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Suffice to say, it’s a fantasy RPG set in a highly detailed and comprehensively ‘explored’ world with it’s basis in analogues of Dark Ages or earlier Earth cultures (although there are some more advanced, medieval-like, cultures in the world of Glorantha, which are given more time and wordcount here than in any previous incarnation of a Gloranthan RPG). Magic is universally known and integrated into everyone’s everyday life. Even an ordinary farmer tilling the soil uses low-level magic to help his task. The ‘high level’ magic is mythic in scope and style, with Heroes (the PCs and NPCs of equal status) expected to travel regularly to the Gods World and re-enact the deeds of Deities for the benefit of themselves or their communities, gaining magical abilities, defeating enemies, or even changing reality. Non-human races and other creatures are mostly familiar to fantasy RPGs, but with significant changes. Elves are intelligent mobile plants, Dwarfs believe themselves no more than parts of a great World Machine, and have as much individuality as cogwheels, etc.
You may read someplace that this is not a ‘new edition’, but is a new game, based on the same mechanics, with the same setting, compatible with the earlier Hero Wars, and with characters easily converted from that game into this. Sounds like a new edition to me. The name change is understandable knowing the history of the game. Back in the early 1980’s an expansion for RuneQuest was promised for high level adventuring, called ‘HeroQuest’. It never appeared, RuneQuest lived it’s life, then faded away (well, the professional support did, fan-produced efforts never did), and by the time a game of high level adventuring in Glorantha appeared, the name HeroQuest had been used for a boardgame (and you know what, personally I’ve never played it…), so the RPG was named Hero Wars instead. But by the time a second edition was ready, the name HeroQuest had become available again, and so, we have HeroQuest, the Gloranthan RPG.
So, why a second edition? Is this just another D&D 3.5? No, not by any means. It was obvious even before the first edition hit the shelves that a second edition was needed. Some nasty printing errors had rendered the books, if not unreadable, at least well deserving of criticism. It looked pretty bad. Then, within weeks if not days, many problems with rules (some as fundamental as “How do I use archery in this game?”) began to appear on the mailing lists. The lack of guidance and example in the rulebooks, combined with some dodgy rules, meant a revised edition was inevitable if the game was to survive at all. It took some time, some years in fact, but now the second edition has appeared, it is much more than a clarification, it’s a complete rewrite, with many new and revised rules, and far better guidance, with a whole book’s worth of examples.
Nonetheless, for brevity, I will refer to the first edition as HW, and this, the second, as HQ. Much of this review will be a comparison between the two, and an attempt to judge how (or if) things have improved. Despite this being a capsule review (I haven’t actually played using the HQ rulebook yet), it’s based on many hours play of HW, and many of those hours using some, at least, of the revised rules. I know what I wanted to see here.
And so, the actual review…
Initial Impressions and Overall Presentation
The cover artwork has been extensively discussed (or at least dissed) on the Open Forum. I, and many others, do not like it. In my opinion, not only is it not a good cover, it also does not fit at all well with the interior art. There’s a lot of that interior art, usually small, quarter-page or less pieces. A lot of it is reused from earlier Gloranthan products, some of it MUCH earlier, I spotted some RQ3 pieces, and the beautiful William Church map of Dragon pass, which was RQ2 if not RQ1. And there’s far more of it beautiful than just that map. There’s a lot of very fine, very detailed and very well printed art in there, barely more than a page or two goes by without art. And there’s barely one piece that doesn’t fit with the others, despite a long list of artists. Except the cover.
Apart from the art, the layout is still pretty good. In my opinion, however, there are just too many bits of separated text. There are sidebars, examples, rule sections, GM suggestions, etc. Take note of the sidebar on page 10 about “Text Conventions” that explains all the different sections of text, it’ll save confusion later. I have so far seen no printer errors, excepting a trivial, but very noticeable, line on page 181 in a strange font. Overall, it’s very readable, although you do have to read through the main text to find the actual rules in amongst the explanation, advice and examples. In addition to the collected tables I’d have liked a more visible or even collected set of rules, especially on magical abilities in character creation.
