The Orginal Sin of HeroQuesting

[Aurelius]

After having been gone from Glorantha for some 20 years, the Lunar Way book is pulling me back in, and I've spent a week frenetically reading post-QuestWorlds stuff. As the RQG has reached product maturity -- defined as the key Lunar book having been published -- it's time to look into whether I'd like to run some Runequest games again. 

As a part of the enI'm trying to read up on what's latest on HeroQuesting. 

It's obvious there's no ready recipe for a cocktail, but I'm trying to assemble the key sources. I'm fairly well-versed in what HeroQuesting entails, from Sacred Time rituals to exploratory HeroQuesting, from emulation of gods to replacing Wakboth with Gorgorma because you really don't want to deal with Wakboth. 

Anyway, what sources, both canon and heretical, should I include in my literature survey? I currently got Secrets of HeroQuesting, 13th Age Glorantha and TotRM #7.

Non-Runequest references are welcome, as are generic Glorantha references. And as a forum newbie, also links to earlier good threads. 

Oh -- what's the original sin teased in the topic? 

The labeling of something as HeroQuesting and defining at as a singular monomythic style of magic spanning through Glorantha. While I appreciate the summarizing and operationalizing work in Secrets of HeroQuesting, the book has far too much language like "HeroQuestors reach the last HeroQuesting Station of their HeroPath".

For my playstyle, it is essential that PC:s and NPC:s can have a coherent, right-sounding conversations about their planned humongous rituals.

"Why should our Clan invest 2 weeks of premium harvest time on your hubris, Master Wind Lord, just so that you can get those lovely Sandals of Darkness? That'll ruin our harvest, someone needs to take care of the cows and raise the ire of the Empire. You say that you will replace the mother of Uz with Zorak Zoran and send him chasing after your Trickster, but what if that doesn't work Master Wind Lord, who will pay the bill if his fire magics hit your earth priestess companion and our unharvested crop burns on the fields?"

And that conversation has very hard time fitting in any of the words in that book.

[Nick Brooke]

I talk about how I run heroquests in RuneQuest games in my free Manifesto, and there are five worked examples in Black Spear: a magic road, temple incursion, static power-up, disrupting an enemy heroquest, and getting lost on the Other Side. I don’t spend any time talking theoretical gobbledegook, I just get on and do it.

There’s also a great overview in Six Seasons in Sartar, a bit more mechanical than my own take but letting a thousand flowers bloom is the glory of the community content programme.

[soltakss]

7 hours ago, Aurelius said:

Oh -- what's the original sin teased in the topic? 

The labeling of something as HeroQuesting and defining at as a singular monomythic style of magic spanning through Glorantha. While I appreciate the summarizing and operationalizing work in Secrets of HeroQuesting, the book has far too much language like "HeroQuestors reach the last HeroQuesting Station of their HeroPath".

Most HeroQuests are given a "Happy Path" treatment, which is what the HeroQuestors are "expected" to do.

Deviations from the happy path are difficult to write for, unless they are classic deviations that everyone does.

We do not know the Adventurers who HeroQuest or the campaigns they adventure in, so we don't have a clue how they will do the HeroQuest, so those deviations are up to the GM and Players to sort out. At least that's how I see it.

7 hours ago, Aurelius said:

"Why should our Clan invest 2 weeks of premium harvest time on your hubris, Master Wind Lord, just so that you can get those lovely Sandals of Darkness? That'll ruin our harvest, someone needs to take care of the cows and raise the ire of the Empire. You say that you will replace the mother of Uz with Zorak Zoran and send him chasing after your Trickster, but what if that doesn't work Master Wind Lord, who will pay the bill if his fire magics hit your earth priestess companion and our unharvested crop burns on the fields?"

And that conversation has very hard time fitting in any of the words in that book.

Yes, that is a reasonable criticism.

On the one hand, Orlanthi support their temples and support their Rune Lords, so supporting a HeroQuest is almost a religious duty. However, on the other hand, HeroQuests can fail and a HeroQuest that is, as stated, for the betterment of the HeroQuestor alone is unlikely to gain support from the clan, especially if the HeroQuest could fail and cause detriment to the clan. 

The Sandals of Darkness HeroQuest is very much getting powers for the HeroQuestor, unless the HeroQuestor gains the spell for other people. 

A Better example might be to gain a spell such as Hail Shield, as this protects the fields from hail. It could be in the clan's interest to support a HeroQuestor on this HeroQuest, as it gains a material advantage to the clan. Similarly, gaining a Stormtup gives a Clan an advantage, as it can tup all the ewes and give them better lambs, thus enriching the clan.

