Hi flynnkd,
As you've probably already surmised, I'm one of those people who
advocates a different
sort of scenario for play. It's very interesting to see how many
holdover assumptions from
other games have still clung on, even in Heroquest. On one hand, you
have lots of quotes
from the game text promoting player characters as heroes and as the
focal protagonists,
then you have the scenario advice that effectively cuts player input
to a very minimal level.
Heroquest is all about making and remaking, of people, cultures and
civilizations, even
mythology and cosmology, through the power of heroquesting. In this,
we have a game
history that reaches back even before the shift to Hero Wars that has
encouraged players
and entire groups to write up their own cultures and mythologies, and
interpretations of
official canon. Right there, we've got making and remaking.
In play, you have heroes who begin play loaded with relationships,
emotional hang-ups, a
culture in conflict, transition or change, heroes who are not
finished products, who, as
play continues, will add more traits and make every adventure a bit
of self discovery on
top of action. You have heroes fighting to save their people,
sometimes from themselves,
heroes fighting for a new ideal, or way of life. You have characters
that making and
remaking themselves and their cultures. You have heroes loaded with
tons of "theme
ammo" waiting to go off.
You have a system that makes generating any sort of conflict a snap.
The narrator doesn't
need to calculate attributes, stats, and secondary scores. You can
always just look at the
resistance chart in the back of the book and fudge something, anytime
you want. You
don't have to worry about movement rates, or encumberance, or tons of
other logistical
bits. You look at what seems plausible(realistic, cinematic,
entertaining, whatever), and
you go with it.
All this together- there is NO reason to 1) dictate a story to the
players, 2) feel as if you
will be "woefully" unprepared to keep the session going. Hence, no
need for linear plots.
In fact, if you really want to have players engaged in the process
making and remaking, of
making Glorantha theirs, of owning the mythology they create, you
can't deny them input
at the same time ask for it of them.
What -is- necessary to be prepared, is to have a good idea of the
situation you are playing
in as a group. What area are you playing in? What cultures are
around? What are the local
politics and conflicts? What's going on with your heroes? What
relationships do they have?
Are there any ongoing conflicts, internal or external?
This sounds like a lot of prep. But, no, it can be as simple as "Two
Heortling clans,
fighting over land." If you know Heortlings, and can come up with
some plausible
situation where they would fight over land, boom, there's your
conflict. Make sure the
conflict or its outcomes WILL affect the heroes. ("Yo, if the
Blackwolf clan takes the land,
they probably will bring in more of those damn Lunar priests! That's
our ancestral graves
they'll be 'blessing'!")
Now, you add a couple of neat NPCs, either having prepared them in
detail, or just jotted
down some names and features ("Geoff the 'Bear', loud, overbearing,
like a berserker army
sergeant...ugh!"), and you play them like you would if you were a
player and these were
your characters. Take the most plausible(realistic, cinematic,
entertaining, whatever)
choices, make things more complicated for whatever the heroes are
doing, without closing
off the ability to succeed("I'm undergoing initiation- if I get
involved in kinstrife during this
week, I'm screwed!")
Here's an example of a non-linear scenario I wrote with the help of Peter Nordstrand.
http://www.geocities.com/doctorpeace/well.html
Chris
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