Disclaimer: I don't work for Hero Games, I don't actually play Champions, and my preferred supers RPG is Golden Heroes (1984).

A book on corporatoins for an RPG system? Who'd have thought this contained so many good ideas. It starts with examples corporations, giving their CEO both a good and evil persona to choose from. Some companies have links to each other. Then you get a lot of text about how companies work. While this could be real dull, it actually works. The books ends with some example stats and a supervillain team. While I haven't used the villains in my own game as written, I've taken their team name for several of my own villains.

If you want to make companies a core part of your supers game, then book is for you. If you just want to use them as background, it's probably not one to buy. I'll definitely use it in my games, though.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Hero Games, I don't actually play Champions, and my preferred supers RPG is Golden Heroes (1984).

This is basically a monsters book - lots of game stats and descriptions. Over all, it's a great book, with plenty of villains you can rework for your preferred supers RPG or to take inspiration from when creating your own characters. Sure, it's an older book, but good ideas never grow old.

This is a very well put together product. It contains almost anything you would need to run a full-fledged fantasy campaign using the Hero game system...except the rules frequently reference the main Hero Games System rulebooks. So, if you want to make the most use of this product, you must pick up the Sixth edition Hero Games System rulebooks, so keep that in mind.

Champions is a very old-school, very cruncy game and it shines at it! Sometimes you don't want narrative adventures and storyteller fiat telling you that you saved the city. Sometimes you want that special power modifier you bought for your character to save the day or the fact that your forcefield protects you from mental attacks to be the difference between victory and defeat! Hero does all this in spades, but with all the customization and moving parts that let you build the character you want, it can be intimidating to get started.

Champions Begins is an excellent introduction to Champions, the Superheroic RPG built in Hero system. It starts out with the simple mechanics and layers on more complex aspects of the system over time, letting players adjust to Champions' complexity bit by bit without getting overwhelmed.

A great into to a venerable game system!

Excellent idea! I think this is exactly the direction that Champions should go. I really like the Chapters with the advancement of each character and their write-ups. I really like the concentration on the abilites by moving the math to later. There might be a danger that dependent players may never pick up how to generate a character, but honestly, those folks may never learn well anyway. It's better, in my opinion, to get people playing. If they are excited, they will be much more open to learning the system. Some of the organization, layout, use of graphics and writing need to be polished, but having said that, the core idea is dynamite.

Played it in the 80's. You design your own superhero with the included rules and go forth and do superhero things after. Hero creation takes a while but you can make just about any superhero you've seen in comics or movies. It's points based and you get experience so your hero can get more powerful or get skills to be more effective with the powers you have. 3d6 rolls for skill execution and combat is a d6-fest counting total and number of dice to do stun damage and killing damage, as well as knockback. It's a very good similution of comic heroes and action. Movement is expressed in inches and hexes (1" hexes) so using ~28mm miniatures works well.

The pdf doesn't have tabs to let you jump around but it's very clean and legible so I don't think it's page scans from a book.

This has got to be one of the best Maps for a Modern city I've ever seen. I've used this map multiple times over the years for Modern games like Mutants & Masterminds, World of Darkness and yes, even Hero 6th Edition game. I love this map.

What a wonderful way to start playing HERO System! You get everything you need to learn the system and start playing at the amazing low price of FREE! Well worth checking out, even if you're just curious about this amazing system.

So. Many. Mistakes! Did no one proofread this before it was published?

This is an amazing product. It's like Hero Sidekick plus Hero Basic next step tool. Well done...

this is a great resourse for both GM's and players showing how to build your favorites from popular comicbooks

I really enjoyed this book, Hero System is a great game, but of course it is on the more complex side. This book does a great job of illistrating how to use the Hero System to make a version of all the recent popular Super Heroes. I learned to make characters in Hero System from books just like this one. If you're looking for a good set a pre-mades to just get your Hero Game off the ground look no further. If you're looking for a how to in the current edition of Hero then all you need to select this and check out. It's good fun for whole family.

I started my campaign with this adventure. The opening scene is perfect for getting characters into the action and introductions to each other. The villains all hit on the nostalgia for longtime players of Champions, but will appeal to newer players because some of them are quite memorable. The maps are great and I had no problems cutting them in Microsoft Paint 3D and uploading them and expanding them for Roll 20 use. There is a lot of value here and the detailed bad guy hideout alone was worth the price of the adventure. Reply

The Hero System version 6 is the best mix of fantasy/real-life role-playing I've ever played. It is a universal principle that when you give someone more options, it become inherently more complex. When you make an RPG closer to real-life, it becomes more complex. The Hero System involves lots of options for character creation and combat, allows the character to specialize in anything, and gives tools for building characters based on back-story, strengths, fears, equipment, and even the people that character knows.