 

[Aurelius]

3 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

I talk about how I run heroquests in RuneQuest games in my free Manifesto, and there are five worked examples in Black Spear: a magic road, temple incursion, static power-up, disrupting an enemy heroquest, and getting lost on the Other Side. I don’t spend any time talking theoretical gobbledegook, I just get on and do it.

There’s also a great overview in Six Seasons in Sartar, a bit more mechanical than my own take but letting a thousand flowers bloom is the glory of the community content programme.

Thank you, I'll check those out ... having been a long-term fan of your work on Lunars, I already got halfway with the manifesto before chasing the next shiny thing! My way of reading Glorantha stuff is usually running all over the place chasing threads instead of finishing complete books, but thank you for the leads.

I like the mechanical ones for examples, too, because although I probably won't use the mechanics, they paint an extremely detailed picture of how someone thought Stuff works. I never use Crimson Bat stats either, but they paint a picture -- and for that reason I would love to get sample stats for some Heroes and Superheroes as well.

Whether Jar-eel's attack stat is 200% or 1000% makes a difference, even though both numbers are silly when rolling D100.

49 minutes ago, soltakss said:

Most HeroQuests are given a "Happy Path" treatment, which is what the HeroQuestors are "expected" to do.

Deviations from the happy path are difficult to write for, unless they are classic deviations that everyone does.

Yeah, this is the big problem -- drawing a map of myths would be extreme amount of work, require one to write a ton of myths from various angles to bridge the issues, and the outcome would be a godlearnerish monomyth map which would make this stuff pointless to play by its very existence. 

Making a heroquesting game meeting Sid Meier's criterion of a "good game being a series of meaningful choices" is extremely hard, since navigating a map of endless folklore would require players to understand that endless map. After all, often the greatest experience with Gloranthan myths is when someone says something like "yes, as it is told in Dara Happa, Yelm only agreed to get back to the sky after his murderer took the trouble of traveling to hell to apologize" -- when puzzle pieces magically fit together in ways that were unexpected by the listener but make perfect Gloranthan sense.

It would make life easier if there was an encyclopedia of myths, a sort of Kalevala-style folklore epic collected by a nosy Irrippi Ontor sage, but yes. Megatons of work. (I did appreciate the way King of Dragon Pass myths all intersected, and how sometimes it was IIRC obvious from the art if not from the text.)

49 minutes ago, soltakss said:

On the one hand, Orlanthi support their temples and support their Rune Lords, so supporting a HeroQuest is almost a religious duty. However, on the other hand, HeroQuests can fail and a HeroQuest that is, as stated, for the betterment of the HeroQuestor alone is unlikely to gain support from the clan, especially if the HeroQuest could fail and cause detriment to the clan. 

In my Glorantha, its actually been usually quite the opposite!

It's more that every fledgling Wind Lord wants to be the superhero of his own life, whether they have the character or the chops for the job -- after all that's the kind of folks who end up as Rune Lords of Orlanth Adventurous, and it is the job of the clan elders to temper their endless ambitions. "Shure shure, we'll put you in the queue, but before you get to risk your health, and ours, for glory, you better prove yourself, make a sound plan, and explain one more time why we should bother". Practically the same dance they did when those same Wind Lords wanted to start another rebellion against the empire right now with zero chances of success and hideous retribution from the occupation.

But of course that is very cult-dependent. Humakti are more serious-minded, Lankorings are too skittish and like the comfort of their temples too much, and the Yanafali Scimitars have too much wordly affairs to deal with to even consider heroquesting. Can't blame Orlanth Adventurous for being too ... adventurous..!

Thank you! 

[Jens]

IMHO clan-supported heroquests are undertaken by the prosperous and the desperate; prosperous clans have the resources to spare on speculative ventures, while desperate clans have nothing to lose and are willing to try anything that might help. 

[Aurelius]

On 6/1/2024 at 6:47 PM, Nick Brooke said:

There’s also a great overview in Six Seasons in Sartar, a bit more mechanical than my own take but letting a thousand flowers bloom is the glory of the community content programme.

To put it mildly.

"I dunno: kill a giant broo? That feels a bit anti-climactic to me, but you know best, and other published heroquests have pulled similar tricks. (“Broo #1 represents the embodied moral evil of the universe: it has 15 hit points and a 40% club attack…”)"

😄

Anyway, just wanted to say these were excellent recommendations and very helpful.

