"Lost World" type games...

[Hans]

Hello everyone:

I have been toying for some time with an idea for a "lost world" type game, borrowing heavily from Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter series and other sources.  The basic idea would be a group of semi-modern characters (Himalayan explorers from the 1930's, British colonial troops and their native auxilliaries in Victorian Africa, American Civil War soldiers, or similar) someone transition (magic portal, time-slip, or similar) into a fantasy or pseudo sci-fi world.  After playing Heroquest several times, it seems to me that the basic system of Heroquest may be the best system for this (my previous first choice was Fate, which is still an option).  One reason I have been interested in this is my own experience of "setting overload" in other games.  Take a game setting like Forgotten Realms (or Glorantha for that matter)...my character will ALWAYS know far more than I do about the setting.  I will always be at the mercy of the game master in terms of my important decisions that involve setting information, because of my incomplete knowledge.  But with a "lost world" scenario, my character and I have exactly the same knowledge of the new setting, i.e. none at the beginning, with all other knowledge gained through actual play. 

In my own reading of books with this kind of "fish out of water" theme, there seem to be three principle narrative structures that these kind of stories follow.  The first is integration - the newly arrived characters become embroiled in some already ongoing history of the world they have just entered, and play a role in its eventual resolution (example - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or several of Vernor Vinge's works, such as Fire Upon the Deep or the Witling).  The second is conquest - the newly arrived characters, because of their advantages (technology, special knowledge or status), essentially work to control, rule, guide or otherwise achieve positions of power and security in the new world (example - John Carter stories, A Connecticut Yankee, sort of).  The third is what I would call "road movie" - the story is primarily about the relationships between the characters themselves, or the characters own internal stuggles, with the new world being mostly an interesting backdrop to these relationships (example - The Book of Kells by R.A. MacAvoy, or Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, or, for that matter, The Wizard of Oz).  All of these structures are independent of whether the characters are excited about the new world, or desparate to get home. 

Here are the points for discussion:

* Which of the above narrative structures seems most suited to roleplaying?  To roleplaying using the Heroquest system?

* Does anyone have any experience in using Heroquest in a somewhat more modernized setting (say, late rennaissance or early enlightenment tech level)?  How did you find it?  What were the plusses and minuses?

* Does anyone have any suggestions on how to give the players a large portion of the power when it comes to developing the "new" world?  I, of course, have a lot of ideas about what it what the new world is like (maps, cultures, races, a kind of magic system, etc.), but I think it would be interesting to put as much power as possible into the hands of the players themselves.  Mike Holmes said something about "world building for world building's sake".  This is something I want to avoid; why bother making up a pile of stuff that a) the players may never actually see or interact with, and b) might bore them anyway. 

[epweissengruber]

Didn't have time to digest your post in full.

It is a great idea!

Plus, in some games like Donjon, NO-ONE knows what is going on.  Sure, the GM sets out some basic challenges ("Levels" in Donjon speak) but huge chunks of setting/play environment are generated by the players AS THEY GO.

Imagine a "Star Trek" game where a successful "Sensors" roll allows the character playing the navigator to say: "Holy Ohm!  I have never seen a Lukashian Space Freighter that big before!"  Now, in this game universe, there are beings called Lukashians who build space freighters (and thus, obviously, ship freight around), and these freighters come in various sizes.

[Hans]

Imagine a "Star Trek" game where a successful "Sensors" roll allows the character playing the navigator to say: "Holy Ohm!  I have never seen a Lukashian Space Freighter that big before!"  Now, in this game universe, there are beings called Lukashians who build space freighters (and thus, obviously, ship freight around), and these freighters come in various sizes.

I hadn't thought of the Donjon model.  I have only read about this game, not the game itself, or played.

Any thoughts on how this kind of idea could be integrated into the Heroquest system?

[Valamir]

I'm not sure HeroQuest is really going to help all that much with what you're trying to accomplish...at least not any more than any other flexible, quick playing mechanic system (like fate/fudge) would.

HQs primary goal...its reason for existance if you will, is to tie characters into their community.  HQ characters are not the lone wolf adventurers of most fantasy RPGs, they are people who are an integral part of their society and the game is really about the conflicts of that society (internally and externally) played out in microcosm through the characters.

