As Lord Liaden mentioned HERO has risen from the ashes before in the 4e / New Millenium / 5e era, so hope is not lost. Anothe book that has not been mentioned for heroes is the original (and new) Strike Force books. Probably one of the very first books with alot of heroes in it that I came across.
Absolutely, and it's a pretty solid book IMO. Nice diversity of concepts, most of them unlikely to take too much spotlight away from PCs. None of them are from the current official setting, though. Several other 4E and 5E books include varying numbers of NPC heroes, although there have been no additional books dedicated to them since.
For the current official setting, the most concentrated sources of full write-ups, with complete background/history and 5E character sheets, are: Champions Universe: News Of The World, which details the rosters of the Sentinels, the Justice Squadron, Project Mongoose, and a few solo heroes, and updates the Champions with several years of experience from their initial publication in the 5E Champions genre book; and Champions Worldwide, providing a small sampling of heroes from each of multiple regions of the world.
I was around during the lean years between Hero Fourth Edition published by ICE, and the launch of the Fifth Edition line after the Hero IP acquisition by DOJ Inc. The game was considered functionally "dead" then, and your revival scenario is exactly what happened. The precedent is there.
As you say, 5E books have a smattering of NPC heroes in them drawn from the current official setting. If you like we could point out the books which have the most concentrations of them. But I can assure you that no book dedicated to them is planned from Hero Games (see below).
Various reps from Hero Games during the DOJ era, including Steve Long and Darren Watts, have repeatedly asserted that hero-based books don't sell nearly as well as villain books, and have offered the same rationale as you gave, Duke. So it looks like your instincts are on point.
As you note, the few heroes that are written up are scattered about various books. Write-ups for Heroes have always been a bit short, from the earliest days of this game.
There are / were (were, I think being more appropriate in terms of "what has been" and "what is known to be coming") a few books: Champions of the North for 4e and one of the new editions. Allies for 4e. Books like that. Actually, there were a lot more published adventures, etc, that included heroes in 4e than in any other edition. The various organizations books contain a lot of agent info...
No; heroes don't get written up a lot. Now I absolutely do _not_ know why, but I have long suspected it was because people will buy villain books to help populate their worlds, but they want to play their very own creations as heroes, suggesting that hero books might not sell well enough to pump them out regularly. I disagree with that personally, because people will always want both examples of "how to" and benchmarks for what works well in the published setting and against the published villains.
As for why we haven't seen any new books?
Bluntly, unpleasantly, and with no joy do I say this:
HERO is dead. It's pretty much just-- well, I don't really know how many people, but the two doing the most of the work are Dan Simon, who does the Hero Designer software and the tech support for it, and Jason Waters, who does, as best I can tell, everything else. The vast bulk of the content released of late has been-- I hate to use this term, because all the 50 Shades fandom has made it a far dirtier thing in common parlance than I intend it to be here-- "fan-created" stuff. Again: this is _not_ a slight to any of it! it's on-topic, and everything I have sampled of it thus far has been well-worth a read. In fact, Christopher's revamp of the Island of Doctor Destroyer should have been a company-published, printed-on-paper, honest-to-goodness HERO Games product. Lord Liaden did "The Valley of the Night" years and years ago and tossed it onto the internet _for anyone_ , _for free_, and it, too, was wonderful.
Anyway:
Whether the problem is money, staffing, time, or interest, I cannot say, but the bulk of the problem is that HERO is, again, functionally dead, and has been for a while now.
Don't let that get you down, though: companies-- small publishing companies in particular-- are a bit unusual when it comes to being dead. Often, they can squeak out enough interest with a hibernation-level presence: a small PDF here and there, a tie-in somewhere else....
And they don't stay dead, typically. They might be dead for years, but there's always that chance that they will rouse again, if only for a little while, and shine for a while longer. Hell, I'm sixty. That's really all I need to last the rest of _my_ life anyway!
And of course, someone else might come along with the right offer and the right backing, and the whole thing starts anew.
ultimately, though: it's like any other game. It's as alive as the fans, and we are still using it, so.....
I forgot to mention that in Champions 3e the characters had both a Hero and Villain write up. The backgrounds were really the same. What it came down to was how the character dealt with the defining circumstance of gaining powers. Did they use their powers for Good or Evil?
AlgaeNymph reacted to greypaladin_01 in Will there be a writeup book for heroes?
