I've never seen it in a printed version of the myth, but Sandy's asserted this both here, and in the flesh. Furthermore, he's said that what you get isn't Standard Issue "Apotheosis Now" immortality, but rather a sort of Physical Indestructability kind. You _can_ be killed, but it's vastly harder than merely chopping you to bits. Reason being, essentially, that Yelmalio (and perhaps even moreso, Antirius) took all sorts of crappola at the HoG, and Came Through in the End. (Admittedly requiring resurrection in A.'s case.)
Somewhat confusingly, you have to "lose" the Quest to gain this benefit. If you knock nine bells out of Zorak Zoran's designated fallguy, then you can get fire-power type benefits back, but not the immortality. Potentially cosy, then, for an oppositional HQ, if the Y. chap is trying to lose, and the ZZ fellah to win, and both benefiting thereby, but there's at least still the small detail of not getting killed in the process to worry about. The minutitae of this can wait until page 3 of the HeroQuest Rules Errata, though.
> Does that mean anyone who's done the HoG is immortal? That includes
> Belvani from Sun County, doesn't it?
I forget the details of his writeup, but I'd imagine he's effectively performed the "Pilgrimage" version of the HQ, rather the the Full Monty. My own feeling is that the "depth" or "level" of a HQ is a rather fuzzy thing, and not a clear-cut "real"/"practice" distinction as is occasionally implied; but obviously, there's a big difference between doing the Short/Stationary LBQ at Sacred Time, and actually (meta-) physically Harrowing Hell to bring back Yelm/Arkat/Sheng/Other. So, doing the HoGHQ as a "mostly mundane" journey would likely yield lesser benefits of the same, general, vaguely congruent with the myth sort; increased CON, free automatic Resurrection, immunity to poison, etc.
(In fact, to harp on about a conjecture I already made, see the Yelmalio gift (and geas!) list for the general sort of effect the quest will have on you. Now ramp vastly up for sufficiently "advanced" versions of the Quest... Try to avoid the "Return, coughing blood, on the back of a maggot-ridden Ox. Roll thrice more." result, though.)
> Apart from this, how do HQers achieve immortality? I know it's not
> common, but what HQs have been documented, if any?
I believe that one or other sort of "immortality" is actually quite "common", relatively speaking, for Heroes; Uzuz HQers routinely become Unaging, it's somewhere opined; anyone with a Hero Cult has become at the very least Mythically Immortal, and may be able to still manifest, to a greater or lesser degree, after death/apotheosis. I don't know of any others that work quite like the HoG quest, though.
> I don't see how you
> can get it from following your deity in a myth, simply because the gods
> are immortal to start with: they didn't have to gain it.
Hence, if you Emulate Your Diety enough, you will become immortal, in one sense or another, at least, without necessarily ever actually performing a specific Become Immortal HQ (in most cases). The snag is, by the time you've successfully done so, you have about as much Free Will as your god, too: to wit, none, or "switch to emergency my-existence-is-being-threatened power, Scotty" type amounts. I know this begs the question of cause and effect, but that's how I currently look at it, at any rate.
Another possible way of looking at this is via Hero Cults; rather than emulating your God directly, one can follow the same path to Herodom/ Immortality as an _earlier_ Hero. There'd seem to be something of a Bootstrapping problem here, mind you, so I plan on stopping digging before I find myself any deeper, holewise.
Mortally,
Alex.
End of Glorantha Digest V4 #267
WWW at http://rider.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/Rolegame/glorantha.faq.html
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