Heroes Unlimited

Overall score:

Let’s clear up the confusion early—this is not a second edition that was revised, this is a second edition of the revised first edition. I know it’s weird, but that’s what you get when you have no set numbering policy. We can take solace in this: the revised second edition is practically twice the size of the revised first edition, and almost all of the new content is solid, meaty stuff.

Let’s clear up something else while we’re at it—a lot of people really hate Palladium’s production values, and they are admittedly low, but there are two sides to consider. Heroes Unlimited is black and white, softbound, with illustrations ranging from excellent to awful; to top it off, Palladium doesn’t even employ a graphic designer. d20 Modern, published by Wizards of the Coast, is full color, hardbound, with award-winning art and a full graphic design team. You can buy the former for $26.95, and the latter for $39.95. Setting aside personal preference for gaming systems, each book gives the same amount and quality of content, but Palladium gives you the bare bones while WotC makes you pay $13 extra for colored ink, a hard cover, and some graphic designers. If you’re the kind of person who considers these to be luxuries, you might want to stick with Palladium, but if you feel that they are necessary then by all means go with WotC. There’s not much else to be said on the issue. For my own part, the appearance of a book does not detract from or add to my enjoyment of a game that takes place primarily in my imagination, so it’s a moot point.

And now, on to the actual review.

The biggest things Heroes Unlimited has going for it is the ease of character creation and the the huge range of possible heroes you can create. HU splits itself into ten power categories that cover almost every base you can think of, especially considering that some of them split into subcategories—you can be robot, pilot a robot, receive special training, use magic, wield a magic weapon, become a mutant human, become a mutant animal, or any number of other options. The system runs into major problems, however, when you try to mix power categories: Wolverine is a mutant with bionic components, Batman is a detective with impressive hardware construction abilities, and Spider-man (at least in the comics) is a mutant with funky technological webshooters. The inability to reproduce this kind of cross-category blend has always been a big weakness of the HU system, and the Revised Second Edition has done nothing to fix it.

A creative GM and player can come up with ways to fix this, but it would be nice to have some official rules—perhaps a future issue of the Rifter will step in and give us something to work with. As it is, past issues of the Rifter have done an excellent job of patching the occasional hole—Issue 16 had rules for teen heroes, and the most recent issue expanded the rules for Super Soldiers pretty impressively. I suppose we should just look forward to Advanced Revised Second Edition, or whatever silly thing they call it, and hope that this information makes an appearance there.

Like I said, though, the stuff that actually is included in this book is great. There’s more than a hundred mutant super abilities and a great system for combining them. The Magic and Psionic systems are adapted from Rifts and blend remarkably well with the superhero environment. The bionics and robotics are extensive and use a purchase system—you get a certain amount of money and build your robot/cyborg as if you were browsing a catalog. The Hardware and Special Training options let you make characters that are less directly powerful, such as hackers, hunters, and stage magicians. There’s even a section for godlike Mega-Heroes (think Superman, Wonder Woman, and…well, pretty much everyone in JLA). Adding a Mega-Hero to a normal campaign would unbalance it pretty drastically, but using one for a villain—or creating a full team of Mega-Hero characters—is a great option. If you want, you can even play an alien.

Though I grew up playing Palladium games, I’m not nostalgic enough to pretend that it’s the world’s best system—I also grew up changing the rules. Palladium is nice, though, in that it can be played as tightly as d20 or as loosely as Storyteller depending on your preference. The rules are quite open to adaptation. One thing the system is very bad at, however, is advancing your characters over time—they gain levels, of course, but those levels don’t do much other than improve your skills (all of them, whether you use them or not) and increase the range and damage of your powers. You’re not going to gain any new powers or abilities over the course of the campaign unless your GM specifically chooses to make up some way of giving them to you. It’s nice to have flexibility, as I said before, but in this case it’s more a question of inflexibility versus chaos—either you follow the rule or you ignore it.

Heroes Unlimited in unique among Palladium’s games in that it is devoid of background and world info. Palladium’s main draw is the incredible imagination behind its people and places and settings. Many people buy the books solely to steal their ideas, or simply to read them. HU contains none of this—no NPCs, no overarching plots, and no story. It’s just a big pile of tools. Admittedly, a game based around comicbook superheroes comes with a built-in setting that needs little augmentation, and all of the game’s supplements provide tons of juicy context and ideas, but the fact remains that core book is pretty bare. Despite this, is continues to sell just as well as Palladium’s more story-based games—a testament, perhaps, to it’s utility as a superhero builder.

Over the past 20 years superhero games have come and gone, but Heroes Unlimited has been the constant cornerstone of the genre thanks to good support and impressively wide options. Its good parts are solid, and if the bad parts are too much for you…maybe they’ll be fixed in Special Revised Second Director’s Cut Silver Dragon Edition. And maybe they’ll fix their numbering policy while they’re at it.

Written by Fellfrosch on June 26th, 2003