JonL

I hope so. Apart from being a fun game, it's a great example of how to take the generic HQ2 toolkit and implement it for a specific genre. That comes as some relief that they just won't necessarily be unavailable forever should Charles decide to make Nameless Streets: Gumshoe Edition or similar going forward. "Flawed Abilities," "Flaws as Hero Point Generators," "Gaining Hero Points" and the Organic/Easy Improvement options make for a better game in my experience (though that is of course a matter of taste). Wise move on Charles, Ken, and your part to put all the rule variants by themselves in Chapter 3 to make it crystal clear what parts Moon Design/Chaosium may use. I'll look forward to the Charles's Chapter 3: Sacrificial Cover Prestige Edition Kickstarter. More seriously, I hope they appear in legit electronic form on the web site or forum. It would be helpful to be able to refer players to them in more substantial form than a sheet of table-rules. Thanks for chiming in, Pablo.

Sad news from Alphetar's Pablo Guccione came up in a discussion over on rpg.net: Prices on Amazon have gone pricing-bot goofy, though Cubicle 7 seems to still have it available, at least for the moment. I wonder if Charles Green would be open to having the rule innovations documented in some other form? (Are you on here, Charles?)

IMO, the key is to have what hypertech can do defined as setting information. The HQ2 mechanics don't tell you what is Easy, Nigh-Impossible, or a Stretch for a given ability, you interpret what's plausible based on the game world. Many games out there convey that information via statblocks, but if you know those things about your setting because it's written down or discussed some other way, you're good to go. The key is making sure there's a common fictional framework.

I like the angle of view more in the original, but I love her posture in the new one. She is poised to wreck that thing.

Alphetar seems to sell Nameless Streets as book+PDF, though if there's a PDF only option I don't see it on their site: http://www.alephtargames.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=article&id=57&lang=en As far as a long-running campaign goes, I haven't done it yet myself. HQ has thusfar been a game I run at cons or as a fill-in when my regular group is short-handed. If I were planning a long campaign with it, I would probably not use Hero Points as XP, give out a single XP per session (or use one of the RQ-style check methods suggested in Nameless Streets), and tick-up base difficulty more slowly than suggested in the rules. Jajagappa has run years-spanning campaigns with it, so clearly it can be done.

If the fictional magic system in the game world is very well understood by the group at a practical level, you can just give somebody an appropriate ability and wing it. Like, you know what someone can do with a "Gymnast" ability, so you don't need detailed gymnastics rules, you just follow the fiction. Supernatural things though by their very nature have few if any real-world points of reference from which we can gain common knowledge, so it can thus be helpful to define such things mechanically, as we see in the magic systems in HQ:G or like I did when translating some old D&D stuff to run Keep on the Borderlands with Heroquest. The third approach is the way Nameless Streets handles it, which is to not use any new mechanics, but rather to spell out the fictional parameters of the magic system in some detail, such that you can reasonably gauge what is easy, difficult, or impossible with them much like you a player who is not personally a gymnast would with "Gymnast."

Or corrected HeroQuest: Glorantha. Seriously, please, fix existing before working on new. Please.

I'm confused by this business about the Morokanth being vegetarians. I thought the whole point of the survival covenant was that some would be conscious beings who eat animals and some would be animals that would eat the limited plants and then be eaten by the conscious ones so that both groups could survive on the limited food - and that the Morokanth were the former and their herd-men the latter. Doesn't the Morokanth being vegetarians fly in the face of that? Like, if the herd-men aren't grazing and the Morokanth aren't slaughtering them - how are they even Praxians? How & why can the other tribes tolerate the Morokanth taking a double portion of vegetation? How can their lands support both them & the herd men eating plants there? Wan't the covenant necessary because there was explicitly not enough plant life left for that to happen?

