Finest Hour (Campaign Pack for Golden Heroes/Squadron UK)

Superhero comics are full of the most unlikely resurrections. Villains who as they shed this mortal coil swear vengeance upon those conquering crime-bustin’ defenders of liberty clad in knickers over their leggings and their capes flapping in the wind. It maybe a cliché but its one we all love. Even heroes are prone to Christ like resurrections, sometimes days, sometimes years after their original demise. But the news of the resurrection of Golden Heroes the 80s superhero role-playing game really did take me by surprise. Yes, news to me even if it isn’t for you, but it’s back after all these years. Back but not the same. Well, not quite the same, this time it has a new name: Squadron UK, but other than that very little has changed. It’s still the same excellent and innovative game it ever was. Not only that, but there’s a bunch of new supplements for it too!

A brief preamble on the history of Golden Heroes/Squadron UK for those who don’t know:

The particulars of the return of Golden Heroes/Squadron UK is a tale of fans of the old game starting an online community in homage to the original’s splendour. Thus inspiring the game’s creator Simon Burley to don his old leggings and cape once again to fight crime, write supplements, self-publish and, if there’s any justice, sell some games too. As any one who read my review on the original game (written when I had no idea of the game’s new-found resurrected status) will tell I am a big fan of many of its game mechanics and its understated yet underlying ironic Britishness in contrast to its brasher American superhero RPG cousins.

In fairness apart from the name change the new game seems to have changed very little over its 20 odd year fallow period. A trait which it shares with another old Games Workshop game Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, which returned unchanged when it was originally republished by Hogshead in the mid-90s after a much shorter period in the wilderness. However Golden Heroes was never as broken as WHFRP was and while there remains a few very minor niggles, the game system remains as strong as ever. Perhaps in an ideal world maybe combat could have been slightly simplified and maybe it lacks a unified mechanic like the d20, Basic Role-Playing and many other systems which might make the game aesthetically a little more pleasing, to my mind it’s 20 odd year old design still has more charm and originality to it than many more unified systems. Anyway, its modular nature, like old school AD&D bits and bobs approach to game mechanics, certainly allows for easy tweaking without any wholesale re-writing of the game-system, but unlike AD&D the Golden Heroes system isn’t as half as messy nor is their any great need to tweak.

For those intrigued by the game in general or would like to read the specifics of one of finest game mechanics in role-playing history: the Campaign Rating mechanic (not just my opinion but also scientific FACT and you can’t argue with that), which is a statistical measure of a PC’s personality which changes depending upon the PC’s actions and behaviour, pre-dating Pendragon’s Passion system, then I’m pleased to say that a FREE Basic version of the new-look Squadron UK rules is available from Simon Burly (just follow the links). Actually there is nothing basic about the Basic rules at all as I believe that they are pretty much the same as the full rules, only without extended descriptions and examples of game play and rule use and such. A decision which has to be commended in my opinion. Okay there’s a lot of other free RPGs out there right now, but how many of them have the same pedigree as Golden Heroes? Only the free pdf of Ars Magica 4^th edition from Atlas Games, Marcus Rowland’s Forgotten Futures or Paul Mason’s Outlaws of the Water Margin come close in my opinion.

For those with old versions of Golden Heroes then there appears to be little reason to up-grade to the full version judging by a quick looksee through the Basic Rules, although there might be some extra campaign background information that I don’t know about in the full rules. Anyway for the first time in decades there are a bunch of new supplements available as pdf files and, coming soon, as hard copies, which might be of interest. Some are free, other require parting with you not-so-hard-earned cash. Of interest to me was the campaign pack Finest Hour, which is one of the ones which will cost you money: $5.99 for the pdf, print version to come on Lulu.

Oh, while I’m here I’ll just say that for convenience when I refer to the game system I shall refer to it as Golden Heroes rather than Squadron UK or the more long-winded Golden Heroes/Squadron UK, simply because those are the rules I own in full and while I like the name Squadron UK for a superhero group, I don’t like it for a name of a superhero RPG. It sounds too militaristic to my ears. Also it would be too tempting to abbreviate it to SUK, which would be unfortunate, because if there’s one with this game doesn’t do is that. Although I suppose Squad-UK has a ring to it, although it does sound a bit like a punk band.

