Ian Cooper

One important thing to note is that HQ 1.0 is essentially a middle-ground version of the system that appeared in HW, designed to appeal to RQ players more. As such it reverts slightly more to the RQ view that everything has stats just like a PC. With HQ 2.0 we move away from that. And with RQG coming out there is less pressure to provide something that works for RQG fans. So I would focus on it as a rules-lite game, and one that is PC focused. (Compare to PbTA games where only the players roll and only PCs have stats). Can you kill the dragon with a simple contest? Sure. But don't make it an simple contest if that seems cheap. Will even a marginal victory kill the dragon? Sure. But when it's body crashes into the town below and crushes several houses, killing innocents, and the claims for compensation come... Use levels of victory and defeat to create new story, not to create a whiff factor. PCs in HQ are heroes not zeroes.

I'm going to agree and disagree. This is valid RAW, but I think it only really makes sense to apply levels of victory and defeat to PCs. So really, we only care about the outcome for the defender when they are a PC. Everyone else, you care about the level of victory from the point of view of the PC, not the NPC. The 'mirror' rule is not important when you consider most NPCs don't have stats. Why is this important? Because you get the prize on any victory. So if the agreed prize was lopping off the orc's head (presumably its important that this effect occurs) you get that on even a marginal victory. It's the prize, don't weaken player victory. The rules do state, but its not obvious, that levels of victory/defeat are optional. You only need to use them when there is value in knowing more graded information about how the PC succeeds. That is useful in contests with graduated goals, or ones where victory encompasses a lot of scope. If you fight off the orc army, it's useful to know when, if ever, they will return for example, if the contest was about saving your community, but may be less important if they were just an obstacle on the way to some bigger goal. HQ 2.0 changed quite a bit from HQ 1.0 and sometimes its easy to bring baggage from one to the other. in HQ 1.0 NPCs have stats, and it can make some sense to track their current status. But in HQ 2.0 we moved away from that to resistances. However, a lot of folks bring the interpretation from HQ and tend to use the mirroring all the time. I would suggest that you don't play that way. The prize is often something more than straight death vs. life. It's "I kill the orc so that..." and the so that is the prize. But the narrator should narrate and choose the fate of the orc dependent on what makes sense in the narrative at that point. Otherwise you end up with a lot of unsatisfying minor and marginal victories where the villain lives to fight another day. I would favor just narrating via the PCs outcome, not trying to mirror that for the NPC.

I think one point to remember here is that the fear of the dragons is not just a collective trauma stemming from the Dragonkill but a religious prohibition on dealings with dragons. You know that interaction with dragons is bad, because the priests remind you every Windsday what happened when the people of Orlantland engaged in dubious draconic practices, split their tongues etc. Today, modern religions continue to create taboos for people around behavior that until the enlightenment few questioned and even post the enlightenment were sustained by the lack of modern communications. Why do we fear dragons? Because the priest tells us to? Why does this have an effect that causes people to quake, run, hide in terror? Because the priest told you about the terrible things that would happen to you if you consorted with dragons, and you are just an ordinary person, not a dragonbreaking hero of the Wind Temple.

They come from the same family, though PbTA is a little different in approach. As you know in PbTA only the PC rolls, and there is no varied resistance, its 10+ to succeed without complication, 7-9 with, whereas in HQ there is a resistance and both GM and player roll. That may be philosophical, but each move in PbTA defines what those ranges mean. Moves are the big difference between PbTA and HQ. Defining moves is a key part of translating this game into a new setting; each one is a tiny rules engine for doing that thing. Writing an implementation of PbTA is harder than creating an HQ genre pack, because you have to create templates and moves for PbTA. In HQ you just have to create keywords because the mechanic is always shared.

HQG and RQG are quite different in what they do, and its not really anything to do with power-level. HQG is a intended to be a fast-paced, rules-lie approach to Glorantha, that allows for and relies on player creativity. It's cinematic in style and scope. RQG is a far grittier texture with a famously lethal combat system, comprehensive skill system etc. In the same way that 13G represents another style of play. it all depends how you want to run, and your choice might differ for styles of game that you want to play. I will probably use all three, depending on the type of game I am interested in bringing to the table. I think that the market for HQ is similar to Powered By the Apocalypse or Fate Accelerated (I think Fate is actually closer to the RQ market out-of-the-box). But where we do agree is that we have not emphasized enough the idea of other genres for HQ, with HQG really being one example of a 'genre pack' and we do need more. So one of our goals will be to support that, using the system for a wide range of genres, particularly picking genres that we think work well with the style of play that we think HQ encourages.

Well Heroquest Core is not 'shackled to Glorantha' only Heroquest Glorantha is. And we will continue to produce Glorantha content. The two lines have quite different approaches.

