> I made a few errors - for some reason I kept thinking high roll not low
> roll won a shared result -
I know lots of people who made that a formal rule, actually.
> 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.
>
>
>
That sounds like a fun group. I like the "We Exiled our old Chief"
approach to dealing with the Lunars.
> 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.
>
As such things do. :)
> 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...
>
Ha. I love Fumbles sometimes.
> 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!
>
Wait. Why did they re-disguise the cattle? Their clan now has cattle
that have been to the Otherworld! Shouldn't that be prestigious? (Also,
was this the Humakti chief or the Exiled one?)
> (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.)
>
Makes perfect sense to me. Escape with Cattle could easily be something
you go to the Otherworld with, and not getting it right gets them lost.
I'd be all about it. Now you have magic cattle. You have an interaction
with the spirit world to build on for the future.
> 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.
I love when players do this.
> 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. :)
>
HQ 1 is a fine game. There are just fixes and having them sorted out and
ruled on would be a great benefit.
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