The idea here is to transplant the concept of Heroquesting from Glorantha into the world we see outside our windows, or at least one superficially similar to it. A loose parallel would be drawn between the 18th & 19th Centuries & the Storm Age - as the powers of the Enlightenment & Industrial Revolution lead to revolutions & upheaval, but also to unchecked imperial colonialism, while the World Wars present a rough analog to the Great Darkness.The era of Time parallel begins in 1973. That's the end of the era of the post-war boom and the beginning of the world as we know it. 1973 in particular has the end of the Vietnam war, Nixon's collapse, the first world-wide TV broadcast (Elvis in Hawaii!), the first cell phone and VoIP calls are placed, Secretariat's Triple Crown win, the birth of TCP/IP & Ethernet networks, the OPEC oil embargo, The Miami Dolphins' perfect season, The UK & Ireland join the EEC, the US Supreme Court rules on Roe vs Wade, the first space station (Skylab), Lexis-Nexis comes online, women become commercial airline pilots and are admitted to the London Stock Exchange, the personal computer (Xerox Alto), Led Zeppelin carries out their great world tour that gets filmed for The Song Remains the Same, the US & USSR sign the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, inflation & the decoupling of productivity gains from workers' income growth begin the long unmaking of the Middle-Class, Special Education mandates begin, conservative think-tanks like The Heritage Foundation begin their long counter-attack against the progress of the late 1960's & early 70's, Hank Arron finishes the season one-run short of Babe Ruth's home run record and expresses fear of assassination over Winter break, the first battered women's shelters open, motor vehicle databases are first used by law enforcement to hunt for (then unidentified) serial killer Ted Bundy (he was caught otherwise before the computer assisted investigators got to him, but his name was on their list), the tide of Cultural Revolution begins to recede in China as the 10th Party Congress brings Deng Xioping and Zhou Enlai back into influence, Pink Floyd releases Dark Side of the Moon, DDT is banned and the Endangered Species Act is passed, Billie Jean King defeats Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match,Gravity's Rainbowby Thomas Pynchon is published, Bruce Lee dies (or does he?) & Enter the Dragonis released six days later, CAT scans & MRI deployed, laser bar code readers appear in grocery stores, fiber optic cable is invented, genetic engineering via recombinant DNA is invented, Dick Clark begins the year with his first New Year's Rockin Eve, and Google's founders are both born. Really, while many of the seeds that were planted that year took many years to bear full fruits, our current world began then. Something about the increasing interconnectedness of the world coupled with major cultural milestones and increasing societal self awareness around the globe brought about a metaphysical shift.The idea then is that people in this modern epoch can under the right circumstances walk in the footsteps of prophets, inventors, rebels, conquerors, saviors, explorers, lover, scientists, and other such Heroes of bygone eras. It might be in light form in the sense of carrying out deeds in the regular world that parallel the acts of a a bygone hero in a mythic sense, such as when the crowds in Kinshasa helped their Hero Muhammad Ali channel Daud to defeat the infidel giant George Foreman. At other times, a quester might go so far as to cross over to the Other Side and walk in the footsteps of John Brown, Joan of Arc, Moses, Julius Reuter, Annie Oakley, Han Xin, d'Artagnan, Beowulf, Kibwebanduka, Jesus, Sitting Bull, Paul Revere, Grace O'Malley, John Henry, the Buddha, Davey Crockett, or whomever; and return with some sort of been for themselves or their supporting community. As with Gloranthan theism, identification with the hero you're emulating is key. More recent figures from your own culture group are easier to identify with than foreign ones in the distant past. The key though is what's in your heart, whatever differences there may be between the quester and the figure emulated are challenges to overcome, but not insurmountable ones for the right quester.Churches, fraternal orders, unions, think tanks, advocacy groups, criminal organizations, underground music scenes, and so on posses secrets & lore that aid in Heroquesting, and provide support for their questers just as cults in Glorantha do. Joseph Campbell may still be alive, and his works are beginning to spawn something of a God Learner movement among certain groups of scholars and counter-culture mystics. Campbell adherents regard Joseph Smith's achievements with a combination of curiosity, suspicion, fear, and admiration, especially WRT rumors of Mormon questers being able to reach the Garden of Eden via crossing over at Independence, Missouri. Attempts at such (Arkatic?) mytho-historical hacking as the Latter Day Saints movement accomplished have proved unfruitful since '73. Jim Jones's People's Temple likely represents a failed attempt, and the results of the PRC's attempt to seize control of the Dalai Lama/Panchen Lama cycle have yet to play out.This is a world of magic & miracles, but mostly personal & subtle rather than huge & flashy. That's not to say that huge & flashy never happen, but such things are rare. A guitar can kill Fascists, though not necessarily immediately or with laser beams.In place of the Runes, we have opposing sets of principles: Dominion/Liberation, Compassion/Acquisition, Change/Tradition, Collectivism/Individualism, Glory/Serenity, Perseverance/Defiance, Work/Play, Perception/Expression, perhaps others. Most people can only embody one side of a pair, though a sufficiently enlightened individual could transcend the duality. Perhaps Stalin embodied Collectivism, Dominion, and Perseverance, while Gandhi embodied Collectivism, Liberation, and Perseverance&Defiance-as-one.How would you frame adventures in this environment, and when would you set them? Where would you go? Whom would you meet? What would you find? (cross-posted to RPG.net forum)

