Borderlands & Beyond reprint - adapting it for Heroquest

[Issaries]

Hello all,

As you may or may not have heard, the Borderlands & Beyond runequest reprint
will soon be back from the printers. One of the thigs that I have been asked is how
easy it would be to convert its information to Heroquest. I can't say that I've had a
lot of experience with doing these types of conversions. I'm much more of a
publsiher than a player now. I've published 4 volumes so far, and it seems that
only a few people have tried to convert much of the material. The Pavis & Big
Rubble volume has had its scenarios converted and they are said to be very
payable. Griffin Mountain is more for beginning characters and I haven't heard
much about it being converted. Thus, because Borderlands is also for more
beginning characters I wonder if it will be actively converted to Heroquest.

Being reprints all of the books in the series are published for the Runequest 2 rules,
but does anyone have some solid information on how difficult it is to convert the material?

Thanks,
Rick

[Jane]

Try taking a look at vol 5 of the Pavis & Big Rubble Companion, "Beyond Pavis". While it isn't quite "how to run Borderlands in HQ", it's pretty close.

[Ian Cooper]

While its mechanically possible to convert Runequest scenarios to HeroQuest, I've never found it entirely satisfactory as the two games have different strengths. RuneQuest scenarios of this era are are frequently combat focused, not infrequently a series of fights with different types of opponents in different tactical situations. While HeroQuest can do this, a series of extended contests all centered on combat quickly saps player creativity and a series of combat based simple contests lacks interest. For my part HeroQuest excels far more in protagonist play (I'm choosing to use Chris Chinn's term here over narrativism) than in aping the linear dungeon crawls of this period.

That said the setting info within these products is good and the Borderlands setting in particular with its community base and cultural conflict has huge potential for protagonist play. In fact many of the elements that were hard to do in this campaign in RuneQuest - the relationship between Raus and his daughter, storm-worshipping barbarians working for the Empire, anit-Morokanth prejudice etc have a lot of power in a game like HeroQuest.

So I would avoid straight conversion. Borderlands and Griffin Mountain do both contain lots if not more potential for HeroQuest play as the have rich character and setting. Pavis is a little harder as the classic rubble hunting adventures are IMO less-suited to the strengths of HQ than RQ

[Mike Holmes]

Well, I agree with Ian, generally. That is, it's not hard to make any conversions, it's just that a lot of the material ends up being largely pointless for HQ play. I mean, yeah, I can take Apple Lane (I haven't seen the materials in question), and pull out the characters from the village, and stat them up. But then what? I still have to modify them to get them into a situation in which there's potential conflict. "I need you to go clear out the newt nest" isn't a conflict.

So largely they're good as inspirational material and simple setting info. Which, of course, needs no mechanical conversion. Yeah it might be nice to have the characters written up, but it would be nicer to have some reason to use them included in the material.

Generally this is true. I go through all of my old D&D stuff occasionally looking for ideas for play in the style in which I play HQ. And, though always hopeful, it's amazing how stacked these are with descriptions of rooms, stats of beasties, and almost nothing useful for running a game of the sort that I want to run. When I read your Apple Lane, I was astonished at how D&Dish it was (in fact how "Village of Homlet" or "Keep on the Borderlands"). Not sure what I was expecting.

Think of how "Return to Apple Lane" varies from the original scenario. Basically you have the map (with it's descriptions of the locales), and the characters' backgrounds refer to those of the original module. That's basically all you get from the original module in terms of useful stuff for HQ play. And the map is of dubious necessity at that. :-)

Not much harder to start from scratch. Here's a village, here are the inhabitants, now what's going on that the PCs are going to get embroiled in?

Mike

[Lamorak33]

Hi

Ian Thomson has done a lot of the leg work on this, and if you talk to him Rick I think you will find that he actually did a direct conversion but II refused permission to publish, maybe because of your reprint.

Onto the real stuff;  Borderlands IMO is probably the most already raw nar orientated material.  As Ian says there are already some excellent conflicts built in. 

Episoide 1 Scouting the Land
There is an excellent couple of bangs in here, relating to slavery and butchery of humans for food, and an execution - what would YOU do?

Episode 2 Outlaw Hunt
This is a basic old style raid scenario, with not a lot to do.  No real protaganist action here unless the GM is very creative.

Episode 3 Jezras Rescue
This is one of the tough ones.  A lot of the encounters are designed with gamism in mind and the RQ system.  In Heroquest it becomes (fairly) simple to overcome the initial obstacles, and decends into not much more than a dungeon hack.

Episoda 4 Revenge of Muriah
Hmmm.  Not bad, but would suggest that this scenario draws out the subject of the scenario, rather than really being just the story of the solution.  If you read it and are familiar with protaganist play you will know what I mean.

Episode 5 Five Eyes Temple
A D&D style dungeon hack, and very hard to convert, unless you happen to be related to Ian Thomson.

Episode 6 Condor Crags
A 5 minute job for any Orlanth devotee with a sufficiently strong Umbrolli

Episode 7 To Giantland
Plenty of potential for some protaganist play travelling for the creative GM/ group.