But before I review in earnest I think its only fair to come clean and declare my potential bias:

Unlike everything else so-far reviewed on here I’ve not paid for the Finest Hour. No I haven’t ‘alf inched it, you cheeky git! I’m pleased to say that after reading my nostalgic review of Golden Heroes game designer Simon Burley offered to send me one of his game supplements to review, which, as I’m a huge fan of the game, I was only too happy to accept. Obviously though there’s a difference between spending your own money on a game and getting one for free. A situation which I’ll try my best to take into account in my review, by being a little picky here and there. Also, I’m not a ‘professional’ reviewer as such, so take that into account if you must do too. I’ll also confess here that I take little pleasure in putting in the boot to any ‘indie’ or self-published stuff as in my opinion life is hard enough without me adding to their woes. So I accepted Simon Burley’s kind offer with the proviso that if I didn’t like it or at least didn’t find it interesting in some way that I would pass and simply not review it at all.

Now, as this is a review of said product you will probably assume that this review will be at least in some way or other positive. Which indeed it is. Read on…

Finest Hour (a Campaign Pack for Golden Heroes/Squadron UK) by Simon Burley

In a nut-shell: Finest Hour is a 46 page campaign pack, available as a pdf or (soon) in print, giving rules, scenarios and advice for running a Golden Heroes campaign in the 1940s: providing a couple of adventures, a bunch of adventure seeds, an alternate character generation system and some solid advise and ideas on running a super-powered campaign against those evil Nazis at the height of WWII in the style of all those classic war films, such as Where Eagles Dare, and the pulp novels and comics scripts from the period; and those more recent pastiches of the genre, such as Indiana Jones and The Rocketeer.

Now this strikes me as a rather good idea for a superhero campaign setting as it saves a game from emulating the ubiquitous post-modern taint that has, in my opinion, all but consigned the superhero comic into a wannabe psycho’s wet-dream and returned it to its rightful place: back in the ‘Golden Age’ of comics. In fairness WWII and the Nazis have always had their place in the super-genre, from Captain America’s war-time Super-Serum origins to the more ironic multi-dimensional Nazis super soldiers found in Zenith in the late 80s.

As you can imagine, Finest Hour doesn’t stray too far from its ‘pulp’ source material. The Brits are the goodies, the Nazis are the baddies. Good vs. Evil, with no, or very few, shades of grey in-between. The Heroes will be patriotic and be prepared to fight and if necessary die for their country. If that premise doesn’t do it for you then you better look elsewhere or be prepared to significantly change things. Of course you don’t have to be a car-carrying member of the National Front, but your characters will be patriotic in a way that is very rarely seen today (at least by me and the tiny circles I move in) even if you aren’t.

Golden Heroes always took an innovative approach to character generation and Finest Hour is no exception. Instead of generating a bunch of super-powered Heroes to wade right into the Nazis super-threat, Finest Hour starts the Heroes off as ordinary everyday service men and citizens, and embroils them in a super-powered Nazis conspiracy to poison London, steal Excalibur and strike at the heart of the British navy. The PCs initially will be very much out of their depth and have to use their non-super abilities, wit and good old-fashioned stiff-upper-lip to defeat the Nazi plot. With luck, by the end of their first adventure the Heroes will be members of a secret organization called ‘Black Watch’ and be prepared to do it all again for King and country should they get the call. And you know they will get the call, many times over. Of course things won’t stay un-super-powered for ever as last Finest Hour adventure in the pack will power-up the PCs into Britain’s very own superheroes.

As far as I’m aware Finest Hour is the first superhero RPG to take this delayed approach to superhero creation, an approach that is to my mind a brilliant idea. The origins of a superhero are usually integral to a his story and in many cases his appeal, as fact that superhero movies have always realised all too well by focussing much of the plot of their first films on this ‘back-story.’ Strange then that superhero RPGs consign a heroes origins to half an hours dice rolling and head scratching with the referee. Well not any more. I believe this approach would be suitable for even contemporary superhero campaigns. I guess role-playing a character’s origins has been done before (Vampire: the Masquerade comes to mind), but usually as a one-to-one with player and ref for half an hour or so. To role-play out an entire adventure or even, if the ref wants to use the scenario seeds as inspiration, many such adventures, seems like a great way to develop a PC’s character up over time and a highly original concept to boot. Of course a non-super-powered campaign against super-powered opposition could be fun in itself and how much more will the players appreciate their characters powers when they finally get them.