We do have an outline of a chaotic initiation in The Coming Storm on p.14. It describes how the Orlanthi initiation ceremony is experienced by those in the Red Cow carrying the ogre taint. Obviously the Red Cow kill most children who emerge from their initiation with this mark, but some do survive and plague the clan. Now that may not be the specific quest you are after, but here are some ideas on how I wrote that. Chaos came into the world because of the actions of the gods in the world. Gods like Ragnaglar. Generally they acted in ways that are now taboo. So secret murder, rape, sacrifice of sentient creatures, spreading disease, regicide, kinstrife etc. They are taboo partially because they help bring chaos into the world, but when they first occur they lead to chaos because they are acts against the social order. Breaking the social order has negative connotations in Glorantha, it weakens the world and lets chaos in. So, I believe many chaotic myths are about how someone broke the social order. Now in their minds I suspect they felt they had 'just' reasons for doing so. Perhaps they felt they had been treated unjustly, not got their fair share. In the Bible 'Cain and Abel' is a great example of what I would think as a chaos myth, for example. For a chaotic cult Cain's actions are justified and he is the 'victim'.

Have you posted on this on Twitter. I'd happily RT.

We know some things about being a Hero. One key item is that you have a cult of 500 or so worshipers, who you offer some magic to, in essence a feat in return for their worship. Being a hero also restricts your freedom of movement (some early attempts at describing high power heroquesting called this free will, the essential idea is that it gets harder to act outside key patterns). So I would say establishing a cult is key. What do you get in turn? A community of followers as per the community rules at the least. Being able to use the Magic Rating of the community could be very helpful for example. Someone to pray for you and send you their strength as you escape the underworld after your death. A Superhero possesses the Infinity Rune, complete control of the magic around them. In the boardgame Dragon Pass it effectively makes them immune to magical attacks. I'm not sure quite how we model this, but it feels like a start

@Bohemond Thanks, its always useful to get feedback. >>1) A book of hero quests for a range of cults (or scenarios built around the same, like the Humakt, Raven, and Wolf scenario and quest). For example, an Ernaldan quest, a Lhankor Mhyte quest, a Babeester Gor quest, etc. Especially quests for female PCs in less martial cults. There is certainly something to be done on Heroquesting in more detail. I'm not sure exactly what as yet. Whilst I empathize with cult heroquests I am not sure that is the scope of a book that helps you understand how to develop heroquests for your own game. 2) A book of drop-in scenarios for Red Cow (especially something that makes use of Snakepipe Hollow) Possible. An interesting question is that given limited publication throughput should we focus a book on that, or open up something new. Would it be better to use a vehicle like Wyrm's Footnotes to produce scenarios that could be dropped in? That said I am working on a book that will cover the rebellion during the period of the The Eleven Lights campaign, and have scenarios that could be dropped in to Red Cow. 3) Praxpack! Please please please! How do shamanic quests differ from theistic ones? We will probably join up somehow with the RQ product release with something for HQ 4) A Holy Land sourcebook The Holy Land is huge. I think we would need to focus on a place in the Holy Land where we wanted to tell some interesting stories. 5) A Lunar or Dara Happan sourcebook. Something that makes the Lunars playable as PCs in a full way (detailed write-ups of the individual Seven Mothers cults for example) Yeah, that is a big one. I have some ideas on how we might do this. 6) A book of Lunar or Dara Happan scenarios Again, as above

Can't make it, too many other travel commitments. I will be there later in the year.

@m0n0cular Nice work, and I agree that the Woods of the Dead were probably formerly claimed by the Dinacoli, but since Foul King Brangbane's exile have not been occupied by 'people'. I also had not noted the KoS reference, so great work, and the Alone issue makes sense considering the clans there are very new and post-Grizzly Peak. Maybe you should think about writing up the Clans of the Dinacoli to submit to Wyrm's Footnotes.

All, this conversation is very useful. @JonL your contribution, given HQ was how you met Glorantha is particularly useful in understanding this.

One option for now is to focus HQG on the 'classic' 1625- era, and let RQG focus on the 1627+ era and add genre packs to help play them. Certainly, that could mean if there was a 1625+ Rubble book we could do a 1625- presentation in a genre pack... The complexity right now would be trying to write two Big Rubble books, an RQG and an HQG one at the same time. That is the major obstacle to navigate.

I'll see what clarity I can provide on some books that may change status, and how we intend to react from an HQG point of view, at UK Games Expo and we will produce some sort of appropriate follow up to that on social media.

It's clearer how to do the Big Rubble in RQ for one. Obviously, my goal is to figure out the best way to give you the Big Rubble in HQG alongside that. But the smoke needs to clear a little. Again, I will try to do the best thing I can for this community and your feedback will help influence what happens.

