Heroquest 7th Sea

[Barna]

My copy of Heroquest is arriving in about two weeks, and I've been craving to do a 7th Sea conversion for some time now. I have read that a lot of contributors here play or have played 7th Sea before, and I was wondering if they have any conversion ideas or tips.

I want to start by creating Homeland and Occupation groups. I'm torn between making Homelands entire nations or the different sub-provinces of each nation. Perhaps one can have the bulk of keywords come from the nation and one or two extra ones from the province. Occupations should be fairly easy to work with.

Another thing I've been wondering about are Secret Societies. I do not know if there should be any special mechanics for them (such as creating a "Membership" keyword group) or just consider them ordinary Relationships.

Thanks for reading folks!

[Mike Holmes]

I want to start by creating Homeland and Occupation groups. I'm torn between making Homelands entire nations or the different sub-provinces of each nation. Perhaps one can have the bulk of keywords come from the nation and one or two extra ones from the province.

It may not seem like it, but all homeland keywords are simply examples from that homeland. These can vary dramatically with things like social strata, or specific location. For instance, being from a big city in a homeland will often be different from being from a village. The Heortling keyword, for instance, works for your typical "from a clan Tula" Sartarite, but not as well if they're from Boldhome.

The point is that there are probably lots of homeland keywords from within each nation. You could probably write yourself silly trying to come up with every one of them. The system is designed to allow people to come up with their own, however, so don't bother trying. What you should do is to come up with a typical member of the entire country, and then let players decide if they want to tailor the keyword to some particular area or other sub-set.

Check out the article I wrote here for more details: http://www.glorantha.com/support/na_keywords.html

Mike

[Barna]

I had that exact problem you mention. There was basically a "Noble" and "Commoner" set of Homeland stuff for each country. However, I decided to keep the "whole country" feeling as you said. Therefore, I'm including a reduced number of skills for each nation (Culture & Geography, Speak Language and two more) with each province granting you a few extra personality and/or skills.

Besides, since I'm not actually writting a professional conversion (that is, needn't be complete), I can start with those nations and areas I need to translate my campaign's characters,

[Mike Holmes]

That's a cool solution.


Also, Co-opt your players for this, if they're the type who might be interested. That is, have them come up with what they think fits. Spread the work around.

Mike

[Hobbitboy]

Culture & Geography, Speak Language and two more

Note that the more recent 'offical' examples of Homeland keywords do not include a Speak [homeland] Language. I'm told it has been dropped because speaking your native language is now seen in the same light as Breathing or Walking.

Thanks,

- John

[Hobbitboy]

a Speak [homeland] Language.

Sorry, I mean a skill along the lines of Speak [homeland] Language.

Hmm..... I've only just noticed the message about post editing being disabled. :(  Sorry for the double post.

[Barna]

I think it´s mostly a matter of taste. I do not know if it´s really important to the Swashbuckling genre whether you speak your native tongue at 17 or 5W2, but it could be used as an augment to skills such as Poetry or Oratory (your "command of the language").

So far I´ve managed to write the basic keywords for each of the 7 nations and I´ll do the regions I need to flesh out my characters. I will be including a Fencing system which works as an add-on to the Extended Conflict resolution of combat. We´ll see how that one goes. One of the cool things about Heroquest is that it allows characters which are not trained in any formal Swordsman School to fight creatively as well, using different skills, augments and bids. Therefore, having a Swordsman School is more an issue of choice & character drive rather than the only way of having combat skills with flair.

One of the issues I´ve been having is how I´m gonna handle conversion. Straight up skills such as Riding or Fencing are relatively easy to translate, but personality traits are another matter. I wish there was some sort of table which told us how the level in a particular personality trait relates to how important it is to the PC. That is, something like:

13   Minor quirk
17   Evident trait
5W  Key to his persona
5W2 Driving passion
5W3 Obsession 

Has anyone ever tried doing such a thing? Same thing goes for relationships (bear in mind that my HQ book has not arrived yet, I´m working from notes here).

Magic is largely absent from my games, so I wil be dealing with it as I go if I need it for some NPC´s.

[Mike Holmes]

Everyone can walk and breathe. Not everyone can Speak New Pelorian. It's precisely the sort of thing that should be part of a character's homeland. Further, unless you want to use the babelfish covention and say that everybody understands everyone else all the time (which many people do), it's important to know what language the character speaks, to know who can understand him. Languages are not unique to homelands. Often they're dialects, too, so that's fun to know as well. Again, if you're interested at all in portraying the language barriers.

