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HeroQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha
Length: 288 pages
Price: $39.95
Publisher: Issaries, Inc. www.glorantha.com
ISBN: 1-929052-12-X
I've never been a big fan of fantasy. Science fiction and horror have always had more appeal to me, or even the modern day.
For this reason, when I want to do fantasy at all, I rarely stray from D&D. It's popular, most people like it, and 3E does its job well, as D&D goes.
But sometimes a game comes along that is so good you have to try it. HeroQuest is one of those games.
Now, a word to the wise: This game has a lot of history behind it. There was a previous edition, Hero Wars, which had a very confusing layout. Before that, the setting, Glorantha, was featured in a highly popular old-school RPG, RuneQuest.
I haven't read or played RuneQuest or Hero Wars. I'm coming to this fresh. So don't expect me to compare it to what has gone before, as others have done.
Short version: This is a great game, and not just for Glorantha.
What do you get? Let's break it down chapter by chapter, or, more accurately, section by section.
After the Forewards and the Introduction, which talk somewhat about the history of the game, we have the "Playing HeroQuest" section. This tells you a little about the game and the world, including the text conventions and a bit about the character sheet.
We get into the meat with the "Heros" section. There are three character generation methods. One is based on descriptions, one is based on "lists" (and amounts to a basic point-buy system) and one allows you to create characters as you go. All the methods are explained well, with examples.
Regardless of the method, you end up picking a homeland and occupation (there are extensive examples of these from the default gameworld of Glorantha), which gives you a set of abilities that are rated numerically, in addition to some abilities that you can simply make up on the fly and rate numerically as well. Now, these abilities can be anything -- skills, relationships (like "Member of the Little Bush Brothers Society"), magical talents, personality traits... You name it. If it's important to your chracter, it can be on your character sheet with a numerical rating, which can then affect the game.
I will note, by the way, that this flexibility is wonderful. It makes it easy to invent new cultures and occupations, just by creating the personality traits and skills associated with the culture. Even if you're not interested in Glorantha, it makes adapting any game world to the system easy, and a large amount of information can be contained in a small amount of game statistic information, which is almost 100% comprehensible to someone who isn't familiar with the system, as it's largely in plain English.
But what do those numbers mean? This is explained in the next section, "Core Rules", right after a short bit on "Hero Points", which I'll come to in a minute.
The basic task resolution is through a "contest". It's a d20-based system. In essence, you need to roll under the rating for an appropriate attribute. Want to impress your fellow members in the Little Bush Brothers Society? Roll against your "Member of the Little Bush Brothers Society" rating, or against your "Charm Friendly Strangers" ability, or whatever. If you have more than one attribute that makes sense, roll your best one, with some bonuses from the other abilities, which "augment" the main one.
In the meantime, the GM (called the "narrator") rolls a Resistance. There are a lot of examples of Resistances, or if you're acting against someone, they can use an appropriate attribute, like "Resist Charm" or whatever.
Regardless, if you roll under your rating, you succeed. A roll of 1 is a critical success and a roll of 20 is critical failure. There is a simple chart based on whether you succeed or not and whether the Resistance roll succeeds or not that tells you how well you did... The chart is so simple you'll have it memorized in no time.
So things are rated 1-20? No, they can go even higher. Every time you go above 20 for a rated attribute, you get a "mastery" -- a 21 is actually written 1W and a 43 would be written 3W2 (for two masteries), where "W" is the "mastery rune". It looks complicated, but it's not -- roll against the first number as normal. Every mastery bumps your roll up one level -- a failure becomes a success, a success a critical success, etc.
In essence, it's a simple system that can handle epic levels of abilities. Since Glorantha has this "Bronze Age/Epic of Gilgamesh" feel, this makes sense. It's all about making the PCs important and powerful, while still making it possible for them to fail.
The above is, in essence, a "simple contest", a all-or-nothing affair. There is also a more complicated ruleset for "extended contests", where one has a set of action points, which one can risk on smaller, simple contests over the course of the conflict. This is for important, detailed stuff, like important fights or political debates or whatnot. It's an abstract system for detailing an overall jockeying for position before putting in a coup de grace.
