[Hero Wars] Black Horse Troop and Grazer preparation

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron! Thanks for your reply. I suspected that Nathan was of one of the players after his comment, and my next questions are for him:

Nathan, can you post about your personal relationship with Glorantha, both as a big sprawling mountain of things to read (if you want), meaning the commercial setting, and as the setting of this game with this group?

And what did you know about the setting? What do you intend to read for this game?

[RosenMcStern]

It's also totally up in the air to me, in my Glorantha, exactly where Ethilrist himself personally stands. Faithful? Cynical? Transcended it all? Or? The possibilities are fascinating and I plan to muse over it for some time, much as I did regarding Ralzakark in my previous game.

This sounds really cool, and IIRC no one has ever tried to create an Ethilrist that is as ambiguous a character as Arkat or Ralzakark (both of which have a "before" and "after" stage, as they died and were resurrected at least once) are represented. Which is strange, as Ethilrist went to Hell, too, so one might have some doubts about him being the exact same person - physically and meta-physically - that entered the Underworld. I suspect your musings will open great gaming possibilities.

Regarding the "dry and boring" statement about sorcery, I must hastily clarify: I'm talking about what I used to think about the sorcery before I applied myself and really outlined the mechanics and the content for myself, which I didn't have to do very much in our previous game. I think I was too much influenced by my careful reading of the Avalon Hill RuneQuest. Now I think very differently, and I tried to convey my new sense of excitement through my write-up in the handout. Specifically:

1. At first glance, the spells of wizards and sorcerers are much, much more fixed in application and in acquisition than the theistic or animist magic, and do look much more like classic D&D spells. I think they are made more fun than that as soon as what they do receives some attention, in setting terms. There isn't any theist magical action out there that simply, clearly, effectively, and reliably blows a person's head off, no more and no less. Why can you do it? Never mind what some goofus god did during a backwoods tribe's myth. You can do it because you can. Also, you the player get to make up spells during character creation and improvement, which is plain old candy-store time.

Exactly. You nailed down how Sorcery is supposed to work according to all sources so far, and it has nothing to do with the old AHRQ approach. I will add a note I heard from Jeff Richard (or maybe it was Nick Brooke) at a seminar in 2009, that might be illuminating (no pun intended): "The answer a sorcerer gives to a problem not covered by his abilities, is to go look into his grimoire and find or craft a new spell that addresses that exact problem". It is a slower but more effective process than the one a theist would use, and produces a more focused result. It is in fact like D&D, only more fun because YOU make up the spells.

I take the liberty to provide an actual play from my last HeroQuest game, hoping that it helps your players envision how it is supposed to work in game.

Let us say that we were mopping up this palace courtyard full of bad guys in Pamaltela, and our Annilla cultist player has just descended into the area from a balcony "walking on a moonbeam" (cool stuff they can do, these theists, huh?) when one bat-Hsunchen shaman who was helping us decides to summon his most powerful spirit. It turns out that this is a red bat with dozenzs ooze-dripping eyes and plenty of long, spiraling tongues. Sounds familiar? Yeah, it is a miniature Crimson Bat. In a matter of seconds, the shaman loses control of the thing and it leaps at the Blue Moon cultist, recognizing it as a follower of an Enemy Moon.

After the Narrator describes this "oh shit" moment, the cultist is preparing to fend the thing off with her ritual kusari-gama - which is not guaranteed to work very well against acid and tongues and screams and all the nasty thing the Bat can do - when my Malkioni character opens his copy of "The Book of Destruction" at the spell entry "Destroy Daemonic Spirits", shouts "Die Demonspawn!" and -poof- the mini-bat is on the ground screaming in agony.

Basically, whereas the Annilla cultist had great powers and could perform great feats, her theist magic simply lacked a direct way to damage or dispel Bad Things from the Otherworld. For a lucky coincidence, that ability was instead in my spellbook, focused against the kind of creature we were facing. As a side note, such a situation was not as bad as it may seem in HeroQuest, where ratings are never fixed for a given monster but arranged by the GM on the fly. However, with the Hero Wars ruleset, where a monster may have three masteries in "bite your head off" but be rather vulnerable to the right form or magic, the "appropriateness" of the peculiar skill possessed by my character would have proved even more important. Bottom of the line: read your grimoire carefully and find the right spell ahead of time.

A final note about BH culture, after Eero's comments. I suggest you consider that "BH County" (and the Grazelands) is not necessarily a single culture, but the overlapping of a ruler class over a serf class that comes from another culture. Do all people in BH County belong to the Atroxic Church? I am not very sure about that. How much the Vendref are integrated in Grazer culture I have no idea, but for BH County I would use the model of "Monotheist nobility ruling over polytheist lower classes" that is presented in Blood Over Gold. This is the reason why I mentioned this book more than once. There are, of course, some real world equivalent that could provide more food for thought, and I will be glad to speculate if anyone is interested.

