Given the general level of woe and despondency on the lists (worse for me who has never even seen HQ2.0 in even the Continuum edition) which to be fair appears almost justified I thought "sod it, I'll give up waiting for HQ2.0 and play the game." For about a year now I have been putting off playing HQ because i was waiting for 2.0 - I now feel that I can accept that giving up a it's not going to be seen before August as far as i can see is ok.
So tonight, in a spirit of perversity, I called a number of friends, and three people who have never played HQ before gathered around my table. All loved the game, and will but a hard copy of the rules if they can find one - second hand as that seems the best way to get it, or maybe pdf? Anyway I'll encourage them to pick up some HQ pdf's, and I think we might have sold a few copies of Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe as pdf's anyway!
Probably this is the best way to actually get the game moving again - sell more stuff. Any new product that cones out we will all buy I guess, but any new person brought in to Glorantha might buy ten already published books - which we own -so really the existing fan base is NOT as valuable as new recruits. Sad, but the economics of rpg works thus. HQ2.0 is not really important for us - it will bring in loads of newbies though, many of whom will buy existing HQ/HeroWars/Stafford Library books, which will generate major sales revenue, and allow for more releases and for more writing! :) So Rick Meints must concentrate on getting HQ2.0 out, not the concerns of us old cantankerous types, and we should be doing our bit by trying to convert other roleplayers to at least trying HQ (hence the incredible importance of demo games at conventions). Playing the game and having fun counts for a lot actually anyway, but to thrive the community needs new blood? Dunno, just my thoughts.
Anyway I managed to get three friends round my kitchen table - my players were Hugh, a lifelong friend and fellow wargamer who despite having gone to uni with me, relocated across the country and shared houses with me for a decade or so before my marriage I actually rarely get to play rpgs with - I introduced him to rpg back at school, and he runs a Pendragon campaign I don't play in. He knows RQ, but has never seen HQ before. Secondly, Rob is an occasional roleplayer, with a vast love for narrativist and diceless rpg, and story uber alles mentality. He is currently playing D&D4e with one group and DArk Heresy with another, but HQ seemed much more likely ot be his kind of game (it was). Tom is half danish like me, quite a coincidence really, and also like me a hard core rpg geek with at least a hundred systems I think in his house. He'll play anything once. All three know quite a bit about Glorantha from RQ, and I think Hugh owns King of Sartar -and Tom has read every published RQ supplement (as have I think, though I have not seen Elder Secrets in two decades) including MRQ, but oddly NOT Hero Wars or HeroQuest. They all turned up at little notice, and were happy to try something new, and luckily got on very well indeed as a game group - they had the slightest of acquaintance before tonight I think.
Anyway we ran through the clan creation in BA, they ended up as a Malani clan, and the Clan secret involved "escaping with cattle". I think it was won at Three Red Peaks. I'm guessing that battle is covered in HoHP - I'll have to have a look later. Because after designing the clan and then their characters we had little time, we decided to tell a simple story about cattle raiding.
I made a few errors - for some reason I kept thinking high roll not low roll won a shared result - we eventually noticed i was wrong on the table; and i started their additional skills at 14 not 13 (I just gave hem 10 less freebie points to distribute to compensate.) Rob wanted to play a Godi of Ernalda, a Priestess, so I charged him all his Hero Points (3 starting +3 from adventure) and let him choose one Feat from each Affinity as starting ones and begin as a Devotee.
The characters were (Rob) the Priestess of the local Ernalda cult, and daughter of an exiled clan chieftain (well not really exiled - the clan is run by the Humakti chief since the Lunar occupation, and the former Orlanthi chief is in hiding in the hills with a handful of rebels and their families - about 80 people in total, supported by the clan secretly.) Hugh chose to play a Warrior who seems to have a psychotic British public school games attitude - his particular sport being cattle raiding. He is an initiate of Finovan. Tom is the Drogarsi worshiping skald, a loyal retainer of the exiled chief.
