This is a post about why I've chosen to shun Heroquest: Glorantha, and pretty much everything that's come out of official orifices and its para-valves recently.
I've been rubbing up against Glorantha for over thirty years now, though only randomly and spottily following its development, and even more erratically being a gamer. So, I'm not really for real, when I talk about it, rest assured. Though I feel inappropriately attached to the idea of the thing.
Back in the '80s, when it was either Runequest or Delenda-Est, I tried to take Glorantha seriously as an imaginary world, or as a 'subcreation' if you want to get all Tolkienian and pious about it. Back then, despite the Rune in Runequest, runes really didn't seem to matter much. In game terms, in setting terms, whatever; they were at best mysterious and I never got a sense Gloranthan people spent much time thinking about them, on average. I gathered that they were packaging chrome. And I liked Runequest and I liked what I could then understand about Glorantha, just fine.
Later, I learned more about the Godlearners, and learned a lot more Gloranthan mythology and got peeks behind the emerald curtain; and I guess I conflated the two: Godlearners are those who break the fourth wall; runes are that which the Godlearners use to make their hammers from. (Sentence-final postpositions? That is which up with I shall put your bottom!) As a nerd and fan, the Godlearners and all their investigations were really valuable, in order to get a grasp of Glorantha. As a player (including GMs), of course they should be shunned and ignored and must be treated as if they don't exist. Eugghhhh!
I missed the HeroWars era per se, but caught up a bit when the first tranche of Heroquest came out; and I really liked it. A lot. I use a kind of HeroQuest rules for my mangled Traveller-2300AD/Blue Planet/Peter Watts/Trotskyist campaign, and my 40-year-old Tekumel-titrated-through-Glorantha campaign, and in other one-offs and mini-campaigns. I really liked it! I liked the HeroQuest Mk.I system. I liked the presentation of Glorantha that came out around then. Sure, there were runes marked out in a systematic, or systematic-seeming way; but I never dreamed then that we were supposed to take it seriously as a world-building thing. It was obviously an aid to gamers/Godlearners; not a description of Glorantha as characters experienced it.
Then, after another gap of involvement and information, I came across Heroquest 2, a refinement of a beautifully curt system, which managed to spend page after page laboring over game mechanics while constantly back-patting itself for being very very clever and not "gamey". You know what's even worse than RPGs that try to convince players they're emulating gritty reality down to the molecular level? RPGs that try to emulate the experience of consuming fictional representations about those experiences. It's just taking more steps away from the shit that goes through our heads; an added layer of simulation with no sane audience wanting it. Who the hell decides with some friends to narrativate around for some fun, and recognize HQ2 as the way to go about it?
Seriously; I like Heroquest for practical purposes, but all the reasons I'm supposed to be impressed? No. Really, no. Never. All that stuff's sad and embarrassing. Someone I knew -- who, for the record, was too mean a bastard to keep in touch with -- called Heroquest 2 an outlet for the people who always dreamed of writing for fanfiction.net but never could work up to that level of confidence or expertise. Heroquest can be a!w!e!s!o!m!e!, but only despite itself.
Actually, in HQ2, I did like some of the rules mechanics it published, and I've adopted or adapted some. They certainly weren't worth the money spent on the book, let alone the time needed to pry them out of the self-contratulatory glossorheia. But, in the big picture at that point in time, what skin off my nose? I'd got a grasp of a great system from HW/HQ1 and a grasp of a great world already. No worries. After that, what future is there, but fine gravy?
Later, Heroquest: Glorantha came out, and a bit later, I bought it. And then I saw that world I'd followed turned upside down. Only then I realized, oh: runes were totally literal, and real, and intrinsic both to the game system and to the setting, to Glorantha; in a conscious and knowing way. In fact, an adult Gloranthan person needs to be made up of, defined by runes. Gods and spirits and principles are all exponents, to greater or lesser degrees, of their runes. They're all Pokemons, down past their divinity and primordiality, down to the turtle, and then past the turtle, all the way down to you, dear gamer. All the legendarium I'd previously read that used runes to summarize and condense an entire universe's mythologies, and which was thus supposed to be the (emically) hated and obscene and worldbreaking fiction of unnatural nerd-horrors; well, no, in fact, it's totally accurate and correct. What I -- and every fellow-Glorantha-traveller I'd ever met in real life -- had thought was a metafictional device for world-building is now gurning literalism.
I haven't been following recent news on the Runequest side of the mechanics, but what I randomly hear makes me think that this same line is being followed: Everyone of us gamers, everyone in Glorantha, is a damned Godlearner now.
I love Glorantha. I love its fans. I hate the collapse to low-budget & half-assed metatextuality that (it seems to me) is the order of the day now.
K
