Mix of magic/non-magic characters?

[Adrienne]

I'm about to start a HQ game set in Paul Zimmer's Dark Border books.  Through eager reading of randomling's thread and the suggested articles, I've worked up a couple of homeland keywords I'm pretty happy with here.  I'm hitting a little stumbling block with magic, though.

To my reading, the setting is pretty secular.  There's plenty of supernatural stuff--all kinds of monsters on the dark side of the Border, and these immortal super-wizards called the Hasturs that keep humanity from being obliterated.  However, aside from a general respect/reverence towards the Hasturs, there don't seem to be many religious beliefs among the people.

I only consider this a problem because certain valid character types in the setting have magic--Healers and Seers (long-distance communicators).  So, I'm wondering how to balance character types who should have some sort of magic keyword with those who don't.  One option I've considered is picking a few magical abilities for each type, and inserting them into an occupation keyword in place of mundane abilities.  Another possibility is to give non-magical characters some kind of extra keyword to make up for it, but another full occupation keyword (for example) seems to overcompensate.

There are probably more elegant solutions, so I figured I'd post here about it.  Any suggestions are appreciated.

[CCW]

Hi Adrienne,

I like your homelands, though I don't (alas) remember enough details of Zimmer's world to comment much.  

As for magic, perhaps the easiest thing to do is give each character a special ability of some kind, which could be a magic keyword or could just be great strength, extra experience, etc.  This is one of Mike Holmes' ideas and if you're the Adrienne I think you are, you'll know what I'm referring to.  The details are on the random average bear wiki  (I can't seem to find my bookmark off hand).

Mark Humphreys (posts as Soviet) has detailed a whole lot of special abilities for his Star Wars conversion.

http://lokarnos.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/09/2111231&mode=thread

Many of them could easily be adapted for other genres.

Another approach might reveal itself to you if you can come up with a more inclusive description of the keywords.  Something like the "Where am I from? / What's my role in the community? / What do I believe?" breakdown of the keywords in vanilla HQ.  Is there any aspect of the setting, or of the issues you and the other players want to grapple with that could be expressed through magical abilities, but could be expressed in other ways too?

Finally, have you considered not bothering to "balance character types"?  It might not really matter that much as long as everyone enjoys playing their character.  Especially if the only magic is a couple of powers included with an occupation keyword, compensation might not be needed or even desired.

Charles Wotton

[Peter Nordstrand]

Hi,

I agree with Charles.

One option would be not to have any magical keywords, and make magic a part of the occupation keyword where applicable. For example a healer keyword in your game might include 5-10 magical abilities related to healing (Make Healing Salve, Cure Red Cough, Kill Pain, Heal Hurt, Heal Injured, etc). If you like, you can decide that these abilities work like spells, charms or feats. Or you may decide not to bother with the details of the various magic systems and just use the more general rules outlined in HeroQuest pages 98-102.

I think that the magic systems of HeroQuest are very cool, but they are fairly detailed, and is writte for a game where magic and religion is partly what the game is about. In a more secular game, the detailed magic rules may not be suitable at all.

HeroQuest doesn't really need any rules beside abilities, ability ratings, simple contest, extended contest, and hero points.

As for game balance, it is a concept that I've stopped adhering to completely. Perhaps you or the players want to feel that everybody's character is roughly equally powerful. This is fine, but you should realize that the game doesn't require equality. The concept of balance is muddy anyway.

Cheers,

[CPXB]

We did some chargen stuff last night -- my character is here: http://riters.com/DarkBorder/index.cgi/ChrisCharacterSheet though it is not fixed in stone -- and one of the players is in fact going to play a Seer.  Talking to Adrienne last night, I think the way she's gonna do it is make some of the psychic powers of the Seers part of occupational keyword (she can, of course, correct me or elaborate on this, hehe), which doesn't bother me in the slightest.

[Bryan_T]

One thing that magic key words do in Glorantha is help give some guidance about the hero's view of the world.

If you worship the storm pantheon, some of the beliefs are "Nobody can make you do anything"  "violence is always an option"  "There is always another way"  "Mistakes are made and corrected."  When you choose the Issaries, the god of communication and trade, you make a further statement about your interests and goals.  Both the general magic key word and the specific also offer some relevant personality traits that you can take to help emphasize this.

I can understand feeling that magic is not a key word in your world, but with only occupation and homeland, I think you leave the issue of general belief, philosophy, and attitude pretty vague.  Sure, a hero might be patient or compasionate or merciless, but most heroes will only have a couple or maybe few such traits defined, the ones most key to the character concept.  But you lose the whole background attitude.  

To put it in a RW comparison, there are generally deep background differences between americans coming from say, an irish catholic working class family versus a jewish working class family.  Between an evangelical christian farmer and an agnostic farmer.

