Rich McGee

As I mentioned, I had some brain fart leading me to think we weren't talking pre-4E.
 
Still don't know if the OP wants to include non-Champions books. My list would boost significantly in that case.

I'm probably going to come across as a Scott Bennie fan boy, because the top three on my list were his products.
 
At the top is Classic Enemies. Scott gathered together the first big collection of a host of published enemies from pre-4E books, updated their stats to the new system, expanded their backgrounds and characters, and presented all that material in a format that became the template for all subsequent villain and hero write-ups.
 
Scott's VIPER source book was the first deep dive into an established Champions organization, tremendously expanding its potential uses in a variety of campaigns.
 
Day of the Destroyer was a brilliantly constructed adventure that cemented Doctor Destroyer as the arch mastermind villain of the Champions Universe.
 
Close behind these I would rank Steve Long's Watchers of the Dragon, a unique blend of martial-arts character compendium, campaign background/setting, adventure series, and fascinating narrative fiction.
 
Dean Shomshak's Ultimate Supermage provided reams of excellent advice and references for magic-focused supers campaigns, and introduced his rich and vivid super-mage campaign setting material and characters. Many additional characters were written up in a companion volume, The Supermage Bestiary. Much of that material was reprinted in various 5E books, but certainly not all of it.
 
I can't really rank my other favorites, so in no particular order: Atlantis, Champions in 3-D, Classic Organizations, Kingdom of Champions, Mystic Masters, PRIMUS. There were very few 4E Champs books that I didn't like, these are just personal highlights for me. And all of them are on sale from the Hero online store, at very reasonable prices.
 
 

Foxbat Unhinged. enough said!

I'll echo LL here: in Classic Enemies, Scott Bennie set the standard for Enenies books, and his 4e VIPER sourcebook set the standard for organization books. Plus having scads of neat characters and campaign concepts!
 
Mystic Masters is the giant on whose shoulders I stood.
 
Aaron Allston's Strike Force is a master class on how to construct and run a campaign, and not just for Champions. I consider it one of the best game supplements, ever.
 
Dean Shomshak

Yeah, its a skill to fill out the stuff a GM needs based on what you come up with in a session when you write an adventure.

It is only when I start trying to write down all the things in my head that I realise how much I am doing on the fly during most of my games...

Begging pardon in advance for my rusty Champions knowledge, but would just having a very high non-combat move (enough to top any PC hero and leave them out of range for attacks almost immediately) and more average SPD do the job as well?  Bit less complicated if that's the concern.  Maybe combine with some kind of smokescreen/jammer/deployable decoys to foil people trying to snipe them down as they depart?
 
Seems likely that one or more Flock members will wind up getting caught somehow (Entangles, grapples, cut off by walls, or just knocked out), but that's a Good Thing if the players need a way to find the Nest and recover the Jovian Egg from the escapees.  If worse comes to worse and they all get away some NPC could have attached some kind of tracker so the plot can move forward.  Bonus points if it's actually some kind of alien musk and the PCs have to bring a friendly but vulnerable extraterrestrial who's part skunk and part bloodhound along to track the scent trail, with little time to prep before it dissipates in high-altitude winds.
 
Much better choice that "tittering" or "gulp" or "conventicle" but that isn't going to be known to the players until afterward, right?  Because it really blows the "more than one of them" twist even if you don't know your collective nouns - and with the internet, everyone who cares can look them up in seconds.  I'm a bird nerd and even I hadn't heard "conventicle" before. 
 
Great word for other purposes.  We need an adventure called "A Conventicle of Cultists" sometime.  Maybe something with DEMON...

Eventually one of the members will, at a later date, adopt individual names and modified the costume for individuality. Heck, one might even adopt the Magpie name.
 
But that is for another adventure.

I am thinking that I might use METE as an organisation (am old fashioned enough to iwn all the latest books but still have 3rd Edition organisations as standard) and that the Flock plan to steal an energy source called the Jovian Egg (due to its shape and high density) from the floating base it calls "The Platform".
 
This is the Flock paying off the organisation (VIPER?) that provided them with the flight suits.  The high profile thefts have, so far, been training missions for Flock members, though the press believe it to be the work of one person (despite mixed eye-witness statements). The press have dubbed this hi-tech highwayman The Magpie and the modus operandi has been to board private jets in flight and Rob the high value passengers of their valuables.  The robberies are daring and "the Magpie" invariably urbane, witty and dashing, though may respond to resistance from guards with deadly force.
 
