What Issaries should publish from issaries on 2002-02-19 (HeroQuest RPG)

From: issaries <rmeints_at_...>
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 16:59:15 -0000

The current state of Hero Wars:

I have watched the recent debates about the quality of the Barbarian Adventures book and whether its content was what the public wanted. I'm a little disappointed in how the discussion has descended into anger, but that seems to be the way these discussions tend to go. Watching it has motivated to write the following.

Goal:
To have Hero Wars become a popular and best selling game for many years to come.

How to accomplish this:

Have rules that are easy to learn, fun to play, and are presented clearly, concisely, and beautifully.

I believe that the second edition rules and the Hero's book could adequately do this.

2. Support the rules with supplements that allow referees and players to have the information they desire.

Unless Glorantha is to become a fiction line that could attract enough readers to remain viable, appealing to GMs and players has to remain the focus. Unfortunately, a lot of the list members do not appear to be active GMs or players, but still feel very happy to energetically comment in detail, often humorously and/or eloquently about what will make Hero Wars a successful RPG. I've started working on getting a campaign going to avoid falling into that trap myself. Thus, I've asked myself what would I like to see written. First, I have assumed that the vast majority of new players and GMs won't have access to most of the RQ2 material and/or won't care to convert it. Plus, many of the RQ2 campaigns aren't based in Sartar, so even if they bought all the RQ2 reprints or originals they wouldn't be of much help for a Sartar campaign. I acknowledge that some useful material has been written in magazines like Tales and Tradetalk, but that only fills a fraction of the void.

In a nutshell, I would like to see a product like Griffin Mountain produced for Sartar. It contains great maps, a nice gazetteer, loads of NPCs, adventures of varying length and scope, nice bits on cults, trade, and regional history, a wide variety of encounters, and just enough demographics to put it into perspective. Furthermore, I feel that the Griffin Mountain approach could be applied to a great number of other areas. For more densely populated areas it could be further detailed with products like Pavis or Big Rubble. Furthermore, I feel that religions/cults/animism/whatever could be well done in a Cults of Prax or Cults of Terror approach. If Hero Wars focuses a bit more on the spiritual or mythic side, no problem. That just means that some of the space filled with the mechanics side of the detail is swapped for more space for the myths and history side. Why discard a still very popular formula.

Let me ask all of you this: Would you buy books approximately done to the standard and scope of Griffin Mountain on topics like the Shadow Plateau, Prax, various parts of the Lunar Empire, various parts of the West, the Holy Country, etc.?

If you have the Griffin Mountain book try doing the following: take a look at how much of Genertela is covered by the maps of Balazar and the Elder Wilds and then mentally calculate how many more maps could be done if you wanted to do the rest of the continent.

3. Have online, convention and game shop demo support targeted at attracting new players.

I've mentioned this in prior posts so I won't beat this drum again other than to say I still strongly feel this is vital.