Champions
There is a school of thought that says that if you know a genre you will be able to game in that genre well. Want to run a good swords and sorcery game? All you need do is read lots of swords and sorcery. Want to run a good superheroes game? All you need do is read lots of comic books. Unfortunately, my experience has been that this does not actually work in the trench-warfare reality of gaming. Between the complexities of converting literary or cinematic tropes to gaming, and the fact that everyone in a group will often have completely different ideas about the source material, genre based gaming is often… well… bad.
Champions is the first genre book for Hero 5th, and it attempts the difficult chore of making Hero based superhero games not suck. It does this not by giving more rules, for Hero is already a brick house of those, but by giving solid and practical advice about using the rules of the RPG and converting the tropes of comics into gameable subjects, in order to make a game that feels like the comics while still being good as a game. It is also very successful, filled with usable material that makes it among the best how-to genre books in the field.
The Book
Champions is a 215 page softbound book with color cover and black and white interior. It follows the same simple, clean layout style that Hero 5th followed. Though I chided that layout as being a bit boring in previous reviews, I am glad to see it being used here. Sourcebooks that use the same basic layout as the main book for their system are a good thing, as they give a feeling of uniformity and are easy on the eye for use in actual gaming contexts. The art in Champions is generally good. In fact, it is a step up from the art in Hero 5th. Though not every bit is wonderful, none is fugly, and almost every piece adds nicely to the comic/superheroic ambience of the book.
The Stuff
After a quick introduction, Champions dives into the meat of its subject. Chapter 1, Truth, Justice, and the American Way: The Superhero Genre, is possibly the best chapter of the book. Starting with a rundown on the four ages of comics (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron) and working through creating timelines, backgrounds, moods, meta-genres, and genre elements this chapter does a workhorse amount of setting up what a superhero game is, and all the different ways it can be played. The advice here is some of the best I’ve seen, just slightly beating out the equivalent sections in Silver Age Sentinels.
Chapter 2 is Improbable Origins: Superhero Character Creation. It, quite obviously, covers the whys and how-tos of making comic book characters who are both capable, effective, and fitting to the genre. Looking at things from the source of powers, to superhero archetypes, to an examination of what stats and attributes in a superheroic game mean, this chapter strives to give players everything they need to create a workable character. It even goes that so often overlooked step and has a section on creating a super-team, making sure that thought is given to the party and not just the individual character. Finally, it has a quick character generation system which is really only good for GMs needing to make up NPC supers in a hurry.
Chapter 3 is both the shortest chapter, and the crunchiest in terms of game material. Blasters & Jetpacks: Superhero Technology covers exactly what it says it does. It also goes over bases and headquarters, vehicles, and equipment. As with everything in the book it spends a good deal of time discussing how these things fit into the genre, and considerations for their use in the game. Unlike much of the rest of the book it also has several game-rules sections, with extended writeups of bases, technology, and superhero vehicles. My favorite part of this section was a for-GM’s bit titled “Destroying the World for Fun and Profit” – all about doomsday devices.
…. Comes Great Responsibility: Gamemastering Champions is Chapter 4, a section devoted to helping the poor, benighted Gamemaster do his job in a way that will not cause his players to draw and quarter him. This chapter is second in quality, right after chapter 1, and is a very thorough and complete look at how to GM superhero games. It covers just about everything, from figuring out PC point values and effectiveness, creating villains, giving normal humans and NPCs an interesting and important role, giving campaigns a strong central theme, and keeping hold of campaigns as they age and progress. It even has a random plot generator that, while not great, is quite good for sparking off ideas when your plots get into a rut.
The book concludes with The Champions a chapter of NPCs. Detailed, with full histories, write ups, and stats are the Champions super-team and their 7 greatest foes. I honestly never cared a whit about the Champions, and I don’t find them any more interesting in this incarnation. Some of the villains, however, are ripe for plunder. As all of them have nicely drawn character pictures, it’s easy to plug them into your own game, complete with a nice picture to show the PCs.
The Good
The index. Champions’ index is good, two full pages of very small type with plenty of accurate entries. The gaming industry needs more indexes of this quality, as nothing kills a book for gaming worse than having an inadequate index. Though this index is neither as complete nor as extensive as the one in Hero 5th, it still does yeoman’s service.
Champions also is quite good at its main purpose – explaining how to run a superhero game in down to earth, practical terms. Though there are not a lot of mechanical crunchy bits in the book, there are a lot of solid tips for using rules to emulate superheroics.
The crunchy bits that there are tend to be quite good as well. There are example powers, options for modifying how actions work in order to make a game more dramatic, and really good bits like “revelatory presence attacks” that give you a bonus to PRE attacks when you reveal a dramatic, life changing secret. I particularly liked the table that helps you figure out what horrid things happen when PCs in comedic games miss an attack roll. Falling naked into the arms of a hideous person, who instantly falls in love with you, is something that should happen to everyone.
The Bad
The bad thing about Champions isn’t so much bad as it is “not earth poundingly good.” The book, while nice and pretty and quite useful to many GMs, is by no means essential or necessary. Though there is lots of nice, quality material in here there is absolutely nothing in the whole work that stands up and say “YOU MUST BUY THIS BOOK BECAUSE OF ME!” Not a single thing. It’s all good, it’s all nice, but none of it is brilliant, and none of it is essential.
Though there is material that would be useful to players in the book, it is not enough to make it worth buying if you only intend to play in a superhero game. In the end Champions is made for GMs, and only really shines for their use. While it would be something a GM could loan to a player who was having trouble coming up with character ideas, or getting the feel of the campaign, it wouldn’t be worth that player’s money.
The Ugly
Though I didn’t exactly hate the cover, I can’t say that I liked it all that much either. It seems a bit murky and soft for a book about playing comic-style characters, and is a bit too monochromatic to take advantage of the lovely full color. Don’t let the imperfect cover turn you off though, this book is one of those odd ducks that is prettier inside than out. The cover might not scream “superhero” but the interior art at least manages to give a little superheroic yawp.
The End
Champions is not a book of crunchy rules bits (though it has a few of those), and it is not a book for those who are able to snap their fingers and create superhero campaigns that feel just like the comics yet remain fun to play, nor is it really a book that every player needs. Champions is a book for GMs who need some help in getting their games to feel like the comics. By focusing on practical elements of game play and style, and showing how comics can be made into games (and where comics can’t really be made into games) Champions succeeds in giving us a work that shines in making a genre game fun, easy, and approachable. If your game already could be drawn up and submitted to Marvel, you won’t really need it. If, on the other hand, you’re a GM who sometimes feel that your Hero game is closer to “Knights of the Dinner Table: the Superhero Years” than to The Dark Knight Returns, you might want to give this one a look.
For having good, solid information and practical steps to running a game Champions gets a 4 in substance. For having decent art, clean layout, and readable prose it gets a 3 in style.
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