I imagine that Thed given justice by Orlanth ends up turning out much like Babeester Gor, though with trappings more Storm than Earth. If Orlanth came down hard on Ragnalar, righteously shames his brother before the whole Storm Tribe, and casts him into the Pit of Solitude where he can harm no one else (though particularly not slaying him, because kinslaying is still a major no-no), whatever cruel & vindictive streak she may have had to begin with remains on-target rather than inflamed to maddening levels by justice denied and turned upon the whole community. She could even be given Ragnalar's former place of honor as Storm Goat alongside Orlanth Storm Ram and Urox Storm Bull, and be the bane of rapists much as Urox is the bane of chaos.

Outstanding summaries, Jajagappa! I also find useful this three page reference with all the key tables on pages 1&2 and a tracker on page three for extended contests and the Pass/Fail cycle. Here's the PDF. There's also this one-pager hosted here last month that's pretty good, but I can print double-sided so I dig the previous one a bit more.

I found that HQ gave me the qualitatively defined structures that I had wanted from Fate, without the burden of needing to manage the Fate Point economy to keep the game running how it should. My flaw as a Fate GM was that the more I got caught up in the flow of the roleplaying and let the system fade into the background, the less I thought to toss Compels out, leading to the players too often being starved for FP by the climax of the session. With Hero Points in HQ being much less central to play compared to FP in Fate, even when using Fate-ish options like the Flaws-as-Hero Point-Generators rule presented in Nameless Streets, you're never in a situation where whole swaths of mechanics are unavailable to the players for lack of points to spend. (Many successful Fate GMs manage the FP economy rhythm just fine, of course. I just turned out not to be one of them. )

For all that I am emphatically grinding the axe, like jajagappa I have successfully used the game in both my regular group and with groups of strangers. The inconsistencies require you to make some decisions about which way you want it to work, but either way you go it's a good and playable game. (I wouldn't get heated if I weren't passionate about it.) However, things like whether one can spend one Hero Point or several on a single roll can have a major impact on outcomes at times. While it's a good game either way, it is a different one. While I can make choices about it to my taste easily enough, the rule book shouldn't leave me guessing as to which one it's describing. HQ:G was my jumping on point to Glorantha, previously knowing both only by reputation. Between RQ & HQ, I'd pick whichever one suits your group's playstyle better. I know, right? Like between Summer of '15 and now there hasn't been one afternoon for them to chat about it, a day for someone to type up a draft based on the notes from that discussion, an hour or so from those involved to look over the errata doc draft, and then another hour or two for someone to incorporate any notes and pretty it up? Never? In all that time? Incorporating the changes into an updated PDF is of course a more involved task, but not a Herculean one. If even a single staff hour per week had been devoted to that task it could have been completed last year.

I won't begrudge you your hobby joys or expect anybody to work unpaid in limited free time, but somebody, whether you or a colleague with available time, absolutely should be getting paid to fix defects in a commercial project in a timely fashion. My vexation is not that you or anyone in particular has not resolved the problems, but rather that Chaosium management has not made a priority of allocating labor resources and budget to resolving clearly stated outright contradictions in the rules in over a year.

I got halfway through a post assuaging Aprewett, but couldn't finish it. Months have once again gone by without the more serious flaws in the PDF being redressed. I don't want to hear a thing about developments on the upcoming Prax book until this gets fixed. I don't want to hear a thing about developments on The Eleven Lights until this gets fixed. Frankly, hearing about work on these things going on while the core book remains unfixed is a slap in the face. Fixing this stuff is a task of days or weeks, not months or years. I am not buying The Coming Storm nor any future supplement until this gets fixed. I am not buying a hardcopy of the corebook until this gets fixed. Seriously, it's been out for a year and a half. Prioritize making the time to fix it rather than continuing to leave your customers having to figure out how the game is supposed to work in spite of what's written in the rulebook..

Now you've got me wanting to transplant The Name of the Rose to Sun County.

I suggest picking up Nameless Streets if you haven't already. Not only could its catalog of Keyword packages* aimed at Urban Fantasy Detective Noir play be handy for your Shadowrun game, it also has several alternate options for replacing the awkward Hero Points=XP dynamic that I've never much liked since I first saw it in good 'ol D6 Star Wars. I particularly like its suggestion for Flaws as Hero Point generators. Using them that way makes for a great carrot to encourage engaging with Flaws, without being so intrusive as that dynamic can sometimes be in FATE since Hero Points are less central to game play than Fate Points are in Fate. * Per our other discussion, Nameless Streets even specifically comments that the Keywords' Ability lists can be used positively to enumerate Package style use or normatively to guide Umbrella style use. NS is a real gem.

