Rich McGee

The usual answers are:
 
1) There's nothing close in a published book and/or
2) One or more players have read all the monster stats every written and metagame that knowledge shamelessly
 
Neither are problems unique to Hero, by any means.  Even D&D with its shelves of monster manuals and supplements over the decades falls prey to them.

Cause it's Fun!

True, however if you use a book then you have a starting point to create your unique creature. And something I just thought of, in DND they’ll tell you that the stat block is the average creature. So as a GM you are free to adjust up or down or swipe and or delete abilities. No reason the same logic doesn’t apply here. 

And if you want to attract a cat instead of scaring it off, just run a can opener. 
 
Me, I start with a broad concept (which includes appearance and maybe ecological role, or at least general behavior) and stats come afterward.  Rather like designing a PC, really. 

I start with stats and adjust them accordingly as needed to fit the need, whether Dex, SPD (that's one of the most important) and so on. Powers are written next, which may influence the stats to be adjusted.
 
I don't worry about mental attacks, I go with the flow of the adventure.
 
"What about Presence attacks on creatures that just don’t care? Like a fish or golem or cat? Because cats just don’t care."    Gotta disagree: fish are easily spooked as are cats. Depends on the type of PRE attack.
 
Eh, this isn't that hard.

In my games he'd be the arch-nemesis of my haunted nanobot swarm Midas over here.  Started out as a fairly basic technopath who could mentally control machines, but after a close encounter with some of Midas' subordinate nodes he took them over entirely and re-formed them into malleable body plating that can also extend itself into tendrils for added reach and mobility.  Golden Hand's mental powers make him a major threat to any sapient machine.  The main mass of the Midas nanoswarm can hold him off, but any divided sub-nodes lack the networked processing power to resist takeover for long, especially at close range.  That makes Midas' main trick - deploying specialized duplicates for specific tasks - worse than useless since they're just easy prey for his foe, feeding him more nanomachines to work with.
 
Things aren't all great for the Golden Hand though.  The sub-nodes he dominated came with their own haunting spirits tied to them and his technopathy can't do a thing to control them - and they've latched onto him in much the same way they did Midas and won't let go.  The guy now has dozens of unquiet spirits making demands on him, and as an organic being with a soul to torment those demands are much harder to resist than they are for a cloud of nanobots.  His physical prowess has improved greatly and grows the more of Midas he overwhelms, but it comes at the cost of unwelcome and even alien compulsions that now drive many of his schemes.  Some of those spirits "just " want their deaths avenged, but others have greater plans of their own - particularly those from pre-human sorcerous civilizations who dream of returning their species to life or calling on their long-forgotten gods.
 
Interesting coincidence to turn up such a perfect counter to an entirely unconnected hero.          

Not just Champions, but I tend to lean toward using one of the small local cities as an initial setting, and the PCs are often part of an official government-approved supers program designed to spread hero coverage around the country instead of having them congregate in NYC and other big cities.  The PCs are usually the only full-time heroes in town barring a true vigilante or two, with NPCs and temporary PCs passing through now and then.  Resident villainy is usually pretty minor league, or "branch offices" for a big conspiracy, with the PCs gradually facing bigger threats as they establish themselves - either attracting them to town or going afield to deal with them.
 
Been doing that with variations on and off since V&V and Champions 1e.  The most recent iterations were the Syracuse Seven based in Syracuse NY (not exactly local, but several of us had lived there in the past) and the Tri-City Foursome based in the Albany/Schenectady/Troy area.  One advantage to using an area you know IRL is saving time explaining the setting's conventional elements, and as I said on my blog post here there's a lot to be said for using IRL urban history in your game when you can.  Much easier to explain there's a heist at the GE plant when everyone at the table has driven past the place a thousand times.  You can always jam in fictional elements when you want them, and you don't have to spend time developing the mundane infrastructure and demographics and economic parts.
 
For other ideas, I like the "road trip" model where your heroes are wanderers with a shared vehicle or two and drift around the country (or planet, or galaxy as power level allows) running into trouble or trying to avoid it.  Kind of a Scooby Doo with superpowers thing.  Have also had a good time with "occult defense force" games loosely modeled on Bureau 13, which lets you draw from urban fantasy/horror tropes as well as going on the occasional gonzo interdimensional quest.
 
