Ian Cooper

Wow, this is the most ridiculous statement I have heard on these boards for a long time. No one is encouraged to 'rape the canon'. HQG draws from the same well-spring as Greg Stafford does, our imagination. In Greg's stories, such as Morden Defends the Camp, included with Hero Wars, magical feats are clearly the hero emulating the god (heroforming in HQG terms) and are based on the god's action in myth. We don't have all of the myths for all of our gods, so instead of limiting players we encourage both them and GMs to make up myths for feats that heroes or their god performed. Of course there has to be agreement at the table that the feel of that myth is in keeping with the established story of the gods. But all Glorantha's Will Vary. For many it is far move evocative of Greg's writing to say I am performing the feat of Vingkot Holds the Lin,when his shield could not be broken than saying I cast Shield 4. YMMV.

A very common companion would be an allied spirit, either embodied in an animal, or contained in an item such as a sword. This is of course, very explicit in Runequest, where it has its own rules, but less explicit in Heroquest where we avoid systemitizing every aspect of Glorantha. But if PCs in your game start powergaming with followers, and others want to balance out without having a character conception that includes multiple 'people' I would recommend using an allied spirit of some kind to balance out. Heroquest is generally a higher power level than say RQ2 was, so its not inappropriate for them to have a companion animal or item from their cult. Make one of the companions runes at least 1W sot hat the companion can be an initiate to make sense of this.

BTW what happens if a PC gets a marginal or minor defeat in a fight to the death. Do they die? Because we said that the NPC can. I would tend to avoid feeling the need to be symmetrical. Opt for the story logic, and only kill if you really don't have options for the story at that point, to recognize defeat. In this case I would tend to leave the PC badly wounded, or be humiliated in front of his lover, perhaps as their opponent spares them etc. You might want to lop of a hand etc. One of the best options is to offer the PC choices for the consequence, such that they make choices about their own story. Indeed the problem with the strict equating of defeat level to injury is that it implicitly trumps story logic, which is what we are trying to avoid. In a story focused on the PCs stories, death should tend be rare, and something that the table feels will be meaningful, not random (unless that is the kind of story you are telling).

Because Heroquest uses opposed rolls, we often tend to get marginal victory results. One problem I see with this is that people tend to crock the results of a marginal victory to mean something like "you don't really get what you want" reserving that for complete victory. That is not really the intent of the rules. I suspect the injury mechanics are at fault here, and to be honest they are a bit of a holdover from more structured games. It should be perfectly viable to kill your opponent on a marginal victory, if that is what the fiction suggests. It might be worth dropping the straight link between contest outcome and level of injury if you want to use this. My group is toying with moving to a yes, yes but and yes and approach. We think this is clearer to Heroquest's intent. A marginal is a yes, but. You get the stakes but there is a complication or hard choice to make. A complete is a yes, and.. in that you gain more than the stakes (or succeed at multiple goals). The converse applies to failure. Quite how is this different. Well let's say I fight a duel with my hated opponent, and its clear from the fiction that it is to the death. I get a marginal victory. The GM knows that killing my opponent is my stakes, so that is up for grabs. But there ought to be a complication: perhaps I can kill him, but I am wounded in the process myself, or my lover becomes disturbed by my savagery as I refuse to show my fallen foe mercy etc. This approach is inspired by other story games such as the PbTA family and Freeform/Universal RPG Result Do you get what you want? Major or Complete Victory Yes, and… You get the stakes, and something else. The loser’s condition worsens, perhaps they take a significant injury, lose the trust of their community, or are publicly shamed. They might be dead or as good as. Or perhaps you gain something, stealing a possession, gaining a new follower, or become renowned in song. If you want to distinguish a Complete should be a greater gain than a Major, but you can ignore this distinction often. Minor Victory Yes... You get exactly what you want i.e. the stakes. Marginal Victory Yes, but… You get what you want, but there are complications, the effect is more limited than you desired, or you have to make a hard choice between benefits or accept a loss to get one. Margina Defeat No, but… You don't get what you want, you lose, but its not a total loss.You are able to salvage something from the defeat, a little more if you sacrifice something other than the stakes to your opponent, that they agree to take instead. Minor Defeat No… You don't get what you want, you lose the stakes. Any consequences or complications such as injury or loss of influence are short term and easily shrugged off. Just take the loss and rest up. Major or Complete Defeat No and… You don’t get what you want, and there are long-term consequences. The situation might grow worse or more complicated or you might suffer adverse consequences that will require other conflicts to resolve: an injury that needs a healer, an insult that requires a formal apology, a loss of influence with the community that requires a triumph to win their trust again etc. You might be dead, or as good as. Or perhaps you lose something, an item is taken from you, a follower deserts you, your reputation lies in ruins as poets mock your defeat. If you want to distinguish, a Complete should be bigger loss than a Major, but you can ignore this distinction often. Thoughts?