They are in a isolated hill stead: the game began with the decision ot go cattle raiding in to lunar-loving Cormyr lands. They located where they were on the DP Gazeteer map - and traced roughly where they wanted to go, deciding to raid on Starfire Ridge. First Question: is the scale on this map right? If so Dragon Pass is pretty small for the population! I vaguely recall something about maps scales on the list a couple of years back...
Secondly, Equipment. Where is it? I kept flipping through the book, and the index helpfully has Armor (See Equipment) Equipment does not appear in the index though! Anyone able to give me a page reference. Also, BA mentions The girding of Finovan rite. Sure, sounds good, and is known to our Finovani initiate - so where is it? Which book does it appear in? Thunder Rebels? I can't find it! I can't find it in BA either. Anyone help?
Anyway they managed to recruit some fellow raiders, and the Finovani then organised a practice raid on the chieftains prize cows. Half joined the herders, half were the raiders. They crept in, all went well, and the "raiders" seized the cattle and made off with them across the tula. And then it all went wrong.
Hugh's Finovani recalled the clan secret of escaping with cattle, which I had stressed was a strange and ancient magic. So he decided to cast it, and see if they could rely on it. And he fumbled... and decided the story would be far more interesting if he did not spend a hero point. So the cattle indeed vanished, and er, well the "herders" and "raiders" stood looking at one another. And then the chief turned up warning them not to spook his prize cows with their silly games...
They persuaded the chief the cows were on the high pasture, then
wondered when the Secret had taken them. The rest of the sorry involved
the return of the cows from where they had been, via conversations with
the spirits of the ancestors and some not very successful improvisation
(using spinning & weaving skill and brew woad ability at minuses)
of dyeing the cows which had been changed by their experience back to
the correct colours, and a lot of skill in getting the cows off the
roof of the granary barn/Esrola temple where they ended up on their
return from the Otherworld. They calmed down the chief, gave up on practicing and decided to do the actual raid next session!
(In case anyone wondered: i had no idea what Three Red Peak involved,
but I decided the secret of escaping with cattle allowed limited travel
in the Spirit world, which allowed terrain to be traversed as a sort of
featureless realm, as long as drovers and cows ran in a straight line,
eluding pursuers. (Some years back I did some work on spirit roads influenced by Paul Devereau and the Glos Earth Mysteries bunch, and the Ley Hunter - so all this soert of influenced my thinking here, as did bits or Arthuriana). The fumble had taken the cows across the boundary between worlds, not the
drovers, and now they were lost in a liminal state, two worlds and in between... The ancestral ghosts were able to help bring the cows back after a visit to the urn field
the sacrifices and oaths the party made to appease the ghosts and boost
there power. No idea if this SHOULD work in Glorantha, but hey it
suited my story and I did not have much time to look it up, so I just went with what worked for the story - after all the whole story grew out of that fumble, and was therefore improvised.)
Anyway it was fun: in the greater scheme of things it might not help, but we won a few more people over to the HeroQuest cause, which has to be good, as they will mention it to their groups, and maybe get a few more gamers in to the community. When all seems lost, it seemed the only thing to do was just play the game and have fun, and hope that might help! :)
What really pleased me abouty the players was how they tried really hard to relate thinsg back to the clan history, and improvised politics, clan history and background furiously, adding more an more detail in play. Tom had noted in his back history that his bagpipes were made from the baldderof a bull gifter to Temertain that he had stolen, and his cattle calling song was a teaditional heir about the clans her from Three Red Peak who had escaped and taught the cattle hiding secret. The Finovani came up with the idea of calling up the ancestors, aas he had a good relationship with the clan ancestors as an ability he had chosen, and i was unsure if they were spirits or not, but the Godi's Sense Spirit allowed them to meet and deal with the (players thought terrifying) hungry ghosts, who I made as creepy and almost malignant as possible, while favourably inclined. Many were anonymous having lost their sense of identity, but a ferw were regognizable - the girl with the crrooked teeth who died in initaiation, the priestesses recently deceased mother, the Finovan's nagging wife...
Anyway it was all great fun. I recommend just playing HQ 1.0 - it is fine. I still want to see HQ2.0 though. :)
cj x
CJ's uneventful life is now blogged: http://jerome23.wordpress.com/
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