Heroes in Time opens with a picture of what looks like a human in some sort of clear space suit, energy sword in one hand and claws on the end on the other with a strange metallic winged creature in the background, a barren landscape and empty space and stars in the background. Beside that is the beginning of an extensive contents that includes the wide variety of settings for adventures – Primeval, Fantasy, Swashbuckling, Steampunk, Modern, Cyberpunk and Space Opera. While many would consider it ambitious to try and create a system that can deal with so many different genres, as the name suggests, it also intends to make it possible to have the same character be playable in all of them as the default setting has all the genres linked in a common timeline.
After the standard “What is a roleplaying game?” and overview of the basic mechanics, each setting gets a brief timeline of the main events of the era as well as a history, adventure ideas, information about the prevalence of Gods, the types of monsters as well as how special powers are viewed and how societies of the era tend to function. At least, that's the case up until the Modern era and beyond where details of Gods disappear entirely.
Following the genres of play we reach details of the Temporal Lords, inspired by Dr Who and Sapphire and Steel, the far future human race with the ability to move backwards and forwards through time and the first mention of their adversaries, The Entropic Alliance. However, even after reading the book I'm not sure if the time travel is at Gms whim or if the players are meant to have access to something to travel with deliberately. We quickly move on to character creation – names, alignment (not just good vs evil, law vs chaos but also has suggestions such as logical vs emotional or detached vs engaged), suggestions for back-stories and the type of personality the protagonist will have (all nicely free of mechanics so far so any suggestions could easily be used for any other game or as a simple guide for new roleplayers) and how they're funded. We start to reach the parts with mechanical effects – races (human, elves, halflings and dwarves though halflings don't seem to have any drawbacks for their bonuses and dwarves get barely a sentence of flavourful text with no mechanical effects) and development points to determine a character's areas of expertise, abilities and powers. There's a wide variety of examples for skills, but they all come under broad headings that may make it easy to skip over and make it seem like far too many development points on a quick read through.
With the powers, it offers two default methods of obtaining them; innate and through items though other than making the choice it has no real effect before going on to say items should have limitations and offering some but curiously not listing the idea of the power being gained from an item being a limitation – If I have a ring of intangibility and it gets stolen, I no longer have the ability until I can get that back and it provides a good way for enemies to try and reduce my power before attacking (or because the GM has realised an ability is too powerful and needs to redress this!) but as it is, there's no reason for me not to make all my powers innate unless being tied to an item was meant to be a limitation but not listed. However, the power list is extensive and covers so much it would be difficult to think of anything quickly that isn't covered by the powers available. As I've been writing this review I cast my mind towards the X-Men but I reckon most or all of them could be made fairly quickly with the rules provided.
The equipment list is similarly extensive without feeling bloated – the main classes of weapon, armour and shield are all provided and extend through the genres and there is also a decent list of general equipment and magic items. My only critique here is the lack of costs or anything to make it a bit more independent and quick if you have several players trying to make characters at the same time. The default is to discuss it with the GM to decide what's appropriate but if there's four or five players doing this at once it may become an issue.
There are also pages devoted to robots, space ships (though with careful use of limitations and adjusting the speed chart appropriately, regular ships could easily be made using this for Swashbuckling/Fantasy periods as well as things like airships), poisons, diseases and environmental hazards as well as a small bestiary that sometimes lacks information on the capabilities or weaknesses of certain creatures (undead are typically just a desciption).
The main rules for skill resolution and combat are right at the start of the book and shows that defences will be important to avoid quickly being disabled (it appears a typical character will have about +60 to 70 on a percentile roll, subtract their opponents dodge roll and armour modifiers and if the score is above 100 after this it will usually incapacitate an opponent.) However, an opponent skilled in dodging and with decent armour should make it a difficult or impossible task to score above 100 but there is the potential for very quick combats. However, I'd need to play or run a game to get a good idea of how likely this is in actual play.
Aside from a few typos that will inevitably slip through the net and taking a few reads to ensure I knew where the relevant rules for combat, etc, could be found there is a simple system with a plethora of information and options to cover most genres and technology levels and manages to condense it all into a surprisingly small book for everything that's contained within. My main concerns would be how quickly a combat would finish and how long it might take to work out each attack (I know I can get slow with D&D modifiers sometimes, let alone trying to work out 143-58 quickly or similar each round). However, even if you never planned to play/run Heroes in Time, it might have enough to inspire you for ideas on certain genres or work well for a simple superhero game (the section on character death even mentions how death is rarely permanent in superhero stories/comics) as well as the default time hopping through genres.
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