RE: Hero Bands

        You are right when you say that characters are more than just members of a clan
defending their cows, and that they will perform great deeds. Still in a moderate openess if I remember it well, all heroes share a pro-rebel or pro-empire stance.
Even if their race and cultures are different, they have that in common. Second at the beginning of the game, they have heroic capacities which are about to reveal.
They are still heroes to be, they are just local heroes at best, and not always know the vast world of Glorantha very well ( best ability at 5w is not so great or wonderful out of a local scale ). They will play a major role in the HW when the situation will unleash, but in the mean time, they have to prepare
My point as a narrator is that Glorantha offers a lot more deepness in its history, social structure and mythology than most rpg. It's a great thing to build a story on, and my feeling is that by creating a composite Hero Band from scratch with no attachment to tribe, clan or whatever, you lose the background part which helps you cement a group, and helps this group create its own identity.
I like the process of cementing a group around local deeds and local folks before putting them on a much larger scheme. And for me the main difference between Glorantha and the other rpg I know is that it encourage you go this way, being much more detailed on what is local life and problems, kind of more realistic than most on what would be social life in a medieval world.
In the Glorantha rpg the characters were beginning as farmers, hunters, etc.. of low status.
The way I see it, in HW they have evoloved to local powermongers, and will go all the way up to Heroes of legend inspiring a whole bunch of people with their deeds, and perhaps becoming semi-gods.

The way I would manage it would be to begin with a social rise with responsabilities to take care of and heroic deeds on a local scale taking the clan/village/town of one of them, interaction with folks to create some emotional attachments between characters and NPC, and make the whole thing more vivid for the players.
After a while when they have increase in power and begin to have an easy time in there community taking decision and rescuing the situations, they would try to travel further trying to accomplish heroic deeds on their own, discovering the vastness of the world, the differences in cultures,.... Then being true heroes put them in the middle of the HW ( they will have lots of foresee in the coming event before, and the supplements developping the HW conflict will have come to me by this time, the tension will raise slowly ), and at some great battle give them some key role to manage the situation and have under their order some of the folks they were in their early days.

Of course that's just my way...

The Frenchy ;-)²

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Develyn [SMTP:Richard.Develyn_at_...]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2000 2:04 PM
> To: 'hw-rules_at_egroups.com'
> Subject: RE: Hero Bands
>
> From: COPPEAU, Jean-Christophe
>
> >I am not expert with Glorantha, but I think you missed the point.
> >In most books, the true heroes have there own quests and motives, but
> also
> >have an occupation and are part of some kind of organisation, have
> >responsabilities, ..
>
> [snipped stuff about local heroes]
>
> I'm not so sure, but I need clarification.
>
> I got the impression that Hero Bands exist (well, they're described on
> p17),
> and that they are similar to traditional adventurer parties in campaigns
> whose range of openness is Moderate or Open (p17 Roleplaying in
> Glorantha).
> The Goals section on p.22 is also much more expansive.
>
> I get the impression that Hero Wars is much more than just members of a
> clan
> defending their cows. I think it's much more anarchic than KoDP, for
> example. I think it's roving Hero Bands whose members have individual
> motives from disparate cultures but who are somehow brought together for
> some time in order to perform great deeds.
>
> Richard
>
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