Ian Cooper <ian_hammond_cooper_at_...> wrote:
> This will sound unhelpful butitis meant sincerely.
That was a pretty yoda-esque statement (koan?), right off the bat. ;-)
> The lack of spell
> descriptions is one of those design features of Hero Wars that needs
> the 'Road to Damascus' moment. The more used you are to being told by
> a game 'this means x' the harder it is to adapt to 'decide in your
> group what x means'. But when you do shift gears and adapt there is
> this amazing feeling of freedom, this revelation that YOU can make up
> Glorantha for your game, decide for your group the myths that were
> behind the sunset leap. Once you do it for feats, you begin to
> realize you can do it anywhere. You make up your own heroquests, add
> new details, take ownership of Glorantha. In all sincerity: the magic
> system in Hero Wars freed me from fear of strict adherence to canon,
> made me appreciate that Greg just made it up too and liberated me to
> play Glorantha. It felt like taking off a straight jacket.
This is for my money more apropos than some of the (many, repeated...) comments about "narrativist satori" in playing HW, but this doesn't convince me that the three-words-per-feat (OK, plus a couple of contexual attributes, granted) is optimal as a mode of play, either for the player, or more especially for Ye Hapless GM. (OK, maybe not so much more especially, as more self-centeredly...) Yes absolutely, it's a good thing to re-inforce by practice as well as statements, that "it's your Glorantha, make it up". Personally I've found mayself veering off from known canon a few times, for assorted reasons, though more often, finding out that the canon wasn't what I thought it was (not to say because the canon changed, or got "clarified" to similar effect), and I certainly wouldn't claim its any sort of impediment to playing the game, or even for most practical purposes when it comes to using subsequent Official material.
But I don't just want to freedom to "add to" Glorantha (or substract from it, when "it" verges towards the naff); I want to have my cake, and not just eat it, but come back for seconds, too. No, not even the supposedly extreme case of Sunset Leap was _that_ bad -- after all, it was reasonably clear what the grounding myth(-set) was, even. (Yelmslaying, Westfaring, LBQ, yadda), even. (Some other Feats I'd be less clear about, admittedly.) And the exact application of the effect, yes, we can put in the realm of Cool Ambiguity and Appropriate SitMods. But Greg's Javern story was so damn cool that I can't help but wish for as much in the way of "feat description" of _that_ quality. Which is obviously impractical for every Feat, especially as far as Official publications go, I'd be the first to grant that. (And yes, I hear the argument about "exemplification as limitation", so perhaps unofficial conduits for those are better in that sense, too.)
An interesting way of looking at this is to invert the question: there are any number of myths kicking around out there, so what Feats do they "embed"? The mapping is likely pretty complex, of course, since not only do Feats potentially correspond to innumerable myth-variants, but a single myth may correspond to multiple feats.
Cheers,
Alex.
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