What follows is not your standard capsule review.
I picked up a copy of Hero Wars: Roleplaying in Glorantha about nine months or so ago. Not the Deluxe Hero Wars boxed set, just the basic rules book. I had been hemming and hawing over the purchase for a month or more, based on the so-so reception it has inspired. My good friend Paul, the one who introduced me to Glorantha through 1st edition RuneQuest twenty years ago, asked me to send him a summary of the book once I had a chance to give it a read-through. By the time I finished my letter to Paul, I realised that I had composed a pretty thorough, if regrettably scathing review suitable for posting here. The letter got filed away during a whirlwind move from one state to another that occurred at the end of the summer. I just recently found it and figured – though a bit dated – better late than never.
You’ll have to forgive me the conversational tone of the review, but I really saw no sense in editing the piece at all. That said…
Dear Paul,
Well, I've finished Hero Wars. We've had a spate of pleasantly sunny summer days here in Seattle, so I've been taking long lunch breaks to lay out on the lawn and read. It's passed the time for me, but I have to admit that I could have found more entertaining and pleasant summer reading. In short, the game left me rather flat.
How do I describe what's wrong with it? It's hard to put my finger right on it, but I think it's appropriate to start by attacking the layout and proofreading. Pretty pedantic of me, huh? It's just a game, right? Well, it's still a professional publication, put together by some awfully talented and learned folk, so I expect decent production values for my money. Issues of grammar aside (the author makes use of very colloquial grammar – I suppose that truly proper English would actually be rather jarring and unfamiliar for most readers – and my grammar isn't perfect, so I'm not the most qualified critic), the typographical errors are visually irritating. Most aren't even simple misspellings – they're instances where foreign diacritical marks have been misinterpreted by the computer used to print the text, and curious symbols have taken the place of the accented vowels. Then there is the mysterious umlauted capital "Ö" at the end of a number of italicised paragraphs. Most irritating, however, is the alternating use of standard type, bold face type, and italicised type to indicate different voices in the prose. This was a deliberate layout decision, and I can understand the use of italics to distinguish examples of gameplay, but the use of the bold face to represent conversational asides to the reader seems redundant when you consider the already conversational tone of the main text. It's just ugly and breaks the flow of reading, too. Oh, and there's no character sheet at the back of the book as is stated in the chapter on characters.
With the niggling stuff out of the way, there are more important issues at hand, such as the mechanics, the very meat of the book. They certainly are innovative, even downright clever, but they seem…uninspired. Perhaps that's not fair – the mechanics seem like they ought to be inspired, but maybe it's just the writing left me flat. While reading through the book I never found myself personally transported to Glorantha, which is what I expect rules that are custom-tailored to a campaign setting to do. It was more like I was reading the game notes for someone's homebrew roleplaying campaign – a brilliant homebrew campaign, to be sure, but it didn't grab me by the shoulders screaming "You need to play this game now! Quick, roll up a character!" I think it had to do with the density of the subject matter and the presentation, or perhaps their viscosity, as they were both thick, sticky, and hard to get through.
Allow me to start off with character creation. On one hand, the mechanics appear to have done away with the standard attribute/skill/numbers conventions that rule virtually all roleplaying games. By this, I refer to the refreshingly free-form method of creating a character, where you compose a 100-word narrative describing the character then derive specific skills and attributes from that description. That's the good part. On the other hand, once you've derived the various attributes for your character, you assign numerical values to them, and that brings you right back down to your standard roleplaying game rules. Granted, you have great latitude (and longitude for that matter) to define the nature of your character, but what appeared revolutionary at first has really only been dressed up for the occasion. At least players aren't tied down to a fixed array of character attributes and skills – if you don't list a characteristic like Strength or Dexterity, your character is assumed to be average in that regard and it wasn't worth mentioning.
With regard to numbers, however, I was quite impressed with the scaling of task resolutions. The game introduces the concept of multiple levels of mastery. Mastery no longer means a perfect, virtually 100%-level skill, but instead implies that one would be automatically successful at a given task under normal or relatively unchallenging circumstances. Each level of mastery grants a "bump" up in the level of success. For instance, with one level of mastery, a roll that would have been a catastrophic failure can only merit a simple failure, a roll that would have been a failure is now a simple success, and a roll that would have been a simple success is now a resounding success. Only the more difficult tasks, those where your opponent possesses comparable or greater levels of mastery than yourself, present significant threats – each level of mastery that your opponent wields negates one of yours, and if the opponent's mastery exceeds your own, you suffer a bump down.
Taking both the good and the bad of the mechanics into consideration, my reading of the book didn't make it very clear how the play of the game would proceed. I've read comments from demo players who swear that it takes only a very short while to get the hang of the system and settle in for play. However, these demos were undoubtedly staged by the faithful enthusiasts of Hero Wars, people who have been following, or participating in the development of the game all along, not by someone who just learned it from reading the book. I imagine that this is where the companion volume, the Narrator's Book: Game Mastering in Glorantha, would come in handy and help guide me through to a suitable revelation, but I neither bought nor read the book, so I'm not really qualified to say. Besides, I'm rather of the opinion that the fundamental rules should convey the sense of excitement and imagination necessary to play a game without a lot of special, optional rules. Oh, and if the rules aren't truly optional and prove integral to the play of the game, then they really should be part and parcel of the basic rules book. Ah, but don't let me get too worked up on that topic.
