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Glorantha 1

HeroQuest

HeroQuest:

Moon Design Publications3450 Wooddale Ct

Ann Arbor, MI 48104

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2 Glorantha

HeroQuest

Written By Jeff Richard and Robin D. Lawsand Neil Robinson and David Scott

with assistance from: Martin Helsdon, Rick Meints, and Michael O’Brien.

Special Thanks: Steve Perrin, Sandy Petersen, Ken Rolston, and Ray Turney

Design & Layout by Rick MeintsCover by Jon Hodgson

Illustrations by: Jan Pospíšil, Dan Barker, Rick Becker, Simon Bray, William Church, Gene Day, Jed Dougherty, Alberto Foche, Lisa Free, Stephano Gaudiano, Eric Hotz, Jennell Jaquays, Kalin

Kadiev, Stephen Langmead, Jeff Laubenstein, Juha Makkonen, Regis Moulin, Luise Perrine, Mike Perry, Roger Raupp, John Snyder, Steve Swenston, and Cory Trego-Erdner.

Cartography by: Colin Driver, William Church, and Darya Makarava.

Art Direction by Jeff Richard

Additional Thanks: Nick Brooke, Ian Cooper, David Dunham, Dan McCluskey, Kevin McDonald, Sarah Newton, Phil Nicholls, and Harald Smith.

Playtesters included Joerg Baumgartner, Franziska Bauss, Herve Carteau, Matthew Cole, Ian Cooper, Christian Einsporn, Daniel Fahey, Simon Hibbs, Kris Alice Holhs, Olli Kantola, Sebastian Koerner, Johan Lindholm, Claudia Loroff, Robin

Mitra, Michael O’Brien, Alison Place, Christine Reich, Mikko Tormala, Gianni Vacca, and Valentina Vacca.

As always, a special thank you and credit goes to Greg Stafford, without whom none of us would be reading this, or playing games in Glorantha.

Copyright © 2015 Moon Design LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this work by any means without written permission from the publisher, except short excerpts for the purpose of reviews or game

play, is expressly prohibited. Glorantha and HeroQuest are trademarks of Moon Design Publications.

First Printing - Summer 2015. ISBN# 978-1-943223-01-5

Would you like to know more about Glorantha? See our extensive website at www.glorantha.com

This book is protected by the terrible swift blade of the Avenging Daughter. Her wrath shall be upon any who misuse its secrets!

Credits

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Glorantha 3

HeroQuest

Magic and Cults 131Overview 131Cults 131b Spirit Magic 134Spirit Traditions 138R Rune Magic 139Ernalda 147Orlanth 151The Seven Lightbringers 157Issaries 159Humakt 163Waha 167a Sorcery 172Lhankor Mhy 1754 Lunar Magic 179The Seven Mothers 187Heroquesting 193S Illumination 202

Gloranthan Creatures 208Overview 208Elder Races 208? Chaos Horrors 219

Gaming in Glorantha 221Creating Adventures 222

Appendixes 233A: Calendar 233B: Equipment 234C: Languages in the Dragon Pass Region 238D: Glossary 239E: Bibliography 241F: Other Gloranthan Material 242G: Quick Reference 243

Index 246

MapsGlorantha 8-9Dragon Pass 22-23Battle of the Auroch Hills 89

Table of ContentsIntroduction 4

The World of Glorantha 7Overview 7The Runes 14

Dragon Pass and Environs 19General Description 19Significant Places 20Dragon Pass Timeline 31

Creating Your Hero 33Some Vocabulary 33Create a Hero As-You-Go 34The Heroes of Samastina’s Saga 53

Game Mechanics 57Overview 57Framing the Contest 58Rules for Contests 63Consequences 64Group Simple Contest 70Extended Contests 72Group Extended Contest 78Rising Actions and Climactic Resolution 82Tactical Options 101Modifiers & Augments 102Hero Points 105Recovery and Healing 106Running Contests 107Assigning Difficulty 112The Pass/Fail Cycle 115

Gloranthan Communities 119Defining Your Community 119Sample Communities 120Drawing on Resources 123Gaming Tips 127

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4 Glorantha

HeroQuest

Tools, Not RulesThink of HeroQuest Glorantha not as a set of inviolable rules that you must adhere to in order to be running the game properly, but as a toolkit containing a variety of ways of resolving dramatic situations as they arise in play. It is meant to facilitate your creativity and then to get out of your way. It offers multiple ways of resolving conflicts, and relies on you to choose the best one for the current moment based on your storytelling instincts.

Every HeroQuest Glorantha Game Master can, and should, use the toolkit the game provides to run it in her own way. You may run it differently from one campaign to the next, or to suit your players. It does not make specific decisions for you, but instead helps to shape and guide your own decision-making process. It is well suited to a collaborative, friendly group with a high degree of trust in each other’s creativity.

If the members of your group are often at odds and rely on their chosen rules kit as an arbiter between competing visions of how the game ought to develop, HeroQuest Glorantha is not the rules set you need. Stick with your more structured system of choice, but feel free to borrow and use any concepts from this book you find useful.

HeroQuest Glorantha becomes your game as soon as you start to use it. This principle is known as YGWV: Your Game Will Vary. For those concerned about canonical Glorantha, it also stands for Your Glorantha Will Vary.

GloranthaHeroQuest Glorantha is set in the fictional world of Glorantha, one of the oldest and best-defined fantasy roleplaying settings. Glorantha is a Bronze Age world, and people hold allegiance to tribe, city, and cult, not to abstract alignments or ideologies. Although humanity is the dominant species, their dominance is due only to the quarrelling of the Elder Races who still rule large parts of the world.

