Champions is a role-playing game published by Hero Games designed to simulate a superhero comic book world. It was originally created by George MacDonald and Steve Peterson in collaboration with Rob Bell, Bruce Harlick and Ray Greer. The latest edition of the game uses the sixth edition of the Hero System, as revised by Steve Long, and was written by Aaron Allston, and was released in early 2010. Though the first version was published in 1981, and was one of the first tabletop role-playing games in which character generation was based on a point-buy system instead of random dice rolls, in which the player would decide what to play, and use a given number of character points to determine how powerful or how many abilities or skills a character has. Champions does not use character classes, but many of its available powers allow players to create characters based on many superhero archetypes, or to even create characters which fall into multiple archetypes.
Much of the setting within Champions takes place within a fictional world full of superheroes, and primarily within an alternate version of Detroit known as Millenium City, in which after its destruction by Dr. Destroyer, Detroit was rebuilt using the newest technologies and renamed. It's the standard superhero setting featuring radiation superpowers, alien civilizations, superpowered aliens, energy projectors, magic, and organizations with advanced technology. Pretty much any trope you'd expect to see in a superhero comic is present here. Notably, it also features the Champions superhero team, with its own established superheros and even rival villains.
A MMORPG based on the license was developed by Cryptic Studios, who had previously developed City of Heroes, and was working on a Marvel Universe MMORPG before turning it into a now defunct Diablo clone, and turning the original MMORPG pitch into Champions Online, released in 2009. The game takes place in the established Champions universe and features classic Champions heroes and villains as NPCs. It should be noted that almost nobody plays this game anymore except those in it for its character customization, but feats and lore stuff from Champions Online will also be looked at in this thread.