This is still a discussion item so I don't want to make an 'official' announcement as yet (and your feedback could influence it). Right now, that would be the way to bet.

it is likely that these books will have their first presentation as RuneQuest books, with HeroQuest support added in whatever we eventually land upon (appendix, sidebars, separate PDF genre pack) etc.

Spot On. I'm in two minds if it remains necessary to have these values in a HQ2 genre pack. You could just describe the creature and its attacks and let the GM pick the resistance. But some folks find it helpful to have a guide to what might be an appropriate 'scale' for how tough a creature is seen as being 'in-world' and I can sympathize with that. We all know that a dragon has a nasty breath weapon that means going up against a full-grown dragon and choosing a Moderate resistance probably strains credibility. But a Floogamwit? How tough are they? Are folks afraid of them? We should probably have excerpted the HQ scale into an appendix. Sorry.

Hello all, I have been summoned. I'm hoping to work with the rest of the team to get ourselves in a position to have some very definite announcements at UK Games Expo. We will obviously share by all the channels after that. To clarify one point above, we are looking at 3-4 'books' every two years. The 'book' is notional, and probably best viewed as a 'project' because we might split a project into multiple volumes for reasons of pipeline, shipping costs, time-to-market etc. That said, I can say reasonably certainly that the projects will include: Non-Gloranthan HQ genre packs, The 'rebel' story from Sartar Rising (i.e. Battle of Iceland, Dragonrise) that you can weave as additional events into your 'clan' campaign. This was material that we considered off-stage for 11L, partially due to space requirements. A goal here would be that between TCS, 11L, and this book you would have the information to run a complete Sartar Rising period campaign A Fonrit book Of course, the usual warning apply, projects may never turn into actual books etc. as the road of trials is fraught with dangers. But we have an active line and we hope to get new material to you. We do need to decide how to dovetail into the material coming for RQG. For now, we will focus on Sartar Rising era campaign material in and around DP. Once the smoke clears on RQG's releases to establish their post 1627+ material we will look to our best approach to Argrath Rising era material and how we mesh with it. The Fonrit material opens up a new area, that we hope comes with less weight and is attractive to those who don't want to delve into DP's richness. Of course if it succeeds we may build on that line. Harrek is nearby in that period for example.

I don't believe there is one. We do have a thread which crowd sources errata for HQG (search the forum for errata). Chaosium distinguishes between errata - errors to rules as written - and typos/grammatical errors. Whilst the latter are mistakes (no publication is ever perfect) errata only covers the former.

Agreed. And let's nor forget, Orlanthi were Anglo-Saxon influenced at Greg's table for a long time too, because he know more about that from his Arthurian studies. It still worked. So if you want to pull those elements into your game because your group find it easier, its hardly without good precedent. It's just that it brings certain connotations with it that become problematic, so its easier for writers to stay more clearly bronze age

Easy there! No one is objecting to beer. I use wine in this example only because in this period beer was an everyday drink, whilst wine was a drink of feasting and celebration. 'Bars' tended to serve wine, and beer was served at home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popina http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/assemblage/html/6/Kelly_web.html

The key point here is not actually the 'canon' nature of barrels. It's not actually the canon nature of the technological base i.e. which items are specifically in or out. It's far more: how do you remind your players that this is an ancient world setting, and not the dark ages. Pointing out that the prevalent technology is not dark ages by not using barrels etc. helps with that sense of place. Consider these two versions of the same scene: The Black Pig is hopping tonight. Old Mellowy the innkeep has had to crack open extra barrels of the "Greydog Old Peculiar", and he freely admits when he ladles the lamb stew onto your trencher that he is worried he will be running out of beer tonight. He nods to the cloaked figure with a mailed shirt, sitting in the corner, with a crossbow placed on the table in front of him, "That stranger there is buying tankards of ale for everyone." and The Black Pig is hopping tonight. Old Mellowy the hostelier has had to had to fetch up extra amphora of the "Greydog Retsina", and he freely admits when he ladles the lamb stew into the earthenware bowl in front of you, that he is worried he will be running out of wine tonight. He nods to the cloaked figure with the bronze cuirasse, sitting in the corner, with a composite bow resting against the wall next to him, "That stranger there has me filling kraters of wine for everyone." One creates a sense of time and place for me, the other is 'generic fantasy'. So my pitch is not this is canon or that is canon, but that using bronze age technology helps create the feel of Glorantha as something a little different. PS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resinated_wine

A lot of that list in fact do go in amphora: https://www.ancient.eu/Amphora/ "Foodstuffs transported in them included wine, olive oil, honey, milk, olives, dried fish, dry food such as cereals, or even just water. Non-food contents included pitch" The Romans used them for fish sauce and preserved fruits. We know palm wood crates were used as early as 500BC, and that the Gauls put wine in barrels, but the amphora dominated transport until about the 7th century AD (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphora). Some winemakers continue to use amphora, as wine shipped in clay tastes different to that aged in wood.