Spacer’s Toolkit

A Sourcebook for Star Hero

As the Star Hero universe, Hero Game’s sci-fi setting, is also the far-flung, superhero-free future of the Champions universe, and because advanced technology and alien devices play a frequent role in the superhero genre, I thought it might be a neat idea to pick up this 128 page softcover for my Champions campaign. The back of the book describes “personal technology, ranging from weapons, to battle armour, to survival, communications, and psionic gear”, “robots, computers, and nanotechnology”, “personal augmentation tech”, plus nearly two dozen civilian vehicles and three dozen starships. Sounds good to me: like a grittier, more realistic Gadgets and Gear. The cover depicts members of several different alien races standing in a forest, laden with guns and gizmos. Even the title, referencing a toolkit, makes you think “portable”.

Well, what I got was something very different from what I expected. Less than a third of the book, only 36 pages, contains personal gear. 18 pages are devoted to vehicles. The majority, over half the book, is filled with page after page of starship descriptions and stats.

The items in this book do not follow the layout you might have come to expect from the UNTIL Superpower Database or the Fantasy Hero Grimoires. While they are statted out in the same manner, the Spacer’s Toolkit items do not half any of the half-dozen or more significant variations on the theme that the aforementioned books do. This book’s primary purpose is to illustrate actual items in the campaign setting, rather than provide a storehouse of ideas. Each item comes with a notation detailing its tech level, as well as its price in credits; occasionally an item is presented with several higher power levels (simply higher stats/more dice), each with a progressively higher tech level.

As the book is set in the Star Hero universe, it describes specific alien devices as used by members of the major galactic species, rather than a bunch of generic blasters or what have you. As this section attempts to cover many different categories, there isn’t much in the way of oddities or a large amount of depth here. The small nanotech, computers & bots, and personal enhancement sections are fun, and you do get Mon’dabi liquors, a trio of psionic items, and some notes on using armour meant for another species, but it’s all too short. There’s simply not enough unique supertech and bizarre alien gear, and all too soon we arrive at the vehicles section.

The vehicles section is broken into civilian and military sections. I’m personally rather fond of the centipede transport, but the giant mining drill, the Jabba’s Sail Barge knockoff, and the spider-like Thorgon Warstrider are fun too. As usual, the section is dominated by human gear, but you have specific alien entries.

Finally we have the Starship chapter. It opens with an intriguing piece on generic components. This section details the basic hyperdrive units available to the Terran Empire, featuring their builds in Hero system terms. The history of Terran spacefaring engineering is laid out before you, in a chart organizing the various systems used in the order they were developed, with their tech levels and credit costs provided. It’s an interesting look at how to model the classic hyperspace fold/jump sci-fi standard, and allows you to more easily develop your own ships. Similarly broken down are a few weapons and some defensive systems.

The starship descriptions themselves are huge: your typical craft runs at two pages of rules text. Provided are everything from superdreadnoughts and massive basestars down to fighters and courier craft. Each ship has a brief description, accompanied by a bit of flavour text. While nice, I would have liked more here: the Battletech warship writeups in the back of Technical Readout 2750 always intrigued me even though the ships didn’t even exist in the game and I knew nothing of how warship combat was supposed to work, simply because they contained names and dates, notable successes and failures, lousy designs and what replaced them.

Not having Star Hero, I simply enjoyed this section for the build ideas. The mechanics used to create the many ships and their various weapons and gadgets cover a host of limited power options most GM’s have probably never thought of. I found the section itself to contain a couple dozen good power ideas, and in addition, having the official costs for so many new power modifiers is nice.

How’s the art? Well, it’s fairly plentiful black and white stuff. Each ship is depicted, I believe. Ultimately, as you may know by now, art doesn’t really matter to me. What’s important is that I easily can read it and that it has a good index: as always with Hero, this book shines on those criteria.

The Wrapup

I feel the spartan personal item section could have been added to Star Hero, or perhaps Gadgets and Gear, or even a later Ultimate Equipment book. The vehicles and ships are harder to place. My first instinct was to want them in the Ultimate Vehicle Sourcebook, but a generic vehicle book would likely have required the background material be removed, and would then hardly need three dozen generic starships over 50+ pages. I also imagine it’s too much material to shoehorn into any of the other Star Hero books.

Ultimately, I’m looking forward to seeing the book repackaged or expanded one day, with a clearer delineation between ships and gear. I think even if the book was retitled “Galactic Armadas” or some such, and advertised as containing a bonus section with basic equipment, I’d have no problems with it. Of course, I also wouldn’t have bought it.

I’m rather torn on what to score this book. I certainly can’t recommend it for anything other than Star Hero, in which the provided flavour text would help the book shine, but perhaps it was foolish of me to think that a book marked so clearly for Star Hero could be so easily used in another way in the first place. I think my feelings on what I thought I was getting vs. what I actually got are reasonable, but nonetheless, the material itself is solid. I enjoyed reading it, but wished the author had more room to play with. I guess that if you’re reading this, you know what you’re getting into, and if you then choose to buy it, you must want starships. In that case, you’ve come to the right place. I give it a 3, with the caveat that if you want starships, you’re probably looking at a book worth a 4.