HeroMachine 2.0 Beta

The Best RPG Utility in the Universe

I'm not one that's very fond of RPG-themed utilities. Most of them fall into the "cute, but unnecissery" category: Die rollers, character generation assistants, campaign organizers and the like. Others fall into the "interesting, but take too long to learn for the payoff": Utilities like Campaign Cartographer and 3-D world builders. Heromachine falls neatly into the third category, which I like to call the "Heromachine: The Best RPG Utility in the Universe" category.

A few years back, I had heard of a utility in the works for allowing artistically inept folk like me to create, to surprising accuracy, the characters they play in RPGs. When I downloaded it and fired it up, it sucked. Total letdown. The pictures looked like they were all drawn in 10 minutes by someone with twice the skill at computer art than myself (and anything times zero equals... you get the idea). I gave up on the idea of such a utility and cast it from my conscious mind.

About half a year ago, I was somehow directed to a link on IGO to HeroMachine: An online, Flash-based hero character. It was extremely limited, only able to produce a limited range of male and female heroes. When I tried it out for the first time, things went something like this:

My friends, this program truly is the best, most rounded and useable computer-based utility that has been ever made for RPGs.

The Original HeroMachine

Heromachine can be downloaded from the HeroMachine site, at http://www.heromachine.com/. It is free and very easy to use. It comes with several body types (3 main male models including "Martial Artist" and "Brick" bodytypes, and 1-2 female models). You can customize the looks of every facial feature, change the colors of the characters' skin and costumes, and fit your character with a variety of clothes and accessories (like weapons).

Here is a picture of a character (like the rest of the pics on this review, it's a thumbnail: Click it) I created using the original HeroMachine. I chose the "Brick" body type, used for "big boned" heroes like The Hulk, Colossus, or any other "tough", whether it be from a modern, SF, or fantasy background.

In the above, I wanted to make a Ninja. I went for the atypical, and decided to make a really, Really BIG Ninja. I chose his clothes and accessories from the items on the right (you can also clear them away or randomize them). When I was done, I went back and chose the colors for all of his body parts, clothes and accessories. For his shirt, there was an "overshirt" selection that laid down the "flair" pattern over his half-sleeved undershirt.

With colors, you choose TWO colors for every clothing item and accessory, a main and secondary color. This feature is truly great, as you can highlight any clothing or item to give it real definition without actually knowing anything about art: See the light and daker blues and purples of his outfit. I was able to choose those myself.

Finally, there is no "save" feature. You have to manually hit ALT-Printscreen (CTRL-Printscreen?) on PCs to save a BMP image of the current open screen, then go into an art program of your choice and crop the picture and save it as a JPG. Photoshop works well for this, but I'm sure any simple freeware or shareware program would suffice. I don't view this as a flaw of the program, because it gets you into the habit of cropping exactly what you want. If you wanted to create a character sheet using a Word Processor and include your character's full body, or possibly just the head, you can do so as you see fit. Still, though, it means you need some sort of basic art program to save your work.

The accessories are plenty in this demo, as you will soon find out when you download it, but there are only a few body types and options for clothes and body features. Hoping that the 2.0 Beta version would have more, I quickly coughed up the $10 Paypal bucks and sank my teeth into the full version.

HeroMachine 2.0 Beta

I'm not prone to hyperbole, but HeroMachine 2.0 Beta rocks so hard it'll make your neighbors deaf. It will kick your ass, the asses of everyone you know, and the asses of everyone that those people know. If someone were to put down the HeroMachine, I'd probably come to the conslusion that they were either just plainly insane, or perhaps possessed by spiteful demons.

It can do almost anything. Seriously. Just look at the pictures below for demonstrations to this effect. In fact, there's so much it can do, in ANY genre of RPG, that I had to sit and think of the few things that the Beta couldn't do. Here is my exhaustive list:

That's about all the "flaws" I could find: there's very little to say about the flaws of this program. If you know of any you'd like to address, please bring them up in the discussions of this review, below.

The Beta version of Heromachine has an exponential number of facial/body features, costumes (my God are there costumes/clothes), metric dumploads of accessories to hold, and even different skin types (elemental, skeleton, see-thru, etc) and companions (ninjas, parakeets, machine gun placements and the like). You can choose ANY color to use for your heroes, and you can increase/decrease the color's or object's transparency.

Here are a few screenshots I took from the creation of a few demo characters: An Aberrant/Terragen hero with lots of taint, an elderly D&D Dark Sun psionicist with rough, worn skin, and finally a capture of the different selectable areas of items, features and costumes for the program:

Below, to demonstrate the versatility of the HeroMachine engine, I created a variety of heroes for wildly different RPGs to demonstrate that there truly is little that this Flash program can't handle. Well, as long as it's in only one pose, I guess.

A pulp action hero for a game of Adventure!	A Call of Cthulhu: Delta Green moden investigator, complete with Tome of Darkness and "Mythos 'Unsummoning' Device"	HeroMaker can't do Cyberpunk? Ps'shaw! How about a Media Front operative for ya?	Playing a telekinetic, overweight Mexican Wrestler and supergenius in you Silver Age Sentinels game? HeroMaker can handle it!
No Fading Suns game is complete without a few of our favorite Temple Avesti buddies...	A villain for a modern Weird Wars game.	The new guy finally talked you into playing his Star Wars/In Nomine crossover? HeroMachine's got your back!	Uh... Pretend there was a REALLY COOL HERO for YOUR FAVORITE GAME here!

There's little more I can say on this product. I've personally used it twice (both times for D&D variants, including an "Ancient India" style game) to create character sketches for characters that I actually used. I know that I'm going to probably use it from this point on in every game that I play in from now on (save one shots). I've plopped down $30 or more for RPGs or supplements that seemed interesting at the time but ended up flopping. This Beta was only $10, and I've got something that I can use for the rest of my RPG days, compatible with ANY game... and of course, when the full version of HeroMachine 2.0 comes out, it will be that much more incredible.

Excellent, excellent, excellent product. I can't recommend it enough. Again, you can find it at http://www.heromachine.com/.