Khymeria

Never built in the real world, but many of these cool prototype vehicles are being built for the upcoming Justice Inc. setting. I’ve been running down specs on all these cool vehicles for months.

I've included a vehicle talent in the updated and upcoming Justice Inc. called "Blasting From the Running Boards."

When I was writing/researching Victorian Hero I struggled with what to include about phrenology. Stick to the facts or since I was mixing history with literature and myth, have some fun with it. In the end, I just couldn’t get past the silliness of it for some reason.

The new fantasy stuff Khymeria that has been mentioned on the Patreon page has a bunch of small adventures written for it but are all pretty easily adaptable. I wrote it all with adaption in mi d, since I like to adapt stuff myself.

That would be so cool. I used it to start my campaign which is based in San Francisco, where I actually live, so it was perfect. The Protectors themselves are such a potent and interesting group, and adding in the slow twist to evil was great. I second your idea.

Blockbuster Video is my usual bad guy hideout, but my next adventure is a more aquatic theme so I am switching to Red Lobsters.

That was just an announcement about it and whether to release to the public at large or just the Patreon subscribers. It will begin to be released in its rough document format soon I suspect.

https://www.patreon.com/hero_games

The newly announced setting Khymeria on the Hero Games Patreon is aimed precisely at that. I’ve created a setting with the ability to handle the random weird character (like the latest thing in D&D) without needing a whole species setup. I converted standard races, improved on many others, include several different types of magic (that don’t all work the same). It’s what I’ve used over the years to bring many players to the Hero System, since it’s often easier to grasp and more popular than supers. Working on 5E D&D gave me insight into how the sauce is made, and I knew I could do it better with Hero System, and here we are.

What genre of adventure would you like to see, supers, fantasy, horror, etc.? Would you prefer individual standalone adventures and if so, how much are you willing to pay for what page count? If you like some one night adventures packaged together, how much would you be willing to pay for how many adventures? Anybody please feel free to answer these questions because if adventures help you bring in your pals, I will see if I can maybe put that in my sights for upcoming stuff to put my energy into (I have already expanded and updated “Serve and Protect” from 3E to 6E as it is a great module to have the Protectors take the new kids under their wing and then become the villains. It can tug at the soul.

Packaging stuff so that it is ready to go isn’t terribly difficult “out of the box”. I went to a convention a few months back and signed up to play in a Champions game. We were told the setup, the GM pulled out Hero System Book of Templates I & II (this really felt good since he’d no idea I wrote them), players picked a setup, took ten minutes to tweak complications and away we went. In Heroic, like Victorian Hero, there are templates and then you have a few points to spend since it’s lower point totals. Off to the races. Having every new player learn to build a new character from scratch, a huge intellectual buy-in, then learn the game play rules (only moderate complexity), back to back, is overwhelming for many. This is especially true of newer gamers who cut teeth on things like 5E D&D. There are things that are packaged but I suspect many longtime Hero players don’t introduce the system that way. They don’t approach it from the position of no experience with the front loaded system. Many adamantly refuse to use anything they don’t create after a while (I’ve read the Discord posts), and likely this causes the system to not be taught with a newbie brain in mind. Experienced have the ability to overcomplicate things if they don’t come out the teaching with that in the forefront of their minds. Everything is trimmed, shaved, optimized, and complex to save two points. Which is fine but not out of the gate.

