John says that Greg sees the process of heroquesting as something that will transform the character, the gameworld society, and even the players. This sparked some ideas from my recent innoculation with the 7 Habits mind virus, and here's the result.
To become a hero, you need to transform yourself from an ordinary person into a great person with a goal to free society from a tyrant. But exactly what do you want to become? That's the first important question to ask. When the nascent hero goes into the otherworld to find the elixir to overthrow the evil tyrant, what will he be at the end so that he can accomplish his goals?
7 Habits has the reader undergo an exercise where he visualizes a funeral, with himself in the casket, and people describing what he did during his life. Then he takes the things the people say and decides what kind of person he would need to be to have people say these things. And finally he decides on some goals he can set in order to become the person he wants to be.
I think you can do this in the game too. Have the players write several funeral orations for their characters, then describe in game terms what the character needs to be to accomplish their ultimate goals. Now they have a direction. Some of their directions may point at heroic status. Players also realize their character will die, one day. And players also realize that their character needs friends, family, culture to support them in their greater goals.
Further, when you become a hero the final test is whether you will become the next tyrant, the one who starts the cycle again and prompts the universe to create the next hero. I believe it is necessary to describe the anti-hero you don't want to become with as much love and care as you describe the hero you want to be. Have the players write several funeral orations for their characters who did well, but failed dramatically, catastrophically, at the last minute, the final test of hubris. The higher their goals were in the first place, the worse the catastrophe should be. The more alone they stand, the easier it will be to fail. Make these funeral orations full of bile and hatred, for that is what these characters would deserve if they had failed so badly.
So far the players will have written two sets of funeral orations, and two character descriptions in game terms. Now they hand copies of these over to the GM, who will design adventures so that characters have the chance to develop themselves as necessary, and to fail in the same way that the anti-hero in them fails. We may even want to give the anti-hero-conscience in each character to another player, so that some of the PCs extreme single-mindedness and virtue goes away, so the PCs become more human in their failings.
Thoughts?
whoah!
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End of Glorantha Digest V2 #598
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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