HeroQuest has a strange publication history. It was originally called Hero Wars, then HeroQuest, and now it's just been reprinted as QuestWorlds. It's a rules-light narrative game - so rules-light that there are no game statistics for anything apart from the player characters! There's also no skills lists or powers lists or anything like that. PCs can create their own skills lists, and anything that could be used to resolve an obstacle is treated as a skill or can be used to support another skill. Meanwhile the GM decides on the difficulty of tasks subjectively, based on how narratively appropriate it would be for the PCs to succeed or fail, rather than with objective difficulty numbers or enemy statistics like in other games. The GM is encouraged to create a rhythm of alternating successes and failures. This is inspired by the narrative theories of Robin D. Laws (the author of Feng Shui, which I've already done in this blog!)
I have to imagine that you'd need a good group to run this with. Everyone would need to be on the same page. I also think you'd need a group with a good knowledge of Glorantha, since this is very open-ended - you can choose your runes, cultural group and career, but apart from that there's a lot of freedom, which might be difficult for a group that's unfamiliar with this very rich world. I really appreciated that the book gave me an example of character creation for an entire adventuring party, which helped with context for what you can do.
While we're at it, let's talk about Glorantha, because it's really the big selling point for this game and for Runequest. Glorantha is a bronze-age fantasy world powered by mythology, rather than physics. There's lots of well-developed human and nonhuman cultures, each of whom can make a pretty good case that they're the good guys. Everyone is part of different communities and religions, and everyone can use magic drawn from the runes. It is a really, really cool world with an incredible amount of depth, and I strongly recommend the phenomenal computer game King of Dragon Pass as the easiest way to experience it.
Character Creation: Denesra Battle-Reader of the Blueberry Clan was the character that I was trying to create for RuneQuest. RuneQuest has heritage tables that tell you about the deeds of your grandparents and parents, and also your own early history. When I rolled for mine, it involved stealing food from my tribe during the Great Winter, and then spending a lot of time abroad in foreign lands. In HeroQuest that's easy to do - I could just say I'm a Treacherous Scribe. You then pick three runes and give them ratings, one Community (I'd joined up with the hero Argrath and was loyal to him) and five other abilities. These can be 'breakout abilities', which are like specialisations of more general skills. Then you allocate points to them and you're done!
No comments:
Post a Comment