Hero Games was in at the creation of superhero role-playing games and thanks to the company's ability to adapt to changing times, the current Hero System Fifth Edition could well be the most popular version of the Hero system yet. While they often don't get as much notice as other RPGs the Hero games and supplements just appear to keep selling year after year, as the company expands its appeal by introducing new genres (science fiction: Star Hero and fantasy: Fantasy Hero). For 2004 Hero Games plans to expand on its Fifth Edition core games with monthly releases of new settings and sourcebooks for its various Hero and Champions lines.
In April Hero will issue The Turakian Age, the first setting book for its Fantasy Hero game, followed in May by Fantasy Hero Battlegrounds with maps, locations and scenarios. In July the publisher will issue The Valdorian Age, another setting book for Fantasy Hero, detailing the epoch that followed the Turakian Age.
Hero Games is also planning a number of new releases for its Champions game including The Ultimate Brick, which debuts in April and addresses that favorite topic of gamers everywhere-strength. In May the 178-page Galactic Champions takes the Champions Universe out to the year 3000, when space exploration is commonplace. The Mystic World, a 208-page volume releasing in June, takes gamers into the mysterious world of magic, sorcery, and threats from beyond our plane of existence that is lurking the shadows of the Champions Universe. Demon, which comes out in July, is an organization book for Champions, describing the secret arcane cabal, DEMON. Mysticism is also at the core of The Ultimate Mystic, 192-page volume set to release in September.
In August Hero will release its fifth genre book, Dark Champions, which covers the modern-era action-adventure genre -- everything from vigilante crime fighting, to espionage, to techno thrillers, to special forces, to cops and robbers. The 256-page volume is filled with information about forensics, the underworld, the illegal drug trade, and criminal psychology. In September Hero will release Hudson City: The Urban Abyss, the first setting volume for Dark Champions, which details the cesspool of crime, corruption, and evil in the South Jersey town that is the perfect setting for Dark Champions' struggles with organized crime.
Other Hero Games 2004 releases include Worlds of Empire, which comes out in October and provides details of the Terran Empire that are extremely useful in the Space Hero RPG, and Villainy Amok, a sourcebook for Champions, which describes dozens of standard comic book plots. This exceptional resource for Champions GMs is slated for a December release.