Hero Lab is the name of Lone Wolf Entertainment's character creation software for use with tabletop RPGs. It currently only supports the d20 System, but plans are underway for it to support Mutants & Masterminds, RuneQuest and White Wolf's World of Darkness games. You can download the full version of Hero Lab for free and then unlock the program's complete features for a cost of $29.95. The price includes a full year of support and updates, as well as access to Lone Wolf's forums. The system requirements for the program state that you need a Windows PC with at least 64 meg of ram and 16 bit color. The program installed and ran just fine on my crappy HP Celeron laptop.

I have used several other character creation aids for D&D in the past, including spreadsheets, E-Tools and PCGen. I am currently running PCGen 5.10.1 in addition to Hero Lab. Any comparisons that I make between Hero Lab and PCGen will reference that version of the program.

Hero Lab loads quickly and the interface is clean. The interface, with dark blue background and white characters, looks good - even on my laptop. The fonts are also a nice size for my aging eyes and the tabbed layout is easy to navigate. Finally, the interface keeps a sort of summary of your character’s stats in a side panel, even while you navigate through the various tabs. PCGen loads more slowly than Hero Lab for me (I assume because it is written in Java). PCGen’s interface is tabbed in a somewhat similar fashion to Hero Lab’s, but I don’t think it is quite as easy to navigate.

There are many nice touches to Hero Lab. For instance, if you hover your cursor over the ? beside an item like a skill, feat, weapon or armor, the program displays information about that item in a pop-up box. For instance, if you hover over the ? beside a feat, you get the SRD text about that particular feat. If you find that functionality annoying, you can also turn it off. There is also an X beside each item, making deletion quick and easy. The program uses colors to remind the user of missing information, ineligible feats, etc. I also like the integration of drop down boxes to pick things like an item's size. I was impressed with Hero Lab’s stability. It never crashed on me once. I have used PCGen for several years and while the current version has been pretty stable, it has definitely crashed hard on me in the past on multiple occasions.

I was able create a 1st-level D&D character from start to finish in about fifteen minutes with no prior experience using the program. The only think that stumped me for a minute was how to add money. Everything else was quick and intuitive. It took me longer to enter an existing character, but the process was still relatively painless. The only thing that I could not do was enter the information for a character’s special cohort (from his Leadership feat). I emailed Lone Wolf support to find out if this could be done and they quickly confirmed that the program did not yet have this functionality.

What are Hero Lab’s downsides? Well, compared to PCGen, the program appears to be a little sparse. PCGen has numerous little bells and whistles like random name generation, tons of monsters, a separate GM module and more. Of course, it's also free. I was also a bit disappointed with Hero Lab's character sheet output. It looks a bit jumbled to me and doesn't have the detail of PCGen's character sheet. It does have the option to output as PDF, which is good. I don't know anything about continuing support for PCGen since Code Monkey Publishing lost their license from Wizards of the Coast to produce data sets, but it looks like Lone Wolf will continue to provide updates and fixes for Hero Lab where needed. It's also nice that the program will be supporting other popular games.

If you are looking for a character generator to use in a standard d20 campaign and don't need or want a little of extras, Hero Lab is a good choice. It is stable program (in my experience) and has a clean interface that is easy to navigate. The fact that it will also support other game systems in the future is a definite bonus. Lone Wolf Entertainment also appears to have a good track record of supporting their other products like Army Builder. Give it a download and check it out.