But eventually as victims of Nazis experimentation the players will get to try out the second half of the tweaked character generation rules via the lovely and much improved super-power generation tables. Rather than one ‘master’ table to roll your powers on, each table has a unique selection of powers each reflecting powers appropriate to their respective origins. A player’s super-origins include: animal powers, surgery, drugs, radiation, occult or powers derived via some found Nazis technology in the form of powered armour or some strange device. For instance if the PC gets his power via Nazi drug experimentation, like Captain America’s super-soldier origin, then he might role anything from super strength to psi powers to shrink, but he won’t role something incongruous to his origin like magic powers or armour. I very much like these new costume power tables and I think I would use them for all character generation is any Golden Heroes game and for these alone Finest Hour is work the money. While it doesn’t stifle the ‘rationalize your powers or lose them’ method of the traditional character generation system, it does reduce the chance of a player being lumped with too many inappropriate results that might be next to impossible to rationalize on the fly. To be honest I’d have liked to have seen something like these tables introduced, at least as an option, in the rules found in the Basic rule-book, as some tables like this appeared in an old issue of White Dwarf back in the day and I though it a good idea then, as, eventually, other game-systems like TSR’s aweful Marvel Superheroes took this approach to random character generation.

I like the approach Simon Burley takes with Finest Hour. Instead of providing tonnes of background data from which the referee should be inspired from, he instead gets thins moving with a long introductory adventure, ‘Dark Business,’ which drip-feeds the players the setting: taking a peeling layers off the onion approach to scenario design, which always works well. The second mission, ‘Dark Origins,’ to be run sometime later, results in the PCs gaining their super-powers. Once the players get their powers the rest of that mission, ‘Escape to the Light,’ follows in what amount to a daring escape followed by a massive punch-up in which they can flex their new bulging biceps and energy beams. I like both adventures, but for me ‘Dark Buisness’ is far superior to ‘Dark Origins/Escape to the Light,’ which is based a little too strongly on an aforementioned war film in this review, which makes certain sub-plots a little too obvious to nay players familliar with this film.  Finest Hour also gives a dozen or so adventure seeds to either run in between the introductory adventure and ‘Dark Origins’ or to run after the players get their powers – depending on how much the players and ref relish the ‘against all the odds’ style of adventures that an un-powered Finest Hour campaign might offer. The quality of some of these adventure seeds are a little variable, but there is plenty of good ideas here to inspire even the most jaded of referees. Finest Hour finished off with some great advice and some interesting suggtions for  directions that the ref might wish to pursue: my favourite of which should result in the Heroes trying to stop the Allies from nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki while simultaneously forcing the Japanese to surrender by forging their own attack. All in a days work, I suppose!

As you can probably tell I like the Finest Hour, I like it a lot, but, like just about everything, it isn’t entirely perfect, although it’s pretty damned close. Still, in the name of armature journalistic endeavour I better list the few minor issues I have with it.

