[Orccon][HeroQuest] In Glorantha, of all places!
Moreno R.:
Quote from: Christopher Kubasik on February 25, 2008, 01:35:55 PM
I don't know if that helps, but that's the bet I've got.
It does, thanks!
Christopher Kubasik:
A BUNCH OF STUFF ABOUT KICKERS
Better a meal of acorns among kin than a honey feast with strangers.
-- old Heortling saying
So, here's where we stand:
Chris is playing Alandres. Alandres' Goal is "To get over mourning wife." Alandres' Kicker is, "I found the woman I've been courting is pregnant.
Scott is playing Torkan. Torkan's Goal is "To spark the rebellion against the Lunar Empire." Torkan's Kicker is, "I find out Daleeta is pregnant."
David is playing Iskalli. Iskalli's Goal is "To protect and preserve the ways and worship of Orlanth." Iskalli's Kicker is, "I find out Daleeta is worshipping the Red Goddess."
A Kicker works is a moment or situation that demands a choice on the part of a Player Character. It is Player authored -- which means, by definition, it is a moment or situation that the Player cares about.
The GM frames the scene for the Kicker, using details the Player has offered in the Kicker, and then the scene is played out like any other scene. The Kicker demands a situation, but there's no way to know which way the PC will jump or act until the actual scene begins in play.
A Kicker isn't a motivation, nor what I generally call a Plot Hook. By Plot Hook I mean a bit of backstory or story used to hook the character into the GM's plot. When using Kickers there is no plot. Instead of a Plot we have is a Player authored situation that demands a choice for each PC that demands resolution. We keep playing until the Kicker is resolved. How the Kicker is resolved is unknown -- to myself and to the Players. Only by playing out the game can we determine this.
I'm sure people have used the technique of a Player authored situation that demands an improvised choice and defines the scope of play for an open-ended narrative for years. However, the technique was formalized in Ron Edward's Sorcerer and I credit the game for giving me such a useful piece of game play. It is an integral part of the rules of Sorcerer and I've lifted it for my own purposes. While the technique isn't useful for all games, it works -- I believe -- very well for HeroQuest.
An Old Tree, Dead, Stark Against a Blue Sky
We started with Chris' character, Alandres. Chris said he wanted his character near the long house, but not in it -- even though he was a village elder. He said Alandres had been despondent for months, ever since his wife's death. He went into despondent slump, embodying how Alandres lacked all will or life. He was, in essence, the complete opposite of a healthy Heortling man.
Picking up the cues Chris described, I said, "Okay, I got it. Alandres is sitting under a tree. An old tree, dead, stark against a blue sky. It's near the longhouse, but apart from it. And it's where Alandres has been spending most of his days. Daleeta approaches him. She has her hand on her belly...."
And then we played out a scene where Daleeta, very happy, tells Alandres that she's realized she's carrying a child. Alandres is nonplused. He accepts the news without joy or concern, and simply says, "Well then. We will have to make an announcement of a wedding."
[For those of you much better versed in the ways of Heortling culture than I was the day of the convention game, you'll notice that we glided right over the customs of Heortling marriage. I've had time to read a lot more of Thunder Rebels now, and if I were to continue playing in this scenario, we would go back and make decisions about which clan Daleeta had come from, about the relative status of Alandres and Daleeta, and about what sort of marriage the would be having. I'd throw most of the decisions to Chris, since this would be a good chance for him to add more detail to Alandres and what sort of situation he wanted to have with Daleeta. I think it's interesting to note that the scenario didn't require all these details hammered out at first, and that Chris' choices would be much richer after we played our session. Gong back and establishing facts the maybe we "should" have established earlier wouldn't be a bad or confounding thing at all.]
Daleeta leaves, happy that she's going to be marrying Alandres. She's an interesting character to me, because I really don't know who she is yet. Because all the PCs are circling her for their Kickers, I'm willing to wait a bit to discover what the Players want from her for dramatic resistance. I do decide this: she seems content to be marrying a man who seems broken. I know he's an elder and so will have status and wealth. What this means to Daleeta, how she sees him, what she wants from the marriage is something I have yet to discover. I'm willing to play her as a gold-digger or as a woman who is looking forward to being around an older, worn down man for reasons I don't yet know (or both) is something I have yet to find out.