Another problem that I sensed in this game is the inevitable organic growth of the campaign world. It has become more refined and serious – even dark, if you will. Gone is much of the whimsy that appealed to us when we first played RuneQuest. This was something that we first saw happening with 3rd edition RuneQuest, where much of the tongue-in-cheek humor that pervaded Greg Stafford's world was being edited, seemingly to make it a more earnest and dignified work. Societies that were once fast and loose allegories for real world cultures have been increasingly codified and more tightly paralleled with their Earthly counterparts, and this trend continues in Hero Wars. While this attention to anthropological detail may lend a sense of realism to the game, it simultaneously causes that dreaded density and viscosity to which I referred – the learning curve for becoming accustomed to your character has gotten steeper.
As you might imagine, this can be both good and bad. What campaign setting material exists in the book (and there's rather a lot of it) simultaneously describes the cultures of Dragon Pass in more detail than ever before, while being just vague enough to let the reader know that he's clearly an outsider to an imaginary world of someone else's devising. As much as you read of these cultures in this book, one gets the distinct feeling that you wouldn't be playing with a full deck, so to speak, that there are clearly details missing that will prove vital to play. Toward this end, there are promises of various "Player's Guides" that will describe individual cultural backgrounds in greater detail, which begs the question of how an uninitiated beginning player is supposed to know enough of the background to start up a competent game based solely upon this book.
While I'm on the topic, allow me to relate why this issue of cultural detail touches a sore spot with me. A few years back, I subscribed to the Glorantha e-mail list. I didn't last long. Sure, I was a long-time fan, but I simply didn't take it as seriously as many people on the list did. The enthusiasm for this fictitious world was great to see, but it was a little disconcerting to discover how hidebound so many people were to the official "canon." I was used to the feeling of freedom to move within Glorantha, that not everything was rigidly defined and that my imagination had room to play. However, on most issues, the membership of the list had come to toe the line of an official canon, much of which involved making the world of Glorantha more "realistic" and internally consistent. Watching arguments crop up where people quoted chapter and verse from obscure missives found in Greg Stafford's notes led me to politely unsubscribe from the list. That is the sort of feeling that I get from Hero Wars – that it has become someone else's game, a game written by committee, fixated on a kind of joyless internal realism, striving to meet someone else's vision of the world instead of painting a broad landscape that invites players to make it their own. My God, yes, it's vast and glorious and complex…and ultimately subject to the canonical scrutiny and development of someone else. Hero Wars fails to let you know that it's your game, not the creators' and writers'.
As I intimated with my "homebrew campaign" comment and reference to the demonstration games, Hero Wars appears to be a game for those whom already know how to play it, who are intimately familiar with the setting. I can imagine Greg Stafford or Robin Laws sitting down with a group of dedicated and enthusiastic fans and having a truly kick-ass gaming session, but the way that the rules read, I can't imagine a someone completely unfamiliar with the Glorantha getting all hot and bothered to play. It seems to be preaching to the choir, not to the unconverted.
I guess my overall impression of the game is that it was written for a market of pre-existing Gloranthaphiles, which I find odd, because I consider myself one, yet I felt somehow excluded from this incarnation of the world. Perhaps I'm being nostalgic, and I want to see Glorantha the way that it was, not all grown up. Perhaps I just can't take the world as seriously as its most dedicated advocates do, and that causes me to chafe at the Earthly realism that has seeped its way into the game world. Either way, I don't feel motivated to actually play the game. Worse yet, the exposition of Hero Wars is so…lackluster…that it leaves me frankly bored and strongly disinclined to lay out another $15.00 for the Narrator's Book, which ostensibly would make the rules that much more playable.
I'm sorry to admit how disappointed I am to give this book the review that I have. I truly wanted to like this game, but while Greg Stafford says that it more closely approximates his vision of Glorantha, I find that that it has strayed farther afield from mine. Also, rather than being the labor of love that I expected, Hero Wars seems more like an outright grudge to prove that Glorantha is do-able as a serious, contemporary roleplaying game. Personally, I never thought Glorantha had anything to prove to anyone, though I'm now of the opinion that the onus is upon the authors and developers of Hero Wars to redeem themselves with the forthcoming books and any subsequent editions of these rules. Sadly, they won't be doing it on my dime – I already have more Glorantha sourcebooks than I'll ever be able to use and at least two different sets of mechanics with which to play them. Seeing how this game doesn't appear to be aimed at new players, I find myself wondering how many other veteran RuneQuest players will find themselves in a similar quandary.
So there you have it – a noble effort that should have been great, but that seems to have been mired in committee and geared to please those who were already sold on the project. My advice is to put a check on your sense of nostalgia and hold off on buying a copy – I'll be happy to lend you mine if you're interested.
Yours truly,
Ian
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