[Orccon][HeroQuest] In Glorantha, of all places!

[Joel P. Shempert]

First.  Listen, this is my obsessive preference.

[SNIP]

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.

Hey, don't worry; the reason I'm posting is that I sympathize with the obsession. I do worry that it'll cut a bit too much into play time, but as you say it IS an important game facet to show off.

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.

Oh, God, no. That sounds like a horrible idea to me, honestly. That's why I'm going off of the Hero's Book, which limits itself to Orlanthi and Lunars so as not to overwhelm beginning players. I like the grounding, the simplicity, the style of esp. the Heortlings. . .and more than anything, the ripe conflict.

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.)

[SNIP]

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.

Totally with ya on intimate stuff being the heart of the most epic stories. I guess I was getting hung up on the incompleteness of playing an introductory game of something that needs time to pay off big. So the temptation is to rush into the Big (not to mention I don't actually know the end of your con story yet).but it sounds like an intimate tale that has some hints of the Big Epic could work just fine.

I'd like to state as a counterpoint, though, that some of my trepidation comes from my longstanding feeling that not everything in Glorantha contributes to the "Epic Myth" feel. There's some obvious stuff, like Ducks, but also some nuts and bolts like the magical terminology (God World? Nodes? In my own game I would just make real cultural terms for such things to use "in character, but the terms are already kind of a magical moodkiller). Dragonewts are another example; they feel a lot like a "Fantasy Race" to me, and not so much like "The savage and feared distant descendants of Dragons." A lot of it's in the descriptions, I suppose, which are often pedantic and unmysterious. When you get down to the level of Durulz lips, you've crossed a certain threshold.

[charles ferguson]

Hi Chris!

fabulous post. I hope you get a chance to finish it.

cheers, charles