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 I came to the HeroQuest campaign setting a complete stranger, unfamiliar
with the setting of Glorantha and only vaguely familiar with (but tantalized
by) the system. The unique task-resolution system and the name "Robin Laws"
on the cover did most of the selling. In HQ, I discovered a buried treasure
- buried perhaps a little harder and deeper than it needed to be, but
worthwhile nonetheless.
DISCLOSURE
I'm a roleplayer with a dozen years of experience, with systems ranging from
the dense crunch of Hero and GURPS to the airy minimalism of Nobilis and
Amber Diceless. My regular gaming group consists entirely of professional
improv performers (comedy and long-form). If we had to peg ourselves in Ron
Edwards' G/N/S paradigm, I'd say we were Narrativists who thought we were
Gamists - we want our characters to get cool things and accomplish their
in-game goals, but will often take a longer, more abstruse path to that goal
if it tells a better story.
I bought my copy of HQ at a gaming store sale. I post from time to time on
the HQ boards at the Forge, using the same alias as I do here, but I'm not
what I'd call a "regular." I also did not run this review by anyone there
before posting it; I'm the only one who can, and should, take responsibility
for my opinions.
I review products by evaluating each of five categories of Substance and
Style, giving each category zero, one-half or one point. I then punch the
calculator a lot until it tells me the total score for Substance and Style.
SUBSTANCE
Character Creation
Creating my Hero was just different enough from every other roleplaying game
that I'd ever played to be completely baffling at first. Layout and
presentation issues didn't help (see under Style), but I eventually got the
hang of it. You select a series of Keywords that define your hero, a
Keyword being a package of available and potential abilities that your
character receives. A Hero has an occupational Keyword (Warrior, Farmer,
Merchant, Petty Noble, etc), a cultural Keyword (his homeland, such as the
rigid theocracy of Seshnela, the civilized aristocracy of Dara Happa, or the
Braveheart-esque hills of the Heortling lands) and, if desired, a
specialized magic Keyword (your character might be a devotee of a particular
god, or might use the reliquary of an ancient saint to channel magic
spells). Don't worry if you don't specialize, though - everyone gets access
to Common Magic, simple charms or feats that can aid your other abilities,
like Run Faster or Cook Tasty Meal.
The interesting part is that HQ offers you three options for how to select
your hero's Keywords. First is the narrative method: write a hundred-word
description of your character, and then pluck the keywords out of there.
"Bjorn is a Heortling hunter who travels with his wolfhound Freya ..." gives
you an occupational Keyword, a cultural Keyword and a relationship, and you
might even wheedle a "Travel Great Distances" ability out of the GM. Second
is the list method, where you simply pick out Keywords and distribute a set
of points among any abilities you choose. Third is "as you go" - you jot
down any details that you know already, and add in other abilities as the
game requires. This variety of methods gives the starting player more
options than most game systems. Players who already have a clear and
holistic conception of their character might prefer a narrative. More
traditional players, accustomed to point-buy systems, might prefer a list,
while complete newbies to roleplaying would be comfortable with "as you go."
It's rare to see a game offer this many options for character visualization,
and HQ pulls it off.
Character Creation: 1 point.
Task Resolution
The task resolution system is what drew me to HQ from the get-go, through
its descriptions on this forum and others, and its full elaboration in the
main rules didn't let me down. A character's abilities are rated from 1 to
(potentially) infinity, with every increment over 20 being expressed as a
"mastery," a square-looking W. So a starting character might have Cook
Tasty Meal at 17, a more experienced chef would have it at 10W1 (ten with
one mastery, read as "ten-mastery-one," or the equivalent of 30). The
legendary heroes of Glorantha have their most important abilities at 10W5 or
higher. Inaninmate objects typically have a difficulty "ability" of 14. If
both hero and opponent have masteries, they cancel each other out: our 10W1
chef preparing a meal of difficulty 5W1 would test an ability of 10 against
a difficulty of 5.
In a simple contest, the hero rolls a d20 and compares it against his
ability, while the GM does the same against the test's difficulty or the
opponent's ability. If you roll under your ability rating, it's a success;
if you roll over, it's a failure. If you roll a 1, you get a fumble, an
exceptional failure, while a 20 is a critical success. However, a mastery
allows you to "bump" your result by one category - from fumble to simple
failure, from failure to success, or from success to critical. Leftover
bumps can be used to bump down your opponent's result. Compare your result to your opponent's result on a simple table to learn the degree of victory
(marginal, major, complete, etc) or failure.
