The Inside Scoop on Gaming

This is a disappointing product, not because it's bad but because it does not fulfill its considerable promise. Robin D. Laws' rules engine is elegant and innovative, but badly handicapped by poor presentation. Glorantha is probably the best-developed fantasy world in gaming (and maybe even outside it), but you wouldn't know that from the information in this box. And the overall production is shoddy for any game, and particularly for a "Deluxe" boxed set.

The Good Stuff: Rules

Character design involves writing a 100-word description and deriving your game stats from that, or just making a list if you can't stand the idea of writing out complete sentences, or just starting with a basic concept and fleshing out the numbers in the first session or two. The baseline numbers seem a bit weak for characters described as "experienced local troubleshooters," but the game should be easy to customize to any power level you like. Obviously the system follows in the Over the Edge tradition of individually-defined characters; for instance, there is no standard list of attributes (strength, dexterity, etc). Much of your character, however, will be determined by your three "keywords," which give your home culture, your basic profession, and the magic you know (typically, the god that you worship).

This is a good approach, both for experienced gamers (who tend to appreciate the flexibility of user-defined character building) and also for newcomers -- if they freeze up at the thought of writing a 100-word description, they can always use one of the other two methods.

This game not only encourages but requires a great deal of input from the individual GM and even players. The rules do not tell you what exactly your skills and especially your magic can do. This vagueness is a feature, not a bug. You are expected to make it up as you go with the GM as referee to disallow the wilder interpretations. Players are encouraged to add elements to the game background, even leaving blank references in their character sheet to be filled in later as the story requires or inspiration strikes. For instance, the sample character's description includes the sentence "Kallai went to the East and learned the secrets of Six Cuts Silk." Neither the player nor the GM needs to know what Six Cuts Silk is at the start of the game.

But it's probably magical because Glorantha is filled with the stuff. There are four basic forms of magic based on distinct (and incompatible) views of the spirit world and it is explicitly stated that there are minor forms and phenomena that do not follow any of those rules. In the theist cultures, which are central to the game as presented, everyone will have significant magical abilities. The other three magics tend to be the province of specialists: wizards & sorcerers, shamans, or mystics. These four magical types are used as the basic distinction between characters.

RuneQuest veterans will find Hero Wars magic quite a bit different from what they remember, and many of them will undoubtedly complain. I like them a lot, but then I don't have any particular attachment to RQ (my previous experiment being limited to a single game of maybe half a dozen sessions). All the magical abilities are stated in general terms with precise capabilities left to be defined by the individual GM or group. Given this level of deliberate vagueness, it is a considerable accomplishment to make the four types as distinct as they are. They also seem fairly well balanced between the four systems, though it may be a bit hard on animists who aren't shamans, or Westerners who aren't wizards or sorcerers, or beginning mystics.

Mechanics

The fundamental mechanic is simple and extraordinarily flexible. Roll under your skill on a d20, with 1 a critical success and 20 a fumble. For almost any task, your opponent also rolls ("the world" has a default skill of 14), and the two results are compared to get the overall level of victory or defeat.

A high level of skill is represented by a "mastery," the equivalent of 20 points in a skill: every mastery raises your success level by one. Thus, an unskilled nobody will seldom defeat a journeyman professional (one mastery) and have only a miniscule chance against a true master (two masteries). The most powerful mortal heroes, who are supposed to be able to take on small armies, may have four masteries, which overlaps with the gods.

While a simple task is resolved using a basic roll vs. roll, a longer or more important challenge adds the concept of "Action Points" or APs, an abstraction representing everything from basic skill to positional advantage to confidence and determination. Your APs start out equal to your skill. In every exchange, both sides wager a certain number of Action Points, which will be lost or exchanged depending on relative success. An ordinary bid is 3 APs, representing a cautious approach, but you can take greater risks if you are confident or need to finish the business quickly. You are told how many APs your opponent(s) have after the first exchange. You lose when your APs drop below zero, and the final amount of negative APs determines the degree of the defeat. The rules comment that this is a much more faithful adaptation of most fictional combats than most RPGs, since it doesn't involve a lot of serious physical wounds. The point is well-taken: most RPG combats would seem terribly bloody in most books, let alone on screen.