These are good goals. I reference your Western Hero supplement as a good product to buy in Victorian Hero and just referenced it again for Justice Inc. in the write-up for different styles of Justice Inc. campaigns. If I need anything besides a basic horse I ain't starting from scratch and even if I did I would never compete with what you did in that book. I looked at your stagecoach and then altered it so it was smaller, more maneuverable, and quicker to create a Hansom cab. These are things that encourage us to buy books of different genres, equipment, characters, etc. and the beauty of the Hero System being universal. The Madness rules in Victorian Hero can apply to any game from colonial space marines fighting xenomorph, Cthulhu, or even supers (where I started playtesting them actually and then scaled them back a bit for Competent Normals). Justice Inc. will have a whole bunch of new vehicle stuff, and not just vehicle stats. These are rules and tricks for really bringing vehicles into your Hero System game regardless of the genre. Some is done with Talents built for the campaign, but others are just different things to do with skills. Maybe you don't like crimefighters in domino masks shooting spies and master villains dead in the 1930's but you sure do like vehicle stuff for your wastelander game, so maybe you drop a few bones on the pdf of Justice Inc. I think encouraging sales is good for longevity but I am also all goofy enough and fortunate enough to go nuts buying everything for the system since release schedules are not overwhelming. The whole disclaimer in the front of the book telling you what you need to play the adventure is standard fare. Is it ideal, no. Is it a non-starter for somebody thinking about trying out the system, maybe. I sure do like adventures though and they are hard to come by and I can read up on the characters on the internet and stat them out, but again, that's me. What a conundrum. Now that I think about it, I should have thought all this through before I started typing.

Victorian Hero has two mechanics, Slow Descent Into Madness and Slipping Sanity, worked out to simulate the effects both short and long term of looking at Cthulhu or any general losing your sanity sort of thing. It also provides for ways, both short and long term to recover, such as the Alienist.

The regular and cheap part is a solid take.

That is a great question, and I think that because Justice Inc. lies squarely in the Pulp genre this has created some confusion. It is a modern interpretation of the Old Justice stuff, but not just an update. That was produced at a different time in gaming when things were usually a lot smaller. I am going to expand on what was laid out before me, fill in the cracks of the story where the details have not been given already. I am going to do my absolute best not to rewrite what has been given but expand it out. The Empire Club will run more like a full fledged secret operation than some big hotels for agents to meet up. I want to give the reader the bases mentioned in Justice Inc. located in San Francisco (where I call home), New York City, London, and Hong Kong in more detail with support staff to aid the heroes. The San Francisco base has already begun to worked up including the staff, and facts about the location at the time. Like why the Empire Club chose that neighborhood, and why San Francisco for a headquarters over Los Angeles that had Hollywood up and coming at the time? (San Francisco pretty much ignored prohibition). Who administrates and runs the day to day operations? It is a heroic level game, so does the London base perhaps have a chap that is good with building gadgets? These will be the large bases that control regions. Then I want to include a whole bunch on making your own bases where you want them. Big city kids have all the fun but small towns are perfect targets for saboteurs and bank robbers. Okay, so that should cover your first sentence. It is a pulp game but much more focused than what you would find detailed let's say in the Pulp Hero for 5th Edition (a must have book for Hero fans of any genre). Obviously there will be archeology covered as missions. There is a great archeology mission for Justice Inc. called Carolina Caldwell and the Quest for the Golden Idol from Adventure Quarterly #24 that is right in this wheelhouse, and would be fun to update. But, much of this will lean more on the guns, the poverty, mooks, goons, saboteurs, domino mask style heroes, violence that heroes make no apologies for and likely the cops don't hassle them for (unless you take that in a Complication or such). The kind of game, in a time, where when a hero said on the street, "I will stop you Nazis" and got in a fistfight, patriotic passerby rolled up their sleeves and knuckled up for their country. But poverty was there, and tragedy. Many of the heroes will be scarred from WWI, a bit older, and a bit broken. I like to think of it as taking Pulp Hero and smashing it with Dark Champions, and then upping the action to a nice respectable level. Like with Victorian Hero, I have the blessing of a lot of public domain to work with and history itself, so there is a lot of meat on the bone there, but I want to leave room for a mystic and a bare knuckle boxer to team up and both feel like they belong in the setting. So we can have Tommy guns and dynamite, but still want to leave room for clouding the minds of men or smashing behind the curtain ridiculously over the top spymasters. I want to be able to have heroes stop a counterfeiting operation in Baltimore or recover the McGuffin in the Lost City of Somewhere I Just Made Up.