The following responses are strictly my own opinion, and come at the end of an exhausting day (ad triple-digit-Fahrenheit), so it's bound to sound a bit critical; I apologize in advance. Really, what I want to do is show how I think that the Hero Wars rules do a better job of entering into the true spirit of (my) Glorantha, a world I've been in love with since 1979.
Guy Hoyle
On 8/10/00 at 12:42 AM Mikko Rintasaari wrote:
>Although it wasn't me that was quouted here, I'll add something here.
>Yes, I do worry about the details. The details are what I love about
>Glorantha. The depth and detail of the cultures and religions. I don't
>want it all to degenerate to "whatever feels cool at the moment and
>amuses your gamers goes".
All that still exists; there are volumes of literature about Gloranthan myth and culture, with far more on the way. None of this is in jeopardy. The details you seem to be worrying about are in the game system, IMO. I think HW is liberating us to experience Glorantha as it is, more so than RQ ever did.
> I want details. I want Glorantha to feel real. I want my gamers to
>feel the hot sand in their sandals and worry about their bronze sword
>getting dull. I don't want Xena vs. Batmat cinematics in gloriously
>vague dreamcolor.
Then don't run it that way! HW is a game that depends utterly upon the Narrator to bring it to life. It's a set of tools for you to use, not a straitjacket. Don't worry about the type of Glorantha in everybody else's game, worry about your own True Glorantha.
>But is the current view then that we should cast away all cohesion and
>similarity between our views about Glorantha? What good will the
>published stuff be then? Are we all just left to our own devices. The
>cults for instance get only the bare outline, with feats named with
>whatever amused the writer at the moment "the names mean nothing anyway,
>they'll just have to make it up themselves"
It seems to me that the names mean a LOT, given that we have only the published myths to go by (and those may not be readily available to everybody). The published stuff is a source of ideas, of inspiration, that must ultimately be realized by a narrator. You are the most important source of creativity for your players, not some 20+ year old system of rules that never really captured Greg Stafford's vision of Glorantha. Your Glorantha probably wouldn't be the same as anybody else's; I have my own preferences, Greg and Roderick and Sandy have theirs. Personally, I prefer the liberation that the HW rules give us; I don't have to remember what the range of a Disrupt spell is, or the particulars of the Second Mouth runespell (horrific as that is), or what the Blast earth spell does in RQ terms; I know how those would be resolved in HW, and don't have to have the critical hit chart memorized to boot.
>
>If this is the case we'd be better off with just getting information on
>the lines of "Orlanth is the greatest of the gods of storm, and his
>worshippers see him as the ruler of the cosmos"
That's probably what I'll be telling my players. FWIW, Sandy Petersen's player handout to us for his RQ campaign was about a page long.
>
>Then we just make up our own views on his magic. I don't see that the
>current trend is giving us much more than that. The details we have are
>all from the RQ stuff.
Actually, I know more about Glorantha as a whole from HW than I did from all of RuneQuest 1st and 2nd editions, and there are more details in the first 3 books than there ever was in the RQ3 boxed set.
>
>> The RQ version of Thunderstone was a stone imbued with the power of
>> Thunder, usable only for lobbing it at your enemies. The HW version
>> is that you imbue a stone with the power of Thunder, usable for
>> whatever is appropriate, which includes, but is not limited to,
>> lobbing it at your foes.
>
>And this makes for a more believable and deep Glorantha to you?
Does for me. I realize that Glorantha is more about mythic reality than it is about game stats.
>It's the details that make the world. Othervice we are just playing make
>believe, and we dont need any rules or backround for that. The details
>make Glorantha come alive.
Details about Glorantha, agreed. Needless detail in the rules seems counterproductive to that.
>
>> Remember, just because something was determined in RQ doesn't mean
>> that that description was actually correct or exhaustive.
>
>It's way better than not having any!
And it's probably misleading and constricting. HW aims to make Glorantha more than just the sum of its parts.
We Meddle in God's Domain So That You Don't Have To
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