There are a number of bells & whistles added, especially for group combats -- in principle, the system handles general melee, or even wars, as well as duels. What is perhaps most notable about the system, however, is that it works just as well for non-combat contests: a footrace, a courtroom trial, bargaining, or (an actual example) a courtship played out with one exchange every couple of months. The system obviously requires a great deal of input to translate from numbers into descriptions. The rules give some advice on how to do this with combat -- most important, do not describe lasting wounds until the final exchange. Outside of combat, the system actually offers more structure for imagining the ongoing course of a contest than most games.

Altogether, the rules are one of the great strengths of Hero Wars. They are unfortunately handicapped by their presentation -- see the long list of problems below. Like most games with dreams of attracting new blood, these rules are friendly to new players, but not to new GMs.

Setting

The other great strength of the game is its setting, Glorantha, Greg Stafford's world of myth. This is an original fantasy world with no connection to Earth. It is hard to express just how rich a background it is: see the background volume or check out the Issaries web site (www.glorantha.com) to learn more. Glorantha is filled with echoes of real cultures and real myths, but with a distinctive flavor of its own. For instance, the storm god Orlanth has a family resemblance to Zeus and Thor (and his followers are recognizably Teutonic), but his mythology is as different from the other two storm gods as they are from each other. Glorantha has forest-dwelling elves, but for once they owe nothing to Tolkien -- they're mobile plants. And so on and on, in more depth than can easily be imagined.

The setting would be cramped even in a book-length introduction (and, in fact, it is -- but that book is not part of Deluxe Hero Wars, and is not reviewed here). This set presents a brief historical overview, and otherwise leaves the details to be absorbed by osmosis from the cultural keywords and lots of name dropping. Limited information about the world as a whole is actually a good design decision, for two reasons: first, Gloranthans tend to have a very local view of their world, so your average character won't know nearly as much about the world as you would after reading the background volume. Second, the world is so rich that it can easily overwhelm newcomers, especially (I would imagine) if they are relatively new to gaming.

The game is set at the onset of the "Hero Wars" (hence the title), a time when many long-simmering problems are coming to a boil -- maybe too many, really, although selection is really fairly simple. The central focus of the game is on the Dragon Pass region, resettled in the last 500 years after the dragons killed everyone in the area. Here the barbarian followers of Orlanth and his Storm Pantheon are rebelling against their recent conquest by the Lunar Empire, a vast, polyglot, and rather creepy imperium founded just a few centuries ago by a newly-born goddess whose rise created the Red Moon. A narrow focus is quite a good idea for a game that intends to be an introduction to Glorantha, and Dragon Pass is surely the best place to start.

The Bad Stuff: Setting

And here the game falls down badly. Deluxe Hero Wars desperately needs a discussion of what is going on in Dragon Pass and what it's like to live there, at least for the Orlanthi and Lunars. There isn't one; there are only a few paragraphs in the introduction, and a set of cultural keywords. That might be enough for the animist Grazers (who have a simple society) and the sorcerous Black Horse Order (which isn't a complete society anyway). It is nowhere close to sufficient for the Orlanthi, let alone the Lunar Empire. It really gives no clue what sort of things are supposed to be happening in Dragon Pass during the Hero Wars, except for a few unexplained references to future events.

The keywords are terse to the point of being obscure, and Hero Wars' "make it up as you go along" approach does not excuse the failure to provide at least a few detailed examples. Indeed, a few magical keywords, especially for animist traditions, are basically incomprehensible as they stand -- e.g. if there was no room to provide more details about, say, the Jakaleel animist tradition (what are moon spirits, and what can they do?), it should have been left to a supplement.

Presentation

The whole point of a boxed game, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, is that a gaming group should be able to buy the set and play the game, needing nothing else except perhaps dice. It also gives the company the opportunity to include game elements other than books, such as dice or cards or a map.

Deluxe Hero Wars fulfills neither of these purposes. The rules are complete, but there is not nearly enough background information. The 112-page book of Gloranthan fiction is no substitute. Granted that I am no fan of gaming fiction in general -- still, while these stories may interest Glorantha fans, they are completely useless as an introduction. The book is chock full of unexplained references, and the stories vary tremendously in style and background. Using this book to decide what kind of game to run would be like basing a game of Greek myths on Oedipus Rex, two chapters from Bullfinch's Mythology, and an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

The box includes a map of Glorantha and one of Dragon Pass. They are neither attractive nor useful: 8 1/2 by 11 inches, black and white, with so little detail that they probably could have been printed in the digest-sized rules with no loss of information. Disappointing is too mild a word: large, colorful, and nice-looking maps have been a standard feature of RPG worlds since Greyhawk, and often seem to be the only justification for offering a boxed set in the first place.