The 11 Lights, The Coming Storm's campaign book, opens with some beginning scenarios. I'm trying to get that into your hands as soon as I can

I agree, I think that Pendragon style for criticals works better.

Second. First is meant to be farmer's campaign

I am thinking hard and talking about how the lines should differentiate. Obviously we don't want to repeat material across the two lines, and we would like some cross-fertilization. But Heroquest and Runequest are quite different games in what they are trying to achieve. I'll save questions about that for another poll though :-)

Just to avoid doubt. I'm dont want you all to worry about discussions you may seen on work in the Chaosium pipeline etc. Don't let that affect your judgement. I'm trying to understand, irrespective of those concerns, what you would want to see next. So assume a blank sheet. Given that "what's next" is a blank sheet, what would you want. And because folks worry, no I am not suggesting anything about items you may have heard about in the pipeline, either their likelihood of their happening or thier status. Don't try to 'read the tea leaves' from this request. It is what it is: I'm taking raw input on preferences.

I'm trying to understand appetite for material outside of Dragon Pass. Traditionally, supplements for areas outside of DP and Prax have not done so well, because folks can't use the material in their own game. But, post the Guide, folks may have more of an appetite for exploring the wider lozenge. So let's talk about where you might want to go, if you could only pick one to cover for the next two to three years

@JonL Let me check on that. I was talking with @MOB the other day about fan publishing, licencing etc. For now, if you have an idea, you can send me a proposal (just a summary, not a manuscript) at ian@chaosium.com

Hi all, First of all a big thankyou to the Chaosium guys for showing faith in me over this. Working for the Chaosium is a boyhood dream. I still don't live on Mars, but at least I have ticked one item off younger me's list. I'll be working with the team to figure out where we are going with the line. We will get The Eleven Lights out as soon as we can to start with. If you have ideas, suggestions etc. please feel free to mail me at ian@chaosium.com. I would love to hear from you, our customers, about what you want from the line. I'll read and reply as fast as I can to all your submissions. I may not be able to make all of you happy, but I hope to figure out what most of you want. I am particullarly interested to hear from those of you running Heroquest games. Where in Glorantha do you play? How long are your campaigns? What works for you, what doesn't. What do you need help with most of all? More soon. Ian

Hello, Our goal is to push out 2 HQ publications in a year. That is a reasonable goal for us for now. It can take a couple of years from inception to finished book in your hands, and about a year from an ms being finished. A lot of that length is due to the labour intensive nature of the tasks (creating text and art, laying out etc.) and the difficulty in parallalizing some of those steps effectively (at what point can you commission art during creation of the ms etc.) We have some material written and waiting to go out, and we have more in 'development' and some at more of an inception phase. Of course HQG players can adapt anything for RQ or 13thAge as well. We are having some interesting discussions about the idea of systemless books supplemented with system books for them. But nothing concrete, just ideas about how to effectively meet everyone's needs given production constraints.

We have an official thread for errata. At some point, once the Eleven Lights is done, I'll try to collate both. I don't know about the availability of people to re-issue the PDF with corrections right now. Also remember errata means: corrections that affect gameplay (i.e. the errors in the sample characters) not typos or grammatical 'errors' (some of which are open to dispute and may not be a productive use of time). On the Eleven Lights, @Rick Meints and I are working our way through the art issue. We'll fix an soon as we can. I am VERY keen to get this book finished and into your hands. It's been a long labour for me, and I want to see my child birthed.

I've run a number of long term games, hell The Coming Storm and The Eleven Lights are one of those long term campaigns (the other was in In Wintertop's Shadow). Two of the playtest groups for the campaign have been running long term games with it. I tend to run the game using TV logic, in seasons. A season lasts 12 sessions usually. We often break in between seasons. In terms of character growth, bear in mind two things. Focus players on keeping the characters to a small number of keywords with breakouts. Think of this as strong character conception, you don't want to add too many ideas, or the character becomes diluted. Players want to focus on increasing a smaller range of abilities. In a TV show, a character rarely gains whole new skills, but they often increase in competence. Consider tracking number of session separately for each player. This helps with absences but it also allows folks to drop a character and bring in a new one, without needing you to up their abilities. One beauty of the relative resistances of pass/fail is that a contest can be Hard for everyone, but have numbers appropriate to each participant. It also allows some of the continuing characters to 'strutt their stuff' by wading into help their friends, helping to highlight their relative power.

Some comments in The Little Suns thread got me thinking: what is the Gloranthan experience of drama? This is a little interesting because of how Gloranthan's experience their religion, compared to our own. On Holy Days they fly to the God's World and experience the god's mythic exploits. Rituals are often magical, this world heroquests, not simply teaching the stories of the gods. Even storytelling in Glorantha can be used as a form of divination as the muse of poetry takes over the teller's tale. Given that our drama seems to have evolved out of the telling of the myths of the gods, through acting them out, would the sacred nature of such telling alter Gloranthan drama. Would you retell the story of the Sword and Helm War in a play, to make a poetic point? Or would this be sacred, and not touched in that way. And what of comedic traditions in drama? We know there are poets, puppeteers, and potters. But what of actors?