So, that's the end of the Kicker scene with Alandres. From the scene we know that Alandres is going to establish a wedding contract with Daleeta and that he will announce it at the longhouse that night. What will happen at the longhouse, what will happen with the marriage has yet to be determined -- I honestly have no idea at that point -- but that's where we're going.
We move onto Scott, who is playing Torkan. He originally says that he wants to be at the tavern, but I point out there's no tavern in a Heortling village. He decides Torkan will be at work, making weapons at his anvil. I say, "Cool."
Now, I didn't want to just dump his Kicker ("I find out Daleeta is pregnant") on Torkan as exposition. Scott has made Torkan Angry at Father and Rabble-rouser, so I did decided to give him things to be angry and rabble rouse about.
I have two village girls walk by him as he's working. They're giggling behind their hands, and looking at him, and clearing coming to cause gossipy trouble. In brief, though the scene played out a while, they taunt Torkan with the fact they know something he doesn't, dropping clues that ultimately make him realize Daleeta is pregnant.
What I liked about this scene was that the girls weren't really interested in the fact that Daleeta was pregnant per se. What they were poking fun at Torkan about was that their father, currently broken and grieving, had knocked up a girl even younger than Torkan, and Torkan's father seemed as dazed as before. In short, their cruelty was coming from the fact that Torkan's father wasn't in control of things. That's what mattered to them. And I knew I had found an angle into hammering Torkan if I wanted it. Torkan was a guy who wanted to spark a rebellion against the Lunar occupancy; he was focused; he was trying to subtly get others onboard, even though his father and brother wished he'd just pay attention to daily life and not try to agitate people in their village. So having a father that lacked focus, that wasn't even paying attention to what he was doing as a potential father and husband -- and how that would play in the social dynamic of the village and bounce back to Torkan -- seemed really cool.
Armed with this news, Torkan went off to confront his father. He demands his father stop sitting around under the tree, start paying attention to his responsibilities and seemed emotionally motivated from the previous scene and everything Scott had built into Torkan. And then Chris has Alandres snap back at Torkan: "I'm your father, know your place... stop causing trouble in the village..." and so on and tells his son to be at the longhouse for an announcement that night. Alandres rouses himself just enough to smack his son around.
I thought it was a great father/son scene, with all the cracks that can come about in that relationship. I go into detail about all this because it shows that we were getting good scene material that was good "role playing" but was still on the spine of the Kickers. It wasn't roleplaying for roleplaying's sake, which I'm not very fond -- though it can be fun in doses. Instead, we were building a dramatic spine off the Kickers.
No dice were rolled (and, in fact, no dice have been rolled at all yet). Torkan, frustrated, relents, walking away, furious at his father, upset he seems to be dishonoring his mother's memory even as his father is caught up in melancholy grief.
Finally, Iskalli. His Kicker was that he finds out Daleeta is worshipping the Red Goddess. David and I nudge around some ideas, and then decide that Iskalli, a storyteller, has just returned home from traveling to another village. I frame them scene with him entering his family's home and setting down his bag. He sees Daleeta's bag there, but Daleeta isn't there. (I see this as a way of Daleeta "marking her territory" -- moving into the family before she's officially been invited.) Iskalli moves it out of the way, and as he does so, he sees a small, clay figure of the Red Goddess.
David takes over now -- the Kicker is on the table and it's time for him to choose how to react to his self-authored Kicker. He carefully, making sure no one else can see it, pulls it out to confirm it is the Red Goddess. It is.
Now, remember, I have no idea what he's going to do. Nor do I have an agenda, a plot point, and action or a revelation I'm trying to maneuver Iskalli toward. As with all the Kickers so far, once they're in gear, I'm just watching to see what decision the Players are going to have their characters make.
For all I know Iskalli is going to go straight to his clan chieftain and tell him the truth about Daleeta. Or he could go to his father and see if his father knows about this. Or he could go to his angry, rabble-rousing brother and let him deal with it. I have no idea what's about to happen -- just as I had no idea with the previous two Kickers.
Here's what David has Iskalli do: Iskalli puts the statue back in Daleeta's satchel, folds the satchel up, and heads off to find Daleeta. That I did not see coming.