These complaints only begin the long list of errors and bad choices made in the presentation of this game. To expand upon it:

There is no index. I really thought people would know better by now.

The rules have a large number of typoes and errata. The most widespread is the use of the wrong symbols for the "1/2," "1/4," and ellipsis (". . ."): one or more of them crop up on practically every page.

The book layout includes such elementary mistakes as splitting a table with a page break.

The writing in general is often unclear, especially in the magic sections. In several places, important concepts are tucked away in the middle of a paragraph. The basic rules mechanics have adequate examples; the magic rules do not.

The rules are also organized so that all the cultural keywords come just after character generation, before the rules are explained or the basic schools of magic are described. I can see why it was done that way -- the keywords are the basis for character generation -- but it was still a mistake: they are functionally world background, and don't make sense until you've read the magic rules.

The division of material between the Hero Wars rulebook and the Narrators Book is odd; it looks as if they covered everything they had to put in the main rules and then threw in a final chapter on "Advanced Magic" just because it would fit -- much of it is GM information, including near-philosophical material on misapplied worship that no PC can possibly understand. Meanwhile, a major set of rules (for "heroquesting" -- more Advanced Magic, really) is in the Narrators Book. So is the general introduction to Glorantha: this is what should have gone in the rulebook in place of the final chapter. Or, better yet, the specific introduction to Dragon Pass that the set doesn't include.

Some Other Stuff

The Narrators Book in general is a mix of stuff you really need to run the game (the aforementioned background and rules) and extras. There is rather good advice on general gamemastering, and on the community ties which are one of the features of Glorantha. There is a short bestiary, mandatory to get a feel for how to define creatures in Hero Wars stats. There are brief descriptions of four "hero bands" (Orlanthi rebels, a Lunar tourist company, well-intentioned sorcerous mercenaries, and a nasty animist secret society) which give some idea of what sort of adventurer groups exist in the setting. The book concludes with four linked adventures which take up about 30% of the total pages -- too much, although they do serve to introduce several types of conflict. Only the Orlanthi hero band is really suitable for the adventures, although the others might get roped in with some GM ingenuity.

The boxed set also includes some handouts which you have to cut apart yourself. There are character sheets divided by type of magic. There is a useful rules summary, which you can copy and give to players who already understand the mechanics. It has one significant typo. There is a nice glossary of terms important to the rules, which helps to make up for the lack of an index. You can download both of these off the Web; the rules synopsis still had the typo when I did it a few days ago.

There are four sample "hero bands" with brief descriptions reprinted from the Narrators Book in an irritating bit of duplication; this time, they have half a dozen sample characters each. This could allow you to start playing at once if you intend to take the "default" option and play Orlanthi rebels against the Lunar Empire. The other three bands do not follow the guidelines from the rulebook for character generation, and -- presumably as a result -- the sample characters are not balanced: they range from somewhat weaker to substantially more powerful than a beginning character is supposed to be.

The art and physical presentation is okay -- not exceptional, but considerably better than the standards of the text editing. Or the cartography. There seems to be disagreement about the cover; I actually like it, even if Orlanth looks a bit superheroish.

The Bottom Line

There is a lot to like about Hero Wars; the flaws are almost all in the presentation. Many of them relate to my expectations for a boxed set, and would be less disappointing if I'd just bought the rules. So that's what I recommend: do not buy the Deluxe Hero Wars boxed set unless you are a completist and were planning to purchase the entire line anyway. The basic rulebook is worth your while, even with its flaws; you may still want to wait for a second printing which should at least clear up the printing errors. (Issaries does at least have the errata online.) The Narrators Book is something you'll have to spring for even though its value-to-price ratio is substantially lower. Nothing else included in the set is necessary, or even especially useful -- and you can get most of the extras (not the fiction) off the Glorantha website anyway.

