[Orccon][HeroQuest] In Glorantha, of all places!
Christopher Kubasik:
Oops... one more really important thing.
Mike Holmes has some excellent essays on running HeroQuest at glorantha.com
One of them is Narrator Advice: Not Heresies. http://www.glorantha.com/support/na_heresies.html
I know I read it a while back, and it must have stuck. Because when I looked at it two days ago I realized I did everything Mike suggested. (A few conversations with Ron helped me make choices along the same matters.)
In short, here's what I took from the HeroQuest rule book:
Anything to do with the setting of Glorantha
All the core mechanics and rules
That's it.
I ignored all the examples, as they suggested a goal of play I simply wasn't interested in. (For example, in one of the examples the Players roll to see if their characters get across a river. Now, if there's was some cool choices the characters had to make to get across the river -- do I save mom or my friend -- or something -- I'd buy it. But as it stands, it's just a bunch of rolls to see who ends up upstream or a hundred years downstream. It's simply not providing the kind of scene content (story content) I'm interested in.) A lot of the example run counter to the spirt I see valuable about the rules and setting.
I didn't worry about looking through all the specifics of rituals and what-not. I see those as, "Look! Here are some examples of how cool and flexible the system is! Go at it!"
You can check out Mike's essay for more details.
CK
Christopher Kubasik:
Oh... and three posts back there is a sentence that reads: "...A few years ago when I started playing Rags again..."
That should be RPGs. My grammar checker betrayed me when I wasn't paying attention. (I'm sure one could make spotting typos in my posts a cool drinking game!)
Moreno R.:
Hi, Christopher!
Very good post, full of very useful advices. I took the liberty of adding a link to it in the Italian gaming forum of Narrattiva, as an example, I hope you don't mind (if you do, I can still remove it).
Remembering my last time in Glorantha (it was a lot of time ago: we still used Runequest II...), I didn't have a lot of problem in "starting small" in the geographical sense, as in the "mythic" sense. I really didn't know how to convey even a tiny part of the Gloranthian Myths to the players. I had them start as a little Praxian tribe in the Wastes (little tribe, little contacts, little knowledge of the world), but even then I had a lot of problems in trying to show, in the SIS, even the different cults of praxians and the neighboring states, and when the tribe move to central Prax with Lunars and Templars and all of that it unraveled quickly. How did you address this problem in a quick convention game? Even if you use as setting a very little village, they still have a rich pantheon of gods around.
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi Moreno,
First, thanks for the compliment. And no, I don't mind the link at all.
It's my hope that the thread is helpful -- whether one plays HeroQuest or in the setting of Glorantha or not -- in the same way Ron Edwards' Actual Play posts about Sorcerer, HeroQuest, Tunnels & Trolls, AD&D, The Pool, The Riddle of Steel and a gizillion others have informed my ability to now have all the fun I always wanted to have from RPGs that I didn't have in the past. Whether or not I've played all the games Ron has played, and whether or not I have any intention to play the games is moot. His explanation and example of how he played gave me perspective, techniques, and practical application of what to do with rules, with play, and with bringing out the best from myself at the table.
On the other hand, this is a thread about HeroQuest and Glorantha. And I would be remiss if I didn't also give props to all the work Mike Holmes has done in breaking out the rules of HeroQuest for easy and practical consumption. Go down to the retired HeroQuest forum ( http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?board=13.0 ) and you'll find Mike doing amazing work in teasing out and explaining the properties of the game. The fun my game produced is due in large part to the work he did in those threads.
Second, this:
Quote from: Moreno R. on February 24, 2008, 12:07:23 AM
Remembering my last time in Glorantha (it was a lot of time ago: we still used Runequest II...), I didn't have a lot of problem in "starting small" in the geographical sense, as in the "mythic" sense. I really didn't know how to convey even a tiny part of the Gloranthian Myths to the players. I had them start as a little Praxian tribe in the Wastes (little tribe, little contacts, little knowledge of the world), but even then I had a lot of problems in trying to show, in the SIS, even the different cults of praxians and the neighboring states, and when the tribe move to central Prax with Lunars and Templars and all of that it unraveled quickly. How did you address this problem in a quick convention game? Even if you use as setting a very little village, they still have a rich pantheon of gods around.
This is a big topic, but it is part of what this thread is about, so I'm willing to make a stab at it.