[ndpaoletta]

I know next to nothing about Glorantha (there's ducks in it, somewhere?), and will probably only read what Ron puts together as reference material/handout/whatever. I technically played in it once, in Mike Holme's long-running IRC HeroQuest game, where I played an island-born dancer and cartographer, who I liked very much. But outside the immediate surroundings of that experience (there was a stream, a valley and about 12 different military factions that I don't really recall) I'm coming to this essentially blind. I have high trust that I'll be supported through whatever I "need to know" in order to play productively, and high intention to play in the spirit of things as I find them at the table.

[Moreno R.]

Thanks! I don't have other questions, for now, but I have a request: Nathan, can you continue to post here after playing the next sessions your impressions about the setting? And if you (eventually) get curious enough to read some Glorantha Book, write here about it, please
I am interested because the passage of information about the setting between GM-Players-manuals, written or orally, it's something that interest me very much, and Glorantha is a rather (in)famous "stress-test" of this exchange of informations in groups.

[Ron Edwards]

We met for our first session! I've been busy with my kids and away from a reliable printer, so I didn't bring physical handouts. The one I finished in addition to the ones I linked to above is, I think, pretty good for my basic introduction to the game: here. I mentioned a few points from it and opened a couple of books to three maps: Glorantha as a whole, Dragon Pass (pointing out the Grazelands), and finally this Grazelands map. For some of you reading, you may spot incomplete or overly-general details in my handouts. Please do not attempt to correct or clarify them. I am perfectly familiar with the distinctions among the names Rufelza, Sedenya, and Natha, for instance, and I have carefully chosen what to present here and what to clarify later.

I briefly presented the same material I linked to earlier, here, then everyone made up characters: Tim has a Grazelander warrior, Julie has a vendref Hiia swordsperson, Nathan has a liturgist of the Black Horse Troop, Tod has a Grazelander shaman, and Maura has a Black Horse County merchant (a noncombatant). I had just enough notes on hand to be able to run three scenes. I will wait to discuss events of play after our next session. The main reason is that my major preparation is actually now, after the characters have been made and after a few introductory and mildly adversity-introducing scenes.

As always, relationships are everything - each character is full of interesting situational potential concerning the diversity of their relationship characters and the character's stated individual goal. I find that between the listed relationship NPCs and the necessary NPCs based on some of my notions to include, I am now tasked with making up twenty-nine NPCs in total, with the majority coming from the player-character relationships. Fortunately this is very easy in Hero Wars, at least, after I review the rules a little more about ability requirements and limitations (it's been over a decade since I did this before, after all).

I'm thinking of making a Hero Wars game page at the Adept site too, for an easy one-stop shop for all my handouts and various other things, like links to relevant stuff on the internet and PDFs of the starting character sheets.

I'd prefer that everyone withholds further interrogative posts until after our next session. My first reason is that our group has made a strong start but needs a period of play and thought without any interference. Necessary activities include filling out the character sheets, acquiring folders for the stuff I want to pass out, seeing consequences of the short session we've already run, and otherwise getting a feel for various NPCs, cultural opportunities, and the practical adversity facing each stated character goal.

Second, I suspect that on-line discussions of play set in Glorantha face problems similar to (although differently slanted from) discussions of D&D. Many people experience such a strong sense of ownership over the material that they cannot help but lecture and try to correct what they think are problems, and/or they have suffered such obstacles in trying to play that they cannot help but bring their frustration to the discussion. I've only seen the first threatening murmurs of such things here.

I'll say only one thing about that: I do not subscribe to the apparently widespread perception that "players" are necessarily mentally-limited or resistant regarding Glorantha. I think that players and GMs are the same people and that what one of them can understand voluntarily and without stress, the others can too. All the stress I've read about on-line regarding players' "problems" with the game and/or setting seem to me to be 100% based on failing the basic requirement of Social Contract, "let's play this game" with every word in that phrase given its full meaning.

Therefore I'm designating a cool-down period during which we, the ones actually playing at the moment, can enjoy our game and see it begin without the whole world fogging up the window from outside. I'm not actually closing the thread to posting; if you have any questions or ideas which strike you as not tainted by the issues I mentioned, then please feel free to post them.

For anyone who's interested, here are the threads I found on my first pass through the old HeroQuest forum (originally Hero Wars and mostly about that game) at the Forge. Some of the threads include a lot of material about the way I approach both the themes and the content of play, and a lot about what happened in that game, but some of them were begun by other people and seem to me to bring out good discussions of how this game works, by a number of people.