Cool. I'll look over the threads to get a feel for what you're doing. I dug the looks of Harrik though. Air, Movement, & Truth sounds like an adherent of the Indiana Jones sub-cult.

I've never done a PBF, but I'd be willing to take Harrik for a spin.

Inspired by a discussion over on rpg.net... Monster High! Choose the following array of Abilities: Choose a Ghoulish Heritage (Werefolf, Vampire, etc) as a Keyword rated at 15, give it two Breakout Abilities at +1 and one at +2 Choose a High-School Social Role as a Keyword rated at 17, and give it two Breakout Abilities, one at +1 and one at +2. Chose a Distinguishing Characteristic, either as a distinct Ability at 17 or as a +3 Breakout to one of the above Keywords. Chose two Abilities that are Relationships to other characters, one a PC and the other an NPC, one at 13 and one at 15. Chose your best subject at or activity at school as an Ability at 15. Chose any three other Abilities to round-out the character to your taste, rated at 13. Spend 5 points as follows: Adding a new Ability at 13 1pt Adding a new +1 Breakout to a Keyword 1pt Raising an Ability or Breakout 1:1, up to three above initial score. Raising a Keyword 1pt+1pt/full two Breakout Abilities, up to two above initial score. Chose four Flaws: One relating to your Ghoulish Heritage One relating to your High-School Social Role One relating to either another student or group of students One relating to a personality defect, weak subject or activity, or other similar shortcoming. Assign them ratings equal to your two highest and two lowest Ability ratings (including Breakouts), as you see fit.

You can also split the difference and write "Typical" in front of the Abilities section as well, making the package a guideline for interpreting an umbrella and inspiring/informing breakout choices. You've touched on a key dynamic of understanding when to apply more detailed mechanics within HQ: The more everyone understands the fictional parameters of the game world, the less mechanics are needed to portray it. Conversely, that's why most of the fiddly bits & bobs in the rules end up being related to things like magic, because it's not obvious based on our lived experiences, knowledge, and common fictional points of reference just what should be easy, difficult, possible only with great effort and support, or outright impossible for a wizard, Rune Lord, or what have you.

I would though keep in mind things like injuries or other consequences to NPCs possibly providing bonuses to characters other than the one that inflicted it. Like, if Character A breaks an NPC's arm via a Major Victory, I would strongly consider applying that Lingering Benefit result as an Assist or Plot Augment if Character B fights that NPC later on. Parallel concepts could apply to Player A smearing the NPC's reputation and then Player B debating the NPC in court, and similar.

Umbrella-style doesn't worry about enumerating everything that the Keyword might encompass, it just counts on Player & GM to understand for what it's applicable vs what would be a Stretch and uses breakouts to enumerate particular areas of effectiveness/focus, like so: Hunter of the Great Forest 17 -- Keen-Eyed Archer +1 --Relentless tracker +2 Package-style enumerates a specific list of abilities it encompasses. The awesome Dark Ages HeroQuest wiki has many examples, such as this one: Hunter Appropriate Cultures: Brythonic, Germanic, Irish, Pictish. Abilities: Archery or Throw Javelin, Butcher, Dodge, Hide, [Hunting Style], Keen Senses, Know Animals, Know Local Area, Retrace Path, Skirmish Combat, Track, Wilderness Survival. Typical Personality Traits: Patient, Solitary, Wily. Typical Relationships: to Family, to Hunting Band. Typical Followers: Pair of helpers or pack of hunting dogs or single sidekick dog. Standard of Living: Minimal. Typical Equipment: Javelins or bow and arrows, traps, survival gear, spoils of the hunt. In this example, you can use your "Hunter" keyword for anything on the "Abilities" list, while using it for things outside those would likely be a Stretch. The "Typical" sections provide guidance on selecting other Abilities.

There's a PBF over on rpg.net where a group of questers take a seriously Arkatic run at the Hill of Gold, in which Elmal intervenes after Orlanth attacks Yelmalio and brokers a truce between his lord and his half-brother, leading to Yelmalio facing Zorak Zoran fully armed and armored - and offering ZZ mercy in defeat on the condition that he help fight the Chaos horde assailing the mountain. Meanwhile Orlanth and his wingman Yinkin are off seducing the snow queen, and then they all meet up at the end to fight Chaos together.

Because when Orlanth and Elmal work together at The Hill of Gold, Zorak Zoran is not able to steal Elmal's fire.