Pyramid Pick
Champions (for Hero System 5th Edition)
Published by Hero Games
Written by Aaron Allston & Steven S. Long
Art by Storn Cook, Andrew Cremeans, Albert Deschesne, Malcolm T. Harrison, Jeff Hebert, Eric Rademaker, & Greg Smith
216 pages; $29.99
If you are a roleplaying fan of the superheroic genre -- either in comics or in gaming -- and have not yet purchased Champions, the newest edition of one of the most venerable supers RPGs -- it's probably because you didn't know it was out. It is. Go buy it.
Okay; if you're still reading, yet have not purchased the book, perhaps it's because you haven't heard of it before, or maybe it's because you have heard of it before, but believed it was designed only for the Hero System, or only targeted at fans of the Champions universe. This review, then, is for you.
If the Hero System 5th Edition is a toolkit, providing the rules and framework necessary to run the mechanics of a game, then Champions is everything else . . . at least, for the costumes-and-cape crowd. Whereas in previous editions this material was found more closely tied with the Hero System rules -- for example, as the second half of the classic 4th Edition hardcover -- this time it has received its own book. In so doing, Aaron Allston has been able to greatly expand, revise, and add to this material, creating a book with so much generic material that anyone running or playing in a superheroic campaign for any game system would do well to read this.
Chapter One is an overview . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: February 28, 2003
Copyright © 2003 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.