I'm not sure what the solution is.  It feels like I'm talking myself into suggesting a "beliefs" keyword, although I'm not actually sure it is the best solution.  Anyway, it is something to think about.

--Bryan

[CPXB]

And to go along with what Bryan said, the books do have the main characters going around angsting about their professed beliefs a lot.  One of them angst about his beliefs while failing to adhere to them, while the other professes his beliefs and grows stronger into them.  I don't know if that's territory Adrienne cares to go into (I wouldn't mind, either way) but the books do it pretty often.

[Adrienne]

Wow, lots of good options.  In no particular order...

Game balance is important to me, so I included it as a concern without actually wondering whether it was important to everyone else in the game.  As someone points out in the linked Star Wars thread, though, balance in HQ can be more about spotlight time than a strict equivalence of abilities.  So, one option is to write Seer up as a theism-style magic keyword (that seems the most appropriate of the magic types, in terms of mechanics), and just give it to that character.

The Trademarks in that awesome Star Wars conversion looked pretty nice, too, and kind of similar to the special abilities in Mike's HQ game.  Despite being that Adrienne, I hadn't really thought about handling it that way, because I associated the special abilities with making more powerful characters, not balancing starting ones.  But that would definitely work, giving one character psychic powers while not leaving out the other two.

The beliefs keyword is also a neat idea, and fits well with the strong personal philosophies espoused by some of the main characters in the books.  Plus, it adds that dimension of "what is the character's world view?" that Bryan points out.  Man, lots of good choices.

After the partial character creation last night, though, I'm leaning towards my original plan--Seer as an occupation keyword that happens to contain some magical abilities.  It's looking like the Seer player is already struggling pretty hard with the idea of player-defined abilities and the importance of relationships.  I'm sorta worried that if I add a "beliefs" keyword in, or otherwise complicate the character creation choices, it'll be the last straw for him and possibly another guy in the game.  So, I guess "simple" will trump "interesting" for now in my mechanics.

Drat.  I'm open to other ideas or to reconsidering, though, so keep the awesome feedback coming.  :)

[Mike Holmes]

Isadora doesn't have a magic keyword. Archelaus does (as evinced by his little ritual the other night). Do you feel that there's a balance problem between your character and Charles' character?

I'm going to guess no. But tell me otherwise.

It's interesting, but in this particular phase of the game, many players decided to forgo magic keywords. They all made conscious decidions that their characters were really more focused on secular stuff.

Here's the interesting thing, to me. HQ makes the "lack" of a magic keyword an interesting character issue itself. Automatically the player is asked by the system, "Are you suuuure you don't want to take some magic?" There's an implicit question of where the character is going in terms of belief.


Well, this might be a premise that's just not important to your world. That is, if really very few characters ever use magic, so that this question really isn't being asked, if it's just not going to come up in play, then maybe you do want to alter things.

Let's start from scratch, then - just what are these books "about?" What premise does the setting suggest. HQ says, "the old world is ending, what will you do with the new world?" This works for Shadow World, Midnight (and it's source, Middle Earth), Dark Suns, and most fantasy worlds, because there's always some evil force just waiting to take over. Meaning that the world is changing, and the question gets asked.

Is your fantasy world different? I see there's some "Shadow," that people in Manjipe "Hate." What's that all about? What question does the setting ask of all people? Once you've determined that, I think the question of what to do here will become clearer.

Mike

[Adrienne]

You're right that Isadora's lack of a magic keyword doesn't bother me.  Out of curiosity, have she or the other characters without magic keywords caused any difficulty for you, since they bypass that question asked by the system?

Let's start from scratch, then - just what are these books "about?" What premise does the setting suggest. HQ says, "the old world is ending, what will you do with the new world?" This works for Shadow World, Midnight (and it's source, Middle Earth), Dark Suns, and most fantasy worlds, because there's always some evil force just waiting to take over. Meaning that the world is changing, and the question gets asked.

Is your fantasy world different? I see there's some "Shadow," that people in Manjipe "Hate." What's that all about? What question does the setting ask of all people? Once you've determined that, I think the question of what to do here will become clearer.

Hmm.  If the "what will you do with the new world?" question is broad enough to cover all the others you listed, it'll work for the Dark Border setting also.  The books are about the people of the kingdom of Tarencia fighting off invasions from the other side of the Border while coping with civil wars started in part by their own internal strife and ambitions.  (The "Shadow" is a broad term for both the land and the creatures on the other side of the Border.)

The setting elements I'm most interested in for my game are the reclaiming of land from the Shadow and the politics of the Border courts.  In particular, reclaiming land requires more than just possession of territory; it includes years of labor to turn tainted soil into something that will support crops, while dealing with miscarriages and crop failures due to the Shadow's proximity.  Meanwhile, many of the local aristocracy harbor dreams of rebellion, since the Border provinces were only recently brought under the rule of their current king--before that time, they were an independent vestige of an empire swallowed by the Shadow.

