Old School Champions - Adventurers Club #1

Hero had its own house magazine for many years - Adventurers Club! This is the first issue dated Fall of 1983. It was allegedly a quarterly publication but it came and went at its own pace during the 80's and 90's. Issue 20 was published in 1993 so you can do the math there. It's a 32-page black and white booklet (other than the outside cover).

The content of this inaugural issue is pretty solid.

• We start with the editor's column explaining the purpose of the magazine. 
• We then get a designer's notes/rules question column for all of the hero system games. 
• Then we get stats for the Awesome Exo-Skeleton Man! I always liked the Foxbat stuff in the various Champions books and this just adds to the legend. 
• We get the police academy and police detective package deals for Espionage.
• There is a column on Champions power variants for Endurance Reserve and Multi-Form
• The letters column is "Foxbat and Fandom" where Foxbat answers the reader mail and it gets off to a fine start in this issue. Also, if you get the joke in the title YOU ARE OLD! Like me, apparently ...
• The middle of the magazine is a 16 page adventure called "The Mechanon Gambit" that I would be happy to run today. There's a secret base underneath the local airport and Pulsar wants what's in it. There's information on the airport including a full hexmap of the area in the center spread of the book. There's a tactical map of the main encounter area in the airport, a tactical map of the secret base, stats for participants like thugs and airport security, and a fairly solid plan for the villains. There are also notes on how to include some of the other back-of-the-book Champions villains in the adventure too - it's a good solid piece of work and it's better than some of the stuff I see now.

I had never read this issue until I picked it up earlier this year. I do own quite a few of the later issues as I always found it to be a source of creative use and interpretation of the mechanics and a rich source of the  Champions meta-verse with Foxbat and the rest. I wasn't sure how good this first issue would be but I really liked it. Stuff like this still makes me laugh:

 So, Adventurers Club: Issue 1 is good, and I will be walking thru the rest of them as I can work them in.