I expect the PCs, if they do not already belong to a team, to be hired gy one or more of these high-value individuals to stop this predation of the wealthy elite.
 
Investigating the Magpie may or may not reveal there is more than one of them but it should deliver most, if not all of the rest of the plot.  it should also show them that they cannot expect to just chase and catch the Flock.
 
I want The Platform simply as an exotic locale and an excuse to introduce some background characters that the PCs may draw on in future.  I also want to up the stakes where getting it wrong might result in terminal velocity outcomes.
 
I plan for The Platform to be mostly normals but where random aliens might be met should the heroes go there in later adventures.
 
I plan to title the adventure "A mischief of magpies".
 
Now all I need to do is get things done.
 
 

The flying faster is to ensure it is not just a chase, if the Flock hit the open sky, then, barring a lucky shot, they escape.
 
I reckon I want to give them SPD 6 for movement, SPD 3 for any actions.  Wondering what +3 SPD, only for movement is worth?  I see it as acting on 4, 8 and 12 like a highly trained normal, but being able to move on 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12.  This avoids having to give them massive movement and potentially getting caught by turn based movement and allowing more reaction to events.
 
Doc
 
PS: my big concern is that I am getting too complex for a starter game but then I think I want new GMs to be exposed to variety of builds and what CAN be done.  I remember poring over every new published hero and villain looking for hints and tips.

OK.  @Stanley Teriaca suggested a set of adventures for new GMs. I want to try out new ways of planning adventures and so am going to use the ideas on the Champions NEXT thread to prompt those.  If I can settle myself to it, I will try to get full write-up and post.  I want to use this as a holder for discussing the adventure, as I see it, and for related questions.
 
 
 
I plan to have three scenes, 1 - meeting the Flock, 2 - Thwarting the theft, 3 - Cleaning out the Nest.
 
I have some base premises:
Flock can fly faster than PCs.  Flock have good connections Flock have resources Flock are arrogant Flock are exhibitionist  

Like I said, not impossible. But other published artwork for Silverback gives him standard gorilla proportions.
 

 
If you want the OP image to be a gorilla, I can't definitively say that wasn't what the artist intended. Can't say it matters to me either way. It's just a drawing.

Looks a lot like an unusually well-dressed bigfoot/sasquatch/skunk ape to me.  The proportions are closer to the one from the Harry & the Hendersons franchise than a gorilla and (while colors are just guesswork) the exposed skin tone seems lighter. 

Looks a lot like an unusually well-dressed bigfoot/sasquatch/skunk ape to me.  The proportions are closer to the one from the Harry & the Hendersons franchise than a gorilla and (while colors are just guesswork) the exposed skin tone seems lighter. 

Oh yeah ! I love the idea of having my fav character created by Storn finally.
Surely there will be more.

If my wife comes to her senses and walks out, tell him to call me!
 

 
 

Thanks. Contact was from hubby not I ^^
But I know he wants to "surprise" me with a commission for my fav character 😛

If it wasn't for the fact I no longer have a job, and I have no income, I would probally ask for some myself.

Do you know if Storn is usually reactive ?
Noticing this post, my hubby contacted him for some commission two days ago, but without even a notice his message was read.
 
 

Design Mechanism has done supers (and a much better job of it than Superworld ever managed) with Destined, and there's whatever Luther Arkwright qualifies as (alt-history?  dimension hopping?  sort-of-time travel?) qualifies as, plus some other science fiction of varying degrees of firmness.  Their output is a mix of BRP, its close cousin Mythras and some modded Runequest and d100 system, all of which share enough similarities that they overlap a fair bit and are pretty trivial to port between. 
 
There's others out there but they're the most prolific single publisher AFAIK.
 
Heck, Chaosium did straight hard scifi with Ringworld back in the day using modded BRP, and Hawkmoon was post-apocalytic sci-fantasy, not straight fantasy.  As Worlds of Wonder demonstrated, the engine can do anything.

Design Mechanism has done supers (and a much better job of it than Superworld ever managed) with Destined, and there's whatever Luther Arkwright qualifies as (alt-history?  dimension hopping?  sort-of-time travel?) qualifies as, plus some other science fiction of varying degrees of firmness.  Their output is a mix of BRP, its close cousin Mythras and some modded Runequest and d100 system, all of which share enough similarities that they overlap a fair bit and are pretty trivial to port between. 
 
There's others out there but they're the most prolific single publisher AFAIK.
 