So, I suppose the inescapable questions of the Manjipean province might be, "How will you make a life on the Border?" and "How much should the past govern the present?"

Sorry if that rambled a bit; I've never tried to sit down and figure out the key questions of a setting before.

[Mike Holmes]

You're right that Isadora's lack of a magic keyword doesn't bother me.  Out of curiosity, have she or the other characters without magic keywords caused any difficulty for you, since they bypass that question asked by the system?

I'm not communcating, apparently.

There's this question, "What does your character believe?" that's answered by powerful magic keywords. You can answer Devotion to Andaras, or you can answer Shaman of the Little Scorpion, or you can answer, "I don't know." Actually the last answer is the best for play. Because it means that the answer can be discovered in play. That is, you've made your character more interesting to me, not less, by not giving her a magic keyword.

Again, the question will be getting stronger and stronger for Isadora as my list of Bangs goes by. I hope (actually Fred is helping me a lot with this with his whole Hero Band notion). And she can still answer "I'm beholden to nobody" if she likes...that's completely valid. But the question is there for her, and that's part of what makes her interesting. Just what does keep her going, despite her heavily jaded approach to life? We shall see.

The Hero Quest rules very intentionally allow players not to take magic keywords. This is a very wise design choice, because it means that one of the central questions can be answered in play. It doesn't make sense to ask "Where are you from?" in play, because we need to know that to start. Same thing with "What do you do?" Without these the character is pretty incomplete. But people decide what they believe in strongly all throughout their lives. So it's brilliant that the system as it stands allows players to start with characters that aren't already committed to one side or anther.

Hmm.  If the "what will you do with the new world?" question is broad enough to cover all the others you listed, it'll work for the Dark Border setting also.  The books are about the people of the kingdom of Tarencia fighting off invasions from the other side of the Border while coping with civil wars started in part by their own internal strife and ambitions.  (The "Shadow" is a broad term for both the land and the creatures on the other side of the Border.)

Thought so. This is so prevalent in fantasy that one can almost guess it's the central theme. It's all copying Tolkien. Let's see we have an impinging shadow (Sauron) in a dark land cordoned off from the rest of the world currently (Mordor), and the politics of the nearby nations (Rohan, Gondor, the Elves) threaten to cause the defense to collapse.

Well, I think that Belief is still paramount here. That is, you want different operant systems going on so that the conflict inherent comes out. To a certain extent this is automatically embedded in the homelands. But when you say political bickering, do you mean inside of nations as well as between them? If so, at what level do these conflicts occur? Are there noble houses, ala Dune? If so, then it sounds to me remarkably like Brand's Throne War conversion. Have you seen that?

Basically the third keyword becomes household or something like that. Would that fit? How about with the option to start sorta "neutral?"

Mike

[Adrienne]

I'm not communcating, apparently.

Or I wasn't listening. ;)  I think I see what you're saying a little better, now.  Without really thinking about it, I built some "What does the character believe?" answers into the homeland keywords.  Seynyoreans get Serve Hasturs, and Manjipeans get Hate Shadow.  People can skip or lower those abilities, of course, but in my limited experience that's not common.  (One of the characters lowered several of his Manjipean character's abilities, but Hate Shadow stayed at the full rating.)  So I suppose I pushed mini-belief packages on the characters without noticing.

Well, I think that Belief is still paramount here. That is, you want different operant systems going on so that the conflict inherent comes out. To a certain extent this is automatically embedded in the homelands. But when you say political bickering, do you mean inside of nations as well as between them? If so, at what level do these conflicts occur? Are there noble houses, ala Dune? If so, then it sounds to me remarkably like Brand's Throne War conversion. Have you seen that?

Hmmmm, I say.  The province where the game has started is part of a kingdom that was only recently (~100 years ago) pulled together.  There's lots of internal tension--Manjipeans chafe at being ruled by anyone, since they used to be the big dogs; Portonans are encouraging Manjipe to break away because it will lower their taxes, etc.  

I've just looked at Brand's Throne War notes, and I like the Allegiance keyword.  The only trouble is finding the right "units" to break it down.  Provinces are a natural fit for the setting, but might not be for my game (two of the characters are from an entirely different kingdom, and I don't know if they'll start shopping outside of the current province for allies). Taking it to an even finer grain, I suppose there could be an Allegiance keyword for individual nobles in the current locale--do you share Lord Jagat's loyalty to the throne, or agree with Lord Saladio that Manjipe would be better off on its own?  And so on.  

I guess I'll have to see how the game develops, and ask the players if they'd like allegiance to be enough of a focus to get its own keyword.  I'm less anxious now, after the first session, about the players being able to deal with the complication of adding another keyword.  Thanks for the feedback!