The Rules
I’ve decided to separate this out, since the rules are somewhat spread out over the various chapters on character creation, basic rules, and magic. HQ uses a D20, just one, and no other dice. There is just one die rolling mechanic (with two forms), and every ability (magic, skill, relationship, personality facet, all are generically called ‘abilities’) is compatible with others. Want to counter his Sword and Shield Combat with your Fast Talk? Go ahead and try. Want to parry a Lightning Bolt with Greatsword Combat? Well, you can try, but you’ll get a hefty penalty to the roll…
Every ability has a Rating, with theoretically no upper limit, although there will be very, very few with Ratings above 60-odd, and starter character will have only a few over 20. How do you roll an ability of 60-odd on a D20? Abilities over 20 are divided by 20. Each full 20 becomes a ‘Mastery’ (denoted as a sort of square ‘W’, 12W2 for instance means 12 and two Masteries, or 52), while the remainder is left as a Target Number. Try to roll the Target Number on the D20. Roll a ‘1’ and it’s a Critical. Roll 2 up to the Target Number and it’s a Success. Roll over the Target Number up to 19 and it’s a Failure. Roll ‘20’ and it’s a Fumble. However, if you have one or more Masteries, each one ‘Bumps Up’ the result by one place, Fumble>Failure>Success>Critical. If your opposition has Masteries too, cancel them out before rolling, so 12W2 against 5W becomes 12W vs. 5. If you reach Critical but still have a Mastery or two, you then Bump Down your opponent’s roll (that’s new from HW). The end result is that you get a lot of Criticals if you have a couple of Masteries of superiority.
So, what does a Critical actually mean? Well, there are two ways to resolve any contest, be it combat, chase, romance, debate, whatever. Simple Contests are all over in one die roll for each side. They’re meant for simple stuff, or for speed. Take your Ability and the opposing Ability (either someone else’s Ability, or a Rating assigned by the GM to some natural feature, such as the height of a cliff to be climbed, the weight of a rock to be moved, etc. One vast advantage of magic is that the natural world resists magic specific to it at the default rating of only 14. A river might be 2W2 wide for a mundane Leaping ability, but it’s only 14 wide for ‘Leap Over Water’. Of course, some rivers are magic too, and they get their full resistance). Compare the die roll results on a table, and results range from total failure (Fumble vs Crit) to total success (Crit vs Fumble). HQ doesn’t need a Mook rule, thanks to the Simple Contest. Extended Contests are for the important stuff, climactic battles, tense situations, not cutting through mooks or picking a simple lock. For an Extended Contest, the skill ratings of those involved are taken as Advantage Points. 12W2 would be 52 AP for instance. Alternating if it's a one-on-one contest, or in AP order for a group contest, each character takes an action and the player bids a number of AP. The more risky and outrageous the action, the higher the AP bid. If you win, he loses the AP, lose and you lose it instead. First one to 0 or less loses the contest, the lower the final total, the greater the degree of defeat.
Note that that’s ‘defeat’, not damage. Even in combat (and the same rules apply to every contest in HQ, not just combat), a defeated opponent might be injured, but he might be demoralised, driven off, or just impressed so much he surrenders. Neither side might take a single scratch. Actually, that’s one criticism I have of HQ and HW, the winner NEVER takes a scratch (in most combats at least), since he stays above 0 AP. There is an optional rule hidden away in the GM section of the rules allowing you to do a little damage during a contest, but generally there’s no wearing an opponent down with waves of attacks here, the winner escapes unscathed, the loser is defeated in one contest (or at least driven off).
Also, there are Hero Points. The currency of character improvement, but also used to ‘Bump Up’ any vital, but fluffed, die roll by one stage of success. You might well use a lot of those in a dangerous or critical situation, and certainly on a HeroQuest.
There’s one final part of the basic rules, and it’s my favourite of HQ and HW, Augmentation. So, you have Greatsword Combat skill, you also have Strong and Find Enemy’s Weakness. How do you use them? You Augment Greatsword Combat with them. Either add 1/10 of them on as an automatic Augment, or attempt a higher bonus with a risk of failure. The automatic augment, which takes no time to add, is new to HQ. So long as you can convince the GM that the ability is relevant, you can augment with it. So if you’re fighting a Troll, and have the Ability ‘hate Trolls’, you can Augment with that too! In HQ, your character’s personality actually comes into play. Of course, you could say that makes it easier to just roll the dice instead of roleplaying the personality, but it works in play.
Chapter by Chapter
Contents
Yes, there is a contents page (two, actually), and a 9 page index, along with glossary, bibliography and other appendices. So that’s an improvement over HW straight away.