Heck, Chaosium did straight hard scifi with Ringworld back in the day using modded BRP, and Hawkmoon was post-apocalytic sci-fantasy, not straight fantasy.  As Worlds of Wonder demonstrated, the engine can do anything.

BRP was the house engine for every RPG Chaosium did for years, I think Pendragon was the first of their games that really broke from it rather than just making mods.  I must have had half a dozen copies of the original little booklet from buying RQ2, Worlds of Wonder, Superworld, Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, Elfquest, Call of Cthulhu, etc, etc.  The new edition that came out last year is a big hardcover with a very reasonable price and more versatile than ever.
 
"Do Everything" game engines are more popular than ever, and there's a huge amount of competition in the field at this point - which is part of the reason Hero isn't thriving.  Just off the top of my head, other currently available options include:
 
GURPS
Genesys
Cortex Prime
FATE
Savage Worlds
the Apocalypse Engine, ie what all those Powered By the Apocalypse games use
Cypher
Cepheus
BESM
Year Zero
several different things using d6 in the title, not least of which being the engine WEG used for the original Star Wars
 
and I'm probably forgetting a bunch, including who knows how many small-publisher efforts on DTRPG
 
Outside of the D&D crowd I'd say a majority of roleplayers these days are more interested in either "Do Everything" engines or extremely rules-light hyper-specific systems.  Mid-to-high complexity systems dedicated to a specific game/setting are somewhat out of style these days.  That should be good for Hero, but it's got a lot of competitors and a bad rep for being extremely high-crunch.  Unless it finds  away to promote itself better that's going to continue to be a barrier to gaining new players, although I doubt it's really bleeding many at this point.  There's worse things to be stuck in than a stable holding pattern, but it's not sustainable long-term.  People get old and quit or outright die, and Hero has been around long enough that fan base attrition through age is an increasing concern.

I've played a lot of Sentinels and that definitely isn't the case for homebrew adventures, anyway.  Montage scenes rarely require any GM planning at all, and Social scenes don't need anything more than maybe a list of what your NPC motivations and info are so you can carry out a sensible conversation using them.  Action scenes are where most of the mechanical prep time for a session goes, and usually where the bulk of your table time will be spent because that's where most of the mechanics (and all the combat) live.  It's really only that last category that calls for much detail, and even that varies wildly.  When I'm prepping I'll prep a climactic combat (or chase, or heist, or whatever - they're all Action) and maybe a second Action scene to set up for it, but usually I do just one and throw together any others on the fly.  Once you know your way around the scene design system and have a stable of enemies and challenges to draw from it's easier than it looks.
 
That "Stop Fracture's Plot" thing isn't even a scene anyway.  It's a (quite complex) challenge, which is a type of scene element.  You have a budget based on how many PC heroes there are to "buy" scene elements when creating an action scene.  That particular challenge is a doozy and probably counted as a Difficult element, which means either the whole scene was meant to be rough (which is probably the case - that scene was the adventure climax IIRC), or it "cost" two elements in a standard scene.  Assuming there thing's written for 4-5 heroes there would be other elements - the villain Fracture is probably another one or two chunks of your budget, and there's likely an environment producing complications for one or both sides.  For larger groups there'd be some lesser challenge or threat to deal with as well.
 
If anyone wants to dig deeper into this chunk of Sentinels there are a bunch of articles on scene design, scene elements, and an example of a (rather over-scripted) climactic scene over on my Sentinels blog, which are most easily accessed through the sub-index page here.
 
Interesting challenge, BTW.  You really, really do not want Baron Blade completing that Meanwhile track (he'll escape if he does so, and this is a Doctor Doom-tier villain in the setting), so taking the shortcut route to draw out Fracture puts a real tight clock on you wrapping up the scene fast.  You're probably much better off breaking in to the rocket and dealing with Fracture afterward, even though it costs more actions (and probably triggers more twists) to do so.
Now that's a full adventure draft, and might even take multiple sessions.  In Sentinels it would consist of several scenes of each type, probably something like:
 
Montage scene to locate the Foxbat Cave (which is probably in the penthouse of an abandoned skyscraper knowing FB), maybe mixed with one or more Social scenes with potential informants.
Action scene to deal with Leroy and the no-doubt fearsomely unreliable Foxbat Cave defenses.
Montage scene to heal up (the system expects you to take damage a lot but heal from it rapidly during Montage breaks) and possibly get some clues/bonuses going forward from investigating the lair.
Social scene to interrogate Leroy - a good time to use those bonuses from teh scene before if you have to improve your odds of getting info out of him.
Probably a combined Action scene where the players need to split up at first to deal with the bombs, then come together to deal with FB in person - although there are other ways to do if you wanted.  FB by himself isn't beating a hero team, but he might run the scene tracker out on them and escape if they took enough time dealing with a couple of complex bomb challenges - or if some heroes got blown up while trying.   
 