 

I've had the most luck using the nearest "big" city (it barely breaks the 6-figure mark at night when the state workers go home) with my rural groups, which probably weren't any more familiar with urban life when we were young and what few of them are left are only slightly more so now.  No one wants to actually set a game in our podunk home towns (although we did wreck our share of local landmarks in our fictional youth) but Albany is just close enough that everyone knows it a little bit while it still feels kind of exotic to the folks who never actually lived there.  Other groups got a kick out of using my (current) college town and campus as a setting.  None of them were played straight - there were always fictional elements shoved in beyond just the PCs and their foes - but there were enough recognizable bits to save a lot of explanations.
 
Of course, it might help that Albany is a freaking weird town with a totally out-of-place vanity worthy of Nazi Germany project stuck in the middle of it, basically right next to the slums and what passes for a business district.  Schenectady (the next city over) is only a little less screwy, with a gargantuan half-empty industrial plant in the form of General Electric dominating downtown.  hove some supervillain lairs, fictional gangs and conspiracy groups in and it's pretty good turf to run low-powered supers in.
 
Not every group buys in to the idea of staying local, but it's an option to keep in mind.
There are fewer differences between classic Traveller shenanigans and low-powered space supers stories than most people think.  Just substitute "better tech than the local schmucks" with "superpowers" and you can do a lot of the same hooks.  If you're on a Tech 8 planet that second-hand suit of battledress is a superpower, and the difference between a good blaster hero and an FGMP-14 is pretty thin.
RPGs just plain work well on a growth model, even when you start as a hero rather than a zero.  I find everyone's more invested when they earn their reps as world-class supers through their in-game deeds instead of just starting off as respected JLA/Avengers members or the equivalent. 

I've had the most luck using the nearest "big" city (it barely breaks the 6-figure mark at night when the state workers go home) with my rural groups, which probably weren't any more familiar with urban life when we were young and what few of them are left are only slightly more so now.  No one wants to actually set a game in our podunk home towns (although we did wreck our share of local landmarks in our fictional youth) but Albany is just close enough that everyone knows it a little bit while it still feels kind of exotic to the folks who never actually lived there.  Other groups got a kick out of using my (current) college town and campus as a setting.  None of them were played straight - there were always fictional elements shoved in beyond just the PCs and their foes - but there were enough recognizable bits to save a lot of explanations.
 
Of course, it might help that Albany is a freaking weird town with a totally out-of-place vanity worthy of Nazi Germany project stuck in the middle of it, basically right next to the slums and what passes for a business district.  Schenectady (the next city over) is only a little less screwy, with a gargantuan half-empty industrial plant in the form of General Electric dominating downtown.  hove some supervillain lairs, fictional gangs and conspiracy groups in and it's pretty good turf to run low-powered supers in.
 
Not every group buys in to the idea of staying local, but it's an option to keep in mind.
There are fewer differences between classic Traveller shenanigans and low-powered space supers stories than most people think.  Just substitute "better tech than the local schmucks" with "superpowers" and you can do a lot of the same hooks.  If you're on a Tech 8 planet that second-hand suit of battledress is a superpower, and the difference between a good blaster hero and an FGMP-14 is pretty thin.
RPGs just plain work well on a growth model, even when you start as a hero rather than a zero.  I find everyone's more invested when they earn their reps as world-class supers through their in-game deeds instead of just starting off as respected JLA/Avengers members or the equivalent. 

Oh, aqnd how could I have forgotten the Heroes of UNICoRN? I started this as a pick-up game for when we couldn't get the full group of players, but it was available for other GMs to run too (and they did).
 
I was in the same setting as the Seattle Sentinels and Keystone Konjurors campaign, but for this the premise was that heroes and villains are not spread evenly around the world, so some countries have a would-be hero but no local villains, while other countries have supervillains but no local heroes. The United Nations International Crim inology Resource Network tries to remedy the situation by sending volunteer heroes to parts of the world that need them, on a temporary and ad-hoc basis. This is no CU-style high-tech and well-funded organization, though. UNICoRN consists of a small office with some filing cabinets, an outdated PC, and a Rolodex. Unofficial motto is, "The mightiest heroes we could get on short notice and no budget."
 