Also, I can only speak about this topic from my point of view. And my point of view is, essentially, being a Story Geek. I love all things story. RPGs are just another media for story for me. Movies, sit-coms, fairy tales, theater, RPGs and so on. I cannot stress the importance of this enough in terms of the discussion to come. Many people see RPGs as very different from other story-telling media -- to the point where they don’t want to draw any comparisons from other media to RPGs. I get that. And that's their agenda. But it's not mine. So, as we proceed, keep that in mind. And, by the same token, if I reference my reactions to games I don't like it's not because they're terrible, but because they're not what I like. Yes, there's a preference there. But it's not an a priori admission that I'm going rip copies of those games from the hands of players, kick down doors to destroy publishing efforts, nor murmuring Satanic rituals to ruin the lives of those who enjoy, design or publish those games. (We're all clear on that, right?)
And, also... It's complicated. We're talking about your experience years ago, vs. my experience last week. We're talking about you using the Runequest rules, while I was using the HeroQuest rules -- a huge difference with concrete effects I'll discuss below. We're talking about what turns you on about Glorantha as a setting and what you want to share with your players, vs. what turns me on about Glorantha and what I want to share with my players -- which may be the same thing, a different thing, or a thing with many differences and overlapping similarities. And underlying all of it is what you want you want from RPGs -- what you expect them to be, to do, and what you want to get from them, which may or may not be similar to what I expect them to be, to do, and what I want to get from them.
So, let's unpack all that. What I say might end up not applying to what you want, but it might give you some perspective to get closer to what you want.
The Focus of Dramatic Narrative
Here's how story works. There's a character. There character is in a situation. We follow the character through the low levels of intensity about the situation, to more and more intense conflicts about the situation, until the conflict is resolved.
That's it.
How much background/color/detail do we need? Just enough to tell the story. Just enough to establish the situation. We might add more details as the situation's conflicts get more intense. But that's about it.
Think for a moment about the movie Aliens. How much do we know the culture of Earth? How much do we know about the technology, the religions, the economy of Earth? Well, nothing really. We know nothing almost nothing about Earth. How much do we know about the many, many worlds that we can infer that humanity has settled? Nothing. Nothing at all.
Here's what we know:
There are corporations.
Corporations fund colonies and terra-forming.
Corporations own space ships.
Corporations make human-like robots.
There are space marines.
That is it. Really. I mean it. We could infer a whole lot of material if we wanted. We could sit down with a notebook and start spinning out notes for fourteen sourcebooks for the Aliens roleplaying game. But the truth is, we don't know any of that from the movie.
How is that possible? How can we watch a compelling story and know so little about the character? Because we're not looking at the world. We're looking at the characters and the situation. That's what we're paying attention to. The background, the world, that's just stuff behind the characters to give the characters a place to be. It provides a substance for them to stand on and interact with that feels real enough to make their efforts to deal the situation have weight. But that's it.
Take a look at other movies you love. Pay attention to how much you don't know about what's happening in the world that's happening off-screen. You know nothing about it. Why don't you notice this unless you're really paying hard to pay attention? Because you're paying attention to what happening with the characters right and front of you on the screen. What they say and do is what matters.
Now, some might say, "Well, what about a novel? What about a hard SF, for example. That will have plenty of background detail. Pages and pages of it.
Yes. Absolutely. True. And I don't think particularly helpful. Let me ask you something. When you play an RPG, do want the GM do read you five pages of detailed notes every twenty minutes. Of course not. You want to play your character engaged in situation, and you want to get caught up in other characters engaged in situation. It's a roleplaying game. We should be playing roles, not listening to the fourteen ways this culture crafts it's knives for each stage of a person's life during a 15 minute dissertation from the GM. (Remember the knives; I'm bringing them back later.)
See, dramatic narrative -- that is, narrative told through the words and actions of characters -- is, I think, a terrific model to learn from to help build stories. Does this mean I think there's a 1:1 correlation between the two? Of course not. But just as the cinematographer learns from oil painting, so we can learn a few tricks from other media.
And does this mean I think there shouldn't be descriptive passages? Of course not. RPGs are a verbal medium. We relate details of the characters and the world through words. So paying attention to how writers capture detail in words is a great idea as well. Practicing communicating cool imagery and detail at the table is ever better.
My point is to put focus on not giving description about the world. My point is to ask, "What are we putting focus on?" And I put focus on the Player's Characters. In the events at the table, they are the focus of the story. The world's narrative details revolve around them. There may be other narrative details "out there" -- waiting to be mined. But if the PC's don't need them, don't encounter them, or would be extraneous to the tale, they don't become engaged.
For example, as the movie Aliens continues, we learn more details about the world's setting:
People still eat corn bread.
People still have photos of people they love.
