> 2) How does the gloranthan examples of Sheng Seleris and Oorsu Sara
> actually require that mystics have the capacity to be adventurers
> requiring their own rules so they go out and use their powers for good
> and avoid falling into temptation?
>
> If such is not your position then I struggle to see what the argument
> is. My position is that when people want to play mystics, they can
> easily play people with the look and feel of mystics (ie a wandering
> monk) who operate with conventional magic and have to work their way to
> curbing their inner unrest to they become true mystics (using the
> Staffordian defintion). What's your position?
I am with you Peter on this one -- although I think that HeroQuest (or the HQ gaming style) is flexible enough to allow narratives that would be centred on mysticism. But such a game would be a very unusual one, not a typical Gloranthan game at all.
The problem in my opinion is one of focus : the typical focus of a Gloranthan game is most likely going to be quite unrelated with the focus of mysticism or mystics.
It would of course be possible by some contrivance to have some mystic or semi-mystic or other wandering the countryside in search of ... whatever .... and in the company of some other PCs ; but it is hard to see how such a setup would be related to mysticism per se.
I think that there are some schools of mysticism that are more involved with the Inner World, although Nils is quite right to point out that by doing so they give themselves a hefty handicap mysticism-wise. Even so, the typical timescales and focus of a normal Gloranthan campaign would *still* not be those of a mystically focused narrative. All that this would do is to provide a potential narrative hook to allow such characters into your game as PCs.
However, and just in terms of practical gameability, let's say Character C had mystical Ability A target number xWy -- under what circumstances exactly should the GM let the player improve the Ability ? If this is going to be real mysticism we are talking about instead of just some cool orientally-styled powers, martial arts, or doom rays, then the typical story elements in a Gloranthan game are unlikely to provide any justification for such improvements.
Story-driven justifications are not an impossibility, and certainly not in HeroQuest ; but then we get back to the weird mysticism-focused narrative where seven years of meditation might be the roll of a single d20 ... and where the problem wouldn't be having mystics as PCs, but the diametrically opposite problem of how to integrate non-mystics into the game.
Julian Lord
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