Now, this generally means that heroes who win an extended conflict aren't hurt at all -- you only get hurt if you lose a conflict. This bothers some people, but the ruleset is pretty explicit as to why this is: "HeroQuest combat is modeled on popular fictional sources. You rarely see or read about fighters delivering a succession of permanent woulnds to each other until one of them finally keels over. Instead, they jockey for a favorable position, ducking, dodging, knocking each other over, tossing each other around, and smashing up the furniture. Up until the final blow, they generally deal out only minor bruises and cuts."
Personally, this is fine with me. The ruleset does exactly what the authors intend to do. If you wanted something different, you should play D&D or The Riddle of Steel, which have their own merits -- but not what is being aimed at in HeroQuest.
I will note, by the way, that any contest, extended or no, physical or no, results in "damage" to the loser. If you lose a debate, your debating skills may suffer for a while afterward, just like your combat skills suffer after you lose a fight, because you're hurt. Everything uses the same system, so once you get used to it, you can make it do anything. I've seen it compared to the old Marvel Super Heroes game, and that comparison isn't far off, though HeroQuest is much more sophisticated.
Character advancement is through "Hero Points", which are outlined right before the core rules. With a hero point, you can "bump" a success up like you had a mastery (for those important, climactic rolls) and "cement" benefits, like your relationship with that sorcerer woman you encountered last session. Hero points, in essence, let you decide what's important and/or interesting to you, and modify your character to fit that vision.
After the core rules is an expansion of those rules to cover all sorts of relationships, in the obviously-named "Relationships" section. HeroQuest solves the "lone wolf" problem quite simply: By emphasizing that no man is an island, that at the very least there is a culture that produced the character in question. Relationships have a useful game-mechanical effect, encouraging players to cultivate them, and making the game richer as a by-product.
The next section, "Basic Magic", is about magic. Magic is so much part of the essence of Glorantha that even peasants can do a little magic, called "Common Magic" in the rules. In essence, common magic augments mundane skills, like sheep breeding. You just need to be able to wiggle your fingers and chant...
Even if you're not playing in Glorantha, the various magic and religious options and examples given allow you to do a lot of different things. The basic magic chapter is followed by three different magic systems, each getting their own chapter, from "Theism" (magic derived from pagan gods), to "Animism" (magic derived from spirits), to "Wizardry" (which covers traditional wizard-style magic as well as magic from a distant, single God -- think Roman Catholics). All three exist together in Glorantha, but any one of the systems would be fine for another game-world.
The next section, "Narrating", is for GMs. There is some solid, if not terribly original, GM advice in this section, as well as some optional rules, including a rule for partially wounding the successful party in an extended conflict, for those who don't like the "all or nothing" nature of combat.
The next chapter is about "Heroquesting", a uniquely Gloranthan activity where heros can travel to the Hero Planes and attempt to re-enact myths, facing mythic beings, in return for a variety of potential rewards, including the possibility of forging one's own myths. This is very good stuff, as it allows a game world (like Glorantha) to have detailed background myths, but instead of all the cool stuff having already happened (i.e. like the Forgotten Realms), the PCs can get involved in the past AND have it affect the present directly. In essence, it's a fourth magic system, one that entire campaigns can be written around.
The next section is "Creatures". This is your basic bestiary; I imagine it would have thrilled me more if I were already a Glorantha fan.
The book ends with an "Introduction to Glorantha" and some sample "HeroQuest Adventures". This is enough to get you started, but it barely dips into the setting. (That's what supplements are for.) A touch annoying, but since I didn't want to use HeroQuest for Glorantha anyway, the low page count wasn't a big deal to me. Plus, given all the examples are Gloranthan, there is more than enough for a campaign here.
The back of the book has an extensive (and good) index, not to mention all sorts of reference materials that greatly aid play, including a wonderful bibliography of inspirational sources.
So, is it worth it? If you're interested merely in new information on Glorantha for a RuneQuest game, perhaps not. If you're interested in an excellent new system that works in any game (espcially fantasy, but that isn't required) where culture and relationships are important and the PCs are central to the game and have the power to make sure they stay that way, then HeroQuest is for you. Given that, if you like Glorantha, that's a bonus.
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