In February 2024 we revived the September 2020 Hero Magazines Bundle, a bargain-priced assortment of long-running hobby periodicals devoted to Champions, The Super Roleplaying Game and the universal HERO System rules set from Hero Games. This revival gave gamers a new chance to acquire, in one stroke, a vast library of Hero characters, organizations, locations, equipment, vehicles, adventures, rules variants, and essays. You can stock your campaign for decades with Adventurers Club magazine (all 27 issues, 1983-1995), Digital Hero (all 47 issues, 2002-2008), and hundreds of articles from the APAzine (Amateur Press Association publication) Haymaker (1992-2014).
Adventurers Club (no apostrophe) was the first Hero Games magazine, launched in Fall 1983 after Champions 1E became an unexpected hit for the three-person company. Published erratically for 12 years, AC presented scenarios, characters, and variants from many leading Hero designers of the time, including Aaron Allston, Steve Long, Bruce Harlick, Scott Heine, Steve Perrin, and many more. AC also chronicles the line’s development and the young company’s roller-coaster history. The last few issues of AC supported both the Hero System and the Iron Crown Enterprise FRPG Rolemaster, during the time ICE owned Hero. The last editor was a young newcomer named Monte Cook.
Before the modern web and its many campaign portals, blogs, forums, and subreddits, enthusiastic writers and journalists made do with Amateur Press Associations (APAs). (Some still do. The oldest APA, the National Amateur Press Association, was founded in 1876 and is still going.) The Hero System APAzine Haymaker produced 67 weighty issues (1992-2014) of hand-collated manuscript contributions from many Hero System aficionados.
For this offer’s original run in 2020, Jason Walters of Hero Games assembled almost 280 Haymaker articles in seven giant .ZIP archives, a 180MB barrage of characters, organizations, locations, equipment, vehicles, adventures, rules variants, and essays. These thousands of humble manuscript pages encompass everything from two-page character outlines to full-scale campaign supplements, plus the contributors’ informal musings on the state of the Hero System and commentaries on each other’s works. These Haymaker archives are deep waters; lower your net here and there, and you never know what you’ll discover.
Hero Games started Digital Hero magazine in 2002, soon after publishing the Fifth Edition of the HERO System Rulebook. Digital Hero maintained a regular monthly schedule through 2006, going bimonthly in 2007 and ending its 47-issue run in 2008. Supporting Champions, Star Hero, Pulp Hero, and Fantasy Hero, each issue presented a varied assortment of characters, variant and advanced rules, articles, and (sometimes lengthy) adventures.
There were twenty-one magazine issues in this revived offer’s Starter Collection (retail value $45) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the first 20 issues of Digital Hero magazine (2002-2008) in two ten-issue archives – Digital Hero #1-10 and #11-20 – and the HEROGlyphs essay collection drawn from them.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got this revival’s stupendous Bonus Collection with sixty-one more magazines worth an additional $144, including the complete 27-issue run of Adventurers Club, all seven giant archives of Haymaker articles (180 megabytes!) – 1: Characters and Creatures 2: Vehicles and Equipment 3: Settings and Locations 4: Organizations 5: Adventures 6: Rules 7: Essays – and three more archives of Digital Hero with the remaining 27 issues: #21-30, #31-40, and #41-47.
The Adventurers Club issues are .PDF image scans of the original 1990s hardcopies. Text is always readable but not copiable. Haymaker articles are simple .PDFs of manuscript pages; text is clear and often copiable.
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) for these three Hero System offers went to their designated charity, the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. Each year, the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, amplifies the voices of up-and-coming game designers by featuring them during an expenses-paid visit to Gen Con. The global Emerging Designer Program focuses on creators from marginalized communities.
