In February 2025 we resurrected (for a second time!) two huge offers from April 2017 that gather the entire Fourth Edition product line (1989-2001) for Champions, The Super Roleplaying Game from Hero Games – 65 ebooks of superheroic action. The revived Champions 4E Essentials had all the rulebooks and many key supplements. We completed the collection with the three dozen supplements and adventures in Champions 4E Universe.
Hero Games published Champions, one of the first superhero RPGs, in 1981. Champions quickly went through two more editions and grew beyond its roots into modern-day espionage, pulp action, fantasy, science fiction, and giant robots. Hero later licensed the property to Iron Crown Enterprises. In 1988 ICE initiated an ambitious project to reconcile all the diverse approaches of the past as one universal rules set, the all-encompassing HERO System. This led to the landmark 1989 Champions Fourth Edition, known to fans as the “Big Blue Book” for its splendid George Perez cover.
Over the next decade, Iron Crown and two licensees (Gold Rush Games and R. Talsorian Games) published more than 60 superhero RPG supplements and adventures for Champions. These books, though uneven in quality, shared a brio, a sense of imagination and excitement, that fans still recall fondly.
These two offers collected all 65 of the superheroic 4E ebooks from Hero and its licensees. These offers’ original April 2017 runs marked the debut of many titles in .PDF, fruits of another ambitious effort by Jason Walters of Hero Games. These titles are also sold individually on DriveThruRPG, but these two super-sized Bundle revivals give you a new chance to acquire, at one stroke (well, two strokes), a whole virtual shelf of Champions Universe ebooks.
Questions? Check our companion post on this blog, “About the Champions 4E Bundles of Holding,” which includes complete lineups for both offers.
1. CHAMPIONS 4E ESSENTIALS [start here]
If you’re new to Champions or to the Fourth Edition, start with the titles in the April 2017 Champions 4E Essentials Bundle, with the Big Blue Book and key supplements. This Essentials offer’s jaw-dropping Core Collection presented more than 1,900 pages of top-quality superheroic roleplaying material – thirteen .PDFs (retail value US$97.50). The 354-page Big Blue Book itself and the Hero System Rulesbook extracted from it, plus Classic Enemies and Organizations, PRIMUS and VIPER 4E, Normals Unbound and Allies, Hero Bestiary 4E, and more: With just these books, Champions Gamemasters have run campaigns lasting decades. AND THAT’S JUST THE START.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got the entire Essentials Bonus Collection with fourteen more titles worth an additional $102.50, including Dark Champions: Heroes of Vengeance for 4E, Golden Age Champions, the 4E versions of Ultimate Martial Artist and Ultimate Mentalist, The Ultimate Super Mage and Super Mage Bestiary (plus Mystic Masters), Challenges for Champions, and both Champions Presents anthologies. And we didn’t forget Champions New Millennium and its two supplements.
2. CHAMPIONS 4E UNIVERSE [get these titles next]
This April 2017 Champions 4E Universe offer added the rest of the Fourth Edition line – no less than thirty-seven setting supplements, villain books, and adventures. There were nineteen titles in this revived offer’s Starter Collection (retail value $97.50), including five Enemies books of supervillains, ten adventures, and the highly regarded San Angelo: City of Heroes line from Gold Rush Games.
This offer’s Bonus Collection added eighteen more titles worth an additional $110, including nine Dark Champions books, two collections of Heroic Adventures, Kingdom of Champions and other location books, Foxbat Unhinged, and Champions in 3-D, the dimension-roaming campaign book that holds pride of place in every HERO fan’s trophy room. Together these two revived offers presented the entire Champions Fourth Edition line!
There’s more 4E Hero!
Somehow in previous runs of these Champions superhero offers, we never got around to presenting the non-four-color Fourth Edition campaign sourcebooks: Ninja Hero, Horror Hero, Cyber Hero, Western Hero, and so on. In February 2025 it finally happened! We added a new companion offer, Hero 4E Campaigns.
