heroes

From: David Cake <davidc_at_cyllene.uwa.edu.au>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 1997 00:42:16 -0800

        Two brief insights about heroquesting, in a separate message to emphasise their importance in among the nitty gritty of heroquesting rules messages. Excuse this brief lapse into pontification.

        My biggest recent insight about heroquesting is that the John Hughes 'anthropowanking' approach is more or less right. Any version of heroquest that suggests that heroes essentially follow a neat script, without emphasising the transformative or gain of insight aspects, is only going to produce unrewarding mechanics. More to the point, looking at heroquesting as something that happens to the heroplane rather than something that happens to the hero is essentially wrong.

        Now, this doesn't mean you need to talk like John Hughes, Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly (insert any new age self-discovery blatherer here - no offence intended to John or Joseph) in order to run a heroquest. But I think its easy to misconstrue the neat powers or mythic changes gained by heroquesters as the aim of the quest, and construct your mechanics suchly, whereas the insight brought back is generally the real prize, and the new magics its allows a side effect. And the more the heroquest rules discussion rages on, the more I am convinced that the rules are largely irrelevent to the act itself. What we need is not rules for heroquesting, we need
a) a whole lot more insight about heroquesting and
b) rules for the results of heroquesting - which is, in effect, rules for magic that are both more scalable and more flexible. But the important thing is that the rules we need are not so much about the act itself, but the capabilities of the returned hero.

        Next insight. I've used the metaphor that a myth is a map of the heroplane before. I think this metaphor stretches well in trying to explain how useful the 'truth' of a myth is. Like a map, the objective accuracy of a myth is not directly correlated to its usefulness. A friends mud-map on the back of an envelope is often more useful than a street directory. And either is more useful than a fantastically accurate map of the sewerage system, if you are in a car. Myths are like that. The most useful ones are the ones that presume a huge amount about who you are, what you already know (in terms of the right ways to behave), and where you are going and why, and so on. They don't really tell you much, but they get you to your destination.

        And similarly, talking about the objective truth of maps is missing the point, and the same with myths. The most useful maps are often highly stylised, with a fairly abstract relationship to geography (maps of train routes, for example, or tourist maps that show one building in 50, but show exactly the ones you might want to visit). The best heroquest myths for a culture are like this too. And the myths for another culture aren't 'wrong' - - they are unintelligible or useless or of only peripheral interest, like maps for a different city, or maps of rail stations when you are in a car.

        And lastly, of course, the map is not the territory and neither is the myth. This isn't a modern concept - I think it would be obvious to Gloranthan heroquesters that changing the way they tell the story is just messing up their map.

        Cheers

                David


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