I think he as neatly expressed my feeling while reading and testing HW. I was truly disappointed by the poor layout of the books (no index, no table of content to speak of, charts split between two pages,omegas and all...) the lack of description for skills and feats (does it seems coherent to explain that theist feats are purposefully left vague for players to discover by themselves then to single out one or two of them and explain them in detail, like berseker?) and the presentation of the background (a lunar touristic organisation for dilletantes wishing to visit the home of their deadly foe, are you kidding? why not a circus performance with the crimson bat?).
I ran a session, and it turned out that the book are difficult to use during play because of the format, the lack of index and the mixing of rules and background (always a bad idea, I truly prefer to have rules in one place and then the background and the special cases in another).
Don't get me wrong. I bought the books, I will buy the french edition (hoping that Multisim does a good job with it, they surely did for their previous games), and I will buy the next releases for the background. Still I rate an issue of Tales or Drastic higher than HW in professionalism and usefulness for my gaming in Glorantha so far. I wonder if this is an unique feeling or if others think the same.
Let's hope that success will bring better quality in the future. Even if core fans can bear with it, I do not think that HW is likely to draw many new players right now given the competition in the field.
Bye.
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