The space marines seem to be going through a phase of bad discipline.
Corporate guys still wear suits.
There's definitely a social pecking order (a tense one!) between the corporations and the military.
The movie didn't front load all of this. It revealed details as it went, using these details to expand the world and -- most importantly -- allow characters to reveal behavior and choice about what they care about.
[continued]
Christopher Kubasik:
[continue]
"But there's all this stuff!
Yes, there's a lot of stuff in Glorantha. But that doesn’t mean you can't unpack details as needed. And only as needed.
For example, in the game description above, one of the Players in the game asked for a "tavern" or a "pub" three times. Each time I corrected him -- there are no taverns or pubs in a Heortling village. The last time, I broke out the description of the village's Long House. I painted it with much more detail than I had before. I wanted to give the player a fixed image of that Long House. I wanted to make sure all the Players understood that the Long House, and especially the sacred hearth burning inside the Long House was the center of their community, the most important place of their community.
We needed to clarify that. Now, I could have made a big deal about this earlier. But then, there's a million things about Heortlings and Dragon Pass and Glorantha I could have made clear earlier. And we never would have gotten around to rolling dice! So I gave quick brushstrokes of details, and as we needed to created fuller pictures I created fuller pictures.
Please note that rule I mentioned upthread about the group being able to "re-write" and retcon activities and ideas to make play move more smoothly. The player who wanted the tavern wanted to go there and rabblerouse. But when I made it clear there was no tavern, but there was the Long House, he decided it didn't want to go to the Long House, he wanted to frame his scene while being at work. My guess is, he wanted a place where his scene would put him in direct conflict with village elders; he wanted a more casual environment.
The point I want to make is this: I didn't say, "Oh, now you have to go to the Long House, because you were looking for something like the Tavern, and this is the closest thing we've got." No. I had added more details to the world he had been unclear about, and now I let him make a new choice about his PC's actions based on this new information.
This give and take -- a casual and social approach to the establishing what becomes "real" in the fiction we're all creating at the table -- is very important to my playing. As a GM I really, really never try to play "Gotcha!" with my players.
This allows me (and my players) to clarify ideas, add new details, and toss ideas back and forth to create the most satisfying details and fiction we can think of. We're editing as we proceed. We don't contradict what has come before -- we build on what we've said before. But we never get trapped in a "reality" that isn’t as interesting as what we can make up in present moment with a little bit more discussion.
But, remember, my goal is not to create a self consistent world that would continue running without the PCs present. That's not what my game is about! My game is about the Player Characters. Moreno, I want you to really think on that. Because it's pretty radical departure from how most of us build our game worlds. But I really mean it. I don't mean that I don't know what's over that hill just because the PCs have never gone over that hill. I do mean that the enemy tribe over that hill will take action -- if it takes action -- that will have significance to the PCs (and thus the Players). This story is the story of these PCs. In the movie Aliens we can assume there are billions and billions of people living lives and having drama and so forth. But we never know about them. We know about 20 characters we meet in the film -- the characters that circle Ripley, because this is her story and everything is designed to throw her into situations and watch her make choices.
So, let's look back at how I filtered limited information to the Players. In ALL OF THIS please remember what I said to the Players before character creation began: "When you make your characters, I'm not looking for what your character cares about. Your character is just a conduit for what you care about. What do you care about? What do you want this story to be about? HeroQuest will let you do that."
So here's the list of details of what I told them about Glorantha religions:
• the fact that the gods are real and a vital part of every day life
• that the Lunar Empire has moved into Dragon Pass and outlawed the worship of Orlanth
• that several tribes have submitted to the religious law of the Lunars
that a rebellion is fermenting
• the Lunars worship the Red Goddess (bad! hiss!)
• the Heortlings worship Orlanth and Ernaldan. Orlanth is the Storm God and the Father. Ernalda is the Goddess of the Earth and the Mother
That's pretty much it. Really.
Then, during character creation I mentioned that there are aspects of the Gods -- specific cults of Orlanth and Ernaldan that the PCs could be members of. We ran down the list so they could get a quick idea of what was possible: Deemborth the Thief; Destor the Adventurer; Drogarsi the Skald. Two of the Players decided to be devotees: One to Destor, the other to Drogarsi. We tossed together a couple of color details. Not much -- it was a con game, and the focus seemed to be about Darleeta, the fact that she was pregnant, and the fact that she worshipped the Red Goddess. So, I didn't create fellow members of their cult nor NPCs that they would interact with. Certainly I could have, and if our game had continued past the Con, I would have brought these details and NPCs into play to create new situations for the PC. But right now, there was no need.