Playing Heroquest
This is definitely a chapter on playing HeroQuest in Glorantha, not just the usual advice on playing RPGs in general. As such, it’s a lot more interesting than many such chapters. It also starts the examples of play. A lot of the criticism of HW was directed at the lack of examples of play. HQ has examples bursting out of the seams. Barely a page goes by without an example, at least a few paragraphs on virtually every single rule, some of them multiple whole pages! The examples follow the games of a quite realistically portrayed gaming group, as they tackle the rules in their game, and are pretty well written and believable. However, that means that some of them are a bit long winded, and a couple pretty pointless. But generally, they’re good.
Heroes
This begins the character creation system, by explaining how a character’s abilities are recorded. I should too, I guess…
All HQ Heroes (PCs) have a number of keywords, Homelands, Occupation and Magic. Each of these is a collection of skills, abilities, relationships, attitudes, etc. which the character will have from his background. Everything is called an ‘Ability’ as a generic term. All these start at a Rating of 17. You can never raise a keyword Rating, only the individual Abilities within them. Abilities not raised above the keyword Rating don’t have to be marked down (although it’ll be easier to remember them!). Then there are your character’s own, individual, unique abilities, those are rated 13. It’s bit strange that the abilities you are renowned for are actually poorer than those common to many others around you, but there it is. One of the unusual things about HW and HQ is that these abilities are not pre-defined, other than the ones in keywords. There is no skill list, no spell list, and there are no attributes. If you’re not remarkably Strong, you’ll have no ‘Strong’ ability. If you are, you might be ‘Strong’, ‘Brawny’, ‘Muscular’, ‘Mighty Thewed’, or any other term you fancy. Abilities do what they say they do, if you try to do something they don’t say, you either take a penalty, or just can’t do it. Players are encouraged to invent strange and ambiguous ability names, they might become useful later on. This takes some getting used to, there are a lot of "What skill do I use to do that?" questions at first.
There are three methods of character creation.
Narrative, describing the character in 100 words, then picking out the keywords and other abilities. You tend to get more abilities this way, but not everyone can write 100 coherent words on demand, and it does require some knowledge of the PCs background, which not everyone likes to detail in advance.
List, with three keywords and 10 other abilities. The simplest method for everyone.
List as you play, like List, but fill in blanks during play. I don’t like this much, it gives the player too many ‘Get out of Jail Free’ cards, allowing them to wait until a situation arises then choose an ability ideally suited to escaping it.
A good selection of Occupation Keywords follows, giving plenty of selection for characters. Then there are the Homelands writeups, two pages each giving basic cultural details of diverse parts of the world of Glorantha (most of them never written up in any publication before), and their Keywords. Personally, I find these inadequate to actually start a game in areas I have no deeper details on, but they are interesting and could be used for NPC travellers in your games.
For magic, you’ll have to look in the later magic chapters. Once you have it all written down, add 20 points around your Abilities to individualise your character. Starter characters are pretty good, with a few abilities of a Mastery or slightly more. A typical 'Hero' worthy of the name will have a few abilities with two Masteries, and a dozen or more with one, but ordinary folks will have no Masteries at all except in their one or two specialist abilities, and those will tend to be 'Plough Field' or 'Bake Bread' or the like.
Hero Improvements
For the purpose of this review, let’s just say the GM gives out Hero Points as experience, and the players can use them to buy new, or improve existing, abilities.
The chapter also explains ‘Cementing’ experiences. Like in many Superhero games, you can’t just pick up a magic sword (not that magic items are so common in Glorantha anyway), you have to pay for them with a Hero Point (just one, at least), or else it’s assumed to ‘disappear’ before the next game, lost, worn out, given to you clan, or whatever. What is not explained, and caused a bit of argument with HW, is whether such a new item starts as a new Ability, with a Rating of 13 (all new Abilities do), or at whatever Rating it had before. Some have said you can find Stormbringer, but it only has a Rating of 13.
Core Rules
I explained the basics of these earlier. Lots of examples, clear rules, adequate options, lists of sample modifiers, rules on healing (too easy, in my opinion, if you have magical healing you’ll rarely have to suffer any wounds from one encounter to another). A chapter that does what it says it does.