Regards
Rob

[droog]

My long-running RQ/PD/HW/HQ game is currently set in Balazar, so I have in fact done a fair bit of musing on conversion for Griffin Mountain, which I combined with some stuff from Griffin Island. GM is also an excellent Narrativist setting, with a built-in relationship map for each citadel, themes of slavery, exploitation, the price of progress, the worth of tradition and so on. As most people who know it have pointed out, the scenarios for GM are certainly very old-school, but the setting itself is rich with possibility. It converts very well.

[Mandacaru]

Episoide 1 Scouting the Land
There is an excellent couple of bangs in here, relating to slavery and butchery of humans for food, and an execution - what would YOU do?

Hey Rob...where's the spoiler alert...? ;-)

I'm playing in a conversion of this for HQ as far as I know. Doing episode one I think, but I avoided seeing what episode two was. Met some folk, made up a new Praxian tribe, persuaded some ghosts not to possess us, worried about the chaos-broo-witchish-ostrich-riders, all grand and throroughly HQ as she was meant to be so far :).

Sam.

[Lamorak33]

Hey Rob...where's the spoiler alert...? ;-)
Sam.

Hi Sam

I hope you enjoy the campaign, I am very jealous!  Note to self:  Put spoiler notices on potential spoilers!

Regards
Rob

[epweissengruber]

The Indie RPG Group in Toronto will be thrashing out a HQ setting using Griffin Mountain.
It might contain material of relevance to this discussion.  As of yet, we are still at the "proposal" stage.

Setting Creation
http://roleplayers.meetup.com/261/boards/view/viewthread?thread=1528457

Don't Worry about Glorantha's Complexity
http://roleplayers.meetup.com/261/boards/view/viewthread?thread=1528463


Background to Glorantha
http://roleplayers.meetup.com/261/boards/view/viewthread?thread=1528442

[nellist]

I feel that some of the NPC descriptions in some of the old RQ scenarios can be taken as straight HQ c.100 word narratives. Check out examples like:

"Crokar Littlespawn us the leader of the troll group in the barracks. She and her followers are there out of shame. She had never bred anything but trollkin, so she took her sister, the brewer; and her lover, the father of the trollkin, out of the normal troll society to the south and founded the barracks as a home for herself and her brood. She has no idea of any historical significance of the place or what may be here. It is just a convenient place to set up shop."

Just underline a few words, "leader", "shame" "relationships:sister, brewer" and your done.

"Sakurno the Mystic Esrolian - claiming to come from the Holy Country, Sakurno puts on a variety of mind-reading, conjuring and prestidigitation acts. His personable ways and rapid patter have made him quite popular and taverns are crowded on nights that eh puts on his act."

"Krang is a troll with a past, for her family came to Pavis with Gerak Kag. They carved out a small piece of Pavis for themselves and have held onto it ever since, through depredations of elves, humans, dragonewts and other and stranger things. In all that time they have maintained a tradition of pride, ruthlessness and independence. Krang wishes only to pass on her stronghold to the younger Krang in as good a condition as it was when she got it..."

This isn't true for some characters, where instead of a page of identical stats for identical trollkin skeletons, it could now just say "six trollkin skeletons 14" with the ability rating of "trollkin skeleton 14"

Keith Nellist

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

In my Hero Wars game, I made Narrativist use of the following with very great success.

Griffin Mountain
The Haunted Ruins (solid gold, this one)

More generally, I was influenced by the early versions of Cults of Terror, Cults of Prax, and Trollpak. All of these are full of bits and notions and hints that scream Narrativist once you get attuned to them.

I also used Snakepipe Hollow, but it required a great deal of revamping and original back-story, and Shadows on the Borderlands even more so. The Black Rock scenario, for instance, needs to be utilized as a social crisis, rather than a mystery hiding a Big Bad.

The Big Rubble doesn't adapt well at all, as Pavis seems to have been kind of a "D&D pocket" in Glorantha.

By the way, guys? Fuck spoiler warnings. If people don't want to know what's in the published material, then it's on them not to read threads about them. This is a discussion forum, not a peek-a-boo party.

Best,
Ron

[Mandacaru]

By the way, guys? Fuck spoiler warnings. If people don't want to know what's in the published material, then it's on them not to read threads about them. This is a discussion forum, not a peek-a-boo party.

I believe I brought that concept up. But not in any seriousness, hence the smiley wink thing. And yes, I have still managed not to read beyond point 1 of the relevant post, all the way down to Ron's interesting post.
Sam

[Lamorak33]

Hello,

In my Hero Wars game, I made Narrativist use of the following with very great success.

The Haunted Ruins (solid gold, this one)

Haunted Ruins? Was this with players who played Trolls? I ask because that is my assumption, and I'm interested if you ran it with human/ some other race characters.

Possibly a very dumb question!

Regards
Rob

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

The Haunted Ruins presents a complete troll community full of fascinating relationships and back-stories. It could be used with either human or troll player-characters, and the illustrations imply human ones. As we used it in our game, with minor modifications (e.g. its location), the player-characters were humans, although with strong histories of ties to trolls.

Best,
Ron