Pyramid Review
Fantasy Hero (for Hero System Fifth Edition)
Published by Hero Games
Written by Steven S. Long
414-page softcover; $31.99
Fantasy Hero is the latest genre book from Hero Games. The book is 414 pages long; this was something of a shock as few RPG books approach this size. When you add the art-light and text-heavy layout common to all of the books from Hero Games, you get something very large and very dense. As a reviewer, I find these types of products, with broad scope and innumerable details, the most difficult to approach by far. Many reviewers choose to take the work as a unified whole and omit the sections in detail; others choose to pick apart each section in turn. I hope this review covers the basic sections in broad detail, without the "nitpicking" many longer reviews suffer.
Players familiar with the Hero System in any of its incarnations will feel immediately at home with the book's nomenclature and jargon. However, players new to the system will have a steep -- possibly too steep -- introduction to overcome. In short, the Hero System is the first, and most complete, Universal system currently in print. Beginning in the 1980s with Champions, Hero System has been massaged, sliced, and hammered on by legions of playtesters, fans, and developers. This, combined with enlightened management -- by both the original developers and the new owners -- has yielded a system incredibly difficult to break. Characters are constructed using points, and balance is at the very . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 17, 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.