HeroQuest: What do YOU think?

[Matt Snyder]

I just received my copy of HeroQuest, and so far it looks quite good. I am featuring this game as the cover story for my upcoming e-zine, Daedalus. I'll be conducting an interview with Greg Stafford, and I'll write a review as well.

As part of that coverage, I'd really like to hear what others think of the game. Please consider posting short review and actual play comments in this thread that I could use as sidebar "man on the street" type commentary to expand the viewpoint of this cover feature. Obviously, making such commentary is, in effect, you agreeing to be published (such as it is!) in the zine. Please post your real name, if possible.

FYI, Daedalus will be a quarterly e-zine dedicated to RPGs and speculative fiction. The zine will be available in both PDF and HTML formats, for free. Contact me if you're interested in contributing fiction or articles.

[Thalaxis]

Daedalus sounds interesting, I'd like to read it... so how would one go about subscribing? :)

Thanks!

[Mike Holmes]

I've only been over the game a small bit in the time I had to look at Josh's copy last night. I don't usually do this...

Buy

This

Game!

I can't put into words how much regard I have for it, even with the limited knowledge that I have of it. Throw out everything that was bad about HW. Take everything good, and torque it up some. Add a lot of new cool stuff. Put it all in a tightly organized presentation.

Call me a raving fanboy, but this is a must have.

Mike

[Thalaxis]

All right already! Now stop teasing me, dammit!

(I'm still waiting on UPS...)

[joshua neff]

I'm pretty much with Mike on this one. Go read my own thread on the new edition. HeroQuest is earthshakingly brilliant.

And as for the cover (which I've been hearing mixed responses about), Julie (my girlfriend)'s daughter, Morgan (age six), looked at it, pointed at the Red Goddess, & said, "Wow, she looks really cool. I like her."

[Nick Brooke]

And as for the cover (which I've been hearing mixed responses about), Julie (my girlfriend)'s daughter, Morgan (age six), looked at it, pointed at the Red Goddess, & said, "Wow, she looks really cool. I like her."

Hurrah! Another convert to the Lunar Way! She's welcome at the Seven Mothers' Temple any time she wants to drop by.

Love and peace, Nick

[Matt Snyder]

Daedalus sounds interesting, I'd like to read it... so how would one go about subscribing? :)

Thanks!

Daedalus will be offered intially as a free e-zine PDF and HTML formats. Hopefully, it will remain free, with support from sponsorships, ads, and reader donations.

The site will be located at:

http://daedalus.chimera.info/    (right now, this is the Daedalus blog)

You can check out the in-progress site design at:

http://www.chimera.info/daedalus/

[Thalaxis]

Thanks!

It looks like you already have quite an array of contributors on board, too.

[Nick the Nevermet]

I got HQ on Thursday.  The same day as my birthday, and the same day I found out that the faculty in my department Really Like Me.  

I think spent the next 2 days reading it.  Wow.  A lot to digest, but I love the core mechanic and the setting dares you find something lacking.

[Wulf]

I've found many (or at least 'quite a few') little niggling problem details, all of which I can solve to my own satisfaction, but some, at least, I feel should have been adressed in the rules.

Generally, it looks very good, and very complete. There are a few things it does not cover, but none of those came up in the examples or sample cults & characters.

Overall, it's allowed me to convert or recreate my Hero Wars characters without loss of ability, and in a couple of cases to their advantage, and furthermore seems to cover all the rules problems I had with HW. I have a review up at RPGnet with further comments.

Wulf

[Mike Holmes]

Yeah, there have been several clarifications about rules on the HW-Rules yahoo group. While it seems that there are still some cases where things aren't perfectly clear, it seems that a close reading and some logic makes it all become playable. It's not that the book is wrong, but that the solution isn't always perfectly obvious.

I atttibute a lot of this to the fact that the system isn't really simple. That is, the central ideas are easy to understand, but the applications can get really intense. I think this is a great thing, personally, and forgive the authors most of the fuzzy spots simply because of the breadth and difficulty of the subject matter which they had to cover.

Very simply, Glorantha is a complex place, and making the rules able to cover everything that can happen there in detail is no small feat (pun intended); especially given that they got it all in one book. So, again, I give it a pass. There's a lot of stuff to pick up in that book, and it might take people a couple of reads to get it all down.

Mike

[Loz]

As a playtester for Hero Wars, I always found the game iffy.  In the hands of the right narrators, it was memorable, but to be honest I found the rules confusing, and the A5 book format was a pain.

With HQ though, they got it right. Things are clearer, the augmentation rules superb, and the format vastly improved.  Also, having played more sessions, I believe it to be a very versatile system and I've been seduced into producing key word conversion for gaming in Moorcock's Young Kingdoms.  Folk on The Forge who know me know I'm a BRP/d100 die-hard, but I think HQ is terrific, to be honest, and it suits my GMing and playing style.

And the HQ book is also the best intro to Glorantha I've seen.

Top marks, Issaries.

[TKurtBond]

In short, HeroQuest doesn't just fix the problems with Hero Wars, it improves on Hero War's successes.

[Ludoch]

Loz, here here
This is the game I have been waiting for since I first discovered Glorantha in 1978.
Martin H.

[Drastic]

I think I'm in love, is what I think.

No slight meant to Glorantha, the whole living-fabric-of-myth thing is certainly interesting, but I think the setting and I would only ever be just friends.  The system though, good lord.  I cheerfully admit to being smitten with it.

The only downsides I have thus far is that the game didn't ping on my radar until it was too late to get the limited-edition hardcover (I really hope it does well enough for a hardcover reprinting, and possibly even expanded edition).  Also, I would have liked more full-fledged examples of extended contests.  Not just one big fight, and snippets of a debate, but some of the niftier applications of them--an extended contest covering an entire castle break-in-and-burgle-and-get-out, an extended contest dungeon crawl, an extended contest leading-a-mythic-exodus-of-entire-tribe-through-a-snowy-mountain-pass, and so forth.  That engine has a lot of horsepower, and while the number of examples included was still very nicely packed, it really could have used more.