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.

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

Thanks!

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

All right already! Now stop teasing me, dammit!

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

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."

joshua neff wrote: 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."

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

Thanks!

Thanks!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

HeroQuest is, simply put, as far above Hero Wars in sheer genius of design as HW was above all prior roleplaying games. I was, as you might surmise, a huge fan of HW and embraced it from the start. The system turned so many RPG standards on their heads that I believe the problems most people had were more perceptual than mechanical. HW required a paradigm shift in one's approach to scenario structure and task resolution, as complex activities could be rendered in a single extended contest rather than as a series of independent activities.

An example from my playtest campaign: the heroes commit to the task of assassinating Fazzur Wideread, Governor-General of Dragon Pass. I set a single extended contest before them, with the heroes pitting their abilities against those of Fazzur's personal security staff of guards and magicians. Together the heroes had to eliminate the physical and magical defenses, scout out the perfect location for the triggerman, calculate escape paths taking into account troop positions, etc. The degree of victory achieved would determine the type of test the triggerman would need to make, as follows:



• complete victory = automatic kill, no roll required;
• major victory = kill on successful ability test, dying otherwise;
• minor victory = kill on any victory in simple contest vs. 14 resistance, dying otherwise;
• marginal victory = kill on complete or major victory in simple contest vs. 8W resistance, dying on any other victory, incapacitated otherwise.



The penalties for defeat were increasingly horrendous, culminating with the capture and swift execution of all the participants, their conspirators, their bloodlines to three generations, etc. on a complete defeat. Rather than weeks upon weeks of scenarios coping with each aspect of the plot, we resolved it in one contest, the centerpiece of the evening's play. That was when I realized how powerful HW was... and HQ kicks HW's butt on so many levels. You need it, you want it, you will never forgive yourself if you fail to acquire it.

After all, how many other games do you know that can model the drama of a courtroom battle with the degree of nail-chewing, spine-tingling, seat-of-your-pants tension normally reserved for a massive melee, using the same mechanics and without any added complexity? I will do the math for you, my friends... exactly ZERO. Run, do not walk, to your FLGS or Warehouse 23 compnode and loudly declaim your God/dess-given right to own a copy today!

Having finally got some time to start reading HQ, I 'm going to launch into something that could cause me trouble if a certain comeone reads it...

You see, I've been with my SO, Kelly, for over 9 years now. When we met and got together, it was so natural we arranged to rent our first flat together without actually discussing it (it was kind of, "Hi, how are you, so where are we spending the rest of our lives?"). We have two kids, and I'm damn sure I've never once regretted our lives together.

Now, since the start of this year, kelly, mainly through sheer bloody mindedness, has lost getting on for four stone in weight; that's otherwise known as about 60-70 lbs, or about 8 european dress sizes, or more than our two children (aged four and two) combined. She's lighter than she's been since a couple of years before I met her. She's actually started wearing clothes that not merely hint at the existence of limbs, but actively flaunt them. Just before a recent family wedding, she decided to dye her hair bright red: my father nearly accused me of setting up with another woman and bringing her along with Kelly's kids before she opened her mouth.

She's always been, in my opinion, the finest human being in the world. She is now also one of the most confident, self assured, and, dare I say it, sexy women I know. Ah, she always was, but formerly only I had the good taste to see it.

I am a very happy man. And have taken up the same diet.

What, you're probably wondering, has this to do with Hero Quest? Apart from attractive, confident women dyeing their hair red?

I've lived a pretty large part of my life with my mind in a number of worlds apart from the one my body resides in. Perhaps the most frequently visited has been Glorantha. When HeroWars came along, it was a head over heels perfect (as I saw it) match of amazing world and fabulous game mechanics. Maybe not the perfect game, but perfect for me.

Then Heroquest came out: it's shed a few rules here and there, rewritten a few more, got it's act together, got it's physical layout and design together, it's got a wider view of Glorantha for beginners. Where HW lurked at the back of the FLGS, enchanting anyone who could get past its shy exterior, HQ invites everyone to the party.

I am a very happy man. And demoing at the local games club AGM next week, and the local convention in October...

Now, I'm not directly comparing my other half to an rpg (heaven forbid), but when a friend of ours asked how I was finding HQ, I fired a version of the above across his bows without thinking. And I think it pretty neatly sums up how I feel about HQ.

Great post Pete, kiss your deer family for me!