The Combat & Adventuring book is necessary to learn and run Hero System campaigns and adventures. It's also useful during character creation so you can see how your choices will affect your combat. This book contains a good foundation for having combat that uses super powers, guns, dinosaurs, robots, mental magicians, and everything else the Hero System can take.

At my age, I know how I learn. I learn well from reading, but I also learn from example. This book has way too few examples and formulas for combat scenarios. As I reviewed in the Character Creation book on this web site, a list of formulas with variables would be really helpful, rather than the English in-line wording that so often describes how something works. The Hero System is for intelligent folks because it involves a lot of math. Laying out the math in formulas would help so much in the heat of combat and might also make good annotations on a character sheet.

I purchased both the printed book and the PDF as a combo. The problems with the printed book are that it's black-and-white and soft cover. The soft cover means it doesn't stand up well in my collection; it kind of slouches. The B&W print isn't exciting to look at. Titles and captions in the black-and-white print are merely a bigger font, rather than using a stand-out color. The page numbers in the Index at the back of the printed book are hard to read as they were originally red and light blue; which get printed as a light-gray color. The colored page numbers have significance, too: blue is for handbook 1 and red is for handbook 2. Luckily they are prefixed with 6E1 and 6E2, otherwise I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Although I started Hero System with my teenage kids and their friends, they put no effort into learning this complex system. They never learned how to make a character or how to properly do combat. And no one showed me how to play; I learned it all from the books. Combat became bogged down because, not only did I have to control the NPC enemies' attacks, but also help the PCs make their attacks. After trying this system for a few years, they eventually got the fantasy hook and we transferred to D&D. D&D is easier for character creation and combat, the art is better, but the system makes little sense. Every racial and class feature, spell, and magic item has to be explained in loose English terms, rather than in game terms like the Hero System does. Armor class (AC), hit points (hp), and healing make even less sense in D&D, so I love how the Hero System tackles those issues. D&D combat involves one or two attack dice, the addition of small numbers (like +1 or +3), and comparing them as less than, greater than, or equal to some number. D&D won over our group because of simplicity.

Would I go back to Hero if they did? I don't know. It really took so much time building the enemies, vehicles, weapons, armor, and adventures behind the scenes. I would spend hours in the library, the restaurant, and at home preparing for a few hours of adventuring. And I would always figure the costs to make sure things were balanced which meant lots of math, and even more math when I would change a power by adding an advantage or limitation. I would sooner be a player than a GM again.

I purchased the Bestiary for the same reason I purchased other Hero System supplements--to save time preparing for play. Since the Hero system requires you build everything beforehand, any time-savers are appreciated. And because the Hero System rules are so complex, it helps me become a better builder when I see the pros build things like centaurs, giant frogs, and living chests (mimics). For instance, it was cool to see how the dracodemo has wings built as a small multi-power: they help it fly and they can attack with those wings, but not both at the same time.

Another reason I bought the Bestiary was because the Villains 3 book I purchased mentions it. There is a monster there able to summon a certain number of character-points worth of creatures from the sea and it mentions the Bestiary.

I believe this was one of the rare PDF-only purchases I made from the Hero System. Like any good PDF, it is searchable and does not seem to rely on OCR (optical character recognition) that comes from scanning pages.

As far as the organization of the book is concerned, it is pretty well organized, but it can be hard to find things, even though it's a PDF. For instance, while there is a Table of Contents, there is no index. Take the imp, for example. The two-page, small-text Table of Contents shows imp under demons and devils. While I understand why it's found there, where could I go to easily find imp alphabetically? If I search the PDF for imp, I'll find words like "chimpanzee", "improve", and "important." So let's say that I check the box that says "Whole words only", then I'll find it. Looking for bear has similar problems. I find it when used as a synonym for carry, and in words like werebear. In the Table of Contents, it is on page 2, under Chapter Six - Mundane Beasts, under Bears. So, yes, while I agree with the organization, search helps would make the book and PDF better.

The art is okay, but I didn't buy the book for the art. However, while I kind of expected a black-and-white printed version (as it was with the Hero System handbooks), the Bestiary PDF itself is black-and-white! There are drawings of dragons, apes, and demons, all of which look to have been drawn in a single color. But like I said, I didn't buy the book for the art.