After getting the two rulebooks, you'll have spent substantially less than the cost of the boxed set, and be just as thoroughly equipped to run a game. Which is not thoroughly enough, assuming you want to stick to the official Glorantha: you'll probably want the world guidebook and certainly at least one of the (still unpublished) culture books. But these are not strictly required to play, especially if you obey the rules' injunction to make up your own interpretations.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Deluxe Hero Wars
Author: Robin Laws, with Greg Stafford, Roderick Robertson, and Shannon Appel Category: game Company/Publisher: Issaries, Inc. Line: Hero Wars Cost: $45 Page count: 580 ISBN: 1-929052-06-5 SKU: ISS9901 Capsule Review by Craig Neumeier on 07/26/00. Genre tags: Fantasy	This is a disappointing product, not because it's bad but because it does not fulfill its considerable promise. Robin D. Laws' rules engine is elegant and innovative, but badly handicapped by poor presentation. Glorantha is probably the best-developed fantasy world in gaming (and maybe even outside it), but you wouldn't know that from the information in this box. And the overall production is shoddy for any game, and particularly for a "Deluxe" boxed set. The Good Stuff: Rules Character design involves writing a 100-word description and deriving your game stats from that, or just making a list if you can't stand the idea of writing out complete sentences, or just starting with a basic concept and fleshing out the numbers in the first session or two. The baseline numbers seem a bit weak for characters described as "experienced local troubleshooters," but the game should be easy to customize to any power level you like. Obviously the system follows in the Over the Edge tradition of individually-defined characters; for instance, there is no standard list of attributes (strength, dexterity, etc). Much of your character, however, will be determined by your three "keywords," which give your home culture, your basic profession, and the magic you know (typically, the god that you worship). This is a good approach, both for experienced gamers (who tend to appreciate the flexibility of user-defined character building) and also for newcomers -- if they freeze up at the thought of writing a 100-word description, they can always use one of the other two methods. This game not only encourages but requires a great deal of input from the individual GM and even players. The rules do not tell you what exactly your skills and especially your magic can do. This vagueness is a feature, not a bug. You are expected to make it up as you go with the GM as referee to disallow the wilder interpretations. Players are encouraged to add elements to the game background, even leaving blank references in their character sheet to be filled in later as the story requires or inspiration strikes. For instance, the sample character's description includes the sentence "Kallai went to the East and learned the secrets of Six Cuts Silk." Neither the player nor the GM needs to know what Six Cuts Silk is at the start of the game. But it's probably magical because Glorantha is filled with the stuff. There are four basic forms of magic based on distinct (and incompatible) views of the spirit world and it is explicitly stated that there are minor forms and phenomena that do not follow any of those rules. In the theist cultures, which are central to the game as presented, everyone will have significant magical abilities. The other three magics tend to be the province of specialists: wizards & sorcerers, shamans, or mystics. These four magical types are used as the basic distinction between characters. RuneQuest veterans will find Hero Wars magic quite a bit different from what they remember, and many of them will undoubtedly complain. I like them a lot, but then I don't have any particular attachment to RQ (my previous experiment being limited to a single game of maybe half a dozen sessions). All the magical abilities are stated in general terms with precise capabilities left to be defined by the individual GM or group. Given this level of deliberate vagueness, it is a considerable accomplishment to make the four types as distinct as they are. They also seem fairly well balanced between the four systems, though it may be a bit hard on animists who aren't shamans, or Westerners who aren't wizards or sorcerers, or beginning mystics. Mechanics The fundamental mechanic is simple and extraordinarily flexible. Roll under your skill on a d20, with 1 a critical success and 20 a fumble. For almost any task, your opponent also rolls ("the world" has a default skill of 14), and the two results are compared to get the overall level of victory or defeat. A high level of skill is represented by a "mastery," the equivalent of 20 points in a skill: every mastery raises your success level by one. Thus, an unskilled nobody will seldom defeat a journeyman professional (one mastery) and have only a miniscule chance against a true master (two masteries). The most powerful mortal heroes, who are supposed to be able to take on small armies, may have four masteries, which overlaps with the gods. While a simple task is resolved using a basic roll vs. roll, a longer or more important challenge adds the concept of "Action Points" or APs, an abstraction representing everything from basic skill to positional advantage to confidence and determination. Your APs start out equal to your skill. In every exchange, both sides wager a certain number of Action Points, which will be lost or exchanged depending on relative success. An ordinary bid is 3 APs, representing a cautious approach, but you can take greater risks if you are confident or need to finish the business quickly. You are told how many APs your opponent(s) have after the first exchange. You lose when your APs drop below