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I grabbed this as soon as I saw it, being a big Robin. D. Laws fan - for those of you who don't know his work, he's written two of the finest sourcebooks ever, GURPS FANTASY 2: THE MAD LANDS and WEATHER THE CUCKOO LIKES, for Over The Edge, as well as much other fine work and virtually the only good roleplaying novel ever published, PIERCED HEART. I've also played RuneQuest (occasionally) since I was about ten, and have a vague fondness for Glorantha as a consequence, and I'd heard good rumours about the game on the web.

For my money, I got a 256 page Player's Guide, a 176 page Narrator's Guide, and a 126 (I think ...) page book of Gloranthan myths and stories. Oh, and a booklet of character sheets, a glossary, and a not very good map. So, what was the game like? All in all, I was a little disappointed and quite frustrated. There's a really good game hiding in HERO WARS, but it takes some effort to find. Let's summarise -

Strengths: Well, it's Glorantha, which is an amazingly well-developed fantasy world. Character generation is nifty: you write a hundred-word summary of your character and derive abilities from that. Everybody gets groovy magic of one kind or another. The Heroquest system, whereby you reenact myths in the spirit world to gain power for yourself and your community, is really nicely done, and the sample adventures are good. Finally, the system is very neat, and I'll try to describe it below -

At the most basic level, you try and roll under your skill on a D20. 1s are criticals, 20s are fumbles, below your skill is a success, above is a failure. If you're competing with someone else - or against a 'resistance' set by the GM, you both roll, and lowest success wins.

This is complicated by the addition of mastery levels. If your skill goes over 20, you drop 20 and keep the rest as a mastered skill - so 24 is actually a mastered skill of 4. Essentially, if you're a master of a skill, you get to automatically 'bump' your success up a level, provided you're competing against someone of a lower mastery level. (If you've got two mastery levels, and they've got none, you get to bump twice - pretty much an automatically victory). So, if you've got a mastered skill of 5 and you roll a 13, it's a success. If you roll a 4, it's a critical success. If both opponents have the same level of mastery, they cancel each other and they act as normal skills - which I can see being a little bit ridiculous with Mastered skills at low levels. Players start with one skill mastered at 5 and two more at 1 - the 1s seem a trifle mean, I'd make them 2s.

The niftiest part is that long contests are resolved with Action Points, an abstract concept representing positional advantage, wounds, good taunts - pretty much everything. You wager a certain amount of your APs (which start equal to your skill) with every contest, and either you or your opponent loses that many, depending on who wins that round. It's more complex than that, but that's the basic mechanism. Nice system, usable for all kinds of conflicts, and designed to encourage player and GM description and drama.

Weaknesses: The layout is truly terrible. The chapters are in a very poor order - why, for instance, are the Gods stuck in the middle of the book, taking up a lot of space, rather than in the Magic chapter at the end? You don't reach the system until half-way through the book, which makes everything else rather confusing. There's lots of basic errors like gaps in the middle of lines, words done in bold by accident, and tables split across two pages, with the headers on one side and the bulk of the text on the other. My copy is badly printed, fading irritatingly on many pages. Most annoyingly of all, there's NO INDEX - surely a cardinal sin.

Mr. Laws' writing was disappointingly poor, too. Compared to his normal fluent and witty style, it seemed rather flat. Important game terms are often skipped over briefly or defined poorly - the magic chapter, in particular, suffers from this. I'm still not certain of the distinction between the use of affinities and feats, for example, or under what conditions a starting character can be a devotee of a god rather than an initiate.

Much of the game feels like it's been cut down from a much longer draft, and, indeed, I see that we're expected to buy the Guide to Glorantha and Player's Guides for each culture, each the size of the main rulebook. In general, the game reads as though the author knew the rules and concepts so well himself he didn't realize that they needed much clearer explanation for first-time readers.

Oh, and the cover art is pretty sucky.