Extended contests, best reserved for climactic trials, give your hero a
number of Action Points (APs) equal to his ability's numerical value. Our
10W1 chef would have 30 action points in this contest, while the meal he's
preparing would have 14 action points. In each round of the contest, both
the hero and the GM bid a portion of their action points, with larger bids
representing riskier attempts. Both sides then roll as for a simple contest
- the degree of victory or failure indicates whether you lost your AP bid or
whether your opponent lost his. This creates a dramatic interchange, with
point totals dwindling to frightening depths only to skyrocket in a
last-second comeback.
Again, as with character creation, the watchword here is "options." How
many last-ditch, campaign-ending duels have boiled down to the same tired
interchange of "roll, parry, roll, hit, damage, initiative" that followed
all the duels that led to this one? Or, alternately, how many times have
you wished that you could just handwave PCs through inessential trials
(fording a river, bribing a guard) so they could get to the meat of the
story? HQ gives you two options where most systems only give you one
Heroes also have access to Hero Points, which can provide a bump if used in
contests. These are also the "experience points" of HQ, leading to the same
"short-term luck or long-term growth" dilemma of games like 7th Sea. I
happen to like this dilemma, but I know some folks don't, so I mention it
just to be thorough.
Task Resolution: 1 point.
Setting
Glorantha, as any longtime HeroQuest / RuneQuest / HeroWars fan will tell
you, has three decades-plus of source material behind it. Throwing all of
that at you in the introductory book would be a mistake, and HQ avoids that.
Also (and this is a subtler point), throwing all of that at a newcomer over
ANY number of books, be it one, ten or twenty, would be a mistake. The
history of Glorantha has evolved over time, and most of the attachment that
longtime Gloranthans have with the world is because of that evolution: it
means so much to them because they've helped nurture it. To try and pass
that same joy along to a complete newcomer would be an awkward mistake, like trying to get a stranger to fall in love with a woman you've dated for five
years.
HQ has apparently taken the better route and given newcomers enough details
to latch onto, without too many as to overwhelm them. We're given a broad
portrait of the main continent of Glorantha, with the most focused view
being on Dragon Pass. Dragon Pass is home to the Heortlings and Tarshites,
among others, and the last conquest of the burgeoning Lunar Empire. It
features ancient cities, plains speckled with clans, mountains so tall that
they've become gods, and even duck-people. The "big name" NPCs, like Harrek
the pirate and JarEel the Razoress, are given only brief mention, which is
as it should be - this is the PCs' game, not theirs.
The Magic chapter gives the impression of a world where gods still walk
alongside men, a la Greek or Sumerian mythos. Those gods are too numerous
to detail here - or even in the book, apparently - but that gives the
budding GM plenty of room to insert favorites of his own. The history was a
little sparse, but I presume that, too, was deliberate; Glorantha is a
fairly young world by the standards of fantasy RPGs.
The setting as presented in HQ does not swamp you with details, but instead
gives you a series of broad "flavors" (the amiable atheism of the Esvulari,
the rugged pride of the Heortlings, the genteel hedonism of the Teshnites) and allows you to mix according to taste. There are times when I'd like the system designers to give me a little more direction in a ruleset, but setting isn't often one of them: I like to tell stories and adjust the setting to fit them.
Setting: 1 point.
Uniqueness
Any new game system should bring something new to the table, to justify the
effort that was put into packaging it. While the task resolution system
above is a large part of HQ's uniqueness, the concept of the heroquest
itself is breathtaking in both its simplicity and its scope.
A heroquest, in its essentials, is a magical recreation of a legendary
adventure of a hero who has gone before you. People go on heroquests in
order to symbolically retrieve the same rewards that the original heroes
did. If your clan is suffering from an unnatural drought, an elder might
recall the time Destor wrestled the Rain Demons and pinned them in the
Cracked Gorge, turning it into the Fertile Valley. Some worthy adventurers
might then travel to the Otherplanes and go on that same adventure - getting
directions from the Hermit Crow, climbing the Wall of Angry Vines, racing
the wolfpack to the herd of sacred deer, etc. A heroquest is not simply a
retelling or a re-enactment; it is you, the hero, stepping into the shoes of
Destor and going on his same adventures. If you can do as well as the
original hero did, you bring back the blessings that he obtained.