So, he's heading toward the village's main longhouse and sees Daleeta walking toward him. She's got a light step -- she's returning from her meeting with Alandres and is happy. But as they approach each other she sees Iskalli is holding her bag. They meet. I still have no idea what David is going to have Iskalli do.
David has Iskalli ask if it's her bag. (Iskalli already knows the answer). And then asks if the statue inside is hers. She goes pale. He says, "I will not tell anyone what you are doing. This is you business. But I need you to make me a promise: You will not drag my father into what you are doing."
Okay, now it's time to roll some dice.
Suddenly a lot of stuff about Daleeta becomes snaps into place. She loves the Red Goddess. In part because she values peace. She doesn't want war and rebellion to tear apart Dragon Pass. She wants the Heortlings to submit to the Red Goddess for the safety of those she loves. She's now pregnant, so she really wants peace. Her relationship with the broken and mourning Alandres makes sense to me now and has definition: she is planning on drawing him into the worship of the Red Goddess, hoping that his mournful state means he'll be weak enough to make into a convert. He's a project: someone she might be able to build a safe haven for with for worship of this invading goddess.
A lot of this makes sense precisely because it provides resistance to Iskalli's request, so I decide to go with it. I say, "Well, this is a conflict. Let's roll some dice."
Iskalli has his devotion to Orlanth. He's a devotee of an aspect of Orlanth, so we toss that in as an Augment. He's also got a Love of Family -17, so he gets a couple of points for that. (I didn't know he had written that down, but now I do!)
[Augments: In HeroQuest all of your attributes -- relationships, skills, beliefs, personality traits, and more -- are quantified. Not only can you use any of these in a contest, but you can use them as Augments. This means you take the ability, divide it by 10 (.5 rounding up) and that gives you a point value to add to your roll. So, if you're swinging at a giant spider who is about to eat your friend, and you have "Love Master Frodo" with a score of 25, you could add three points to your sword skill and do better than you normally would because your fighting to same a friend you love.]
She rolls her Devotion to the Red Goddess. David's got the higher value, but my roll wins. She's all like, SNAP!: "I'm marrying your father and I'll live with him the way I want." She grabs her bag back and turns and walks away.
Iskalli is left standing there, having lost the conflict. But I'm looking at David, and it's clear he wants more. I say, "You know, you could spend one of your Hero Points and bump your result to a success and beat her."
[Hero Points: Hero points are a mechanic in HeroQuest that let you define your character's story for your character, as I think of it. You receive three to start with, and another 1-5, at the discretion of the GM, at the start of an adventure. And then a few more for doing cool stuff and wrapping up an adventure. You can spend them to boost stats, add new stats, bump successes to your advantage when in conflict, drive down an opponent's success to really cream him, cement enchanted items or relationships to make sure they stay part of the PC's history.]
David says, "Yeah, I really want to win this conflict."
So, he erases a hero point, we back it all up and I say, "You see Daleeta look down at the ground. Afraid. You've cowed her. She gently takes the bag back and says, 'I promise. I won't bring your father into this.' She leaves."
Okay, so David has won the conflict. Daleeta, who had very happy a moment ago is very upset, and in a few hours everyone is going to meet up at the longhouse for the announcement of the marriage. Torak is pissed at his father. Alandres is lost and confused, following the lead of a woman who is secretly worshipping his enemy's goddess. At this point in the game I'm a very happy man.
Final notes for this part of the summary: There's the potential here for a lot of inter-PC conflict. I'm fine with this on five counts.
First, the Players jumped at the chance to establish this as a possibility when they made their characters. If their willing to go there, then I'm not going to stop them.
Second, remember what I wrote about whom I was playing with back in high school: guys and gals from my English Lit and creative writing classes. This means that when I was getting my handle on RPGs I was playing with people who were, all at the same time, reading The Odyssey, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Poe, Hawthorne, Medea, The Trojan Women, McTeague, The Great Gatsby, and tons of stories that were about conflicts between characters, within families, and the social stress points that force lots of people to make choices about where their loyalties lie (their families, their gods, their society, their loved ones, and so on.) So, I'm very comfortable with playing with this stuff since it's what I wanted all along.
