There you have it. European Enemies debugged to the best of my ability. I can’t promise any of this will be useful to you, but hopefully it provided some entertainment.
Some may ask "What makes the book so bad?" There is no one answer to this, but the simplest is "poor writing." And I don’t mean poor as in technically poor (although the writing is no great shakes in that department either), but poor in terms of research, concept, and execution. The book has a number of characters whose origins are clichés, stereotypes, or just plain absurd. A notable lack of imagination seems to have gone into some characters (such as Godfather, Napoleon of Crime, Inquisition, and others), as seen in cases where the writer simply grabs something a country is well known for, then adds some super powers to the concept.
I have been told the writer didn’t know the HERO System well, which makes me wonder how he got the job. Granted, at one time, HERO published Enemies books left and right (let’s see, there was Enemies I, Enemies II, Enemies III, Enemies : The International File, Enemies for Hire, European Enemies , High-Tech Enemies , Horror Enemies, Villainy Unbound, and to be complete—Allies and Normals Unbound. Did I miss any?), and a good Enemies book will have characters, concepts, powers, and designs that anyone should be able to take advantage of and use. European Enemies has precious little going for it.
The book has maybe 2-3 decent designs (Bastion of Budapest, Carpathia, Vlad) that can be worked into an even better design. There are maybe 4-6 more that need serious work to be useful. Some are totally useless (all of Argent Anarky, Enigma, Godfather, Mandelbrot, Inquisition, Spector, Thespian). But as the debugging sheets show, every single character (except Das Wall) will require error correction, not to mention reworking and quite possibly, a complete rewrite. So why bother?