zero, and the final amount of negative APs determines the degree of the defeat. The rules comment that this is a much more faithful adaptation of most fictional combats than most RPGs, since it doesn't involve a lot of serious physical wounds. The point is well-taken: most RPG combats would seem terribly bloody in most books, let alone on screen. There are a number of bells & whistles added, especially for group combats -- in principle, the system handles general melee, or even wars, as well as duels. What is perhaps most notable about the system, however, is that it works just as well for non-combat contests: a footrace, a courtroom trial, bargaining, or (an actual example) a courtship played out with one exchange every couple of months. The system obviously requires a great deal of input to translate from numbers into descriptions. The rules give some advice on how to do this with combat -- most important, do not describe lasting wounds until the final exchange. Outside of combat, the system actually offers more structure for imagining the ongoing course of a contest than most games. Altogether, the rules are one of the great strengths of Hero Wars. They are unfortunately handicapped by their presentation -- see the long list of problems below. Like most games with dreams of attracting new blood, these rules are friendly to new players, but not to new GMs. Setting The other great strength of the game is its setting, Glorantha, Greg Stafford's world of myth. This is an original fantasy world with no connection to Earth. It is hard to express just how rich a background it is: see the background volume or check out the Issaries web site (www.glorantha.com) to learn more. Glorantha is filled with echoes of real cultures and real myths, but with a distinctive flavor of its own. For instance, the storm god Orlanth has a family resemblance to Zeus and Thor (and his followers are recognizably Teutonic), but his mythology is as different from the other two storm gods as they are from each other. Glorantha has forest-dwelling elves, but for once they owe nothing to Tolkien -- they're mobile plants. And so on and on, in more depth than can easily be imagined. The setting would be cramped even in a book-length introduction (and, in fact, it is -- but that book is not part of Deluxe Hero Wars, and is not reviewed here). This set presents a brief historical overview, and otherwise leaves the details to be absorbed by osmosis from the cultural keywords and lots of name dropping. Limited information about the world as a whole is actually a good design decision, for two reasons: first, Gloranthans tend to have a very local view of their world, so your average character won't know nearly as much about the world as you would after reading the background volume. Second, the world is so rich that it can easily overwhelm newcomers, especially (I would imagine) if they are relatively new to gaming. The game is set at the onset of the "Hero Wars" (hence the title), a time when many long-simmering problems are coming to a boil -- maybe too many, really, although selection is really fairly simple. The central focus of the game is on the Dragon Pass region, resettled in the last 500 years after the dragons killed everyone in the area. Here the barbarian followers of Orlanth and his Storm Pantheon are rebelling against their recent conquest by the Lunar Empire, a vast, polyglot, and rather creepy imperium founded just a few centuries ago by a newly-born goddess whose rise created the Red Moon. A narrow focus is quite a good idea for a game that intends to be an introduction to Glorantha, and Dragon Pass is surely the best place to start. The Bad Stuff: Setting And here the game falls down badly. Deluxe Hero Wars desperately needs a discussion of what is going on in Dragon Pass and what it's like to live there, at least for the Orlanthi and Lunars. There isn't one; there are only a few paragraphs in the introduction, and a set of cultural keywords. That might be enough for the animist Grazers (who have a simple society) and the sorcerous Black Horse Order (which isn't a complete society anyway). It is nowhere close to sufficient for the Orlanthi, let alone the Lunar Empire. It really gives no clue what sort of things are supposed to be happening in Dragon Pass during the Hero Wars, except for a few unexplained references to future events. The keywords are terse to the point of being obscure, and Hero Wars' "make it up as you go along" approach does not excuse the failure to provide at least a few detailed examples. Indeed, a few magical keywords, especially for animist traditions, are basically incomprehensible as they stand -- e.g. if there was no room to provide more details about, say, the Jakaleel animist tradition (what are moon spirits, and what can they do?), it should have been left to a supplement. Presentation The whole point of a boxed game, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, is that a gaming group should be able to buy the set and play the game, needing nothing else except perhaps dice. It also gives the company the opportunity to include game elements other than books, such as dice or cards or a map. Deluxe Hero Wars fulfills neither of these purposes. The rules are complete, but there is not nearly enough background information. The 112-page book of Gloranthan fiction is no substitute. Granted that I am no fan of gaming fiction in general -- still, while these stories may interest Glorantha fans, they are completely useless as an introduction. The book is chock full of unexplained references, and the stories vary tremendously in style and background. Using this book to decide what kind of game to run would be like basing a game of Greek myths on Oedipus Rex, two chapters from Bullfinch's Mythology, and an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. The box includes a map of Glorantha and