help do that.
 
Again, character creation is the most complex part of Hero System.  DND - make a first level character.  Okay, I either roll or point-buy my stats (depending on the DM), allot skill points, select feats, spend money on equipment, a bit of background... ready to go!  Level up?  Roll for hit points, allot new skill points,  new Feat (at certain levels), stat increase (at certain levels), maybe a new level-based ability... done!  Hero - I have these XPs, what to spend them on??? It's so open-ended.  For example, in our current Golden Age campaign my Speedster wanted to buy a Power straight out of The Ultimate Speedster - "Cant Hold Me!" - additional Strength only for resisting Grabs and Entangles.  The experienced GM looked at it and said, "Okay, but only +40 STR instead of +50 STR, as that is in line with the campaign power levels."   But how does a novice (to Hero System) GM know that?  Make the campaign power levels explicit.  Discuss them more than is currently done - "8D6 is agent-level, not too concerning to the Heros unless in large groups, 10D6 is under-powered but will do some STUN, 12D6 is average, 15D6 is a powerful attack that will Stun and possibly KO with one hit."  Delve into the math (which 6E1 and 6E2 already do to some extent, and it goes back to early editions - I don't have the books available right now to point out examples.  Talk about averages and standard deviations (although probably not actually using the term 'standard deviations').
 
I'm not saying make it as on-rails as DND progression.  But *make it easy* for the new GM.
 

Tekumel's problem was two fold. It had a background, that unfortunately was not Tolkeinesque, and shared more with the Maya, than it did with Northern Europe. The second problem is that it was saddled with a terrible combat system, unless one used the Mass Combat rules.  THe individual Combat system was similar to the first examples of D&D, but was quite lethal, and klunky. It would be a good candidate for a "Single Book" Hero conversion 
 
I have heard the same.  But I do remembher there were several companies that produced Traveller  materials, and there was one group out of Alaska, or their Illustrator was from Alaska, that had just some of the most achingly perfect artwork of any of the Traveller materials. I wish I remembered that Illustrator's name.
 
 
They had two maps. One was a blank, 25mm Hex Map.  The other was a 25mm Hex map with a couple of terrain features printed on it. I think it was two sides of the same sheet of paper, folded into quarters, so it could fit in those  booklets, all of which was wrapped inside a plastic bag.  Advanced Melee / Wizard, was a magazine sized book that came out later, with a bit more background and more information, but not a lot. Like I said, Magazine sized.
 
 
Which Space Opera?  The one by FGU?  Geeze I think there were two books on that, A set of Miniatures Rules, and an RPG sort of background thing?  I was happy with the Third Imperium stuff.  But I played in a Traveller game, that had a Homebrew Background and slightly different tech, run by Paul Gazis.  He published a fair amount of material in the APA The Wild Hunt. 
 
Again, it's a time issue.  The "Modern Gamer" has little time for imagination or prep work, what with jobs and such. One could produce material in little packets, but in the end, there should be a large overall world and a plan to release and support it, with adventures much in the way Paizo has done for Golarion.
 
 
Golden Age: From  Action Comics issue one in 1937, until just after the end of WW2.
 
Silver Age: from the First Issue The Flash, as Barry Allen(?), though some Mark it from when Timely Comics changed its name to Marvel Comics, this until Spiderman dropped the Comics Code Authority.

 Bronze Age: The Rise of the Direct Market and the first wave of independent Publishers, like Pacific Comics, and Comico,  until  the Publication of The Dark Knight Returns, and The Watchmen.
 
Iron Age: The Publication of The Watchmen, when everything got Dark and gritty, until the end of the 1990's.
 
There have been comics published continuously since the mid 1930's  so these blocks of time are not representative to all comics published. Some companies like Archie, changed very little until quite recently.
 
 
They hated comics?  Or , did they hate the comic stores? If it's the stores I understand that.
 
 
Sounds like they are solid Silver Age fans. This is very much the same sort of reading material that spawned Champions originally.
 
 
Sounds like late Bronze and Iron Age were not to taste.
 
 
Unfortunately, A lot of the current output from The Big Two are marketed to those that exist on Twitter. No one seems to understand that the Twitter Audience is a small and extremely self referential audience, that does not share tastes with the general audience, so the general Audience is dropping their reading habit. The Pandemic should have fostered and environment of more reading, but people were turned off, and dropped the habit of buying American Comics, and have instead moved to reading translated Manga. The Comic industry is currently shrinking and dying, but not quite dead, but only valued as an IP farm by their corporate masters, as they are not bringing in the profits that they used to.

Tekumel's problem was two fold. It had a background, that unfortunately was not Tolkeinesque, and shared more with the Maya, than it did with Northern Europe. The second problem is that it was saddled with a terrible combat system, unless one used the Mass Combat rules.  THe individual Combat system was similar to the first examples of D&D, but was quite lethal, and klunky. It would be a good candidate for a "Single Book" Hero conversion 
 
I have heard the same.  But I do remembher there were several companies that produced Traveller  materials, and there was one group out of Alaska, or their Illustrator was from Alaska, that had just some of the most achingly perfect artwork of any of the Traveller materials. I wish I remembered that Illustrator's name.
 
 
They had two maps. One was a blank, 25mm Hex Map.  The other was a 25mm Hex map with a couple of terrain features printed on it. I think it was two sides of the same sheet of paper, folded into quarters, so it could fit in those  booklets, all of which was wrapped inside a plastic bag.  Advanced Melee / Wizard, was a magazine sized book that came out later, with a bit more background and more information, but not a lot. Like I said, Magazine sized.
 
 
Which Space Opera?  The one by FGU?  Geeze I think there were two books on that, A set of Miniatures Rules, and an RPG sort of background thing?  I was happy with the Third Imperium stuff.  But I played in a Traveller game, that had a Homebrew Background and slightly different tech, run by Paul Gazis.  He published a fair amount of material in the APA The Wild Hunt. 
 
Again, it's a time issue.  The "Modern Gamer" has little time for imagination or prep work, what with jobs and such. One could produce material in little packets, but in the end, there should be a large overall world and a plan to release and support it, with adventures much in the way Paizo has done for Golarion.
 
 
Golden Age: From  Action Comics issue one in 1937, until just after the end of WW2.
 
Silver Age: from the First Issue The Flash, as Barry Allen(?), though some Mark it from when Timely Comics changed its name to Marvel Comics, this until Spiderman dropped the Comics Code Authority.

 Bronze Age: The Rise of the Direct Market and the first wave of independent Publishers, like Pacific Comics, and Comico,  until  the Publication of The Dark Knight Returns, and The Watchmen.
 
Iron Age: The Publication of The Watchmen, when everything got Dark and gritty, until the end of the 1990's.
 
There have been comics published continuously since the mid 1930's  so these blocks of time are not representative to all comics published. Some companies like Archie, changed very little until quite recently.
 
 
They hated comics?  Or , did they hate the comic stores? If it's the stores I understand that.
 
 
Sounds like they are solid Silver Age fans. This is very much the same sort of reading material that spawned Champions originally.
 
 
Sounds like late Bronze and Iron Age were not to taste.
 
 
Unfortunately, A lot of the current output from The Big Two are marketed to those that exist on Twitter. No one seems to understand that the Twitter Audience is a small and extremely self referential audience, that does not share tastes with the general audience, so the general Audience is dropping their reading habit. The Pandemic should have fostered and environment of more reading, but people were turned off, and dropped the habit of buying American Comics, and have instead moved to reading translated Manga. The Comic industry is currently shrinking and dying, but not quite dead, but only valued as an IP farm by their corporate masters, as they are not bringing in the profits that they used to.