Instead of starting with a book to review, I decided to grab the lone CD to see what it held for me. The CD contained a piece of Windows software by the name of Hero Lab by Lone Wolf Development. The software was a demo version of Hero Lab which would not allow me to save/print, but that’s OK. It gave me a taste of the software. It also came with a handful of systems, and I toyed around with all of them. The systems it came with were Cortex (which was broken), d20, Mutants and Masterminds, Savages Worlds, and Vampire: The Requiem. I was familiar with most of the systems, so using the software was very easy.

Free RPG Day 2009 - Hero Lab CD

The interface for the software was top-notch and flowed quite well. The conflict resolver was very well written, and it guided me through making a handful of characters, even if I couldn’t do anything with them.

Did the demo entice me to run out and spend $30 on the software? Nope. I suppose if I liked making characters electronically, I would go for it. However, I’m a very old school character creator. Give me a handful of dice (unless it’s a point-buy system), a sheet of paper (or maybe a good character sheet), and a pencil (with a good eraser). That’s all I need for creating characters. The only exception I make to this is the Hero Builder for Hero Systems. It just streamlines everything so well, I can’t help but use their creator for new characters, especially when I’m running the game and have to come up with bad guys on the fly.

The main downside to the software is that each system must be purchased separately. If you play in three different game systems and want to use this software for all of them, you’re looking at a total layout of $70. It’s $30 for the software and a system. Then it’s $20 per system after that. With a pricing structure like that, things can get pretty steep pretty fast.

Grade: A-  (The ‘-’ part of the grade reflects my personal preference towards pencil/paper character creation.)