That'd be a full 3-5 hour session in Sentinels depending on how fast (and numerous) your players are.  Only thing I'd be worried about is how linear it is - offering some branching approaches so everything doesn't have to be done in order would be less of a railroad, and provide a little more flexibility for when your players inevitably do something utterly unexpected.

I've played a lot of Sentinels and that definitely isn't the case for homebrew adventures, anyway.  Montage scenes rarely require any GM planning at all, and Social scenes don't need anything more than maybe a list of what your NPC motivations and info are so you can carry out a sensible conversation using them.  Action scenes are where most of the mechanical prep time for a session goes, and usually where the bulk of your table time will be spent because that's where most of the mechanics (and all the combat) live.  It's really only that last category that calls for much detail, and even that varies wildly.  When I'm prepping I'll prep a climactic combat (or chase, or heist, or whatever - they're all Action) and maybe a second Action scene to set up for it, but usually I do just one and throw together any others on the fly.  Once you know your way around the scene design system and have a stable of enemies and challenges to draw from it's easier than it looks.
 
That "Stop Fracture's Plot" thing isn't even a scene anyway.  It's a (quite complex) challenge, which is a type of scene element.  You have a budget based on how many PC heroes there are to "buy" scene elements when creating an action scene.  That particular challenge is a doozy and probably counted as a Difficult element, which means either the whole scene was meant to be rough (which is probably the case - that scene was the adventure climax IIRC), or it "cost" two elements in a standard scene.  Assuming there thing's written for 4-5 heroes there would be other elements - the villain Fracture is probably another one or two chunks of your budget, and there's likely an environment producing complications for one or both sides.  For larger groups there'd be some lesser challenge or threat to deal with as well.
 
If anyone wants to dig deeper into this chunk of Sentinels there are a bunch of articles on scene design, scene elements, and an example of a (rather over-scripted) climactic scene over on my Sentinels blog, which are most easily accessed through the sub-index page here.
 
Interesting challenge, BTW.  You really, really do not want Baron Blade completing that Meanwhile track (he'll escape if he does so, and this is a Doctor Doom-tier villain in the setting), so taking the shortcut route to draw out Fracture puts a real tight clock on you wrapping up the scene fast.  You're probably much better off breaking in to the rocket and dealing with Fracture afterward, even though it costs more actions (and probably triggers more twists) to do so.
Now that's a full adventure draft, and might even take multiple sessions.  In Sentinels it would consist of several scenes of each type, probably something like:
 
Montage scene to locate the Foxbat Cave (which is probably in the penthouse of an abandoned skyscraper knowing FB), maybe mixed with one or more Social scenes with potential informants.
Action scene to deal with Leroy and the no-doubt fearsomely unreliable Foxbat Cave defenses.
Montage scene to heal up (the system expects you to take damage a lot but heal from it rapidly during Montage breaks) and possibly get some clues/bonuses going forward from investigating the lair.
Social scene to interrogate Leroy - a good time to use those bonuses from teh scene before if you have to improve your odds of getting info out of him.
Probably a combined Action scene where the players need to split up at first to deal with the bombs, then come together to deal with FB in person - although there are other ways to do if you wanted.  FB by himself isn't beating a hero team, but he might run the scene tracker out on them and escape if they took enough time dealing with a couple of complex bomb challenges - or if some heroes got blown up while trying.   
 
That'd be a full 3-5 hour session in Sentinels depending on how fast (and numerous) your players are.  Only thing I'd be worried about is how linear it is - offering some branching approaches so everything doesn't have to be done in order would be less of a railroad, and provide a little more flexibility for when your players inevitably do something utterly unexpected.

I have been playing this game so long, I tend to do everything by judging things by eye.  And I adjust on the fly depending on what the dice throw up and the way the players react.
 
It is not something you can really teach someone to do except by delivering them the same experience over time.  Reading other systems is enlightening though. I have been reading the Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG and the bought adventures have (I rthink) a fantastic structure.  It really does make you think, as a GM, and probably will provide a bit more structure for the players.  The GM notes for one scene looks as follows.
 

 
The question is whether you guys do anything similar for HERO and whether it would be useful for published HERO scenarios to do something like this too?
 
Doc