Some adventures were fairly standard superhero scenarios with standard-power heroes. (In fact, some got pretty grim, since the Third World can be a grim place.) Others were played for laughs with goofy heroes such as American Ninja (ninja suit also a bright flag suit) or the Mad Piper of Inverness (sonic powers with a bagpipe Focus, and "rreal mad aboot crrime!").
 
Dean Shomshak

I have tried this over and over- thinking it to be something of a shortcut to world building or getting everyone on the same page.  I wont claim to have done it hundreds of times-  realistically, over the years, _maybe_ as much as thirty times.
 
I have never, not even once, been able to get the players interested in playing in a real world location.  Even if I rebranded everything, once one of them noticed "hey!  This central Atlanta / Savannah / Jacksonville / wherever," they just lost interest.
 
So I stick with what my first Champions GM (the oft-mentioned Jim) taught me: a thing he called the DC approach, and we use fictional locations.
 
I mulled of it for years- why real world locations have never worked in our group, and it kind of hit me:  most comics (as far as I know, anyway) seem to be set in New York of Chicago or Los Angeles---
 
And from the POV and personal experience of my players in rural Georgia, those _are_ fictional places.  They are just as unreal as Metropolis or Gotham or Central City.  It is part of the feel that the associate with superheroes: a wondrous and dangerous place wholly unlike the places I know.
 
 
Now I want to reiterate that this has been _my_ experience with _my_ various groups, drawn from more-or-less the same area.  The fact that people still pitch this approach suggests on the whole, it works to at least some degree; I have just been an outlier.
 
On the plus side, I have also learned that building wxonomic infrastructures and such is, by and large, unnecessary, as the players don't really seem to care.  They want thw tech companies, the weapons and,chemical,companies, and who might be helpful and who might be secret villains, and that is about it.  After that: where do I live,and where do I work and where can I go for secret ID stuff.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
For a minute, I thought you were talking about Traveller. 
 
though tossing out that Scooby Foo comment has put certain historic Traveller campaigns under a new microscope!"   
 

We do seem to share one tendency, though, and that is starting small and growing the heroes and their stories.
 
 
 

Not just Champions, but I tend to lean toward using one of the small local cities as an initial setting, and the PCs are often part of an official government-approved supers program designed to spread hero coverage around the country instead of having them congregate in NYC and other big cities.  The PCs are usually the only full-time heroes in town barring a true vigilante or two, with NPCs and temporary PCs passing through now and then.  Resident villainy is usually pretty minor league, or "branch offices" for a big conspiracy, with the PCs gradually facing bigger threats as they establish themselves - either attracting them to town or going afield to deal with them.
 
Been doing that with variations on and off since V&V and Champions 1e.  The most recent iterations were the Syracuse Seven based in Syracuse NY (not exactly local, but several of us had lived there in the past) and the Tri-City Foursome based in the Albany/Schenectady/Troy area.  One advantage to using an area you know IRL is saving time explaining the setting's conventional elements, and as I said on my blog post here there's a lot to be said for using IRL urban history in your game when you can.  Much easier to explain there's a heist at the GE plant when everyone at the table has driven past the place a thousand times.  You can always jam in fictional elements when you want them, and you don't have to spend time developing the mundane infrastructure and demographics and economic parts.
 
For other ideas, I like the "road trip" model where your heroes are wanderers with a shared vehicle or two and drift around the country (or planet, or galaxy as power level allows) running into trouble or trying to avoid it.  Kind of a Scooby Doo with superpowers thing.  Have also had a good time with "occult defense force" games loosely modeled on Bureau 13, which lets you draw from urban fantasy/horror tropes as well as going on the occasional gonzo interdimensional quest.
 
 

You can always get them shelled, but I find they last about three minutes tops at the table that way.

"Destroy the world?  But I keep all my stuff there!" 

Not just Champions, but I tend to lean toward using one of the small local cities as an initial setting, and the PCs are often part of an official government-approved supers program designed to spread hero coverage around the country instead of having them congregate in NYC and other big cities.  The PCs are usually the only full-time heroes in town barring a true vigilante or two, with NPCs and temporary PCs passing through now and then.  Resident villainy is usually pretty minor league, or "branch offices" for a big conspiracy, with the PCs gradually facing bigger threats as they establish themselves - either attracting them to town or going afield to deal with them.
 