Of course, since a heroquest is powered by the myths of its original
adventure, it is subject to the same limitations of myth. Perhaps your clan
elder never heard the full story: maybe the reason Destor raced the wolfpack
to that herd of deer was so he could eat them himself. When you win that
race on the Otherplanes, will you eat the deer as your predecessor did?
Will you choose not to, and accept hunger as the price of piety? And what
will be the impact on your final contest against the Rain Gods - will the
deer come to your aid, or will hunger dull your strength?
The possibilities for heroquesting are endless, if it's used wisely - too
much exposure to this unique tool will make it bland and tedious.
Uniqueness: 1 point.
Adventures
Any corebook ought to provide some sample adventures in order to help
newcomer GMs visualize the possibilities to the system. HQ offers several,
which cover many of the bases of possible conflict. There are combat-heavy
adventures against rival clans, social intrigues that rely on relationships
and community support, and a heroquest to break a plague of heavy gravity.
Again, the strength of HQ is in its variety - enough options are presented
to appease the taste of any GM and player group.
Adventures: 1 point.
STYLE
Art
The illustrations in the book have a simple appearance without being
childish or cartoon-like. None of the cultural renderings are going to win
awards anytime soon (how do you tell one Heortling from another?), but they
get the job done. Other illustrations are detailed and finely rendered,
like the demon Umbarong on page 219, so there's enough variety - there's
that word again - to keep the pictures from being tedious or repetitive.
It's nothing special, but it's clearly the work of professionals, so it
passes my standards.
I hear that some people don't like the cover, which depicts - if I'm not
mistaken - Orlanth fighting the Red Goddess. I don't know what's wrong with
it. It's a little "busy" in the top left corner, with a huge stream of
lightning bolts, but I think it accurately depicts the sense of drama and
struggle that the Hero Wars are supposed to be about. So I like the cover.
Art: 1 point.
Layout
Here's where the "puff piece" falls away and I start taking HQ to task.
Sorry, folks.
Poor layout issues didn't help much with the unusual nature of the system.
I don't know if Laws and Stafford realize how genuinely foreign a lot of
their game concepts are - like Keywords, for instance. Take a look at the Heortling cultural Keyword, as an example. Do I get ALL of the relationships listed under "Typical Relationships" for my starting character, or is that merely a list I get to pick from? What kind of magic does my Heortling magic-user get to cast - it says "Pantheon," but I haven't read that far yet. There's a helpful BOLD warning that says Heortlings and Lunars usually don't mix. Great; which of the other cultural Keywords are Lunars? The Tarshites might be, the Seshnelans look like they could be, the Dara Happans probably are ... but who knows? A little more in the way of big, helpful signs under each Keyword (like "Magic: Theist," "Nation of Lunar Empire") would have cleared those questions up, instead of requiring me to read the book through over and over.
People may respond that the Keyword system really isn't all that hard to
figure out, and I just need to read a little more closely. But character
creation is the foundation of a role-playing system. Your character is how
you, as a player, interact with the world, so the process of visualizing
that character should be flawlessly clear. I'm no moron, and if I couldn't
get it on the first, second, or third read-through, it's more abstruse than
it needs to be.
The Magic chapter ran into similar problems. Characters who start as
specialized magic-users get a different package of abilities than characters
who become specialists in play, and it takes a lot of reading to find out
which come from where. The game uses a lot of specialized terminology that
has much more concrete meanings than the casual reader will be accustomed
to. For instance, I normally read "church" as any place of community
religious worship - a mosque is a kind of church, as is a synagogue or a
Catholic cathedral. In HQ, on the other hand, "church" always means, and
only means, the community for worship from which wizardy magic is accessed. Pantheons (the source of Theist magic) aren't worshipped in churches. Also, who is more "advanced" in magical ability - an initiate or a devotee? An adept or a wizard? You can either read all the way through the Theist and Wizardry chapters to figure it out, or you can page all the way back to the BEGINNING of the book and see which one your character can start as (the former, in both cases). That's not information that should be hard to find.
