Anyone here have experience with HeroQuest:Glorantha or any of the earlier or later Heroquest/Questworld editions? Everything contemporary for Glorantha is for RuneQuest but every single interview I see with old head Glorantha creators/Writers (looking at you David Dunham, my love) they all say a variation of "Oh I'd play RQ4 if someone put the book in front of me, but if I'm choosing to play a game with friends, its HeroQuest." Whats up with the divide there? Most people I know who like Glorantha are far more interested in spending time discussing the most apt action to emulate myth in a heroquest than spending time rolling my hit percentage on a duck's bill, so why is narrative HeroQuest all but forbidden knowledge while chunky RuneQuest is the baseline?
Either way, im trying to work out a Solo HQ:G game and I've spent the last week cooking up my Clan Questionnaire, now I'm on to my character sheet. Anyone else running a game currently? Anyone have experience running a Solo HQ:G?

My brain hates the idea of having left over ability points, since in play you spend 2 to raise abilities where in character creation you'd only spend one. Basically my brain is screaming at me to minmax, but I'm trying to keep it inside reasonable bounds. The open endedness of ability creation makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong but at this point, Im just going to send it until it snags. Don't quite understand how you attain multiple masteries in one rune if each session you get 3 hero points and it takes 2 to level up a rune. 2x20 points (one mastery/W) equals 40 fucking hero points for one mastery. Vargas the Thunderer, one of the example HQ:G characters on well of daliath has 11w. I've got to be retarded because there's no way he sunk at least 400 hero points to attain 10W over 133 individual gaming sessions.
Similarly confused over flaws. Are they really just free abilities that you try to gaslight the DM into thinking are flaws? What tf are the unnumbered words under certain rules in the example char sheets (passionate,proud,unpredictable, violent) are under air for vargast? Aren't those words already associated with the Air keyword, so by using it you'd be able to utilize your capacity for passion, pride, and or violence?
Picrel is Clan sheet, complete with shitty mouse drawn tattoos. I see some say Questworlds is better, but a section of the clan/char sheet to draw your tattoos just screams soul to me, so here I stay.

I think Heroquest/Questworld could be a little better at explaining that everything is rated as how narratively challenging something should be.

With the side effect that converting material to RQ is impossible directly.

>>96105856 (OP)
>>96105932
you picked my interest to check out heroquest, even if i am all for the clunkiness and generally a narrativist games hater.
I also dont find it impossible for someone that games once per week to have a character develop for 3-4 years and thus eventually reach those levels of mastery.
The good thing especially if you re gonna play solo is you can fiddle with the exp all you want.
You can make mastery cheaper or grant an extra point each session or any other solution you like for the game to have the speed you desire.
All i know is that Questworld is the final version that never got exactly finished as they would have liked or smth and i think it was the pet project of Greg

>>96105856 (OP)
Sorry. I've only read the Hero Wars rules long ago, never played it.
>>96105932
> in play you spend 2 to raise abilities
Depends on the version of the rules. If I remember correctly, in the old rules you did spend 1 if the ability was related to the adventure (e.g. you used it) and 2 if it was not. There was also a divide between narrow abilities and broad abilities that did cost more. So check the rules that you want to use.
>Vargas
I think your math is wrong here. Vargas has 11W = 11W1 = 31 (so only one mastery) - he started with 1W=1W1 = 21 and did sink 10 starting points to raise the rune. Later he would need 2 points per increase, so another 20 points will bring the ability to 41 = 1W2 (two masteries).

But yeah, depending on the rules it makes more sense to increase runes/broad abilities/rare abilities that would cost more later.
>flaws
they determine the obstacles/opponents/difficulties that the character needs to overcome during play and give more life to a character. So the player can pick some story elements that the referee can use during play.
>flaws and keywords
I think in HQG you already have some flaws connected to keywords, they don't count against the max. 3 limit - but a player may decide the order, so the two values may not be related.

