Heroquest at Phantasm: Comments on the "Well of Souls"

[epweissengruber]

Scenario:
6 players involved with an intrigue in the West.  On a holy night, two rival sons offered prayers for their father's future; the n'er-do-well elder son prayed for his father's life and the earnest, honest, intelligent son prayed for his father's death.  Both got their wishes.   With the father's spirit lingering between life and death, the fief is torn by competing political and religious agendas.

Players:
2 persons I had run Heroquest with in the past.  The rest newbies.

Physical Set-Up:
A 2.5' x 4' display board with a complicated relationship map - 12 NPC's

Characters:
- a werebear concerned about the fate of her nomadic people
- a visiting atheist sorcerer with a research interest in the dead
- a petty noble interested in scheming to promote his own sub-fief
- a barbarian pagan trapped in this duchy, depentant on the comatose lord's protection for his survival
- a female forester, bastard daughter of the head cleric
- a fiery knight-orderly of pagan burning saint, Saint Gerlant

Outcome:
- players were very good at working with a very tricky intrigue, kudos to the players
- I used WEAVING to bring their various agendas to a meeting point, so kudos to me
- Simple Contests, with lots of Augmentations were the order of the day.  When I ran an Extended Contest with a similar class last year, it took up an hour of play time but the scenario never came to a head.  This time I stuck with the Simple and was able to resolve quite a number of discrete conflicts and weave them together into a final showdown
- Players did not really become emotionally invested in the characters.  This was my fault.  I made the players chose characters and then relate them to the persons at the centre of the power struggle.  Wrong move.  They should have been the schemers.  Sure, some of these characters were quite advanced and some were quite young.  My decision to give all the characters equally simple, starting characters was affected by old-school game thinking.

1) I had to make sure that there was "balance"
2) I wanted a "good, solid, story" for the characters to interact with.

The folly of 1, RE: "Balance"
- the numbers don't insure equal opportunity for players to participate, my bangs and weavings, and openings do.

The folly of 2, RE: "Story"
- I was presenting a story they could affect -- and affect substantially.  But this is not the same as allowing them to create the story.
- Because I did not have a clear premise in mind, I did not provide them with the raw materials and high-octane fuel for running their own story.  Instead, I presented a believable and detailed backstory that could provide a number of reasonable alternatives and courses of action.
- Without a provocative premise, no true Narrativism

Comments:
- The players DID pull the scenario's proffered solution (a heroquest) and brought about their own.  They negotiated the factions and power brokers to achieve their ends.  Perhaps this was Sim.
- The idiot's patron tried to provoke an assasination against the ambitious, younger brother with gold and liquor.  Meanwhile, the idiot got involved in a contest to win a lady's favour at a royal banquet.  During the banquet, the coup let lose.  The forester persuaded her father to stay out of the conflict, the petty noble whipped a dagger across the room and secretly slew the idiot in the confusion, the necromancer summoned a ghost to send the plotters running and screaming into the night, the werebear and barbarian used their various intimidating aspects to assist in the rout.  All along a powerful NPC had been pushing for the elder son to inherit.  He slew the idiot's backer for treason.  He had not wanted the ambitious younger brother hurt, but all the PC's had seen him sceme to put keep the idiot on the throne.  Given the death of his patron, he switched allegiances to the surviving son, and all of the players had carried out actions that allowed them to fit into the new regime, despite whatever their various takes on the brotherly conflict had been.

Satisfying, but not perfect.

I will be inviting the players to comment.

[epweissengruber]

Again, the game's blurb:

:There is no god but the Invisible God, and Malkion is his Prophet!"  So runs the credo of the pious, chivalric knights of Glorantha's West.  But ever since the lands of the west have become cut off from one another by the impassable walls of the magical Syndic's Ban, people have been turning to ancient pagan powers to give them strength to face up to the challenges of their newly impoverished and restricted lives.  In one kingdom, just such a source of power is the focus of a struggle between heirs to a throne.  In this scenario players take the roles of aristocrats in a kingdom threatened by intrigue and by dreaful malign magic.  Player limit: 6

See: I initially thought the players could BE the aristocrats.  Why did I cop out and reduce them to AFFECTING them?