And what about the Lunars. The Players knew almost nothing about them, nor the Red Goddess. I was fine with that for now. They knew them as the enemies of the Heortlings. They knew they were invaders. Notice that they knew the Lunars only from the Heortling perspective. I wanted to keep it that way. Greg Stafford's work (in both Glorantha and Pendragon is full of cultures and faith that are different and in conflict because they only see things from their own perspective. So, just like I've been suggesting, I don't need -- or want -- the Players to be wandering around with a big, objective conceptual and theological map of how Glorantha works. If they go off and read on their own, that's fine -- it's not a secret. But in play what I care about is that a Player interact with the world from his character's point-of-view and that I feed them details and facts that hammer them at the level of their PCs.
So, let's say their PCs meet a Lunar. Well, even if the PCs have met Lunars before, this is my chance to introduce Lunars to the Players. I didn't have to say one thing about Lunar armor before this moment, and we might have played five sessions up to this point. But this is the first time a Lunar is "on screen" -- and if the Players hadn’t asked, this is my chance to introduce them "visually." So I'll do a bit of a description -- talking about how the Lunar warriors look in contrast to the Heortlings. I'll describe how the armor looks uncomfortable in this way or that way, because it isn't like the Hoertling armor. I'll compare their weapons the Lunar warriors are carrying to the Heortling weapons. I'll try to make a picture that makes the Lunar warriors look wrong -- not foolish -- but wrong somehow. Because the Heortlings are proud of how they do things and that is how they view the world.
When it comes to the Lunar gods, again, it would be in how they interact with the world and with PCs. They might find statues. They might see a Lunar praying. I would try to paint it from the Heortling's point of view. I don't care the Player knows everything. If the Player asks, I'll give any information he or she wants about source material -- I'm not trying to keep secrets. I'm just trying not to get bogged down in source material.
So, remember, don't try to "show" more of the world than the Players need to know. Be loose in the first couple of sessions, so that the Players can tweak their PCs early on as the Players get acquainted with the setting and the mechanics. Introduce more and more of Glorantha's religions through the PCs interactions with the world and NPCs.
The Rules Lead into The World
Now, you said you were working with Glorantha a few years ago, using the Runequest system. That's going to have implications and complications as well.
Okay. So, it's 1980. I'm in the Compleat Strategist on 33rd Street in Manhattan. At the time I've been playing AD&D 2nd edition, Traveller, and Bushido (the Phoenix Games edition that came out in '79). I've also played The Fantasy Trip, Dungeons & Dragons, and read through other games -- but those are those three games are the active games. The AD&D game is my main game.
I've had a great time running AD&D for my high school crew (a mix of guys and gals who all met up in a couple of English Lit and creative writing classes -- please note that last part about where we met -- important!).
But the highlight of my gaming so far is the Bushido game my little brother ran. I and the other players were three Ronin and Samurai who, in the climax to the adventure my brother made up, when we all decided to fight a dragon that rules wise we knew we could not defeat. But we all made a choice to die trying rather than go home dishonored. That sense of making a choice -- making a statement -- about how to have the PC behave was the coolest thing in the world. I kept trying to port more of that into my regular AD&D game -- but it was tough. I had begun stripping away so much of the rules to get stuff out of the way that I didn't quite know what we were playing anymore.
So, I'm at the Compleat Strategist, flipping through games, looking for a game that will give me more of that experience from the Bushido game. I don't know about handling times. I don't know about IIEE. I do know there's something I want more of, and I know are there are some things I want less of.
I wander down the aisle and I see the cover for Runequest -- a game I've never seen before. It's the 2nd edition, the 120 page book with the color cover on the staplebound book showing the woman warrior with sword and shield battling the green lizard kind of thing. I pick it up. I flip through it. I see hit location charts. I put it back down. It's not what I'm looking for.
And that, my friends, is my first encounter with Glorantha. I never saw it.
I would, in fact, not encounter Glorantha until I read Ron's panting review of Hero Wars in November of 2000. (You can find the review here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/reviews/16/ You can find his review of Thunder Rebels for hero Wars here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/reviews/14/)
Now, what happened there. Well, no matter how cool Glorantha was as a setting, I was looking at rules that were going to prevent me from getting there. How did I know this? Well, intuition played a big part of it. I mean, I'm looking at a game that had a combat system that by definition got down the minutia of hit locations, interrupted spell actions and so forth. Ron's review of Hero Wars does a great job comparing and contrasting the two system and how they either support the rich environment of Glorantha -- or don't. I'd really recommend reading it.