The only thing I'm kinda missing would be some kind of take on ritual supporters of heroquesters, and a take on the consequences that sometimes befall on them. I like the tradeoff of either getting a ritual support group for your heroquest, which can help you or take some blows on your behalf, or the much more difficult endeavour of going solo, which would be personally a lot more risky but only endangering the hero and his hubris.

And maybe some systems on pretending to be Orlanth and what happens if you accidentally drop out of character while dueling Humakt.

[Nick Brooke]

OK, I don't focus on that stuff because it encourages metagaming and weird behaviour by players, and leaves your sessions open to trad.HQ "we failed the roll we needed to start the heroquest, so what now?" nonsense. It doesn't mean I don't think it happens: in The Duel at Dangerford we see how Fisher Queen Kallyr's debility blights her kingdom, while in Black Spear the adventurers are at times propelled by the Colymar Tribe, the Boogie Newtlings or the True Golden Phalanx's ritual backing. But these are role-playing games, where each of my players is responsible for one protagonist: they aren't some kind of sim-Glorantha, where players sit back from the table and decide, "Rather than take a hit to my left leg, I'd rather half of my Tribe takes a catastrophic blow to their self-esteem."

tl/dr: "Currency? Bookkeeping? An adventurer craves not these things."

[Malin]

I have been putting off actually making any form of published heroquest stuff since I have been waiting for the gamemaster supplement to see how much I managed to reverse-engineer the rules used in the Chaosium While Bull campaign (I would feel weird about using them for stuff since the ideas are pilfered from other people's heads), but since heroquests is one of the big focus on all my campaigns at least I can share some of my experiences with trying to find stuff to scavenge for it.

It's not easy finding something that hits the spot. Nick's stuff has been the closest thing for me so far; everything else feels a bit like trying to apply mundane world logic to something that's supposed to be a break from that. I have read (and bought) most stuff, official or not (I am a hoarder of text), but most of them make me feel less inspired. In fact, the thing that inspired me the most is actually the two-volume Guide to Glorantha (spendy but so worth it) and King of Sartar. None of them have rules. None of them even have heroquests. What they do have are snippets of odd lore and facts that make me take a look at Glorantha and go "oh shit, this world is alien and cool, and nothing I can do would be weirder than what is already here." They give me the license to go wild, and I have had entire adventures built just around a cool place or character name.

Sure, some heroquests are formed from known myths, but are they really the fun ones? It feels a lot like the way some are depicted as fixed plays where what is measured is how well the characters manage to embody the central role and do the right thing every step of the journey. Like follow a recipie and go home with the Sandals of Darkness and so on. We all know players, they will come up with cooler and more fitting ideas than that.

I generally construct my heroquests very loosely, sure I use nodes/scenes and players can move between them, but that's more about navigating the mythic plane and giving people options. Once they are in the scene there is no one true way of resolving the problem; even the gods of the original myths often did different things depending on who you listen to. I keep an open tally of the choices, and these can affect both the outcome and the real-world support. And, especially at the start, not all characters have any support. So I needed to pull people in in other ways.

In fact, our very first heroquest happened because the characters were recruited as "followers" to an NPC they had interacted with earlier, who was doing a heroquest with the support of their tribe. The PC's were picked because they were suitable mythic companions that would not mess up the quest, while most of the other members of the tribe would have issues with that. In short, outsiders were needed to send on this dangerous mission, and it let the players both learn/experience heroquesting, and then keep dealing with the fallout/results. I also had some shorter/place based heroquests where they were pulled into mythic events by being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they are at the point where they are the ones who have to figure out how to gain support and manage expectations for their sometimes deeply personal shenanigans. We have an influence system with various groups in our campaign so that makes it easy to track/see who might be willing and what the advantages/disadvantages will be on a more abstract scale.

As for non-glorantha inspiration: Go to the library and borrow a bunch of myth and folk-tale books from various cultures. Just having read enough of them is so useful a thing to have at the back of your head.

 

[Malin]

I realize that the way we wrote the cultural initiation rites (not cult initiation) in our upcoming Life and Traditions Under the Sun Dome supplement is similar to how I construct heroquests, so I am including two pages of the Ernalda one here. Of course, this is constructed as a document GMs can use to hand to players for character background, with advice on how to handle the different paths the character would have taken later. But the essence is there, different stations/scenes that can be resolved differently depending on the character, most fusing together again while some diverge greatly.