>>96112154
>I think your math is wrong here
My math wasn't wrong, but I did completely misunderstand how the notation worked. I see now that its (Integer) W (Mastery/Presige Level)
>The good thing especially if you re gonna play solo is you can fiddle with the exp all you want.
Yeah, I think I'm still coming to terms with how much I'm going to have to be okay interpreting rules w/ no confirmation of if I'm right. All of my passion and autism is funneled into Glorantha right now though, so I will make it work.
Speaking of making it work, attached is my current character sheet. I think I'm close to being able to actually play, so I'm starting to read over all of the contest rules again.
"An Education in Initiation" is the name of the tutorial scenario I'll run, basically acclimating myself to the game and it's rolls through a peaceful Sea and Earth Season farming, then take my brother and I to get initiated in Elmal (me) and Orlanth (brother)(I thought Humakt for my brother, but that initiation requires cutting family ties so I'll save that until theres a reason for me and my brother to be at odds.)
The main thing I am still unsure of though is whether or not I want to separate out my brother as an individual character. Since I'm playing solo, I've been wondering whether or not it might make my game more dynamic to give more NPC's character sheets than would have them in a normal multi-person HQ game. Like, if I made a seperate character sheet for my brother and then, say, my Elmali mentor and his Orlanthi mentor, I could use all of our sheets to make a grand defense from Praxian raiders a fight where everyone can participate, while still being able to schlep it out solo if I want to go search for a treasure w/out removing those chars from my character sheet. It might be weird to roll relationships in that case though.
Is that "Judge of Intent" under Communication a bad ability? Part of me thinks it should be included w/in the communication rune.

>>96113797
Also, in terms of lore, could any of y'all think of a reason why an able bodied carl or cottar WOULDN'T become a devotee of one cult or another? Maybe if they are too poor and can't affor to tithe? Even then you'd have to be a fucking stickpicker, because becoming a devotee of even just Barntar would immediately make the individual in question richer a la plow magic.

I am an amateur RQ autist but Heroquest is a complete mystery to me, I personally don't hear much about it. I know it's more story focused than other RQ games. I hear people talk about how hero questing in Runequest never got any rules to tell you how to do it, and apparently this was the game that finally gave them to you? But no? And it's set in a different era of Glorantha

This is now also a general Glorantha thread. Tell me about Ralzakark.

>>96105856 (OP)

One thing about Heroquest is that it benefits greatly from being played with a group that demonstrates creativity and resourcefulness. I GMed the Colymar Campaign with two groups, one where that applied and the other where it really didn't, and the difference was night and day; I almost felt like I was having to drag the second group along on a leash, and I didn't like that.

>>96113815

Becoming a devotee is really going above and beyond; Heortlings are unusual in that most of their population are even initiates (this, incidentally, is why Sartar is known as the Kingdom of Heroes).

>>96117064
>and it's set in a different era of Glorantha
I believe you are confusing a 3rd party version of Runequest or Heroquest (can't remember) which was set during the 2nd Age(500-1100) as opposed to the much more common 3rd Age (1100-1625-ish). I read more about it the other day on Well of Daliath but all of my resources are all over the place rn and I frankly can't be bothered to look it up.
>I am an amateur RQ autist but Heroquest is a complete mystery to me
Apparently the HeroQuest trademark got yoinked by Hasbro because in the 60's, Games Workshop published Chaosium products in the UK and they just flat out stole the HeroQuest name for their new boardgame because they thought it was cool. 60 years of one sided corporate war later, and Hasbro's theft is complete, Chaosium is now barred from selling ANY old Hero Wars/HeroQuest products. It's literally been wiped from all stores so it's no wonder you've never heard of it. In fact, the first edition of the game, Hero Wars, isn't available anywhere except for physical resales on e-bay. Libgen, Annas Archive, PirateBay, NO ONE has a PDF of this game. Very frustrating because HeroBands were dropped as a mechanic after this first version, but some supplements include a bunch of HeroBands so I really want that core book to be able to understand those supplements.
>I hear people talk about how hero questing in Runequest never got any rules to tell you how to do it, and apparently this was the game that finally gave them to you?
From my amateur Glorantha autism studies of the last 2 months, it seems to me like RuneQuest as a game system kind of got away from Greg over time, simulating the crunchy lives of adventurers rather than creating epics and myths. Hero Wars/HeroQuest was his answer. As far as I've been able to tell, "HeroQuest - Sartar - Kingdom of Heroes," "Stafford Library #7 Arcane Lore," and "Stafford Library #11 Book of Heortling Mythology" have the most info for HeroQuesting.

>>96117424
I misspoke, apologies, I meant initiate. I was asking why anyone wouldn't become an initiate in at least one cult but I guess that's kind of a question loaded w/ Sartarite bias, based off of your answer. I admittedly haven't read much of anything concerning Glorantha outside of Dragon Pass, not for a lack of interest but for a lack of hours in the day and days in the summer, so I guess the real answer is that Dragon Pass is the only place with prevelant enough cults for near everyone to become an initiate? I didn't know that though, I just thought Kingdom of Heroes was fun branding.

