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HeroQuest is a fantasy roleplaying game. It uses the setting of Glorantha, which was one of the very first to appear in roleplaying in the form of Runequest, which had several different incarnations. The setting has many avid fans and has developed in detail over time. A couple of years ago a new game was made to bring it back to gamers: Hero Wars. This was widely regarded as innovative but impenetrable. HeroQuest is basically Hero Wars Second Edition, with rules tweaks and improved editing, and seems to be regarded as a huge improvement. (The name “HeroQuest” was previously a Games Workshop boardgame but has now passed legally to the creators of the RPG.) Further info at www.glorantha.com.
Perhaps I should point out that HQ is my first contact with all of this, out of curiosity about all the fuss. I do have the hardback Runequest produced by Avalon Hill and Games Workshop, but that doesn’t connect at all – the setting is a sort of mythic Europe.
What’s different about it?
A lot of fantasy settings are mediaeval-esque, with castles and artisans and people generally being like 21st century westerners without a technological society. They have, in some sense, “religions” based on a modern person’s view of polytheistic cultures, which often play no part in-game except as excuses for having magic. Similarly, the life of societies is often “that stuff you left behind so you could go down this dungeon”.
So, HQ isn’t like that. Society and culture are very important. They have shaped characters and continue to be a source of support and obligation. It all feels much more primitive. Some people do live in cities and have urban lives, but the impression of the book is that most folk live in tribal villages. Three otherworlds are bound into everything, and entities from there are hugely important in heroes’ lives.
Let me try that again. This world is mythic, not backwards-engineered scientific. It is a cube of earth on an endless ocean under a domed sky. Magical power comes from celebrating and re-enacting the legends of gods, heroes and saints. Everyone has bits of magic that let them do slightly better at some ordinary tasks. Those who follow a particular religious path can draw greater power from patron entities in one of the otherworlds.
The other thing that’s different is the system approach: much more storytelly than simulationy. The same set of rules for contests can apply to anything: fighting, boasting, chasing, debating. You can either get the whole contest out of the way in one roll, or go for rounds of detail if it’s dramatically important, but even then it dispenses with stuff like initiative. I wouldn’t say it’s a very simple system, but it doesn’t prioritise detail.
So if you want a tactical style game this isn’t for you, but if you want to get into legends and being a hero for your people it might be.
Impressions
One hears a lot from people with previous experience of Hero Wars about how brilliant and clear this is. I came to the conclusion that you have to take those people’s background into account. They’ve already wrestled through to an understanding of the rules, and are looking at HQ from that viewpoint. For myself, I found it somewhat difficult to get hold of, at least initially. Maybe a consequence of working on the game is that you get a mythic head. There were numerous instances where I wanted just that extra sentence that set down in concrete stuff like what abilities are free and what need to be bought. Well, that happens in most RPG rulebooks. HQ is kind of holographic: initially it shows you what’s going on without giving enough information to understand it, and as you read on more of it clicks into place. I still think it would have benefited from another editing pass with a complete newbie asking pointed questions.
Plan to revisit the initial character generation section after you’ve read more, including at least the basics of the magic rules. Specifically – and thanks to the people who brought it up on the forums – there’s a paragraph on p.18 (second bullet) that really helps to explain what magic of what types a player can take. I didn’t take it in on first reading, because I started at the beginning and when I encountered it didn’t have enough of the terminology to understand what it meant.
Visually it’s fine, with decent layout and illustrations. For some reason I disliked the typeface when I first picked it up, but soon adjusted to it. I waved the book at people at my gaming club, and from the cover picture they thought it was a superhero game (it shows two gods fighting – one of the major conflicts in the setting is between them and their peoples).
I think I’d have liked more setting info. The chapter explicitly about setting is only 9 pages long, but background information is woven into the rest of the book in descriptions of homelands/peoples; lots of material on important gods, spirits, etc; and a creatures section. I think the geography got short-changed a bit. The suggested area of the world for play is Dragon Pass, which gets a reasonable 1-page map and a few pages of text. But the two don’t fit together well: for instance, I picked up on the mention of a huge (no, really huge) dragon’s skull that forms the gateway to an essential pass through the mountains, but that’s not on the map (and there’s no picture – a wasted opportunity). From discussions on the forums I gather this has been recognised and will be addressed in the Dragon Pass book this autumn.
The system
All you need is one d20. Every facet of a character is measured by an ability on a 1-20 scale. These can be skills like Sword Fighting or Harping, personal qualities like Strong or Clever, relationships with a person or group, even followers or special objects like Grandfather’s Spear. There is no standard list, and you bring them into play in a situation based on the ability’s name. There are modifiers for how specifically relevant the ability is in that situation, and you can throw in other relevant ones to augment it (like Strong for Sword Fighting). You get a general “goodness rating” that sets your goal number. Roll less than or equal to this and get a success; go over and fail. A 20 is a fumble, and a 1 is a critical success. (Sadly it works out that low is good, which is counter-intuitive and best avoided, but everything else works out much more simply this way.) The GM makes an opposing roll for an opponent or passive difficulty, and the results are compared to find the outcome, e.g. critical vs failure is pretty convincing. What makes this work is the next bit.