one of Dragon Pass. They are neither attractive nor useful: 8 1/2 by 11 inches, black and white, with so little detail that they probably could have been printed in the digest-sized rules with no loss of information. Disappointing is too mild a word: large, colorful, and nice-looking maps have been a standard feature of RPG worlds since Greyhawk, and often seem to be the only justification for offering a boxed set in the first place. These complaints only begin the long list of errors and bad choices made in the presentation of this game. To expand upon it: There is no index. I really thought people would know better by now. The rules have a large number of typoes and errata. The most widespread is the use of the wrong symbols for the "1/2," "1/4," and ellipsis (". . ."): one or more of them crop up on practically every page. The book layout includes such elementary mistakes as splitting a table with a page break. The writing in general is often unclear, especially in the magic sections. In several places, important concepts are tucked away in the middle of a paragraph. The basic rules mechanics have adequate examples; the magic rules do not. The rules are also organized so that all the cultural keywords come just after character generation, before the rules are explained or the basic schools of magic are described. I can see why it was done that way -- the keywords are the basis for character generation -- but it was still a mistake: they are functionally world background, and don't make sense until you've read the magic rules. The division of material between the Hero Wars rulebook and the Narrators Book is odd; it looks as if they covered everything they had to put in the main rules and then threw in a final chapter on "Advanced Magic" just because it would fit -- much of it is GM information, including near-philosophical material on misapplied worship that no PC can possibly understand. Meanwhile, a major set of rules (for "heroquesting" -- more Advanced Magic, really) is in the Narrators Book. So is the general introduction to Glorantha: this is what should have gone in the rulebook in place of the final chapter. Or, better yet, the specific introduction to Dragon Pass that the set doesn't include. Some Other Stuff The Narrators Book in general is a mix of stuff you really need to run the game (the aforementioned background and rules) and extras. There is rather good advice on general gamemastering, and on the community ties which are one of the features of Glorantha. There is a short bestiary, mandatory to get a feel for how to define creatures in Hero Wars stats. There are brief descriptions of four "hero bands" (Orlanthi rebels, a Lunar tourist company, well-intentioned sorcerous mercenaries, and a nasty animist secret society) which give some idea of what sort of adventurer groups exist in the setting. The book concludes with four linked adventures which take up about 30% of the total pages -- too much, although they do serve to introduce several types of conflict. Only the Orlanthi hero band is really suitable for the adventures, although the others might get roped in with some GM ingenuity. The boxed set also includes some handouts which you have to cut apart yourself. There are character sheets divided by type of magic. There is a useful rules summary, which you can copy and give to players who already understand the mechanics. It has one significant typo. There is a nice glossary of terms important to the rules, which helps to make up for the lack of an index. You can download both of these off the Web; the rules synopsis still had the typo when I did it a few days ago. There are four sample "hero bands" with brief descriptions reprinted from the Narrators Book in an irritating bit of duplication; this time, they have half a dozen sample characters each. This could allow you to start playing at once if you intend to take the "default" option and play Orlanthi rebels against the Lunar Empire. The other three bands do not follow the guidelines from the rulebook for character generation, and -- presumably as a result -- the sample characters are not balanced: they range from somewhat weaker to substantially more powerful than a beginning character is supposed to be. The art and physical presentation is okay -- not exceptional, but considerably better than the standards of the text editing. Or the cartography. There seems to be disagreement about the cover; I actually like it, even if Orlanth looks a bit superheroish. The Bottom Line There is a lot to like about Hero Wars; the flaws are almost all in the presentation. Many of them relate to my expectations for a boxed set, and would be less disappointing if I'd just bought the rules. So that's what I recommend: do not buy the Deluxe Hero Wars boxed set unless you are a completist and were planning to purchase the entire line anyway. The basic rulebook is worth your while, even with its flaws; you may still want to wait for a second printing which should at least clear up the printing errors. (Issaries does at least have the errata online.) The Narrators Book is something you'll have to spring for even though its value-to-price ratio is substantially lower. Nothing else included in the set is necessary, or even especially useful -- and you can get most of the extras (not the fiction) off the Glorantha website anyway. After getting the two rulebooks, you'll have spent substantially less than the cost of the boxed set, and be just as thoroughly equipped to run a game. Which is not thoroughly enough, assuming you want to stick to the official Glorantha: you'll probably want the world guidebook and certainly at least one of the (still unpublished) culture books. But these are not strictly required to play, especially if you obey the rules' injunction to make up your own interpretations. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 4 (Meaty)