Jane:
> I do, but not on me - IIRC, no details are given anyway. What
> turns up is an entirely mundane Lunar army. So he was working
> at Practice level, but with high opposition, in that case.
> It's only Practice level that "sucks in" mundane opponents,
> remember.
Except... The whole benefit of the "summons of evil" magic is that it, well, it summons evil!
What I mean is... If the text said "Rurik followed the Hill of Gold quest, and the great troll Zuurg the Malodorous arrived to fight him", I'd agree with you, and say, yep, that must have been a practice quest, and Zurg was dragged in to be Zorak Zoran. If Rurik had been running it on the Hero Plane, he'd have actually fought ZZ, and no trolls in the middle world would have been sucked in to fight him.
But if the text said "Rurik followed the Hill of Gold quest, and learned the magic Endure Any Wound", we wouldn't know whether it was a practice quest or a full-on Hero Plane quest. He could have learned magic either way. In fact, the more powerful the magic he got as a reward, the more likely that he learned it on a full-on heroquest.
Well, in this case, the "reward" of the Summons of Evil magic is that it drags all the local nasties to you so you can clean them out. It seems to me that you'd get that reward whether you ran it as a mundane ritual or as a quest on the Hero Plane. If you run it as a HP/HQ, then when you return to the middle world, you return with the quest's "reward"--that local enemies will show up for you to kill them.
So (rampant speculation here) it seems to me that Broyan could have said, "Huh, the ordinary Summons of Evil ritual isn't going to be powerful enough to drag a whole Lunar army to me. But if I ran the summons as a Hero Quest, that might give the summons more oomph."
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