• Firstly it’s not going to win any graphic design awards. Unlike many games from the 90s onwards which seemed to really integrate the physical design hand-in-hand with the game setting, Finest Hour looks more like a early/mid-80s module. Not that it’s ugly – it’s just not very pretty. Of course it’s unlikely that anyone will be buying it for its aesthetic qualities and in the only criteria that is important, i.e. readability/playability, it is perfectly functional, especially baring in mind that many people will be reading it off a laptop screen (like me) and only printing off the bits they need for game play. The art is mainly sourced from ’stock art’ and online resources and thus isn’t very remarkably, although it more than does the job. The period pictures are probably the best, while some of the super villain illustrations are less impressive. Again, they’re not beautiful, but I’m glad it’s there. There are also a few typos here and there which even my tiered dyslexic eyes could see. Again, not a serious problem and one which is common in many small press publications (and probably common to this blog too). Still, in the context of this being a self-published product it looks more than good enough.
• While I like the approach of showing the setting through scenarios, there is an issue of an almost total lack of dedicated background information. There is no guide to war-time Europe, no historical information, very little detail on Britain in the 1940s (cultural or geographical), no time-line for the War and, possibly most importantly, no maps of war-time Britain or London. Now how much of these details will be necessary for all refs is debatable. If a ref decides to play the game for ‘pulp’ adventure and ‘pulp’ adventure alone, then almost all these details are unnecessary, although they might still add atmosphere or inspire scenario creation for the referee. However should a prospective ref with to mix the ‘pulp’ action with a little bit of cultural role-playing then, effectively, he or she is on their own. Now all these details could easily be sorted with a trip to the library or some online research, but it would have been nice to have included something to wet the appetite here.
• No enough maps! No, not maps of war-time London or Berlin or whatever, but the adventures are a little on the map-lite side for my liking. There are maps for most of the combat encounters in the introductory adventure, although the final climax, set on a naval destroyer, could have been better equipped in this regard. But the final two-part adventure is the worst offender: providing no maps at all in a big location that as a ref I’d really like to have maps for. The adventure is set on a massive cliff-top Austrian estate with a presumably quite extensive underground complex underneath. Okay, it should be possibly to wing it as the action is going to be fairly cinematic, but personally I’d prefer even a simplified map or two to aid my flagging imagination, especially regarding combat encounters, which for me are never my favourite part of refereeing. Okay, I should be able to source something or other with a bit of surfing or from another game supplement or something, but I do feel that this is a bit of an oversight. Understandable as this is a self-published product and professional looking maps aren’t the easiest of things to produce, but I’d sooner a scan of a pencil sketch than nothing.
• Not much information on the Black Watch. Okay, I’m being ultra-picky here, but there aren’t many details about this covert organisation. Not that I think many would be needed, but perhaps a few more details here and there would have been nice. Also a map of the secret HQ underneath one of London’s more famous landmarks would have been nice (although not essential as the other map shaped holes), if only because creating these kind of play aids is a pain in the ass. However the lack of specific details here allows a referee to model the Black Watch to his own campaign needs and once the PCs are super-powered I don’t suppose that this organisation will be more than a background detail.
• A bibliography: While source material might be obvious for us oldies, I’m sure there is at least one generation by now who haven’t been raised on a diet of War films and comics. A brief bibliography is always a nice touch.
• The adventures are linear. Okay, this is unsurprisingly considering the source material, but the adventures are heavily plotted and don’t allow a lot of options for the characters beyond the constraints of the story and the genre. Not that Finest Hour is alone in this regard. Pretty much every published scenario ever published suffers in this regard to some extent and Finest Hour isn’t, by far, the biggest offender. Now this is not to say that there is only one way to progress though the adventures. There is usually at least a couple of ways to follow leads and many scenes encourage the players to invent their own solution, but often the outcome of their actions isn’t in doubt, which won’t suit all styles of play. However it is true to the genre. But still there is no getting away from it, the scenarios assume that the PCs will eagerly put their necks on the line, follow the clues and jump through hoops. Should your players be the type so say ‘fuck this!’ and fly off to the Caribbean till the whole thing blows over, then you’re on your own. Now, I doubt that this will be a problem for many, but some players resent being rail-roaded and prefer a more free-form style of play. If, however, you and your players relish action-packed cinematic mayhem, then this simply won’t be a problem. But it might, just might, be something worth considering.

But none of these issues is catastrophic and many won’t be an issue at all to many referees. Some will only effect certain referees and players who demand a certain style of play, while others can be fixed with only a little foresight. The only significant problem in my opinion is the lack of scenario maps for a couple of key locations. Apart from that Finest Hour could be run by a half experienced ref after only one reading and I imagine the players, providing they accept the genres limitations, should enjoy every Nazis-bustin’ moment of it.

Okay, complaints aside: Finest Hour is a truly excellent supplement for any Golden Heroes referee wishing to give his players a new look and many of its ideas could easily be adapted to other game systems should you desire: Forgotten Futures or Feng Shui maybe. It faithfully replicates those ye oldie war films from your tender youth and perfectly pastiches a style of escapist ‘pulp’ adventure which lies sadly forgotten these days. Note: I use the word ‘pastiche’ here as a compliment, because Finest Hour does so with real love and respect for the genre. Apart from the potential issue of sourcing one or two maps, Finest Hour gives you a campaign setting that can be run with the minimum of fuss. It also does that clever thing which all really playable campaign packs should do: reading it simply fires up your imagination. On every other page an idea or two as to possible missions or interesting directions I could take a potential campaign would literally pop in to my head. No sitting there desperately trying to see a way in which I might use the setting. From the first page it is obvious how the game would run, which makes it a perfect campaign for novice referees or for more experienced refs to break in newbie players.

So, liking a game supplement is one thing, but would I actually run it? In a word: yes. It would be a shame for such an inspiring campaign to lie dormant in my head. Although I will qualify my ‘yes.’ Stylistically I think my role-playing head is facing a less structured direction than this today, which is a pity, but should the right players ever come along, then I’m more than tempted. Previously, despite my love of many of the key mechanics of Golden Heroes, it would be unlikely that I’d have ever have run anything longer than a one-off mission simply because contemporary setting don’t in general really do it for me no matter how clever or lovely they might be, but Finest Hour circumnavigates this and provides an excellent reason to don tights and capes, and does so in the last proper pre-contemporary era in my opinion. For the life of me I don’t know why more RPGs haven’t be set in the 1940s. It seems sadly neglected, which is strange considering the hot-bed of intrigue, clashing ideologies and full-scale war which defines it. Finest Hour readdresses this neglect and does so in style!