Glorantha’s main theme is religion and the magical relation of man to god. In Glorantha, the gods and goddesses are real, and play an active and important part in most major events through their followers and cults. The Sun, the Earth, the Air, the Water, the Darkness, and the Moon all have powerful deities associated with them, as do powers such as Death, Life, Change, Stasis, Illusion, Truth, Disorder, and Harmony. There are lesser deities to things as diverse as cats, cows, boats, vengeance, and volcanoes.

Glorantha is a complete universe. It is self-contained, and from its myths to its molecules it must be taken on its own terms. You will find no worshipers of Zeus or Allah here. There are no Romans, Vikings, or Huns; although there are certainly empires, pirates, and nomads. Many creatures rightfully rooted in other fantasy settings have no representatives here.

The world of Glorantha is fully described in Moon Design Publications' Guide to Glorantha, but a brief summary is presented in this book.

Introduction

Version HistoryHeroQuest Glorantha began its life in 2000, under a slightly different title, Hero Wars. The game was reissued, in a revised edition, as Heroquest, in 2009. Now in 2015, it is being revised again to focus fully on Glorantha. The book you hold in your hands is the game’s reappearance for the setting of Greg Stafford’s classic fantasy world of Glorantha, first glimpsed in 1975 through Chaosium’s boardgames White Bear and Red Moon and Nomad Gods and now fully detailed in Moon Design Publications' Guide to Glorantha.

HeroQuest Glorantha is a roleplaying rules engine designed for play in the world of Glorantha. The game presents a simple and flexible system allowing Game Masters to make decisions the way that epic stories and myths do. HeroQuest Glorantha encourages creative input from both Game Master and players, resulting in an exciting, unpredictable narrative created through group collaboration. Its abstract resolution methods and scalable character levels allow you

to fully experience the magical world of Glorantha from the mundane to the heroic.Sa

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HeroQuestRoleplaying in a NutshellRoleplaying is a hybrid experience, combining elements of game play and collective storytelling. A group gathers together to talk its way through a spontaneously created story, like a sort of improvisational radio theater. All but one of the participants, called players, create fictional characters (called heroes) defined by various abilities written down on paper called character sheets. Using these abilities, the heroes pursue various goals in the mythic world of Glorantha portrayed by a participant called the Game Master.

The Game Master controls various other people and creatures in Glorantha. The players describe how their heroes pursue their goals; the Game Master challenges them by putting obstacles in their path. Sometimes these barriers to success come in the form of non-player characters who oppose them; at other times, they’re impersonal physical or mental challenges, like a lock that must be picked or a cliff the heroes have to climb. Whenever the heroes try to overcome a difficult obstacle, the Game Master decides how difficult it will be. Using numbers attached to their abilities, the players roll dice to see if they prevail. The Game Master rolls dice to represent the difficulty posed by whatever challenge they face. Their success or failure, as determined by the die rolls, changes the direction of the story, in either a big or small way.

Although some games last for only an evening, it is typical for one group to play a series of stories (usually called “adventures”) involving the same heroes and setting over a period of time. We refer to them collectively as a campaign. (The latter term derives from the origins of the roleplaying form in historical war games).

Thinking in Story TermsAlthough there’s no right or wrong way to play the game, a certain story-based logic does underlie the entire system. Where traditional roleplaying games use tactical simulation to navigate an imaginary reality, HeroQuest Glorantha emulates the techniques of fictional and mythic storytelling so that it can describe the story and myths of Glorantha.

Understanding this distinction will help you to run the game in a natural, seamless manner. One of this book’s objectives is to get under the hood of narrative technique and show you how it works. This will either help you to run the game in its native emulative style, or, if you prefer a more tactical approach, to understand how you’ll need to modify it to suit your own preferences.

For example, say that you’re running a game set in the ruins of the Big Rubble of Pavis. A hero is running along the top of ruined buildings, pacing a zebra ridden by the main bad guy. The player wants his hero, Vargast the Thunderer, to jump onto the zebra and cut the villain down. You must decide how hard it is for him to do this.

In most roleplaying games (particularly those often described as “simulative”), you’d determine how hard this is based on the physical constraints you’ve already described. In doing so, you come up with imaginary numbers and measurements. You’d work out the distance between the ruined buildings and the zebra. Depending on the rules set, you might take into account the relative speeds of the running hero and the zebra. You determine the difficulty of the attempt based on these factors, and then use whatever resolution mechanic the rules provide you with to see if the hero Vargast succeeds or fails. If he blows it, you’ll probably consult the falling rules to see how badly he injures himself.

In HeroQuest Glorantha, you start not with the physical details, but with the proposed action’s position in the storyline. You consider a range of narrative factors, from whether it would be Maximum Game Fun for him to succeed, how much failure would slow the pacing of the current sequence, and how long it has been since Vargast last scored a thrilling victory. If, after this, you need further reference points, you draw inspiration more from the tropes of heroic fiction than the physics of real-life jumps from buildings onto zebras. Having decided how difficult the task ought to be dramatically, you then supply the physical details as color, to justify your choice and lend it verisimilitude—the illusion of authenticity that makes us accept fictional incidents as credible on their own terms. If you want Vargast to have a high chance of success, you describe the distance between ruin and the zebra as impressive (so it feels exciting if he makes it) but not insurmountable (so it seems believable if he makes it).

Maximum Game FunWhen writing, thinking, and gaming about Glorantha, always ask yourself, “Now, in this situation what will be the most fun?” and then go with it. That’s Maximum Game Fun (MGF). Keep this principle in mind whenever you apply the rules of HeroQuest Glorantha to any situation.

Need More Help?

Have any questions about the rules of about

Glorantha that this book doesn’t answer? Please head on over to www.

glorantha.com and join the friendly and supportive

Gloranthan Tribe. We have articles, forums, a

mailing list, a full set of detailed products, and many other resources.

And better yet, ask the community itself.

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