In fact, abilities can increase over 20 without limit. When this happens they get masteries, shown by a rune like a square “w”, each representing 20. For instance, 23 is 3w; 57 is 17w2. You still roll against the rating before the “w”, but each mastery lets you bump the result up one level, e.g. success to critical. Once you hit critical you can use remaining masteries to bump opponents down. (Opposing masteries cancel out before you start rolling, so only the side with the higher level gets to use any.) This system allows major characters to become very, very proficient at ordinary tasks. What’s interesting is that it’s relative, not absolute: your result is how well you did against that specific obstacle. Masteries effectively set different power levels: if you want to compete against a minor god with 6 masteries you’d better be able to operate at around that scale. Being able to throw in some good augments looks like the key to this. You also have Hero Points, like experience points and usable for improving abilities, which can be spent for a bump.
Simple contests are just one roll from the player and one from the GM, assessing the result. If you need to get past a couple of minor guards, you can do the whole thing as a simple contest of fighting, sneaking, or anything else that seems appropriate. Characters that fare badly in a contest take “damage” in the form of penalties to abilities, interpreted appropriately, from “Hurt” to “Dying”. So if you’re debating with your clan’s chief to get help and end up “Dying”, this could mean that you’re in imminent danger of being exiled forever unless somebody else can save you.
Extended contests go over several rounds. Each participant has a number of Advantage Points (based on the first ability they use) which mark how well they’re doing. These get lost or transferred from one participant to another according to the results of simple contests (e.g. attack vs defence). When they’re gone you’re out of the contest, with damage results as above. There are some nice little rules for being able to revive yourself and come back in, and for friends to use their abilities to help you (like a rousing song of courage). Once the system becomes familiar it should be nicely cinematic.
Character creation is about assembling your abilities. It’s the area where I felt a little more concreteness would be most useful. You can write a 100-word character description and extract abilities from that; look them up in lists for homeland, occupation and religion; or leave them mostly open and identify them in play. That latter approach can work with the others too: if you have 3 extra abilities to take and don’t know what to choose, just save them till later. Similarly, you can write down a special item with an ability rating without knowing what it actually does.
Magic
There are four kinds of magic: theism comes from the God World; animism from the Spirit World; wizardry (monotheist churches with a religious or academic angle) from the Essence Planes; and common magic is low-profile stuff native to the material world.
The book devotes 80 pages to magic, and it’s a bit of a slog. The three main types have similar structures in terms of the levels of devotion and benefits and obligations thereof, but there’s a lot of terminology. These chapters also contain sample gods, spirits and churches to follow – this is very important in HQ as basically everyone follows some religion and many people follow several different branches. Ordinary folks just use their magic to augment mundane abilities, but those who’ve committed more to a religion can use it more actively, at the price of having to specialise in a particular type of magic.
The narrator’s section suggests that you don’t try to have all the magic types in your group to start with, and that seems like very sound advice. There are plenty of rules for gaining new allegiances and magic in play.
What you’ll be doing
There is scope in the game for all sorts of adventures. (As noted above, I think I’d need some extra setting material to get a feel for city-based stuff.) However, the standard backdrop is that this is the time of the Hero Wars, when great conflicts will ignite and spread across the land. There are several of these, but the main one seems to be in Dragon Pass where the civilised Lunar Empire is taking over the lands of the freedom-loving Orlanthi tribes. The book takes care to point out that this is not about “good” and “evil”, but about a clash of cultures and ways of life. There is an implication that PCs will be Orlanthi – I guess that makes sense dramatically as they can struggle against a powerful, monolithic foe – but there are many other options.
That is the long-term backdrop, but adventures don’t have to be related to it, and the four sample ones are about smaller-scale things: actions against an enemy tribe and protecting patron spirits. The most obvious beginning is that all the characters are from the same tribe, the oddbods who get sent out troubleshooting while normal folks are farming and cattle-raiding. Eventually they might become mighty heroes who beat up enemy gods.
Overall
This is good stuff. But it’s quite different to most games, which can make it a bit harder to get your head round. There are still improvements that could be made, and one should take the crowing of Glorantha aficionados with a small pinch of salt: on its own this book isn’t going to set the world on fire. It’s about what you do with it, and those aficionados are often saying that you need to play it to “get” it. There’s also a lot of talk on the forums about using the system for other settings and genres – which could work with absolutely minimal conversion. I’m certainly keen to try one or two of the sample adventures with my group when I get the chance.
