Champions Universe
Welcome true believers! Welcome also to the semi-skeptical but curious! Oh and the cynical and jaded who find welcoming with an exclamation point to be trite – I guess you can come in too. None of you “comic books are lame” losers with your real girlfriends and high-paying jobs are allowed though, because today we’re going to be exalting in the big-muscles, big-plots, big-powers, big-boobs wonder of super-heroic comics and the setting that loves them all: Champions Universe.
Champions Universe is the superhero setting book for Hero 5th Edition. Following Champions, the genre book for super-heroic play in Hero 5th, it had a big codpiece to fill, but due to the gamma-irradiated powers of Steven S“ex God To Millions” Long and Darren “Manly Muscles” Watts, Champions Universe manages to not only fill that codpiece but… um… okay, that metaphor was about to get nasty. Let’s try again. Champions Universe not only meets the massive muscle-power of its predecessors, it adds a striking dash of flare and class to them as well. If the Incredible Hulk had fashion sense, and was an RPG book, he would be Champions Universe.
The Book
Weighing in at 60 pages, Champions Universe is the slimmest of all the Hero books so far. That works well, because it’s dressed in a lovely wrap-around one piece cover which accentuates its sleek and sexy spring-style lines. (The editors have informed me that I have to stop talking like a beauty pageant host now. Bastards.) The cover has everything that I found lacking in the Champions cover – super heroic battles, bright colors, exciting and dramatic poses, and Sapphire’s bare belly. It does a very good job of conveying the tone and momentum of the book, and sets the standard for the interior art. Yes, that’s right, the interior art is very good, and also features much of Sapphire’s bare belly. Almost all the art in the book not only fits the feel, it enhances it and gives a graphic and visual impact that really brings the words to life in my mind. While the layout is not as cutting edge as something like Silver Age Sentinels (yes, everyone, I compared the two and that means you can now Flame On) it is clean, easy to read, and does a good job of balancing text and graphics.
The Rundown
Champions Universe is a setting book, not a genre book or a bestiary/NPC book. For a look at the superhero genre in general you’d want Champions, for a collection of super villains you’d want Conquerors, Killers, and Crooks. There are NPCs and villains in the book, but Champions Universe focuses on setting rather than specific characters.
Now that I’ve told you what is not in the book (I’m competing for the title of Captain Obvious), let me give you a rundown of what is in it. Champions Universe starts with a history of superheroes in the setting, showing the evolution from masked freedom fighters in the 1700s to the eventual emergence of the beefy, sexy, top-heavy superheroes we get in Image comics. Along the way it talks about how superheroes have acted in war and peace, and how their emergence shaped the nature of the world.
Chapter Two then goes into the various types of superheroes in the setting, detailing how mutants, robots, and various weird things fit into the setting. It also gives a nice look at the number and type of superhumans in the world, including a look at the ratio of villains to heroes and the numbers of techno-geniuses and gadgeteers vs. TSH vs. mutants and so on. It did not, alas, give the average bust size of a superhero or heroine.
We then segue into a chapter about how superheroes, and villains, interact with society. There are sections on how they’ve affected, and are affected by, the media (Uncaped = Playboy for Supers! Woot!), the law, the military, the government, the corporate sector, and technology. The particulars of whether superheroes can wear masks, testify at trials, work for the army, or patent their power armor are all covered. There is also more of Sapphire’s bare belly.
Chapter Four then presents an overview of the whole world, with quick synopsis of the major countries that are players in the superhero game. It also has more detailed write-ups of Millennium City, the generic default city of superheroic badassedness, Vibora Bay where all the witches hang, Haynesville, Kansas, and then a nice and colorful section on lost worlds--Atlantis, Lemuria, Arcadia, and outer space.
Chapter Five covers the details, history, and modus operandi (but not, significantly, stats) of the biggest threats and organizations in the world. There is an emphasis on the big bads here, but there are also a nice number (3, which is more than 2, but less than 4--5 is right out) of good guy groups that the PCs can work with. Sidebars give plot seeds galore, along with nifty nuggets of Champions lore, to fill out the chapter. This section is written so that players can read it. While not every character will know everything here, there isn’t anything that isn’t at least semi-public knowledge.
Finally, Chapter Six gives us all the secrets. The GM's section of the book basically goes back over the rest of the book and fills in all the secrets on the earlier sections. We get a few new, super-secret villains (I really liked Samhain, despite the fact I should have hated everything about it) and lots and lots of plot hooks. We also get a pre-gen adventure, “Return of the Destroyer,” which makes a decent introduction to the setting.
The Good
Superhero game settings often fall into a couple of traps. (Fiendish traps that no hero can escape!) One is that they don’t feel comic-bookish enough. Whether it’s because they deliberately set out to avoid comic-book tropes, or because they just can’t convey the tone they’re aiming for, many such settings end up being perfectly fitting worlds for beings with super powers to live in that have not the slightest touch of the magic that makes DC or Marvel or (Insert Favorite Comic Imprint Here) sing. The other big flaw is that they often lack a sense of history. Not that they don’t have an established linear history that is laid out in the book, but that they lack the feeling of having relics of actual events like comic books do. Remember the time that Atlantis rose and all the superheroes were on the moon and had to crash a ship into New York harbor to return in time to save the day? No? Well, neither do most RPG superhero settings.