Third, I still don't know if this is going to happen. It's up to the Player. If they don't want to do it, it doesn't happen. I'm not expecting it, nor am I going to be engineering the Players toward it.
Fourth, it seems very much part and parcel of the setting of Glorantha. We're playing in the time of the Hero Wars. Families and societies will be torn apart. How the Players choose to have their characters act -- even when this might mean that father turns on son, or son on brother -- is all fair game to me because it will produce great story content. The Players at the table all seemed mature and able to hold their own. Their characters could be in conflict, but the Players would be in cooperation in building a great narrative. They all seemed to be on the same page in this regard.
And fifth, I really don't do the "party" structure anymore. There are protagonists, and I cut around the table. Sometimes PCs are in a scene together, sometimes they aren't. But I've noticed that because the thematic content is rich, no one seems bored even if they're not "on screen." The Players all want to know what's going on and pay attention, because they know the other players are feeding them material they can use for their next scenes. Because there's no longer any "party unity" that needs to be maintained, conflict between PCs is simply cool narrative content, not a threat to a structure of the fun.
Next: All Hell Breaks Loose
CK
Joel P. Shempert:
Hi, Chris! This is a fascinating thread! I do hope you're planning on completing the next installment!
This thread is of particular interest to me because I'm planning on running Heroquest at a con myself (Gamestorm 10 in the Portland area) very soon. So I'm keen on taking any lessons I can from your experience to bolster my own endeavor.
For starters a bunch of red flags went up because I am planning on using pregens. I've got the Hero's Book supplement by Mark Galeotti, and I thought I'd come prepared with the sample Lunar and Heortling characters from the back of that book, but give players the opportunity to customize and make the character their own. I figured it basically amounts to figuring out the keywords for the players; the individuality (and story-driving elements) of the characters is up to them.
But after nodding along with this entire (enormous!) thread I'm having my doubts. My own instincts are to do chargen as a group, and I'm especially in love with the "100 word narrative" thing. I just got all skittish about running a con game (which I've never done before!) in a limited timeframe, with strangers, so I tried to compromise. I'm somewhat committed to the format of the game (I've already posted the description on Gamestorm's website, and gotten several signups). Maybe I'll have a bunch of mostly blank sheets with the Dara Happa, Tarsh, and Heortling keywords filled in, to speed up the process without designing the character for the players. Hmm. . .
I'm excited by your description of the kind of game you want and how you pursued it. I too am a huge fan of Mike Holmes' writings on Heroquest and how it can (not, for instance, by emulating the book's play examples) be used as a hugely potent engine for Story Now. I really want to tap that potential, hence my nervous rethinking of my approach in the wake of your posts. I think I've fallen into old gaming habits in thinking out this event.
So: I'm thinking, 100 word narratives are an important creative and cognitive step in creating player-invested, conflict-read, living breathing characters, especially for one-shot play. The book, in its "eh, everyone plays differently, just do what'chu wanna do how you wanna do it and the benevolent and wise GM will tie it all together and smooth over the friction and disconnects" philosophy, downplays the narratives as just one option, but that's the first thing that jumped out at me in HQ and screamed "This! This is cool and it's just what you've been waiting for!"
Doing "Kickers" (whether I use the word or not) sounds like a winner. I would've never thought of it for a con since I tend to associate Kickers with a longer arc of resolution. But now you mention it, it sounds like a natural fit, and perfect for propelling PCs into story-rich action.
Honestly, your whole thread, long as it is, is just dripping with sweet nectar of insight and ideas, putting into words what I want and how I feel in ways I'd never conceived. This is one of my favorites: "Imagine we're all sitting around a camp fire, and someone says, "Tell us the story of Glorantha." And I say, "All right. I'll tell you the story of Torkan and Iskalli, and their father Alanderes." I don't give you a whole info dump on the gods and goddess of all the religions and cultures. I tell you a story." I love it. Cuts right to the quick of so many of my issues with "setting" in a lot of the games I play, even the better ones with cool and engaged participants. I could go on and on about this stuff. I'm thinking of printing out a couple of your posts as essays on "what I want out of roleplaying and how to get it."
