Little Chris stayed up all night doing his homework, so he was still sleeping when I left the room. I went down with Dave and we went through the dealer rooms. Brisk business today as there were lots of people crowding into both rooms. In contrast, the Buyers Bazaar (what used to be the Swap Meet) was practically empty. They changed it last year so there are like 6 spaces and you can get a space for two hours. No more rush of people cramming into a small room. No more last minute deals before the swap meet ends. It's quite tragic.

Anyway, I bought three Champions books that I don't have and that were on sale. Module 14, The Trail of the Gold Spike, which I didn't have, and two supplements published in 1993. Later on I attended the Hero Games seminar, "What's Up With Hero Games!" Bruce Harlick, Steve Peterson, and Steve Long were present (and one other guy whose name I didn't get). I haven't been paying attention to Hero Games the last few years. I knew they had a very low profile and were publishing e-books to save money.

Hero was bought by CyberGames a while ago, so now they have a full-time staff instead of the part-time staff they were snailing along on. They're back to publishing supplements, with the first one having been recently done. 5th Edition Champions wil be published March 23rd and they have a healthy amount of upcoming products. (For some reason, the mention of CyberGames and Hero brought out a round of derision from Ken and Eric later that night. Not being all that "in-the-know" I wonder what's wrong with CyberGames).

Some talk about licensing. Hero has the Witchblade license and will produce one book for it. Top Cow's president grew up on Champions so the relationship has been a good one. And with the tv show starting this Fall it will bring more attention to the game and then maybe some spillover to the other Hero products. For the most part though, licensing is a bad deal for almost all RPG companies. The RPG market is small, licensing fees are high because the license owners don't realize that RPG sales are low, lots of restrictions with the material that is put out. The only company that obtains a lot of licenses is Steve Jackson Games, and they lose money on just about every license. But they do it because Steve loves those worlds and loves to hobnob with the authors and it's his company, and I personally love him for it.

Also a few opinions about the death of ICE. Once they had their Middle Earth license pulled they didn't have anything popular to sell. For years they were able to keep that license, even though they were often (sometimes years) late in payments, because that was Tolkein Enterprises only revenue license. Then Christopher Tolkein finally got fed up and personally gave New Line Cinema majority control of licensing. New Line said "drop ICE, they don't make their payments" and after a year or two of legal battles ICE lost. Consequently though, Tolkein Enterprises does get ownership of all the MERP supplements published, not that they'll do anything with it. There is a MERP seminar tomorrow, and maybe there'll be some more news there.

Finally, Steve Peterson talked a bit about his dream. He wants Hero to be a major intellectual property. To whit, he wants to have novels, online games, computer games and play aids, movies, television, whatever. "We're not selling books, we're selling an experience." Bruce Harlick, in charge of the RPG line, quipped "that may be what Steve wants, but *I* want to sell books." The Hero Creator program that they have is one part. Basically it's a file translater, using Fuzion as the base language. Templates (scripts, from the sound of it) are used to convert from a particular system to Fuzion and back. That way you can convert AD&D characters to a DC Heroes campaign, or whatever.

My last comment is that the players there were what I would call condescending towards all other RPG systems. You can do anything in Hero; it's not just a list of things, but a meta-list creator; seamlessly convert from campaign to campaign without changing your character; etc. I do plan on one day running a Champions campaign, but unless 5th edition is radically different, you'll still have the problems that (1) it's too easy to min/max a character, which means that everybody does it and it becomes too rules-lawyerish and (2) if you're not careful, you lose all color to the campaign (everything starts boling down to it's stats: I have a 6d6 Energy Blast, this gun has a 2d6 Ranged Killing Attack). The first one I'll solve by writing all the characters so that players can't min/max. They can describe the character and I'll make it for them. Second one is harder to fix and I'll have to be careful not to let the campaign fall into that trap.