Life and Traditions under the Sun Dome (104).pdf Life and Traditions under the Sun Dome (105).pdf

[jajagappa]

15 hours ago, Aurelius said:

The only thing I'm kinda missing would be some kind of take on ritual supporters of heroquesters, and a take on the consequences that sometimes befall on them.

Follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple. 🙂 

If the PC's gain community support, they get a gift/treasure from the community for the quest. It gives them a one-time/one-use bonus on one roll during the quest (you could play either as a +20/30/50 roll bonus or a bump up of a level of success in an Opposed Roll). 

If the PC's succeed in the quest, they either bring something back for themselves (no community benefit, hence don't expect support in the future) or they bring something back for the community (add a bonus to the year-end roll for the community and the PC's). 

If the PC's fail the quest, then whatever gift/treasure was given by the community was lost and the community and PC's take a penalty on the year-end roll.

Of course, the other bonus or penalty from a quest is the next scenario. The quest had consequences. A success brings a new foe. A failure brings some evil that the PC's must now confront.

[Aurelius]

On 6/23/2024 at 12:13 PM, Nick Brooke said:

OK, I don't focus on that stuff because it encourages metagaming and weird behaviour by players, and leaves your sessions open to trad.HQ "we failed the roll we needed to start the heroquest, so what now?" nonsense. [...] But these are role-playing games, where each of my players is responsible for one protagonist: they aren't some kind of sim-Glorantha, where players sit back from the table and decide, "Rather than take a hit to my left leg, I'd rather half of my Tribe takes a catastrophic blow to their self-esteem."

tl/dr: "Currency? Bookkeeping? An adventurer craves not these things."

There are many things in the Hero Wars Quest era of Gloranthan development that make me profoundly sad, but one of them is that the community went from extreme simulationism of RuneQuest all the way to total narrativism/dramatism of Hero Wars in a way that didn't work for me, and apparently for a lot of other people. 

My preference is somewhere in the middle. Not counting fatigue points and not measuring household item weight in ENC, not trying to sum up the MP contribution of a clan of 919 adults (and their bound spirits!) to figure out how many points they are donating to Kallyr when sending the feather of external support to her to underworld. 

I find mechanics like Deadlands Fate Chips and Savage Worlds Bennies simple, useful, and MGF. (And their less-exciting counterparts like Rolemaster Fate Points and Storyteller Willpower are also possibly useful).

I like making it political. Icarus only burned his own wings, I prefer proper folly and hubris dragging down the entire clan or tribe, King of the Dragon Pass way. But I don't think its powergaming if the Hero has to decide whether to confront Aroka alone or whether to also bring in the Thanes and the Fyrd: To me its about consequence, sacrifice and heroism ... and what rulesets could do here is make the decisions accessible and consequential to players. 

(My problem with Hero Wars rules is that nothing feels like anything because everything is amorphous and ephemeral, there is no world, just a story.)

And of course it's political. The ritual support group is there also to make decisions. Maybe you don't want the Thanes there, but they risk it anyway; or maybe you want them but the clan Storm Voice on the ritual grounds says "no". 

So yeah, no "100 MP sacrificed at Houston provides 1 God MP to Hero if lead ritualist succeeds in Support Hero Quest roll". 

21 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple. 🙂 

If the PC's gain community support, they get a gift/treasure from the community for the quest. It gives them a one-time/one-use bonus on one roll during the quest (you could play either as a +20/30/50 roll bonus or a bump up of a level of success in an Opposed Roll). 

I love simple mechanics (and I've got a healthy dose of criticism for RQG from that angle), but I also like complicated situations with a lot of moving parts. So... probably need a bit more than that. 

This thread has given me a lot of stuff to chew on, thank you everyone for supporting my quest!

[Aurelius]

22 hours ago, Malin said:

I realize that the way we wrote the cultural initiation rites (not cult initiation) in our upcoming Life and Traditions Under the Sun Dome supplement is similar to how I construct heroquests, so I am including two pages of the Ernalda one here. Of course, this is constructed as a document GMs can use to hand to players for character background, with advice on how to handle the different paths the character would have taken later. But the essence is there, different stations/scenes that can be resolved differently depending on the character, most fusing together again while some diverge greatly.

This is beautiful stuff! 

And I love the notion that a lot of people come out from the same rites, kinda thinking they were going through the same stuff, and its sort of forbidden to talk about, but they do it anyway, and realize that there are subtle differences that are extremely meaningful. 

