Pyramid Review
Dark Champions (for the Hero System)
Published by HERO Games
Written by Steven S. Long
Cover by Storn Cook
Illustrated by Nate Barnes, Warren Beckford, Storn Cook, Robert Cram, Andrew Cremeans, Keith Curtis, Eric Lofgren, Roberto Marchesi, Eric Radamaker, Scott Ruggles, Dan Smith, Greg Smith, Chris Stevens, Derrick Thomas, Erich Von Haus, & Dean Yuen
372-page b&w softcover; $31.99
Just over a decade ago author Steven Long had published his first RPG sourcebook. 1993's Dark Champions explored the anti-heroes of the superhero genre, the vigilantes like Batman and the Punisher who fought crime on their own terms. Armed with superior skills, knowledge, and training, and often with an array of equipment and armaments they took on not the brash supervillains of the four-color genre, but the muggers, burglars, pimps, pushers, and rapists as well as organized crime in the harsh realities of the underworld. As the title suggests, this was written with the Champions universe in mind.
Now at the helm of Hero Games, Mr. Long is able to revisit his original work, and in doing so make it not an updated vigilante sourcebook, but a guide to gaming in the modern-day action-adventure genre in a gaming version of the real world. Thus Dark Champions takes in spies, cops, soldiers and mercenaries, weird conspiracies, the criminal caper, monster hunting urban fantasy, and the techno-thriller as well as vigilante crime fighting and the new addition of Dark Champions: The Animated Series. In this, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: March 17, 2006
Copyright © 2006 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.