Overall, then, it's badly laid out, the writing style is flat, many concepts need much better explanations, you're probably going to have to spend as much again to acquire essential sourcebooks ... and yet, and yet, the core system is a good, possibly a great one, the setting is full of potential, the culture books look as though they could be excellent ... underneath all the clutter, in fact, there's the bones of a very playable game with a strong mythic feel - and certainly the best system for Glorantha ever written. Gloranthan fans should probably snap it up right now; others should wait until a well-revised second edition comes out.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 3 (Average)

Deluxe Hero Wars
Author: Robin Laws Category: game Company/Publisher: Issaries Line: Hero Wars Cost: £25 ($45?) Page count: Oh, about 500 pages when added up, trade paperback size Capsule Review by James Palmer on 05/18/00. Genre tags: Fantasy	I grabbed this as soon as I saw it, being a big Robin. D. Laws fan - for those of you who don't know his work, he's written two of the finest sourcebooks ever, GURPS FANTASY 2: THE MAD LANDS and WEATHER THE CUCKOO LIKES, for Over The Edge, as well as much other fine work and virtually the only good roleplaying novel ever published, PIERCED HEART. I've also played RuneQuest (occasionally) since I was about ten, and have a vague fondness for Glorantha as a consequence, and I'd heard good rumours about the game on the web. For my money, I got a 256 page Player's Guide, a 176 page Narrator's Guide, and a 126 (I think ...) page book of Gloranthan myths and stories. Oh, and a booklet of character sheets, a glossary, and a not very good map. So, what was the game like? All in all, I was a little disappointed and quite frustrated. There's a really good game hiding in HERO WARS, but it takes some effort to find. Let's summarise - Strengths: Well, it's Glorantha, which is an amazingly well-developed fantasy world. Character generation is nifty: you write a hundred-word summary of your character and derive abilities from that. Everybody gets groovy magic of one kind or another. The Heroquest system, whereby you reenact myths in the spirit world to gain power for yourself and your community, is really nicely done, and the sample adventures are good. Finally, the system is very neat, and I'll try to describe it below - At the most basic level, you try and roll under your skill on a D20. 1s are criticals, 20s are fumbles, below your skill is a success, above is a failure. If you're competing with someone else - or against a 'resistance' set by the GM, you both roll, and lowest success wins. This is complicated by the addition of mastery levels. If your skill goes over 20, you drop 20 and keep the rest as a mastered skill - so 24 is actually a mastered skill of 4. Essentially, if you're a master of a skill, you get to automatically 'bump' your success up a level, provided you're competing against someone of a lower mastery level. (If you've got two mastery levels, and they've got none, you get to bump twice - pretty much an automatically victory). So, if you've got a mastered skill of 5 and you roll a 13, it's a success. If you roll a 4, it's a critical success. If both opponents have the same level of mastery, they cancel each other and they act as normal skills - which I can see being a little bit ridiculous with Mastered skills at low levels. Players start with one skill mastered at 5 and two more at 1 - the 1s seem a trifle mean, I'd make them 2s. The niftiest part is that long contests are resolved with Action Points, an abstract concept representing positional advantage, wounds, good taunts - pretty much everything. You wager a certain amount of your APs (which start equal to your skill) with every contest, and either you or your opponent loses that many, depending on who wins that round. It's more complex than that, but that's the basic mechanism. Nice system, usable for all kinds of conflicts, and designed to encourage player and GM description and drama. Weaknesses: The layout is truly terrible. The chapters are in a very poor order - why, for instance, are the Gods stuck in the middle of the book, taking up a lot of space, rather than in the Magic chapter at the end? You don't reach the system until half-way through the book, which makes everything else rather confusing. There's lots of basic errors like gaps in the middle of lines, words done in bold by accident, and tables split across two pages, with the headers on one side and the bulk of the text on the other. My copy is badly printed, fading irritatingly on many pages. Most annoyingly of all, there's NO INDEX - surely a cardinal sin. Mr. Laws' writing was disappointingly poor, too. Compared to his normal fluent and witty style, it seemed rather flat. Important game terms are often skipped over briefly or defined poorly - the magic chapter, in particular, suffers from this. I'm still not certain of the distinction between the use of affinities and feats, for example, or under what conditions a starting character can be a devotee of a god rather than an initiate. Much of the game feels like it's been cut down from a much longer draft, and, indeed, I see that we're expected to buy the Guide to Glorantha and Player's Guides for each culture, each the size of the main rulebook. In general, the game reads as though the author knew the rules and concepts so well himself he didn't realize that they needed much clearer explanation for first-time readers. Oh, and the cover art is pretty sucky. Overall, then, it's badly laid out, the writing style is flat, many concepts need much better explanations, you're probably going to have to spend as much again to acquire essential sourcebooks ... and yet, and yet, the core system is a good, possibly a great one, the setting is full of potential, the culture books look as though they could be excellent ... underneath all the clutter, in fact, there's the bones of a very playable game with a strong mythic feel - and certainly the best system for Glorantha ever written. Gloranthan fans should probably snap it up right now; others should wait until a well-revised second edition comes out. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 3 (Average)

Deluxe Hero Wars