Welcome to the
Great Net Book of Real HEROs!!!

What is the Great Net Book of Real HEROs?

This is a project that was proposed on rec.games.frp.misc in the spring of 1994. It never got off the ground, much to my disappointment, so that fall I started it up again myself. The result is the text you are reading right now. Essentially, the idea is that players often want to meet their "favorite" heroes and villains from the comics during the course of restoring law and order, thwarting evil plots, saving the universe, etc., in their weekend adventuring. This compilation is designed to make this task easier for the GM. Now you don't have to go through all the effort to write these fabled persons up for Champions play; they've already been done for you.

What's this about comics?

The GNBoRH accepts only characters from real, professional comic books. Characters translated from cartoons, TV shows, movies, and amateur comic books are not accepted. They may produce fine characters, but I have to draw a line or I'll be swamped. However, if you translate a comic book character using information from one of these other sources, that is acceptable. For example, producing Batman from only seeing him on the Saturday cartoon. Manga characters are okay, but anime is not.

So what have you done with these characters?

Very few changes have been made to the contributions other than to format them into "character sheet" style. They should print nicely on an 80-column printer (if you are using the text format), and have been set to take no more than two pages with 63 lines to a page. (You will have to add page breaks or form feeds after each character sheet on your own, however. I was originally adding these, but they didn't transfer across platforms very well at all. I did this primarily because I, as a GM, like to have all my NPCs on separate sheets for easy reference, and thought other GMs would, too.) The only other changes I've made editorially is to:

correct some math errors

correct some rules errors - I know this is probably a controversial point, but there is a line at which things cross from being GM interpretation to being simply wrong

a few translations into English :)

try to include active point totals along with real point totals

I've tried to include all of the contributor's notes in spirit, if not in exact wording. Part of this was due to the reformatting effort.
This is version 2.9. It is the fourth edition on the WWW.

Hey, don't these characters belong to somebody?

Yes, they probably do. The HERO System translations of the characters that follow appear without knowledge or consent of their creators. HERO System copyright is held by Hero Games. This project is not endorsed by them, either. (Although if they wanted to, I'd gladly accept a salary for maintaining it. :-)

Is there a FAQ for this?

More or less, that's what you're reading right now.

Oh. Well, what do I have to do to submit a contribution to the collection?

Write to the following address during the course of the school year (roughly September through April...yes, I'm a student doing this in my "copious" spare time) and I'll send you back a copy of the preferred format (if you got this via FTP the format document should be there also). Even if you don't submit a writeup, this makes a dang good ASCII character sheet. Fill it out with a detailed description of the character's powers. Do all the math and stuff. We HERO buffs like math. (It also means I won't have to do it when you send it in.) Also include up to a page of background/history, identifying quote, powers/tactics, and appearance. Basically, write the character up as you'd see him in a sourcebook. You don't have to tell us everything about the character, because we'll likely know the basics. On the other hand, don't leave us in the dark, either; not all of us read the same comics, or even read comics at all.

But some of the write-ups don't have the extra page of info. Why's that?

Some of the contributors chose not to write a background. It's as simple as that. Although I prefer a "complete" character for inclusion in the GNBoRH, I'm not going to turn down a good translation because it doesn't have a description page. Some of the other contributors have shown interest in writing a brief text for these characters, but more seemed to be in favor of having everyone write their own. Plus, this way it's less of a headache for me, rather than having to attribute the translation to one person and the text to another. However, if a contributor wishes to include someone else's background write-up with the character, that's fine by me.
* Special Note: As of version 1.8 I am no longer guaranteeing that unformatted characters will be included. There are FTP sites where you can dump your character write-ups, but if you want them in the GNBoRH then they should be in this format. The convenience of a common format is about the only thing that sets this project apart from random characters in an FTP directory. I'm not saying unformatted characters won't get in; what I am saying is that I'm too busy to reformat that much and I'll pick and choose characters that interest me.

Anything else?

I hope you enjoy it. Go out there and be a Hero!