I recognize that you're standing on the shoulders of giants (hell, you've linked a lot of them), and I've stood on a lot of the same shoulders in coming to grips with roleplaying. But thanks for giving me yet another boost. :)
There's one thing that struck me, though, in reading your play account: you highlighted the wild, out-there nature of the setting--"the world is made of Myth!" and all that. Which is awesome, yeah. But then it seems to me like you shoved all that stuff into a matte painting for a backdrop, and in the foreground you just had this intimate little web of conflict that could take place in any community of pseudo-Norsemen, whether the mountain range yonder is a dragon corpse or not. Which is not to say your story doesn't sound wicked cool, but it doesn't seem to me that you brought out the Mythic-with-a-capital-M nature of Glorantha, which is something I'd personally love to figure out how to do. What are your thoughts on that?
Peace,
-Joel
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi Joel,
Thanks for the reply!
I don't have a lot of time right now, but some quick answers and replies.
1) Yes! It is long! But I will be finishing it. Just busy right now.
2) Pre-generated characters or not:
First. Listen, this is my obsessive preference. When I ran a Sword & Sorcerer game at the con before this last one, we barely got into play before it was time to wrap. So, there's a trade off. Keep in mind that I had practiced with the Sorcerer & Sword game, and running Primetime Adventures which put a lot of solid, authoritative mojo into my GMing. I know that in both the HeroQuest game and the Sorcerer & Sword game people enjoyed making their characters, so the fun was there. Also, one of my goals is to show off the games -- and since character creation is vital to the games, that's the road I go down.
I can only suggest: whichever route you go for, commit to it. Don't second guess yourself during the process. As soon as you arrive at the table, whichever way you're going is the way and you will do that thing. Do it not because you "should" do it one way or another, or you want to do it the way someone else did it. Do it the way that excites you the most.
Second, if I had had time, I would have had the Heortling Keywords on the sheet. So I really recommend that.
Third, I'd really recommend NOT having the crazy eclectic cast of PCs from all over Glorantha. I know the book kind of pushes for that, but it seems creaky to me. If you have everyone from the same homeland, then all information you're giving out for backstory and setting applies to all characters equally. See what I mean? If you have to give details about different settings (and players will ask!), then each unit of time spent answering only helps one player at a time. It's more time efficient if everyone is getting helpful info at the same time with one answer.
Fourth, family intimacy/ big myth. Well, a few things. Look at The Odyssey, The Iliad, the Greek Tragedies... they're all myth. The Gods are involved in all of them. But it's all about family. In my view, it's the grounding of all the fantastical stuff in the mundane that makes the big stuff matter. (Notice that the same explicit approach is used in Stafford's Pendragon, though the two games are very, very different.)
Also, the climax of the one-shot was a champion fight between a Lunar and one of the brothers, each representing a god in a fight over Daleeta. So the big conflicts did come into play. If we continued playing, I'm sure we would have had heroquests, fights with dragons and so on. But the ke to me, again, is the weaving of choices of these people with actual lives in a world where how you live actually matters in the cosmic scale, just as the cosmic scale affects the daily lives of the people.
If you look at the myths, folk tales, or heroic movies, you'll see that the tellers of the tales often ground the narrative with mundane details. This game could easily have been the first session in a game that lasted months. We were just starting out.
But, this doesn't mean another con game wouldn't be about storming a god's home. I went in with a specific agenda -- what turned me on -- to do a game that grew out of a simple Heortling setting. But that was that four hour slot. As I learn more about Glorantha, I'm sure I'll broaden the scope of possibilities. You've inspired me to do so, actually.
Thanks!
CK
Christopher Kubasik:
More thoughts on the "We're From All Over Glorantha" group:
If a group is built "Star Trek"-wise, with people being from different nations, that often serves in an RPG to say, "Okay, this is how I'm different than you," and interesting questions often stop.
But if we're all Heortlings, we will, by definition, start looking for way to differentiate our characters. Suddenly, the question, "What does it mean to be a Heortling?" is a live wire. We're defined not by being alien to each other, but by being similar and yet different. That produces a lot of tension to play with dramatically.
And since HeroQuest lets people write down really specific and dramatic and relationship based stuff to differentiate their characters, the Players, at least in my case, went to town.
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