Been doing that with variations on and off since V&V and Champions 1e.  The most recent iterations were the Syracuse Seven based in Syracuse NY (not exactly local, but several of us had lived there in the past) and the Tri-City Foursome based in the Albany/Schenectady/Troy area.  One advantage to using an area you know IRL is saving time explaining the setting's conventional elements, and as I said on my blog post here there's a lot to be said for using IRL urban history in your game when you can.  Much easier to explain there's a heist at the GE plant when everyone at the table has driven past the place a thousand times.  You can always jam in fictional elements when you want them, and you don't have to spend time developing the mundane infrastructure and demographics and economic parts.
 
For other ideas, I like the "road trip" model where your heroes are wanderers with a shared vehicle or two and drift around the country (or planet, or galaxy as power level allows) running into trouble or trying to avoid it.  Kind of a Scooby Doo with superpowers thing.  Have also had a good time with "occult defense force" games loosely modeled on Bureau 13, which lets you draw from urban fantasy/horror tropes as well as going on the occasional gonzo interdimensional quest.
 
 

One of my long-term gaming buddies was an absolute master at making jerky, with a backyard smokehouse and a whole circle of people he'd send the occasional batch to in exchange for donations of basic materials - especially venison.  He died unexpectedly of a heart attack last winter, and this has been a sad reminder of better times that will never come again.
 
That said, I'm partial to nuts myself, even plain old peanuts.  You might need to be careful of allergies around strangers (nut allergies are no joke and can be deadly) but for home games with people you know are safe they're a go-to for me.  They were better with some home-made jerky though.  Sigh. 

Jerky is good, if its well made.  Dry, tasty, doesn't stain anything or mess up your hands.  I avoid sugar whenever I can so stuff like M&Ms don't work for me.

A big art dump from this spring and summer commissions and doodles.  

Surely you mean heffalumps and woozles, who are at least native to the general region.  You'll have Tuesday Next and her employers on your case if you start importing orcs wholesale.  
 
You can leave out the "fantasy" part there and still be correct.
 
If not, Peter David's Apropos of Nothing trilogy makes a good example of a mockery, as does Bored of the Rings.
 
True, although I can at least envision a game where no PC understands magic diegetically and the players are mostly guessing what it can do based on trial, error and observation.  A Conanesque swords & sorcery game where the sorcery is the province of evil wizards and perhaps the odd weird but helpful NPC, or a world where superstitions and folktales are as close as you get to coherent magical guidelines.  In literary terms, extremely soft magic systems where "a wizard did it" is not automatically an inadequate explanation.  Your stated preferences call for hard magic systems.  Lyndon Hardy's Master of Five Magics, not Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, for ex.
 
Obviously not a compatible concept with someone looking to play a HERO system style mage, or even one from a system that doesn't try to achieve balance through point systems.

Ha!  I am going to be lucky if I find the dedication to get an adventure finished!  I will leave bigger projects to those with a history of finishing things. 

"Sense of direction" might be better in a general context, but "sense" in Hero has additional meanings they may have wanted to avoid.  There's no roll involved, for example.

When I was writing/researching Victorian Hero I struggled with what to include about phrenology. Stick to the facts or since I was mixing history with literature and myth, have some fun with it. In the end, I just couldn’t get past the silliness of it for some reason. 

True, and thank you.  It hadn't occurred to mw to mention the anachronistic nature of the term itself, possibly because there are still a few people I encounter who use it, myself included (though I would have preferred a Bump of Finance, honestly).  Granted, I have had more than one person tell me I talk like my grandfather, so hey-  you get what you get. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
That had never actually occurrred to me; thank you!  Having grown up with the term Bump of Direction, I just assumed it was more commonly-known than it may have actually been.
 
 
 
Phrenology is a real and valid science!  You'll see!  One day you will be willing to trade all of your phlogiston to take back those words!
 
 

Much like Duke Bushido I can recall it from my youth a half-century ago, but even then it wasn't something my age peers used, more my parents and  grandparents.  It's borderline archaic at this point - which is pretty understandable given its close connection with a thoroughly debunked quack science discipline like phrenology.  I think the more prosaic "sense of direction" is the replacement these days.