Re: running little heroquests

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2004 00:01:01 -0000

Me:
> > (The 'usual' method of obtaining a guardian must surely _be_
> > a HQ in some sense, unless one just happens to bump into one
> > on one's travels and start haggling with it...)

Mike Dawson:
> As I observed a couple of posts back the first line of the HQ
> description of guardians says that most of them come from the
> natural world.

I don't think that does anything to make the 'bump into and start haggling with it' option seem likely, much less likely to preclude the other.

In effect though, (most -- or at least, the 'most popular' ones) otherworldly being as such have a manifestation in the mundane world, anyway. The distinction, if one wants to make a big deal out of it as such is rather about whether that's its _only_, or its native 'place' of existence.

But the HQ vs. haggling option is IMO less to do with this, than with whether there's a substantial myth-conformance element of the guardian-obtaining process. If you just want to establish a mutually beneficial business relationship with some random disembodied being, that's one thing, but if you want a guardian that reflects your communitity's instrinsic mythic state in some way, there surely ought to be a "HQy quality" to obtaining one.

> Certainly I'd think this was the case on practice quests....where you
> are walking down the path that you know, and you turn a corner to a
> scene that is less familiar, where you find waiting for you not the
> beaten lunar prisoner you planned to ritually defeat, but someone
> totally different...did he come to your tula? Did you go to his
> estate? Were you both in the god's war? *shrug* who knows, just
> beat the bugger.

I think that's exactly right. But I also think it happens the other way around too: Oops, here I was doing the LBQ, and alluvasudden My Personal Shit thoughtlessly intrudes, in one form or another.

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