Re: heroquesting

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1998 00:17:21 +0100 (BST)

Dana Myers writes:
> I was wondering if
> anyone has delt with "free form" Style heroquests. Whereas people go off
> venturing through the planes to do heroic things and access heroic powers
> without simply duplicating what others have done before. An example ( I
> believe ) of this sort of quest would be the Seven Mothers reincarnating the
> Red Goddess. Unless someone did that in the past, they had to do that one on
> their own.

The key thing about that, though, is that it _does_ duplicate certain aspects of other quests, notably the Rebellus Terminus and LBQ. (To what degree, and how intentionally, is certainly arguable.)

To simply wander through "the planes" doing whatever one happens to feel like at the time -- effectively it entails blundering through other people's myths, where typically _they_ will know the secret to "winning", and you of course will not. Imagine a non-Orlanthi straying on to the Lightbringer's Path with _no_ idea of the correct resolution of any given stage. Expected outcome: HeroPlane toast.

This isn't to say that one must simply blindly duplicate your god's actions. The art is knowing how "flexible" one can be in interpreting a given myth, and for the more adventurous, knowing when one can graft (apparently) separate and different myths together, and when one can "transpose" from one myth to another, as Arkat did in his "experiments".

Slainte,
Alex.

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