hi,

not sure if this is the right forum for this, because it is both a HQ and a Univeralis question anyway, this is my first post and I hope you people here can help me with my littel musing.

So what do I mean?

First I come from rpg.net and asked there the same question and got unsatisfying results.
Second I heard about Univeralis, read a bit here and there and started to wonder.

So Univeralis does use Traits for components and characters, hmm that would fit greatly togather with HQ in some way.  And hey would it be possible to take the resolution mechanism from HQ and build it into Univeralis?
After some more thinking it came to this basis:

Is it possible to make with HQ and Univeralis and No-GM HeroQuest game? What I mean is to have a game with the normal HQ mechanisms, but no GM, instead to use the Univeralis game.

SO what do you think? Would it be possible? Could it work? Have anyone tried it or combined Univeralis with another game?

There are many different approaches you could take to try and use them together.

The first, and perhaps easiest, is to just play Universalis but establish with the Tenets (which are Universalis rules invented collectively by the players at the beginning of play to define what the game will be about) that the setting is Glorantha as envisioned in the Hero Quest books (probably most effective if you identify specific HQ books or sections of books that will be taken as canonical).  You can then simply play Uni according to the Uni rules and use your identified books to provide built in "Facts" about the game world.

The second way, and also pretty easy, is to just play HQ according to all of the normal HQ rules.  But, in between sessions of HQ play a session of Uni (set up like above).  In the Uni session the goal would be to play out what all of the factions, nations, cultures, gods, and important NPCs of the world are up to. This then will be come the ongoing and developing backstory to the world that the players are playing in when they play Uni.  The advantage here is that all of the players would have a hand at crafting the back story through play of Uni rather than have it developed solely by the GM.  This should make the GM's job easier and get the players more vested in the broader context of the game since they helped create it.

Actually trying to merge the rules of the two games into one rules set is probably possible, but I'm not sure it would be very value added.  One approach would be to graft the Uni rules for Creating Components onto HQ as a sort of metalevel player empowerment.  One could convert Hero Points into X number of Coins and then spend those Coins to create Components and Traits where each level of Uni Trait equates to a level of HQ mastery or the like.  Another would be to graft HQ player characters and resolution mechanics onto Uni which would take a little more effort to make work.  But again, I'd start with one of the first two approaches (both of which have been used successfully for other settings) first.

Hm I think the first approche is not for me and my gaming group. I might use it at some time, but not for what I have planed.

So that leaves the second and the third one. The second one sounds quite interesting and I might try it. It is not what I was searching for, but it could provide what I wanted to achieve, at least on a bigger scale and it would make the game and the world more interesting to the people.

The third one was what I wanted to know about. My question arises from the problem that I don't always want to GM and want to have also a player char, the same is with the other GM. This works when you play episode-based games that are centered around a specific place with a "pool" of people to draw from, something like a village or base. When I read Univeralis it poped into my mind if it would be possible to play a campaign, based around a group of people wandering around and have no primary GM and at best no real GM for a session at all.
So this goal could be achieved partly with the second way, where you switch GM after each Univeralis session, but it would be not the same. When you as a GM have a player char, it always ends so that you don't really play the char, because of metagaming and other reasons and of course you know what the NPC can do and what not and who is mr. evil.

So I my wish is/was to play HQ and make it work GM-less with Univeralis.

Would this thread be better in some other forum then the HQ forum?

After reading a bit and collecting informations and searching I will refine my idea and problem a bit.

So what I am looking for is to play a game in a game. Or more specifically to play Hq in Univeralis. By this I mean that the GM-role switches and the scenes are generated and controlled like in Univeralis, but when it cmes to a fight or to a conflict the Hq rules are used. So that you use Universalis to set up a scene and conflict and the world and use HQ to resolve it. Everyone owns a own PC and is the only one who is allowed to controll him. The character is made by the normal HQ rules.
So in general the GM switches from scene to scene. But I am not sure if it will work if the GM changes in middel of the scene or if he should control the complete scene. As I said I don't own Univeralis and want to now if anyone ever tried it and what people think of the idea and how it might be best implemented.

The question is at what point the game would switch from using Universalis rules, to using HQ rules. If Universalis is just being used to set up the scenes, that might be problematic, since the economy of the game might break. On the other hand, with tweaking scene rewards, perhaps not. You're not using some very important parts of Universalis if you do this, however. Which is not to say that it wouldn't work. Just that you wouldn't much be playing Universalis really.

If using it just for scene framing, the question becomes where does scene framing end for you? Do you allow, for instance, traits to be added to components like characters? If so, do these then get a mechanical representation? The simplest thing would be to say no, and only allow introductions, and not addition of traits. But then the question becomes how the traits get established in play?

The idea of giving control to one player for a scene...well that's very anti-Universalis. I suppose you could just make the player who frames the scene the GM for the scene. And then he'd get to add abilities as neccessary to create resistances and such... Again, you're hardly playing Universalis here at all any more at this point. Just Universalis scene framing rules for determining who's GM for each scene.

At this point it's hard to talk about what would work, because without explaining the entire game to you, it's hard to know what of Universalis will fit precisely with what you want. But I'm sure you can graft them together for control in some fashion. I could even see adding traits as possible in scenes, the mechanical representation being equivalent to something like 17 for one coin +5 per extra coin spent or something. Or even more complex, you could simply use Universalis entire, and have a Gimmick where you pay a Coin to shift in and out of playing using HQ rules whenever you feel like it. That might work, too.

Frankly there are a ton of ways this could work. I suggest you try out Universalis, and then I think it'll become clear to you what sort of options are available, and which might work best for your group.

Mike