2001:  Where to begin?, God damn it, I love Glorantha, I just picked up Glorantha, Glorantha - It's been a long time!, Goddess of Rape?

2002: Ending the story, Premise in Hero Wars?, Getting started

2003: Questions about Hero Wars/Quest, Heroquesting - the larger picture, Glorantha: I'm confused, Goddess of Rape essay + Rape in Glorantha, More Thed material - Inuit mythology, Humakt, Rashoran, and justice, Slavery, morality, and changing times,

2004: Hesitance towards Glorantha as a setting, Gloranthan Sources of Conflict-Pre-Campaign Preparation, Designing Final Days at Skullpoint

2005: Spooked by Canon, Glorantha is Myth-- right?, Railroading and Heroquests , Borderlands & Beyond reprint - adapting it for Heroquest (curses! Erik's links are now lost to the ether - Erik, can you help?)

2006: Last days at Skullpoint (again)

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

I have a long history of yearning for the Lunar Empire, or rather, for sufficient game materials to play Lunar characters with the depth and potential that Heortling/Orlanthi characters had initially been granted. The key, of course, was the tease presented by the genius game supplements Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror, including the remarkable color/story text in each. So, you could play a Seven Mothers character, although without the cultural and mythological background available for Orlanth-pantheon characters (especially if they were from Prax), or you could play a really foul, psychopathic cultist Chaos-worshipper. Well, in the latter case, except for the bolded text which explained that the book was written to supply villain NPCs only and urged GMs instantly to kill any such character brought to them. But still -- in the Prax book, the Seven Mothers worshippers are unequivocally sinister, but in Terror, the picture is much more nuanced and the Seven Mothers material in Prax becomes more enticing in that light. I even filled out the little customer response form in the back of one of the books, although I never sent it; you can see my No. 2 pencil scrawl "More Lunar Empire info!!" there today.

In case you want to know, the source of my interest lay directly in the more positive and philosophically tantalizing side of Chaos, regarding which I did not and today still do not accept the Orlanthi line of "Abomination! Abomination!" -- speaking here in-setting; I do realize we're talking about fiction. I think that Storm Bull is a cult (in the bad sense of the word) for thugs, and that Arkat was an asshole. I even find myself annoyed by Argrath, in a lot of the game material, and don't even mention Harrek the Berserk to me - a character reeking of stupidity and undeserved plot immunity. Paulis' account in Cults of Terror, on the other hand, struck me as fascinating and exciting. You know I'm from northern California, right? Text like "Perhaps 'chaos' is merely another term for 'what we do not understand --' made a lot of sense to me.

But by the time I really developed the interest, game stores were few and material was hard to find - there was no Amazon or Google then, you see. I yearned for Snakepipe Hollow, for instance, but I couldn't find a Glorantha book for love nor money. This would be -- getting on about 1985, I think, and I'm pretty sure the books were not in print. Perhaps everything was on hold regarding the upcoming Avalon Hill license? I don't know. Anyway, a few years later, my interest waned further upon the Avalon Hill RuneQuest release, which I bought, appreciated for what it was, but reluctantly acknowledged that I'd rather eat a dead broo raw than use these rules, at that stage of my gaming preferences.

Moving on to 2000, and after meeting and liking Greg Stafford at GenCon. You can see what I thought, and still think, of Hero Wars in my 2000 review (originally published at the Gaming Outpost). In playing the specific long-term game I've often referred to, I also backtracked to find the Avalon Hill reprints of Shadows on the Borderland, Dorastor, and Snakepipe Hollow (and a few others, including the original Trollpak and the AH reprint of The Haunted Ruins), as well as mining the Hero Wars core book and Glorantha for everything they could provide.

In 2001, I was in heaven. I loved Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribes, and eagerly awaited the promised She Guards Us in exactly the same format. I had worked on a "Toolbox for playing Hero Wars" which at least someone had been interested in including in an Issaries publication (my memory is not pulling up all the details).  I'm not an Issaries/et cetera insider and I know nothing about the situation as it stood, but apparently "things" underwent another paroxysm (and boy do I not want to know), resulting in re-releasing the game as HeroQuest and Steve Jackson Games getting involved for a while. But speaking as a customer, I found myself knocking my expectations down a notch with each release in order to enjoy them at all. The Imperial Handbook vol. 1 was not what I'd hoped for, which I want you to understand is a function of my own desires; again, take a look at Thunder Rebels and put a big "Ron wants this but for She Guards Us" sticker on it, and consider that I prefer the formatting and design of Hero Wars characters over those of HeroQuest. Clearly it was a labor of love, simply not quite the same love for the same stuff I'd been hoping for.

