Re: Re: DnD4e to HQ2 (was Greetings)

From: Kevin Blackburn <kevin_at_...>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2011 19:53:51 +0100

>
>Kevin Blackburn <kevin_at_...> wrote:
>> ... making runes the only important thing and
>> moving away from the gods being defined by their stories made me give
>up
>> on Sartar KoH, it was so against what attracted me to
>HeroQuest/Thunder
>> Rebels/Storm Tribes.
>
>Kevin,
>
>We welcome all feedback on our products. I respect that opinions will
>greatly vary, so I only hope that they have a "in the ballpark"
>description of the product. I don't feel your description is in the
>ballpark. Runes are not even 2 percent of the book so I fail to
>understand how they can be described as "the only important thing". As
>for how the gods are defined, the vast majority of what we have written
>about them all relates to their stories. If anything, we have moved
>more towards defining gods by their stories. If you couple SKoH/Sartar
>Companion with the Heortling Mythology book, I believe this to be
>doubly proven. Even by itself, SKoH is all about stories and
>storytelling. Things are stats lite, spells, skills, feats, etc. are
>given only brief word count, all so the story is the thing. Or am I
>totally missing the meaning of "gods defined by their stories"?

I suppose I owe you an explanation for my comments.

This is of course purely personal opinion, coming from the background of a conservative group of players playing a single campaign for over ten years – so bit non-standard. It also comes from the position of considering Storm Tribe and Thunder Rebels absolute perfection – I still flick through them and new ideas spark off their lines.

I was also coming from the point of actively disliking HQ2's approach of relative challenges, the designers having decided they couldn't work out how to manage absolute scales in a playable manner – whereas to me the greatest innovation of Hero Wars as rules (and kept in HQ1) was an absolute scale that could usefully compare peasants to super heroes (even if the innovation needed a bit of a shakedown to perfect), which in turn meant I had no intent of using its rule changes.

So, “Magic and Religion” in Sarter:KoH - starts by referring to Rune Magic in the first sentence. It moves on to such statements as “Each rune has myths associated with it”. Then on to talking of such things as a god being a “Fire Rune God”, and a discussion of the runes first. Then it gives a translation of rune to god (not the other way round).
Individuals get rune affinities first, not actually gods. Charms and spells are always associated with a rune. To use a god's magic you draw on rune affinities. Your personality comes from your runes.
You can only become an initiate or devotee with sufficient rune affinity.
And all the gods are then tagged by their runes, and this made the organising theme.

This is where I gained my impression from.

So I was rapidly running into the situation of reading a mix of material I already mostly knew well and a new approach to organising the presentation around runes that I felt inferior to the old presentation, for a set of rule changes I hated. Perhaps my judgement was unfair, and certainly it's of little value to others, but it is surely unsurprising I stopped reading and went on to do something I would enjoy more.

Likewise, as you can imagine, I've not read the Heortling Mythology book, for fear of the same result, or worse, damaging my enjoyment of what I have and love.

-- 
Kevin Blackburn                         Kevin_at_...