[KungFuFenris]

You got it right that it seems to be an either/or scenario, and I've tumbled a lot of RQG as well over the past couple of years.
The density of simulation seems a bit more at odds with my personal crunch preference, and I've started several house rules compendiums trying to nail the sweet spot.

Just need that Gamemaster's Guide to see where I can tinker with some of the bigger systems.

[radmonger]

Interim minimum heroquest rules:

• A Heroquest is a magical ritual with a percentage chance of success.
• Off-screen, there is a complex system is some unpublished book that determines that chance.
• On screen, you are running a scenario to replace that die roll.

You don't need the book that gives you that chance of success. What you do need is:

• the ability to describe what the inside of a magical ritual looks like.
• someway of deciding what the long-term consequences and effects of the ritual can be.

The examples Malin posted, along with the similar ones in places like SSiS, give you the first. The second can be extrapolated from the Rune Magic rules, starting from the assumption that learning a Rune Spell available to you under RQ rules is a heroquest. Just one that has sufficient modifiers from cult and temple that make performing it automatically successful.

So, as a baseline, a HQ can lead to gaining a single use of any Rune Spell. Including not only those in the Red Book of Magic, but those in its unpublished Green, Blue and Brown siblings. Such spells may be above the standard scale of personal magic, and so need to be cast by the temple wyter, at a cost of 10, 20 or more POW. 

Making spells learnt this way reusable requires developing an appropriate Worship skill, and so typically requires the founding of a new cult.

Edited June 24 by radmonger

[davecake]

On 6/2/2024 at 3:45 AM, Aurelius said:

Whether Jar-eel's attack stat is 200% or 1000% makes a difference, even though both numbers are silly when rolling D100.

In the new rules, it certainly does matter, because 200% is well within the reach of PCs. A Sword of Humakt who has cast Sword Trance (of BG who has cast Axe Trance) should be higher than that, and a Berserk Death Lord or Storm Khan at least close. So I'd want Jar-Eel to at least be a bit better than them when she has her magic on. 

But that's got nothing to do with hero questing. Or does it? Perhaps the real trick to hero questing is that it isn't about how you take on an incredibly powerful mythic challenges - I think we probably have rules that can deal with that as well as we are going to get*. The point is that taking on those challenges are so important that the powers of the universe, the gods and their more abstract peers, care about the outcome and consequences. You draw attention, and the big players notice, and so you get offered rewards and even bigger consequences. 

* seriously, the Crimson Bat isn't looking all that impossible these days. I can almost see a group of Rune Lords taking on the Crimson Bat (sure, they'd need to DI if they took an Eye Spit, and even Shield 10 and Iron Plate is going to have a hard time with one of its 15D6 + acid etc Tongue attacks, but fly onto its back so it can't bite them, kill a few Bat Priests, and you'd just need to critical it a couple of times in quick succession to get past its 42 armour, and with 10%+ critical chance that's not that unlikely... and while a third of Cwim is a bit tougher his weakest third would be pretty easy to beat, and an Incarnation of Cacodemon quite beatable indeed. With rules like that, we don't need systems for PCs to get tougher!

Edited June 24 by davecake

[Aurelius]

20 hours ago, davecake said:

In the new rules, it certainly does matter, because 200% is well within the reach of PCs. A Sword of Humakt who has cast Sword Trance (of BG who has cast Axe Trance) should be higher than that, and a Berserk Death Lord or Storm Khan at least close. So I'd want Jar-Eel to at least be a bit better than them when she has her magic on. 

I wonder what's the Design Intent there. I have impossibly hard time believing it would be that -- but that is where the spell description points, even if you are a beginner player that just accidentally happens if the GM drops you a POW matrix and you have 20 seconds to prepare for a critical battle. 

[Shiningbrow]

On 6/23/2024 at 5:13 PM, Nick Brooke said:

"we failed the roll we needed to start the heroquest, so what now?"

Just logically speaking from a Gloranthan point of view, with that much power being concentrated in an area, with that amount of ritual going on, there's absolutely no way that nothing happens... nor that a Heroquest won't start.... The failed roll should just mean that it's not exactly the one they thought they were doing (or, the version that a few of them thought they were all talking about at the same time).

[Shiningbrow]

On 6/24/2024 at 6:34 PM, radmonger said:

Interim minimum heroquest rules:

• A Heroquest is a magical ritual with a percentage chance of success.
• Off-screen, there is a complex system is some unpublished book that determines that chance.
• On screen, you are running a scenario to replace that die roll.

You don't need the book that gives you that chance of success. What you do need is:

• the ability to describe what the inside of a magical ritual looks like.
• someway of deciding what the long-term consequences and effects of the ritual can be.

