Strike Force + Champions 6E (Feb 2021) – through Mon 26 Jan

Through Monday, January 26 we bring you two offers – one new, one revived – featuring the 2009 Sixth Edition of Champions, The Super Roleplaying Game from Hero Games. The new Strike Force Bundle from High Rock Press presents the revised and expanded Aaron Allston’s Strike Force (2016), a stupendous deep dive into the late designer Aaron Allston‘s 22-year Champions roleplaying campaign. And we revive (for a second time!) the February 2021 Champions 6E Bundle with the Champions Complete standalone rulebook and all the high-flying HERO System Sixth Edition sourcebooks and supplements you’ll want for your own four-color Strike Force campaign.

STRIKE FORCE [new]

Though he later became well known for his many Star Wars tie-in novels, writer and game designer Aaron Allston (1960-2014) began his career in the plantation fields of gaming, editing Space Gamer magazine for Steve Jackson Games. For his 1981 SG review of Champions First Edition, 20-year-old Aaron started a playtest campaign with a team of novice heroes, Strike Force – and he ran the campaign for 22 years.

Aaron spent decades developing his own setting, “Earth-AU” (for “Allston Universe”). The Strike Force campaign itself involved upwards of 48 players in 260 sessions between 1981 and 2003. The major campaign events covered multiple invasions of Earth, adventures in many parallel dimensions, the rise and fall of the Fourth Reich on a planet 200 light years away, and World War III. In addition to Strike Force, Aaron created 22 other Earth-AU campaigns, and ran many of them for dozens or 100+ sessions.

Amid these grand storylines, individual characters aged, grew, married, had children, and lived out their lives; players arrived and left. Aaron encountered all the issues every gamemaster faces, and he formulated principles and practices, based on years of hard-won personal experience, to address these issues and sustain the campaign: how to read players and tweak the game to satisfy each of them, how to adjust for player absence, and what to do when the group gets too big. In 1988 Aaron wrote the first-ever superhero campaign guide, the original Strike Force, that chronicled the team’s first eight years of adventures. For its grounded, practical advice on running a long-term campaign, Strike Force became a milestone in RPG history.

In 2014 Aaron died of heart failure, age 53. Two years later Jason Walters of High Rock Press ran a Kickstarter campaign for Aaron Allston’s Strike Force, an updated edition of the 1988 sourcebook expanded with previously unseen material provided by Aaron’s mother. Aaron wrote millions of words about the Earth-AU multiverse, for his own use and for his players. His carefully compiled Campaign Chronicles fill well over 4,000 pages, enough for more than a dozen full-length gaming supplements. Longtime Hero fan and designer Michael Surbrook, maintainer of the Surbrook’s Stuff site for HERO fans, spent years organizing and condensing this material for the 2016 update, and High Rock solicited expanded advice from superhero RPG veterans about running a campaign using “the Strike Force method,” as well as testimonials about Aaron’s influence. The revised Aaron Allston’s Strike Force was billed as “a superhero setting like no other – a roleplaying game campaign book that includes techniques and lessons from more than 22 years of play – a tribute to one of the greatest creators in the RPG industry.”

This new Strike Force Bundle presents the 2016 sourcebook along with its brand-new supplement Strike Force Organizations and its massive Strike Force Archives, a gigantic zip file of more than seven thousand documents Aaron produced across the decades. Pay just US$19.95 to get all eight titles in our Strike Force Collection (retail value $98) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including Aaron Allston’s Strike Force (2016), along with the Denis Loubet Sketchbook, the Strike Force Hero Designer Character Pack, and the Mutants & Masterminds Hero Lab Files; the new Strike Force Organizations and its Organizations Hero Designer Files; the The Strike Force Archives; and the facsimile edition of the original 1988 Strike Force version that High Rock produced for the Kickstarter – a new scan accompanied by Aaron’s original manuscript.

Note: The Strike Force 2016 sourcebook and Organizations require the HERO System Sixth Edition rules or Champions Complete. The latter rulebook is in our revived companion offer, below.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/StrikeForce

CHAMPIONS 6E [from Feb 2021]

The matchless flexibility of the HERO System lets you create any character, super power, spell, equipment, vehicle, or headquarters you can imagine, and the 6E version is the most detailed and comprehensive ever. This revived February 2021 Champions 6E Bundle once again gives you the 6E Champions campaign sourcebook (plus the standalone Champions Complete rulebook), the 6E version of Champions Universe, Powers, Beyond, Book of the Empress, and all three Villains books – more than two thousand pages of 6E material for a price even a struggling freelance photographer or mild-mannered reporter can afford. If you’re new to the game, and especially if you also want the Strike Force Bundle, start here.

Pay just US$12.95 to get all four titles in this revived offer’s Character Collection (retail value $65) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the standalone Champions Complete rulebook, the Champions campaign book for HERO System 6E, Powers,and the Book of Templates.

And if you pay more than this revival’s threshold (average) price, which is set at $37.95 to start, you’ll level up and also get this offer’s entire Campaign Collection with six more titles worth an additional $133.50, including Champions Universe for 6E, Champions Beyond, three books of villains – Champions Villains V1: Master Villains, V2: Villain Teams, V3: Solo Villains – and Book of the Empress (about Istvatha V’han, the Empress of a Billion Dimensions), plus The Booklet of the Empress, a collection of characters provided as a bonus to backers of the December 2011 Kickstarter campaign and not sold anywhere else (including DriveThruRPG.).