Off topic: It's also easier to understand when you see it performed, particularly the comedies, when done well. It can also often be easier to understand the comedies with an all-male cast. There is a lot of cross-dressing humor in Shakespeare. (Yelmalions would presumably despire his comedies, hell I'm not sure Yelmalions would not have burnt the second volume of Aristotle's Poetics if they ever came upon it).

There is the All. And the All is divided into the abstract runic powers. And the abstract runic powers are divided into the great gods. And the great gods are divided into the lesser gods. And the lesser gods are divided into the demi-gods. And so on. Glorantha is a Platonic universe, in the sense that mortals see the shadows on the wall of the cave, not the fire. So whlilst Elmal is not Yelmalio, both are just shadows of cast by the All, and the shadows may reflect many of the same parts of the All, but also other unique parts. Illumination is seeing the All, gazing at the fire not the shadows, and if the experience does not drive you mad, realising that the world is just shadows. God Learnerism is trying to manipulate the shadows that the All casts. (And as you can imagine, that comes with great risks).

Some issues: The 'undead' including ghosts, vampires, Delecti etc that have a soul have not passed into the Underworld. They have defied the fate of Grandfather Mortal. Skeletons and Zombies are a little different because they are just re-animated corpses not souls. A ghost is not 'dead' to a Humakti, it is defying death. The cult can create ghosts, their perspective is 'nuanced.' Under this term ghost in Glorantha is different to ours because it does not refer to visits to the living by the souls of the departed i.e. on Ancestor Day. These are the dead who return to commune with the living. Humakti don't go around 'finishing off' the ancestors on Ancestor Day. The ancestors did not 'defy death' they are dead, but on this day they get to walk amongst the living once again. Humakti understand this nuance. Because HUmakti understand nuance they can distinguish between a heroquester who has returned from the Underworld, and someone who has defied the fate of Grandfather Mortal. There is no simple rule which says: Humakt hates things that should be dead that are not, and hates beings that return from the underworld. It's about context.

IMO they also used enslaved giants. Giants move the earth for what is now Red Cow Fort for example. The use of giants in Balazar is a modern equivalent of this practice. You can tell giant's architecture from dwarfs because it uses huge amounts of earth of un-mortared blocks of large stone. Note that I don't think these are exclusive, you might have had dwarfs overseeing giants doing the heavy lifting, later using Jolanti for that purpose.

We know it exists, as in the harlot of Alone or discussion in Pavis of prostitution with both temple girls and freelancers. Please bear in mind, there will be male prostitutes as well as female prostitutes. (Greg's writing has never IIRC shown any society having a prejudice against homesexuality.) It might be worth starting with discussions of prostitution in Ancient Greece: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_ancient_Greece (slightly more applicable than Rome that doesn't have an extant equivalent) There are going to be different classes of prostitutes: slaves, poor freelancers (generally folks without kin) and temple workers. Status (and price) is probably highest for the last, and one would assume that courtesans/hetaera are temple workers, perhaps of some renown. Although slavery is less common in Orlanthi lands, war is going to produce plenty of folks who are destitute. With large military garrisons it seems certain prostitution would thrive, so waves of Maboder survivors, destitute kin of those who fight in Starbrow's Rebellion, Dundealos survivors, or kin of those who fought at Iceland, or whose family or clan died in the Great Winter may well end up in the cities, where if they have no other trade, prostitution may become an option. They are being exploited, because they are vulnerable. In addition, pimps serving the Lunars probably bring in prostitutes from Pimper's Block or Sambari traders making the run to Slavewal. As most Gloranthan societies don't have strong sex taboos, it is unlikely that prostitution is illegal. The one exception would be the Brithini. It's possible that among the Malkioni that bleeds over into caste restrictions on sex, not sure. I'm not sure that Solar prurience is canon, but I suspect there is a 'class' issue in sex between commoners and nobility, but I would suspect sex with temple workers would be fine.

MA=Metamorphosis Alpha (I have some random memory that might have been @Jeff's first RPG, but it could be someone else and I am wrongly attributing

Hi guys, If any of you have read or played The Coming Storm and fancied reviewing it for sites like RPG.NET, ENWORLD etc. (whatever your preference) then I would appreciate it. If you wanted to link to your reviews in this thread, that would be awesome too. Cheers, Ian

Only once the pass into their afterlife, which happens at the Court of Silence, where heroquesters refuse to go to the afterlife and are cast into the pit. See S:KoH. I think that any heroquester who does not refuse their god's help at this step, will never return, instead passing on to their after life. Of course, I don't think this is exactly how Brithini experience it, they have thier own 'perspective' of how this process looks, but it is equivalent.

No they are a hero, and as such they are defying the rule that entry into the underworld and emergence is forbidden. That is what heroes do. Even Humakti heroes.