As someone being stuck with a group of traditional RPGing-minded players and friends, I found that the RuneQuest rules (which can be broken down to a handful of meta-rules and a bit of hand-waving when there is no time to look things up in detail) solved my narrator bottleneck better than trying to restructure my gaming group's accumulated 150 years of roleplaying experience. I always felt that while there is lots of text and detail rules for RuneQuest, most of that is reference material one may take a glimpse at and decide to use, change or ignore as the situation demands.
Given the fact that the group has Cthulhu as one of its main secondary systems, the overall familiarity with the RuneQuest basics is high. If you have a similar gaming group, you'll have to decide how much you want to change your collective style of playing.
> If you do use HeroQuest, I encourage trying to use the rules as designed -- they'd make a very bad RuneQuest variant.
> Which is not to say you couldn't use Sartar: KoH as a setting for a RQ game. It'll be a lot harder, since you'll need to figure out how many hit points Kallyr Starbrow's left arm has...
That's on the off chance that something hitting there has an impact on your game... at which time the experienced narrator takes a look at his players' characters to judge how much magical and mundane armor there might be (in case of Kallyr, depending on the situation, likely more than your better warriors) and add that to human stats.
As a benefit, you can have a rousing good old dice-rolling session if that is what your players enjoy ever once in a while. There are plenty old-school players preferring to overcome mechanistic odds over narrative needs defining the outcome.
Personally, I am happy to use the information in HeroQuest publications as stat-less background material in RQ, introducing stats only where necessary. I do like playing HQ - with people who are willing to use that style of play and at least some of whom have some experience with that. Trying out HQ with my old-school buddies simply doesn't lift off.
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