[Bankuei]

Hi,

WoS has a lot of material, and probably not enough guidance on using it.  Probably some key advice I'd add to anyone running it is:

-The shorter play is, the less NPCs you should use.  Feel free to cut down the R-map as much as necessary.  For one-shots, I'd probably stick with the two sons, and the immediate characters around them.

-Design PCs with whatever size R-map you have in mind.  If you're using the full map, you have a lot of options, if you're only using a small part of it, the PCs need to be tied into it immediately.

Either way- what did you find worked especially well for you in terms of running it? 

Chris

[epweissengruber]

WHAT  I FOUND ATTRACTIVE.

The interaction of religious and mundane affairs is very well structured.  I made a mistake trying to do it all in 4 hours. 

-The shorter play is, the less NPCs you should use.  Feel free to cut down the R-map as much as necessary.  For one-shots, I'd probably stick with the two sons, and the immediate characters around them.

I used the R-Map selectively.  The players chose to relate themselves to the core characters.  I think they all wanted to be close to the centre of the action.  One character chose to relate herself to the hedman who is the gobetween representing the Lord and Peasants to each other.  His presence and her connection to the commoners was a great way to bring in reckless, unprepared peasants trying to assist the older son's bid to consolidate power.

-Design PCs with whatever size R-map you have in mind.  If you're using the full map, you have a lot of options, if you're only using a small part of it, the PCs need to be tied into it immediately.

Either way- what did you find worked especially well for you in terms of running it? 

WHAT WORKED WELL
1) The Layout. 
The concise descriptions allowed me to clip the stat blocks and the pictures and paste them into 4.5" x 8.5" index cards.  VERY handy.
2) Visual Aids
The images of the NPCs were VERY useful for illustrating the relationship map.
3) The conflict
The scenario allows a number of cultural conflicts to be explored

• 1) Heirarchy
  The question of "who is legitimate" is posed but not restrictively answered by the scenario.  I chose to have the "good" son be the one who in a moment of weakness curses his father.  The illicit loves reinforce this theme.
• 2) Propriety
  If a narrator brings an emphasis on outward propriety reminiscent of feudal Japan to this scenario, it would bring out the conflict between socially-condoned behaviour and the seething passions of the participants.
• 3) Impersonal God
So many of the characters seek guidance and reassurance from a deity that can be rather remote and austere. (To misquote Salman Rushdie, Malkionism in not the most cuddly of faiths).  Yet so many of the characters are searching for some external, empathetic guidance to resolving their struggles.  This explains the persistence of paganism in this community.

Nothing was wrong with the scenario -- I needed a tighter focus to make the best use of it.  These thematic conflicts are all there, but I needed to pick one, tie it to a reduced relationship map, and go from there.

[Bankuei]

Hi,

I included the sketches because I also found that images make life easier for mentally remembering "who is who" when you have big R-maps.  I also went with the color schemes to make my scraggly art stand out better memory-wise.

It's also rather interesting to me to notice how few people really play up the interpersonal drama, I'm glad to see that you noticed that there's a LOT of seething passions, and a lot of them are in violation or get in the way of the normal social structure.  That was pretty much the idea.

Chris

[Mike Holmes]

When you say 2 newbies, is this two players new to RPGs, new to Hero Quest, or just new to playing with you?

How'd they fare?

Mike

[epweissengruber]

2 Veterans of D&D/WOD but new to Heroquest

I stuck to simple contests and they got those very quickly.

The also understood self-augmentation and transferring augmentations to others.

[Mike Holmes]

Do you think you made "converts?" That is, do you think those new players will play the system on their own? Do you think that they got the HQ paradigm shifts from the other games they'd played previously?

Basically I'm wondering at how the game is selling itself in play.

Mike

[epweissengruber]

I dunno about converts.  I hope some of the players post here.

[Mike Holmes]

I should have been less specific. Do you think they had enough fun with it that they might consider converting? You say that they understood the rules, but did they seem to enjoy playing them? Did they enjoy the scenario? Or did the aformentioned lack of emotional engagement mean that they were just going through the motions?

Your comments on how to tighten up the use of the R-Map here are enlightening. I've been preparing some scenarios for demoing HQ, and I think I may make some modifications based on what you've said.

Mike