Relationships
HQ and HW took a very community approach to roleplaying settings. Heroes in HQ will almost certainly not be homeless wandering adventurers (although, strangely, the example characters appear to be most of the time), but will have homes, families, clans, guilds, religions, friends and followers. Any relationship can provide a general ability, for instance ‘Love Family’ could be used to augment a combat ability if you’re fighting for your family. But there are three specific cases where relationships are important.
Followers and Sidekicks are Abilities. A character can simply list a couple of warriors as Followers. They’ll help him in combat, or otherwise as limited by their single ability, the Keyword ‘Warrior’ (or whatever). Sidekicks are the Gabrielles and Little Johns to the Xenas and Robin Hoods (Robins Hood?) of HQ. They have a keyword, but also additional abilities, and have more freedom of movement and action. Sidekicks are an addition to HQ. The idea of Followers in general is a nice one, it allows a PC to have a retinue without running multiple characters, they just add abilities to the main PC. The rules deal with Follower injuries, loss, action, etc. just as though they were 'there'.
Communities are primarily used as resources, or for HeroQuests. More later on that. Communities are vital to the game primarily for roleplaying, rather than rules, purposes, but the Abilities that represent the depth of relationship can be useful.
Hero bands are a new idea to HQ, although introduced into HW after the basic rules were published. Every game involves a group of characters acting as a cooperative unit, but in HQ such a group actually gains power from the group, primarily in the form of a supernatural Guardian. When heroes group together in a single cause, the magic of the world sits up and takes notice. Guardians provide useful, but not usually fabulously powerful, magical abilities.
Basic Magic, Theistic Magic, Animistic Magic, Wizardry
Four chapters on magic. Theistic from Gods, Animistic from Spirits, Wizardry from the Essense Plane, and Common magic from the mundane world. Magic, in general, is just another Ability in a contest, but how to get it, and what relationships, with mortals and supernatural entities, are developed, varies between systems. These chapters include the greatest changes from HW, especially Animism. Overall, it’s all clearer, although there’s a lot of terminology packed in here that’s confusing at first, and it’s not entirely plain to me even after a half-dozen readings how to create a new character’s magical abilities as an Animist or Wizard. How to become one during play is plain, but starting off as an experienced magic wielder (an option plainly intended by the rules) is a problem. There are more magical options now than in HW, including Common Magic, an expensive way to gain weak magic, but not commit yourself to any one magical path.
A point deserves singling out here. The use of theistic Feats is, I believe, still inadequately explained. There was massive discussion and argument over this after HW was published, and the HQ rules clear much of it up. But there’s still not one example in HQ of actually using a Feat (the only mention of them is as Augments where they simply provide a bonus to another ability). There are still some ambiguously named Feats in HQ, like the infamous “Sunset Leap”, with no explanation. Why no example of this, or another, Feat being used directly as an Ability, as the rules say they can be?
Narrating
GMs in HQ and HW are called ‘Narrators’. I never did understand the need felt by so many game designers to re-invent the wheel when it comes to game terminology. Anyway, this chapter spends a lot of time giving some useful and well-presented advice on running a HQ game. Much of it is general to any RPG, but a lot of it is specific to HQ, like the afore mentioned “How do I use archery in this game?” (not as simple as it sounds, since the contest resolution system always leaves one side defeated, and in a combat contest, possibly dying. How does a footman, with no ranged attack, kill an archer who’s out of his reach?).
It also mentions Wealth. Only mentions it, mind you. Wealth never worked properly in HW, and there’s no improvement here, except for the general advice ‘don’t bother with it’. Want to run a wealthy successful merchant, a treasure hunter, or a mercenary in it for the cash? No support here.
HeroQuesting
This is the big goal of the game. Your characters get themselves onto the Hero Plane, go re-enact the deeds of their chosen God, Saint, Great Spirit or Hero, and through emulating him, her, or it, gain some of the powers, magical items, reputation, or whatever they did.
The rules have been tidied up a good deal from HW. The result looks a bit more complicated, but more logical and balanced. Collect up all your friends, split them into groups, gain a bonus from each group according to their number and commitment. Apply each bonus to a specific ability or encounter on the Quest, and go to it. The resultant reward for a successful HeroQuest is dependant on the level of the opposition, and may range from improving your character’s Sword Combat ability, to gaining a new magical Feat, to blessing the whole clan’s pigs for a year.