While one could use the system to create characters who have zero ties to community (because they are the strangers in a strange land), that would really be missing the whole purpose of HeroQuest.  You'd basically just be using HQ for its generic mechanics at which point you could take your pick of favorite generic rules-lightish mechanics and get about the same results.

[Hans]

HQs primary goal...its reason for existance if you will, is to tie characters into their community.  HQ characters are not the lone wolf adventurers of most fantasy RPGs, they are people who are an integral part of their society and the game is really about the conflicts of that society (internally and externally) played out in microcosm through the characters.

This is a very good point, and one that had not occurred to me.  Thanks.  Is this feature intrinsic to the Heroquest rules system, or a function of the Gloranthan setting?  Here I express my ignorance, as I have only been a player of Heroquest to date, and not a GM. 

[Mike Holmes]

I agree with Ralph to an extent. I think that HQ is over-analyzed as a "community-only" sort of game. That is, community values are always present in characters, that's true. But I don't agree that it's always about playing out the macro-conflicts in micro detail. Even for Glorantha. This works, sure, but it's only one option. Lone wolves actually play quite well in HQ, their lack of relationship contacts coming into play as telling.

That said, where Ralph is right is in the fact that there is a lot of mechanical focus on this sort of thing that may be ancilary to what you want to play. I mean, HQ will do a servicable job with the "fish out of water" thing. You can easily pit something like Victorian morality against the law of the jungle. And, heck, you could even play this out as a microscopic version of the "What will happen if we expose the lost world to the rest of the world?" question (which is answered by the characters as long as they can't escape and be forced to finally answer whether they expose it or not).

But some of it will just be overkill, I agree with Ralph. The pulp genre should be about rugged individualists doing the right thing even when "out of water." Values questions will be about things personal to the character. HQ will allow this just fine. But it'll also have all sorts of extraneous stuff like questions about whether or not to have religion keywords. To whit, I found that playing Castle Falkenstein with HQ, that a lot of the rules were extraneous to what we needed for play. They worked fine, as Ralph says, in the "Generic" sense - even well in that they allow a lot of flashy narration. They just have some parts that don't do a lot for the game. For example, magic works, but not like it does in a fantasy game where it's about belief systems (which I thought it would work for in CF).

So my advice would be to use HQ if you can't find somthing else suitable. That said, depending on how pulpy you want to play, I think that the Donjon suggestion is an excellent one. If you can move the genre to relatively pulpy, and try to play Donjon relatively straight, I think they'd meet nicely.

Mike

[Daredevil]

I'll go along and agree with both Ralph and Mike to an extent as well.

Community and clash of cultures seems to be very much the stuff of which Heroquest is made of.

In that view, I do think your scenario could play out really well, especially if you focus on the second of the basic choices which you outlined, ie. "the newly arrived characters, because of their advantages (technology, special knowledge or status), essentially work to control, rule, guide or otherwise achieve positions of power and security in the new world."

The question then becomes will the characters - who are now out of their own world (perhaps for good) - retain the values and means they have learned in their old lives, or will they absorb new ones from the world they have just now discovered? Will they change themselves, or will they refuse to do this and change the world around them?

Community plays into this. They have been forced to abandon their old ties and are now required to forge new links. They can look to each other (and form a heroband, of sorts), but they will also learn to love, hate and belong in this new world they now live in. All these things will no doubt create tensions which are intriguing play material.

How will these communities welcome the outsiders, especially if they refuse to adopt all of their values? What will they think of the deadly technology which they bring with them, capable of winning them their epic struggle against an old enemy, but in the same turn making the formerly peaceful tribe into a warlike people just now coming to grips with rising ambitions, as they realize they have a whole new source of power?

All this with a backdrop of conquest in an alien world. Not bad, I think, and oozing with the stuff that is Heroquest.

I'd say that critical for success in this is well designed alien cultures/communities and characters with clear backgrounds which reflect a set of intriguing values. There must be considereable interplay between these two different elements.

- Joachim Buchert -