The examples Malin posted, along with the similar ones in places like SSiS, give you the first. The second can be extrapolated from the Rune Magic rules, starting from the assumption that learning a Rune Spell available to you under RQ rules is a heroquest. Just one that has sufficient modifiers from cult and temple that make performing it automatically successful.

So, as a baseline, a HQ can lead to gaining a single use of any Rune Spell. Including not only those in the Red Book of Magic, but those in its unpublished Green, Blue and Brown siblings. Such spells may be above the standard scale of personal magic, and so need to be cast by the temple wyter, at a cost of 10, 20 or more POW. 

Making spells learnt this way reusable requires developing an appropriate Worship skill, and so typically requires the founding of a new cult.

Actually, I'm thinking it might be fun to roll for the Rune Spell HQ - in case of 'interesting' things happening during it.

[davecake]

15 hours ago, Aurelius said:

I wonder what's the Design Intent there. I have impossibly hard time believing it would be that

Well, Design Intent is difficult to clarify, but I think it is very much anticipated that attaining a skill level well above 100%, maybe 200%, is attainable with the <Weapon> Trance spells, because there would have to be obvious restrictions in place for that not to be the case - PC skill levels of 90% or so are easily attainable in character creation if you so choose, and if you are creating a spell that is limited primarily by magic point expenditure you'd have to think 10 or so is going to be well within normal range. So I have to assume the Design Intent is for there to be skill levels around 200% fairly regularly from its use. 

We can assume that mistakes can be made in design, because when unintended consequences are discovered, they can be corrected. We know this happened with the <Weapon> Trance, because soon after publication the spells were significantly amended - they used to allow massive skill boosts with essentially no consequences, they were changed to have significant restrictions on subject behaviour (acting as incredibly focussed, in a fighting trance) as part of the spell effects, but still massive skill boosts. The version of the spells in the Red Book of Magic differs significantly from the version in the rules. 

Does this mean the Design Intent was to have magically boosted PCs attain such high levels of weapon attack that they could effectively render a mere weapon master, an skilled and experienced expert, powerless to even Parry at more than 05%? Hard to say, but certainly a good design would understand the ways in which those spells work when designing the rules for opposed skills above 100%. And there are other such spells (Berserk can double weapon attack, Arrow Trance doubles bow attack, even Fanaticism and Morale (which applies to entire regiments!) can get far above 100%). I think it is reasonable to assume that such spells are intended to be part of high powered play, and the designers are aware of them. 

Does this mean scenario writers etc always take this into account, or the designers always are aware of all the nuances of balance issues that result? I don't think anyone is perfect, particularly not big collaborative efforts, so we must assume there are mistakes made when people don't grasp all the issues of play balance. I don't know if it is was anticipated that skills far in excess of would be such a dominant feature of high level play. I do know that the Crimson Bat had its attacks significantly reduced, because the RQ3 version had a 750% attack with its 3 Tongues, and that seems crazily high (Sandy probably got it from the same place he got very many big numbers, a vague handwaving feel for it, but it mattered a lot less if RQ3). So someone decided it should be reduced (yes, I agree! A very high powered PC should be able to maybe survive a single attack with luck and good defences) but probably overshot (but not treat such things casually as long as they can keep spamming Repair). There are lots of such issues when you create stats that you have to have a feel for the likely outcomes, which partly only really comes from trying it (I have one ongoing but very irregular game that is deliberately very high powered partly to test the RQG rules at high level, without using too many house rules that bump the power level up higher like Simons Dorastor books, so I think I have a reasonable feel for it), but partly is personal taste and table tradition. 

One house rule I have made is that in my games <Weapon> Trance has a maximum effect of doubling the natural skill of the subject. I think bigger than that has consequences I don't like much - not just an overall escalation that makes only those with access to those spells or other unlimited skill boosts able to compete at a certain level, but it also means the winner of a Humakti duel if both are willing to use Sword Trance is the one with the most stored magic points, not the best fighter. I don't know if the latter matters to anyone but me. But if you really think that unlimited skill boosting with <Weapon> Trance is good for the game, then maybe the Crimson Bat should have kept its 750% attack, after all that is just 60+ magic points, not impossible. 

[Malin]

I have to say though, using up nearly all your magic points for axe/sword trance is a bit risky. A perfect target for a spirit attack or two... And without the ability to cast unrelated spells and heals. However, as the vanguard of attack with other "support casters," they can be lethal.