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General Glorantha
Prax and Yellowtail
Sartar and Cinsina
HeroQuest
Name Generation
Gloranthan Everway
Blue Planet
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These are a collection of notes that I've developed while running a
couple of Heroquests in my Gloranthan role-playing games. I've also
included a couple of sample heroquests that I've run. I ran both of
these before I got hold of the Heroquesting rules in the Deluxe Hero
Wars game. Not that that stopped me, as both of these quests were run
diceless and effectively mechanicless.
The two Heroquests are both 'initiation' type quests, where the
questor(s) delved into the deeper mysteries of a god in order to gain
extra powers and a greater understanding of their place in the world.
The first quest was in a Praxian game, when Stars-Not-Shine became a shaman. The second
quests was for a group of PCs in the Troubled Waters campaign
heard the Voice of the River. As
these were initiation quests, the important factors were to do with
the questor's attitude and actions, rather than with raw
abilities.
From my experience developing and running these quests, I have come
up with some advice that I hope others will find useful. My tips for
running heroquests are:
- Be sure the players trust the GM
- Any heroquest is a dangerous undertaking, and these sorts of
quests can be the culmination of a major plot for the character. As a
GM, the amount of power you have over the character becomes obvious,
while many of the in-game limits are removed (the character is, after
all, in the Heroplane, where normal rules no longer apply). Before a
player will commit his character to a quest, he has to be sure that
the GM won't abuse that power, and will make sure the story
progresses in an interesting way, regardless of whether the character
succeeds or fails in the quest.
- Think on several levels
- In all quests, there is the overall story that the questor is
following, and there is the precise sequence of events that occur. In
many cases, the correspondence between these is not obvious, and the
questor has to interpret what is happening in terms of the myth. For
instance, the events in Stars-Not-Shine's
quest can be interpreted at three different levels
- Link the events to the questors
- What someone finds on the Hero Plane is often a reflection of who
they are and what they have done in the mundane world. It makes the
quest more personal and immediate if the events in the quest are
directly related to the questor's life.
- Make internal dialogue external
- In all Heroquests, and particularly initiation-style quests, a
great focus of the quests lies in how the questor challenges and
overcomes their own limitations or connections. Much of this is in
terms of a character's internal dialogue. It's more fun for the other
players, and adds spice to the questor's player, if this internal
dialogue is made explicit.
- Ensure the players know the myths
- After all this preparation, it helps if the players understand
what is going on, and can react appropriately. They won't be able to
do this if they don't understand the myths behind the events they're
playing through. Either make sure the players have prepared and read
all the relevant myths beforehand, or prepare handouts for them.
- Don't bother with rules
- The two quests I've run were both in games that didn't have rules
for Heroquesting. However, in both of these cases, the quests were
really about the initiation of the character or characters into some
form of deeper mystery about the world. In these cases, the important
factor in whether the quest succeeded or not lay in the attitudes of
the characters and the actions they attempted. I generally considered
that all appropriate actions the characters would take would succeed.
The key to the quest lay in what they did and how they acted, and what
they learnt about themselves.
These are my quests. I hope you enjoy reading them, and that they
help to make your next heroquest sessions even more fulfilling and
entertaining.
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