[Heroquest 2] Pass/Fail and Setting-Heavy Story Now
Erik Weissengruber:
I have played in Glorantha with a whole bunch of agendas over the decades.
I still love the place.
My return to the lozenge was a combination of interest in newer styles of games AND nostalgia. My first few tries were colour-spraying investigations of the setting. This despite picking up a few techniques from Sorcerer and reading about Story Now, playing Dogs, etc.
And I fell back into this default mode with a recent FATE game.
Despite their crunchy-osity I feel that the long Burning games I was in (Wheel and Empires) gave me the longest, continuous experience of Story Now.
Erik Weissengruber:
To pick up on the nostalgia thread: in the past I ran heroquests with as much canonical fealty as I could muster. This time I will see how the pass/fail rhythm interacts with addressing the characters' beliefs through events in the quest.
The myths I have in mind grow out of several sources. First and foremost, the clan generation sheet from S:KoH. The clan's institutions condensed out of it and so did the characters and actions in the myths. Then, I have looked at the issues involving the personalities of the clan and retrojected them back into mythic time (which, in my opinion, is how sacred stories often come into being: a present crisis works in entangles with already-constituted religious practices and a myth is created to fit those practices into a new situation, which situation is brought about by working through the crisis, and the myth making contributes to that work). Lastly, I wanted to create a set of mythemes open to potential unification, not possessing a unity prior to the quest itself.
The Old Stones are a highly idiosyncratic bunch in that they are ancestor worshipers. There store of lore and ritual relating to the great gods of their people is really thin. The heroquesters who venture to the other side to make some sense of the myths and to apply them to their own lives will, through their choices, create a new unity of these elements, and this new canonical structure will be the source for more magic, more challenges, etc. They are not re-enacting the myth: they are creating it. Their people will have to live with the consequences of the myths they make.
The most obvious "opening" for the players is to determine what that gift was.
That is the theory, anyway:
Penene, the Daughter of the Wild Marries Sedenor;
or, how a daughter of the wild became protectress of the people
• Orlanth defeated the Emperor and won Ernalda's love. Penene attended the feasts of the great gods.
• When freedom came, Penene lead the children of the wild in savage dances, even with the advent of the Great Winter.
• She and her band of celebrants came upon Heort’s people, shivering and lost
• Penene took pity of them and tried to convince her sisters to show mercy. She failed and they devoured the children and the old, led hunters into the trackless waste, and taunted the mothers.
• Penene tried to amend the damage her sisters had done by teaching them how to Resist Winter.
• Later, she taught a Curse against Ves Vena
• Upon Sedenor’s advent, she readied the hall of celebration and repaired the Rug of Fate
• In a moment of peace, Sedenor and Penene made their vows and Orlanth — though still on his quest to free the world from the darkness he brought -- sent a gift to their wedding. Penene was wise enough to recognize his true messenger.
• Their wedding was a light in the Darkness
Orlanth’s Departure;
or, how the people persisted even when he went away
• Orlanth won the love of one of the his brother Valind’s daughters, and tasted desire.
• Then he moved on to slay the Emperor to win Ernalda and learned what love is.
• To heal the world he set off on his quest to recover the sun: this mean that he had to abandon his people
• In his Lord’s absence, Heort held the people together. Orlanth learned the importance of making blessed kings for his people.
• And as the darkness got worse, Sedenor dove from the sky to drive Ves Vena and the others away from the people. Orlanth learned the need for allies.
• While his friends and allies defended his people, he had to venture in the otherworld. There, he encountered the child of his transgression with his niece. He tried to make peace with her but failed, and she went spinning off into darkness and terror.
• Before he departed on his great Lightbringer’s quest to recover the sun, he sent a gift back with a messenger to reward Sedenor for taking care of his people. It was a light in the darkness, a spark of hope to old onto while he went further into the land of the dead.
Erik Weissengruber:
As to genre, I can't really think of a situation like this in any of the Juvenile or YA fantasy lit I read as a kid.
Possibly Dune, with its mythology of the messiah and Paul's consciousness of that mythology.
There are traces to be found in the Earthsea trilogy, where Ged and the young priestess both have to step on up to the roles their mythologies and religions hold out to them. Both reject much of what they were born to be, and they reinvent much.
Maybe even the hobbits of Tolkien are similar, in that they stand in the presence of mighty personages who have shaped their world but challenge them from their human perspective.
So "Epic Fantasy" still holds, in that mythology is here and now. And the decisions the protagonists make will constitute the new world that is arising from the shambles of the old. I think I just quoted Led Zep. Time to stop typing.
Erik Weissengruber:
Only one player showed up so I think we are at the end of this little series.
The player who exorcised the dragon-shaped demon picked up the fiction from last time. He was concerned that the carcase to which the demon had been bound would infect the river into which it fell, and spent time getting the fictional and mechanical positioning needed to get it out of the river.
Moreover, he wanted to preserve the corpse as a resources. This was waaaaaaay off my prep. But Heroquest allows you to roll with it. And it wasn't completely random behaviour: as we players worked out the setting, and through our characters fought for its future and to shape it to our will, such setting-preserving actions could be a trend arising from play practices worked out in the first few sessions.
To maintain setting-relevance, I looked at the relationship map for the tribe's leadership ring and had them react appropriately: they thought preservation of the corpse a wise action but all acknowledged that the ultimate consequences of this act were obscure. All were interested in the dragon-related myth mentioned above.
Maybe it was a color connection: but Handor's (James') interest in the dragon gave me the impression that the dragon-related myth would play out well in the night's session. So it was fun to find an angle to bring in my heroquest ideas.
Was I railroading? Well, the characters in the setting had been pushing Handor to undertake a quest for their own purposes. So the fiction was about a character faced with railroaders. If he turned down that heroquest, I had a few other heroquesting options prepped. My agenda was to see some myth hacking but I hope that I could have rolled with a number of options in response to player decisions.
Erik Weissengruber:
Quote from: Erik Weissengruber on March 19, 2012, 08:10:09 AM
So it was fun to find an angle to bring in my heroquest ideas.
Was I railroading? Well, the characters in the setting had been pushing Handor to undertake a quest for their own purposes. So the fiction was about a character faced with railroaders. If he turned down that heroquest, I had a few other heroquesting options prepped. My agenda was to see some myth hacking but I hope that I could have rolled with a number of options in response to player decisions.
Story now?
I have been using the rune afinities of the characters to generate NPC actions that challenge the premise-y aspects of those afinities. With Handor's truth rune, I had a character who is determined to know how her father died during a raid. I was going to have Handor investigate that his own way. Since he agreed to the quest, I will put his answer there.
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