Still, I liked things enough to stay a bit connected and even talked with Mark Galeotti for a little while about contributing to a Darjiini supplement. However, over time, my expectations continued to fall and I eventually stopped buying books and lost contact with the few Glorantha insiders I knew. To some extent, that remains the case: I haven't even seen the new versions of HeroQuest and RuneQuest.

The tragedy of it all is that Imperial Handbook vol. 2, Under the Red Moon, was indeed published by Moon Design Publications and I never even saw a physical copy, let alone found a sensible way to buy it during the time it was available. I could have ordered it with some effort at any time, but in part because for a while I confused it with the Moon Rites book (a con publication), I never did. But now! Now, I have it! Bliss. It's what I've wanted all along.

Glorious daydreaming: oohh, at last I can make that bad-ass Yanafal Tarnils character I've wanted to play since 1981 or so; now I can easily make up a full-on Irrippi Ontor heroquest prep (or two! Or three!); look, look, look at all those freaky-ass little cults with dream magic, sex magic, murder magic, raw horrible chaos magic, about four kinds of scholar-intellectual magic, and I am just about to start wiggling.

Given changes in titles, authorship, sources, and visions, here's my compilation: the Issaries books Hero Wars and Glorantha for the rules, the setting basics, and "when in doubt" for content; HeroQuest for added color; the Imperial Handbook vol. 1 and this one, vol. 2, Under the Red Moon for solid additional content but only for use with Hero Wars rules; King of Sartar for full-on source information with an enjoyable "this narrator is untrustworthy" qualifier; and the original RQ material, primarily Cults of Terror, as honored ancestor, simultaneously seminal for a certain raw inspirational feel and subject to scrubbing-out of certain concessions to fantasy role-playing. For Heortling and/or troll-involved play, I'd add the relevant books I mentioned above. Aside from those, I consider everything else published, by anyone, designated official or not, as commentary and optional inspiration at most. Some of which I love and have adopted whole cloth, so don't get bent out of shape about that, OK?)

So, what is this thing's immediate use, given the game we've just started (described in [Hero Wars] Black Horse Troop and Grazer preparation? It's not prime Lunar territory, and I'm not saying that issue will be central to the game, but as I see it, the Lunar presence needs to be real but not really take over, especially at this point where we are working with "day in the life" conflicts and local destabilizing factors. But I want the in-play touches and brushes with Lunarism and imperial influences (not quite the same things) to be very solid, rooted in strong knowledge and convictions on my part.

In that light, the main communities in the game have historical ties to the Empire and have frequently provided mercenaries for its local needs. And although "Lunar" and "Empire" are not synonyms, they're close enough to consider that not only Seven Mothers but more "core" Lunarized groups would take an interest in either. Especially since as far as I can tell, the local ethnic Heortlings (vendref and non-combatants, and the population pool they come from) are in betwixt and between: not mostly-Lunarized Tarshite, not radicalized Sartarite, and if they'd been heavily into Orlanth, they'd have run off to the Colymar long ago. I figure that crowd is ripe for a friendly Deezola or similarly-benevolent Lunar missionary. If you want to get more symbolic and intense about it, everyone knows you don't call yourself "King of Dragon Pass" without marrying the Feathered Horse Queen, and everyone also knows that if the Black Horse Troop is fighting on the other guy's side, you are going to lose a whole lot of army, so maybe Empire policy is looking at those issues too.

For example, in the previous game, our battered but reconstructed community of up-country Heortlanders had begun to investigate its own myths more critically, discovering secrets and ambiguities regarding historical brushes with Chaos. And right then, who should show up via the recently conquered Holy Country but a priest of Rufelza, very far from home, willing and able to help them against all things Chaos. I loved playing this guy, especially when he was torn apart by the Thed daemon named Eech'ya, but they found him bathing happily in the pond next morning, as full of cheer and advice as ever. Interestingly, they rejected his offer to help them, which was instrumental in landing them in Snakepipe Hollow eventually. But that's not my point in talking about him - my point is that although the character turned out to be only briefly engaged in play, my background reading had gone into enough depth that seeing only this surface still conveyed immense potential and carried a lot of weight for everyone, as well as making him way easier to play.

So that's my model: although the game isn't strictly about "the Lunars come here and this happens," they're around, and I want playing them to carry the same kind of lurking or "wow these waters are deep" feel in play, which comes straight out of my enthusiasm and enjoyment of texts like this.

It's a good day when you're a gamer as old as I am and so jaded regarding sourcebooks that I cannot even tell you, and still to be so thrilled by a new book full of wild details and utterly unchained play-potential. At the risk of employing a rather worn-out SF-geek cliché -- "I'll be in my bunk."

Best, Ron