Champions Universe avoids both of these traps. And not only does it not fall into them, it actively crushes them under the power of its mighty fists. Most wonderful of all, it manages to do so without pandering, talking down, or being stupid.
Champions Universe has a sense of history, not only does it situate superheroes in time and place, it gives a feeling that supers in the modern world are surrounded by artifacts of the world's history. The shell of the ship the Power League used to drive off Galacto Dork? It’s right over there, and not only that, there is a plot hook dingus waiting inside. This kind of setup works very well for getting that comic book feel, because it lets the kind of history and crossover feel get into your game from day one.
The book also does a very good job of doing some cursory but interesting views of how superheroes would have changed the world, but still sticking to the comic-book convention that while supers may make some changes, the world stays the same in most deep functional-level ways. Quick and cognizant analysis of how the media, the government, the law, sports, entertainment, and soda wars were affected by heroes and villains all give a feel for living in a world that is very much like ours, but with people that can fly and shoot lighting bolts out of their butt. These sections are not meant to be a realistic extrapolation of what transhumanism could have accomplished in changing the world, but to give more of an immersive and entertaining comic book experience. As such they succeed brilliantly well (with a few exceptions that I’ll talk about below).
Finally, as in all Hero products to date, the index is excellent.
The Bad
The worst thing about Champions Universe is its organization. The book is a brick, solid, heavy, and unable to do backflips or bring you dinner without crushing the tray. It’s rather clunky in a couple of different ways, some of which might have been necessary, but some of which are about as annoying as that whole clone plot in Spiderman.
The first of the two main issues is one that the book addresses directly: in order to provide a player-friendly overview of the book, they put all the basics of the setting in one place, and all the GM’s secrets in another place. They did this on purpose, and had good and explained reasons for it (just like another company had for changing Superman’s costume). However, it means that when you, as GM, go looking for information you have to constantly flip back and forth between different sections of the book to get the whole picture. And God forbid you try to look up a fact in game and can’t remember which section it was in. Even with the awesome index finding a specific fact could take the Flash an hour.
The second issue is that the example characters included in the book are not separated out from the rest of the writing. You’ll be reading a section on the history of superheroes, and BAM! right there in the middle of the text-flow will be an NPC. Not in sidebar, not referenced so you can look at the stats in another convenient central location, but just right in the middle of the section. This annoyed me for two reasons. First, it makes reading the book a very uneven experience, and was almost as distracting as Sapphire’s bare belly. Second, and more important, it can make characters quite inconvenient and annoying to reference during game.
Hero game products have always impressed me by the fact that they are laid out and set up to actually be used during game. Material is collected centrally, competently cross-referenced, and indexed to within an inch of its life. Champions Universe does not manage to pull this off. While its layout is just a bit annoying for a reader, it can be downright brutal for someone trying to actually use it in play.
The Ugly
I’ve said that Champions Universe does a good job at looking at the ways that superpowers might affect the world, without breaking the bounds of Four-Color genre definitions. I was not lying, and all telepaths are welcome to probe me on the matter (or any other matter, for that matter – probing is sexy fun). However, there are a few points where the book gets headed in a direction, and then in order to conform to the comic-book feel ends up cutting off its head to spite its bulgingly muscular body. One example is this line: “Others recognize that they have superhuman abilities, but… use them to accomplish everyday tasks. The highly-publicized, but essentially trivial, healing powers of the renowned physician Dr. Jeremiah Mugembe, which have done more to diminish the threat of AIDS in Africa than all the pharmaceutical companies in the world combined, are but one prominent example.” Now it could just be my politics talking (uppity thing, politics) but that line hit me wrong. I know that the powers are “trivial” because they do not blow up damns or give women helium boobs that defy gravity, and thus are not in the general scope of super-heroic powers. Even knowing that, it strikes me as just the ittiest tiniest bit lame-beyond-human-understanding to say that a man standing against a plague that is killing millions is trivial in any way, shape, or form.
Champions Universe generally manages a good balance between thinking about super-powers and yet maintaining the wide-eyed and credulous innocence of the classic comic book tales. When it fails, however, the results are often a bit brutal. Luckily none of them will affect game play, so they get listed as ugly rather than bad.
Worst of all, however, is Captain Patriot’s uniform. You NEVER EVER mix patterns that way. Repeat after me: “No matter how beefy my body is, I am not the flag.”
The Conclusion
Though it suffers a bit in organization and agility, Champions Universe is a solid, interesting, fun book full of plots, hooks, organizations, NPCs, and ideas that will put the cape, four colors, and boobs into your game. The book is good enough, and depends on the Hero System little enough, that it might even be worth picking up for those who don’t like Hero. If you’re willing to do a little conversion work, or don’t mind eye-balling NPC stats, there is plenty of information and hooks for any super-GM to use. I’ve often commented that Hero products are heavy and crunchy, but lack flare and style. Champions Universe fixes all that, having style, flare, and bare Sapphire bellies to spare.
The End
For being pretty, but not ground breaking in design, and being entertaining and engagingly written, Champions Universe gets a 4 in Style. For being chock-full of nutty superhuman goodness, and having Sapphire’s bare belly every single chance they got, it gets a 4 for substance.
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