How difficult is it to use HQ in other settings?

Well, that works Ian. In fact what I've been doing is to let the players know about the culture and work out the keywords together. Very similar in effect. Indeed, once the player has written the Keyword for their character, I've been saying that it then becomes the official Keyword for the setting (in this case Shadow World).

The problem with this is that I've got very few done this way. And the "work" of putting the keywords together is actually entertaining, IMO. Why let the players have all the fun? I have an urge to put these things together because I think it'll be a really interesting exercise.

In any case, when I have a written Keyword, I consider it a jumping off point anyhow. The last character I made was from Esvular, but I wanted him to have been on the road all his life. So we changed his Homeland keyword from Esvular to Esvular Traveler, changing a couple of his Abilities with it (mostly the area knowledge sorts of stuff).

So having Keywords written up is just food for thought and shortcuts for character generation. If the player says, "I want to be a typical Brother Battle," I want to be able to give him the list right off. And if he wants something different, he has something to modify off of.

But not having Homeland Keywords written wouldn't stop me from playing, indeed hasn't. I'd heartily recommend diving on in.

Magic, OTOH, is the sticking point. Not in terms of what the keywords are, but in terms of what modeling they progress upon. One could just make all magic Abilities simply straightforward Abilities. But that would take some of the color out of the system. So I try to make the Magic convert in some ways to keep the nifty elements. I've found that the setting converted benefits greatly from the thought that goes into how magic works, and that the magic itself is, in the end, much more interesting.

Mike