Creatures
A short, but varied, bestiary. I must admit I’ve not yet done an extensive comparison of the creature Ability Ratings to those in the HW bestiary book, Anaxial’s Roster. That book suffered from some very low numbers, making horses that could be outrun by beginner characters, lions that could be outfought by farmboys, and the like. The HQ Ratings seem higher, but not by much. I see Broo, the goat-headed humanoid Chaos creature that typified RuneQuest monsters, no longer has an Ability of ‘Impregnate Victim’…
Overall, a nice and wide selection of inhuman opposition, usable as foes or even friends – including Followers and Sidekicks. You too can have an intelligent dinosaur as a best friend…
Introduction To Glorantha
There’s an awful lot of history in Glorantha, and this small chapter can barely scratch the surface. However, it has a good scratch, and a good scratch is always satisfying. Dragon Pass remains the centre of the gaming world in HQ, as it did in HW and RuneQuest (even though RQ actually had more material published about the desert land of Prax, Dragon Pass was home to the game and the movers and shakers of the world. Especially the Shakers, they live around Kero Fin).
HeroQuest Adventures
A set of scenarios to start you off. One’s about rescuing the chief’s son kidnapped in a raid by the neighbouring clan, one’s about recovering a blown-away kite (it’s less trivial than it sounds – but still odd), one’s about investigating fish falling from the sky, and there’s a HeroQuest to stop the heaviness (in scientific terms, someone turned up the gravity around your clan). Decent scenarios, playable by beginner or relatively inexperienced characters (although the HeroQuest will prove quite a challenge).
Sample Hero bands
What it says. A selection of hero bands to copy, emulate or oppose. Nice enough.
Appendices
An explanation of Runes (magical marks of power), a collection of game tables and modifiers, etc.
OK, so after all that, what’s it like to play? Well, from experience with Hero Wars, and many of the new rules, it takes some getting used to. It is not, and strongly resists any attempt to make it, a simulation. The contest resolution system is heavily Narrative, without player and GM contributing a lot of description and explanation it all becomes a very bland series of die rolls and number crunching. The great stress on relationships makes it more rewarding to work on in-game social interaction, but also makes it easier to reduce these to simple die rolls instead of actually roleplaying them. How well the game plays depends, more than in most games, on the imagination and immersion of the players and GM. You cannot run this game entirely in third person and get any great satisfaction from it, in my experience, nor can you resolve contests by only quoting Ability names and numbers without it getting boring. The world of Glorantha is rich, deep and detailed. With 20-odd years of publications, professional and fan, plus the high stress of HW on ‘realistic’ roleplaying in the culture of the Orlanthi barbarians, it was getting to feel far too detailed and the detail was swamping out the game. HQ seems to be setting out to correct that, although, of course, it barely even dips into any one individual culture. That’s for the setting books.
And, lastly, how does it compare to HW? Is it better? Is it worth buying? It’s better, a lot better. I can still see some weaknesses, lack of explanation of Feats, lack of any useful Wealth mechanic, some inadequately explained features of character creation, etc. Minor, but notable because many of them were noted in HW as well. I also see no Berserk magic at all. This was the one rule rendered entirely unusable in HW thanks to printing errors (fractions being replaced by symbols). The examples of play are curious, including as they do a wide and diverse group of characters, portraying a less organised and less restrictive world than I and others perceived from HW, possibly a deliberate attempt to lighten it up.
Is it worth buying? If you own and play Hero Wars, and want to continue doing so, yes, certainly. If you liked HW, but couldn’t ‘get it’ for some reason, yes, it’s worth considering, HQ is far easier to ‘get’ and far better presented. If you didn’t buy HW, but like the idea, then still yes, it’s worth a look. It’s far better than before, and as good as many RPGs I’ve seen lately. Of course, if you prefer a gritty simulation game, it’s not for you.
For myself, HQ addresses every major concern I had with HW (except Wealth). Not every one was resolved the way I’d like it to be, but every case was an improvement. It’s a better game, and one I’ll be playing as soon as I get a chance. This review is written less than a week after buying, and clearly I will have to read more before I play, but there were a lot of expectations of HeroQuest after the poor showing of Hero Wars, and I am pleased to say that, overall, HQ lives up to them. A better cover and more visible separation of text blocks and it would get a '5' on style, a few stray points left over unanswered from Hero Wars and it would get a '5' on substance.