It shouldn't take so many readings to figure out the basics of a new game. HQ throws a lot of brand-new concepts at readers, and should not be too proud to hold our hands through discovering them.
Layout: 0 points.
Editing
No obvious errors. Editing is at its best when it's invisible.
The Keywords for things like Magic are consistent, if esoteric (a "church" is always a source of wizardry magic and nothing else). That's important for the struggling reader, and it shows good editing.
Editing: 1 point.
Examples
A new game system succeeds or fails (with me, anyway, and I'm sure with most
other readers) based on the strength of its examples. Unfortunately, my
struggle to understand the world and system of HQ was hindered in almost all
aspects by the examples of gameplay that come with the core rules. Frequent
sidebars follow the adventures of a group of young men and women from
cultures all across the face of Glorantha, seeking to learn more about
themselves and the world around them.
First: on more than one occasion, the sidebar had almost nothing to do with
the chapter in which it was found. The chapter on Heroquesting has a
sidebar when one of the heroes dies while in the midst of a heroquest on the
Otherplanes. Well, tragic, yes - but it tells me nothing about the rules
and task resolution of Heroquesting. There are several other questions that
might have been better underscored with a well-phrased example of play:
which community support bonuses can be used at which times? What is a
"heroquest moment," and how do you decide it? The rules answer all these
questions, granted, but examples would help. Other areas where the sidebars
fall short: when the various heroes decide to join particular religions /
spirit traditions, the "new band" sidebar on page 181, the "Otherworld in Action" on page 119 ... poorly chosen.
Second: the tone of the examples of play is almost never consistent with the
tone of the game. I don't want pretention, and I know that even the
heaviest melodrama needs its moments of comic relief. But this is a game
whose central conflict is called the Gods War, where adventurers can step
into the forms of heroes of legend and re-enact their quests, and where
magic is so infused in the world that every farmer can call upon ancient
charms to aid his efforts and every forest is alive with spirits. Given
that, the "iconic characters" of HQ's examples of play include ... a Grazer
(sort of a Plains Indian) who wants to invent surfing, a girl who makes
origami figures for her magic, and a puma shapeshifter named (wait for it)
Mr. Puma. When they decide to incorporate into a hero-band, a union of
adventurers with symbolic bonds who adopt a guardian spirit, they call
themselves the Tri Lambs, a reference to that staple of fantasy literature,
Revenge of the Nerds. One of the characters names her sidekick, a deer that she can ride as a mount, "Chaseity" - because it likes to chase things. They refer to a recurring NPC villain as "Fancypants" (not mockingly - that's the only name anyone calls him, including the GM) and alternate between OOC colloquialism and stilting, awkward prose.
So, (A) I didn't find the examples of play funny, and (B) funny wasn't what
I needed. It got to the point where I had to ignore them, and that's just
wrong. Some of the sidebars were genuinely useful - like the sample debate between Greim and Mr. Puma. Those, unfortunately, I found to be the exception.
Examples: 1/2 points
"Color"
Color encompasses little details about the world that make it distinct and
memorable; its counterpart is uniqueness on the System side. Glorantha
doesn't lack for color - the duckmen of the Kerofinela deltas, the powerful
Lunar Goddess in her three aspects, the nomadic Bison People and the Puma
shapeshifters, diverse and exotic gods and spirits ... exploring PCs should
never lack for something bizarre and awe-inspiring to come across. The
cultural Keywords provided in the main book describe cultures that range
from Roman Empire civilization (Dara Happa) to Middle Ages theocracy
(Seshnela) to Highland clan struggle (Heortling lands) and more.
Color: 1 point.
FINAL RATING
Substance: 5
Style: 3.5 (or 3)
FINAL THOUGHTS
The HQ core book is an encyclopedia of unique and fascinating information.
You can pick up an encyclopedia and find a very interesting article, if you
know where to look, but it doesn't make a good read cover-to-cover. I
understand that Issaries has put out a Hero's Book to act as a player's
guide for new Gloranthans, which presents most of HQ's information in a more
user-friendly format. That'd be fantastic, and I definitely plan on buying
it, but I shouldn't have to put down another $15 for it. For others who buy
the HQ rules and run into similar frustrations, I can assure you, however:
the effort of understanding HeroQuest (and there is a lot of it) pays off.
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