>>96117424
Having run a few campaigns in HeroQuest before, do you have any thoughts about how it would work w/ solo play? I'm still preparing, but I really have no idea how much being limited to one imagination is going to help or hinder my experience.

>>96117224

>>96117224
Fucked up to think a broo brutally raped a unicorn to make him

>>96118488
Kind of hot actually...

>>96118304

I think a large part of it stems from the Heortlings' social equality relative to other cultures: this is a setting where personal, magical, and political power are largely one and the same, so in more stratified societies there is an incentive to keep people from gaining enough power to threaten the elites. For example, in Dara Happa, only nobles are allowed to worship Yelm directly, as worship from commoners is seen as beneath his dignity. If memory serves, in Kralorela the worship of commoners directly empowers the Emperor, a process that Can Shu in the Kingdom of Ignorance has usurped to his own ends and that was adopted by the EWF (which is where the meme about magic pyramid schemes comes from). Conversely, societies more egalitarian than the Heortlings invariably use spirit magic instead of theistic magic.

>>96118321

You might want to consider giving the player a few free Followers to round out their skillset.

>>96118285
>From my amateur Glorantha autism studies of the last 2 months, it seems to me like RuneQuest as a game system kind of got away from Greg over time, simulating the crunchy lives of adventurers rather than creating epics and myths
Love it or hate, one of Stafford's biggest influences on gameplay itself was storytelling stuff. He did the Prince Valiant, which would become an influence on Vampire: the Masquerade and the WoD games. But the other influence of his was Pendragon.
Runequest was always a weird marriage to me. This extreme, fantastical almost surreal fluff but very brutal and relatively realistic crunch. It's like the opposite of D&D where some people try to have grounded gritty settings but then the crunch has characters almost become superheroes.

>>96123960
Wow, every time I think I'm getting a good grasp on Glorantha, a new piece of lore just shatters the image I've constructed in my head. The last piece of info like for me was the revelation that the Red Moon is just fucking SITTING there above Glamour, it never goes away, and not only is it a place you can go to, it is a place that multiple lunar heros and deities are inhabiting currently. I'm well aware that not all societies are Theist like Central Genertela is, but I guess the reiteration in every single rulebook, either RuneQuest or HeroQuest, that magic is everywhere and everyone can use it lulled me into applying that everywhere. I did not know the half of that, especially that some societies even bar lowly peoples from worshipping certain gods. I want to get outside of my 'tula' and go read some of that stuff, but frankly if I do, I will never get this goddamned game started.
>>96123960
So I've seperated out my brother and I think I'm going to create an additional sister character who is an Ernalda initiate, older than both my brother and I so she can softly guide us through initiation. I'm more communication and diplomacy focused, my brother is more ambitious and warlike, while the sister will be harmonious and magical. Think that would round out the skillset in lieu of followers? I'm just struggling to think of who would go along with 2 Carls on a very routine journey to become initiates, or even what skills my additional followers would need to round out my own. Eonast Quicklip is still my character, identical to the sheet I posted above, now just w/ Eowain removed.
>>96124798
>Love it or hate (it)
I fucking love it and I'm pretty sure it's the reason that Glorantha has my engine of autistic interest so completely. I did some more research after reading your comment and I was surprised to learn that Greg didn't actually create either RuneQuest or HeroQuest, the only ttrpg he's actually fully credited with creating was the Pendragon one.

>>96126132
I say love it or hate it, because this board has plenty of people that despise story games.
Runequest's system and the whole BRP family was basically Steve Perrin's baby. White Bear & Red Moon had a following, and during the advent of D&D tons of people asked him if he'd make a Glorantha RPG. He usually said nah, but after a while decided to go for it, and Perrin was right there trying to make his own system. Originally Chaosium was gonna use Arduin for Glorantha but there were some disagreements with the creator of that, I think.
The Chaosium website has a series of articles by Perrin recounting the creation of the system
>(it)
I really need to start proofreading my posts, holy shit

>>96126132

There really is no bottom to the rabbit hole that is Glorantha. But for the mechanics of Heroquest specifically, spirit magic uses the Spirit Rune affinity and/or fetishes (either as standalone abilities or as augments), and abilities are gained through making pacts with spirits, while sorcery is much the same but with the Law Rune and grimoires, and mysticism is usually handled by Illuminating a rune affinity.