As other have mentioned, there is no guarantee that you will have a good mix of nobles. I'm in year 17 of my first serious game, and have never had a trickster or humakti in my tribe *pout* In addition, my only Chalan Arroy worshiper has died of old age without replacement, and my only Uralda and Barntar worshippers (one of each) are singularly ungifted. I finally have one Yinkin worshipper now that whats-her-name has come of age. Even the new nobles that are finally cropping up seem to mostly from the well established cults.
This has led me to prove that you can succeed in heroquesting without members of seven different cults on your ring. But I have noticed something odd...
I've ended up performing the "Ernalda feeds the tribe" heroquest 4 times now: once early on because I could, once not long after because the gods wanted me to get more treasures and my exploration and trade were going poorly and I didn't know any other myths that would let me bring back treasures, once because the mystic told me I should (I'm running an Ernalda based tribe, because I inspired the tribe from the cat that largely formed my character, and that cat was a she), and once because the god speakers predicted bad harvests.
The first two times, I walked through with no problems. The next time, Ernalda's daughter said (roughly) "because I'm not born yet I'm not your daughter so you can't command me" instead of (again, roughly) "Because I'm your daughter if I kill you I'll never be born so I can't stop you" and I ended up sacrificing blood to get out, loosing clan members, gaining less magic points, and not doing much for the clan mood.
Besides the fact that I was back on the same quest for the third and fourth time, I was heroquesting about every second year at that point, building up my strength to hold onto the clan kingship. The first of the two times things went wrong I only had six different cults on the ring, the next time I made sure to have seven, but still had the same problem.
My question is: has anyone found that repeating the same heroquest too many times makes it harder to complete? What about simply heroquesting too often? Or did I just face random bad luck?
Oh, and on the Uralda heroquest people were complaining about, out of curiousity I tried it both with a very gifted Ernaldan and with a rather insipid Uraldan, and the Uraldan walked through first try, while the Ernaldan died three times in a row, so I'm guessing that maybe you *really* want an Uraldan on that quest.
--Bryan
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