Consider the needs of a hypothetical Balazaring Sun Dome worshipper whose precious pig herd gets raided by, say, a wandering family of Telmori. He decides that they are chaos, and knows just one ritual heroquest which responds to chaos - the HoG. However, he isn't interested in besting Inora, keeping his armour while facing Orlanth, bashing ZZ or gaining immortality from surviving the chaos beast for himself (or all of it thrown together), but what he wants is to ensure that his (village's) hog herds are kept safe so that they can survive whatever bad season is about to come.
So, how does he insert "the rescue of the three piglets from the bad wolf" into the HoG-Quest to save his hogs?
HeroQuest-initiation:
Nick described the "heroquester" status in the Super-RQ approach as having a drawback in becoming available "herofodder" in enemy quests. If you are an adherent of the "everyone and their cat quest" approach I subscribe to, this effect can be nicely used thusly: Once a small-time quester has done a however minor heroquest run, she becomes susceptible to all the challenges and cross-links within that run, some of which can be yet unknown. Like in the case where it says "nod twice to the Red Guardians, and smile" in Belintar's "how to return from the year-king sacrifice without having to get a new body"-quest, where these guardians all of a sudden fail to react in the expected way...
This might hold un-thought-of dangers and rewards. IMG any local questing, be it a pure "temple-run" or an attempt to creatively use or change a myth at least locally to get a result, is heavily laden with all sorts of "seemingly" unimportant accoutrements, meaningless (?) meetings, and unexpected identifications. If the quester happens to remember that that Vorian bracelet of daisies might represent a much stronger ring of Vogarth Strongman which he got from his virgin bride before setting out on whatever consisted his Silver Age march to herodom, he might get an advantage of this identification with strength at some point.
The problem with this is how to get the quester's player to "remember" such a myth and make _up_ the correct identifications, and how to keep book on such ideas. Especially if your players happen to be unexperienced in Glorantha...
Nick asked quite correctly for descriptions of how "exactly" a ritual (like say an initiation) looks to the participants, active or passive or onlookers. It is one hell of a job to make up the proper local chrome to put into such a thing. Like in the initiation skill test of weapons for all the boys coming of age, I had a prospective Orlanthi and a prospective Yelmalian do this on some slippery treetrunks laid over the mill creek, giving this an Orlanth meets Elmal touch. How did any of you other people play out these skill tests? Did you at all?
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