Personally I do a compromise, and simply give characters a 13 in the local tongue. This is fun, as it indicates a strong accent and lots of communication difficulties. But not an inability to communicate.


I think your personality conversion chart works fine. It's about how I'd describe levels of ability in personality traits. Note that I'd allow players to take "Driving Passions" and "Obsessions" for free as flaws. They'll tend to be as useful against them as they are for the character. This removes the "problem" of the point balance for these traits in conversion. I wouldn't force players to stick to this scale, however, but to simply select the level of ability that they want for the character (as with any flaw). For non-flaws, make them pay as normal.

Oh, one more level of personality trait:
5W4 Heroic Obsession - the kind that they tell stories about.

[Barna]

I like your idea of having very high levels of personality traits for free. Indeed, they will most probably cause the player as much harm as benefit. Up to 5W2 I beleive that personality traits can be bearable or overall "positive". After that, it gets a bit "obsessive" and even dangerous.

Keeping your advice in mind, I think that I am keeping the Speak (Language) skill for my characters. Besides, in the 7th Sea pseudo-europa, language is an issue.

Another issue I have yet to solve is Membership. In the 7th Sea world, characters can be part of a number of Secre and Not-So-Secret Societies. These impose some duties and codes, but also give the player a lot of advantages such as increased reputation, training, special equipment, etc. I´m not sure how to work with this. Perhaps I can give each Secret Society a number of Skills, Personality Traits, etc just as a Homeland or Occupation, including a Rank skill which represents how important the character is to the organization. In order to keep these balanced, I´d start the membership keyword at 13 or 6 (not sure) so that the character has to spend some HP on it.

[Barna]

Another finer, more complex issue I´ve just realized I´ll have to deal with is how to present the system conversion to my players. I recently tried a FATE conversion which I aborted after a single session. The group is very supportive of all my crazy ideas, but I really want to present this as an improvement of our gaming sessions rather than a struggle. I guess I should make clear that they are very "open" gamers and while their RPing experience is, as mine, more of the traditional sort (AD&D, Star Wars, etc.) I have never seen another group I´d so eagerly take for a Narrativist ride.

One of the main "cool things" I wanna present them with is the notion of augments and the idea that any skill, talent, personality trait or relationship of your character can affect how he fares in a situation. One of the things that made me love HQ is indeed augments and how they work. Another notion I like and I think can be positively introduced to them are Extended Contests and specifically combat as an Extended Contest. In R&K (Roll and Keep, the original system) 7th Sea, not having a Swordsman School kinda hampers your creativity and style when fighting. Problem is, not every player is supposed to have one. That is, one should be able to fight creatively even if not a trained swordsman. I beleive that the notion of AP bids, augments and using different skills in combat makes creative, swashbuckly combat more natural.

Any other ideas on how to introduce a group to the HQ system?

[Mike Holmes]

I tend to introduce groups to HQ during play. I follow the following progression:

1. Simple contest, primary ability only (no augments), and the ability is less than one mastery. Introduce HP bumps.
2. Simple contest, primary ability only, and there's a mastery involved (introduces Mastery bumps).
3. Simple, introducing augments.

If the second contest doesn't include a primary ability with a mastery, then I introduce augmenting in that contest. If, by the end of the session, the players seem to get the system, and a likely contest comes up, I'll introduce them to the extended contest. But as often as not, I just don't.

Mike

[Barna]

Since I won´t be seeing my group for another week or two, I wrote a handout introducing the basic concepts to them (the xM notation, simple contests, augmenting, extended contests) with a bucketload of examples for each of the three notions. I still have to complete the extended contests part (and I do need the book for that one...arriving on friday :) ) but I beleive they are getting the gist of it. As soon as they get comfy with the system I intend to let them go over my conversion of their PC´s and see if I´ve missed anything.

[Mike Holmes]

You did download and read the free rules summary from the site, right?

http://www.glorantha.com/support/GameAids.pdf

Mike

[Barna]

I believe I leeched that .PDF for every drop of information ;)

I thought of sending it to my players, but it's concise nature added to their less-than-optimal english reading skills convinced me not to.