I'd suggest the HeroQuest rules are much better suited for playing in Glorantha. Or rather, for the Glorantha I want to play in.
A few paragraphs back I was talking about how one can introduce facts to the Player via the PCs -- that the PCs are in fact the conduit for the Players to interact with the world about the things the Players care about.
The rules system for Runequest was primarily a pseudo-realistic combat simulation thing (as most RPG rules are pseudo-realistic combat simulation things). But if you look at a HeroQuest character sheet that's been filled in you'll find a bunch of things like "Ashamed of Son 13" or "Devotee of Destor 17" or "Loves Family 17." The system itself makes no claims to modeling combat. It's a conflict resolution system where the Players roll dice to determine outcomes of conflicting interests. And how do you get bonuses to win a conflict? By adding in fictional color and with Augments -- which means that Love of Family and Ashamed of Son can both become bonuses in the middle of a fight. That's because were building story here.
And I bring this up because some of the problems you had with the huge pantheon elements years ago might be mitigated by the rules system of HeroQuest.
Here's a thread that touches on some of these issues: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=13831.0
The HeroQuest rules connect the PC directly to issues of religion and family and relationships and society. The key is the things on the character sheet is what the game and story is about.
In a lot of games there's a thick, rich background with all this cool stuff (Runequest, Shadowrun, Battletech, Ars Magica, Fading Suns, and more.) But when you look at the character sheet, what we see is tools for punching, shooting, and fireballing people. There's not solid connection between the character sheet and this rich background.
Before I go further, let me make a whole lot of qualifying statements:
• D&D didn't have a problem of not connecting to a big rich background because there was no big rich background. The character sheet was perfect for what the game was about: kicking down doors and taking their stuff. The big, rich background for RPGs came later, but the character sheet and what they covered stayed pretty much the same. In my view, this was a problem.
• But it might not have been a problem for YOU! (Whoever you are, you reading this right now.) Plenty of people have successfully run Ars Magica, Shadowrun and so on. Good! I'm truly glad and wish you no ill-will. I'm discussing my experiences and the experiences of other people where thing didn't work out so well.
Here's what I saw happen a lot of the time with these big backgrounds that didn't tie the characters in directly via mechanics:
The Players know there's this whole big world out there. But they know the GM is in charge of the whole big world and that he knows which parts of that world environment matter and which don't. We try to "get into" the setting, but it's so big that's it's like watching the movie Aliens while thinking about the nurse from Gateway and Jones the cat the whole time: There's all this setting details we're tracking that's spread out all over the place that sometimes obscures building a story right now.
But look what HeroQuest's mechanics do: They give a clear focus to what the story and session will be about: it’s the stuff on the Character Sheet. Yes, we have values for weapons skills -- because committing acts of violence is certainly an option in Glorantha. But what else do we see? We see a value for being Heortling barbarian. We see a value for being follower of Orlanth. We see a value for Ashamed of Father, Loves Family, Vengeful Against Lunar Empire. We see a Goal: Spark a Rebellion against the Lunar Empire. We have a situation: The Hero Wars have begun, mortals and gods are in conflict over specific issues. Tribe turn against tribe. Family turns against family. Armies are on the march. Gods will dies. Others will be born. The world will be different by the time the Hero Wars are over.
And the story we're going to follow is isn't everything that happened in Glorantha Ever. No. Instead we're going to follow the story of the Player Characters. 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. And a story is about specific characters in specific circumstances. And that's how I run my RPG sessions these days.
So, to swing all this back to Glorantha and its plethora of Gods and Goddesses:
Notice that by using the HeroQuest rules, the world gets narrowed down fast. With the Runequest rules we have the stats on our character sheet and the world is "out there" waiting for us to explore. But with a HeroQuest character sheet, which parts of the world I want to explore (as a Player or a GM -- the GM sets the location and situation, the Player choose among those pieces to create a character). Suddenly it isn't "all that out there." The focus of the game is right here on the character sheet.
I can't emphasize enough how the two different games create expectations and patterns of behavior when it comes to interaction with Glorantha. If you allow yourself, as GM, to work with the HeroQuest system, all that other stuff that might be a constant distraction ("How do I get them here to see this? How will I explain all of that?") fades away.
The focus of the session becomes the PCs themselves -- the choices they make, the opportunities they seek. Then game is no longer about showing off Glorantha. It's about using Glorantha to show off the PCs.
I don't know if that helps, but that's the bet I've got.
CK
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page