HeroQuest (Glorantha)?

[Hobgoblin]

Has anyone much experience of this? If so, would you recommend it?

The Glorantha thread (and recent experiments in dark trolls and trollkin) has whetted my appetite for some Gloranthan gaming. It's been a while: my first ever gaming was with RQ2; alas, the rulebook, which I got for my eighth or ninth birthday, has long gone.

Now, I could buy a PDF of RQ2 (I think it's just been revived). But while it's a great system, I recall that it took aeons to stat up characters and (more importantly) NPCs. I gather that HeroQuest is very "rules light". That would allow much more time to be spent on absorbing Gloranthan weirdness (I'll be GMing for a very occasional group who played RQ2 with me first time around, and also, potentially, for my son and his friends).

Any advice much appreciated!

[LeadAsbestos]

No! Character generation is smooth and easy, and could be easily streamlined for wargaming purposes. Just stat the characteristics you actually intend to play. I still think RQ2 is the best RPG system ever. Combat is also intuitive and easy, and my fallback for.any ultra small skirmishes I want to run.

Do it! All the classic material is coming back.

[Hobgoblin]

No! Character generation is smooth and easy, and could be easily streamlined for wargaming purposes. Just stat the characteristics you actually intend to play. I still think RQ2 is the best RPG system ever. Combat is also intuitive and easy, and my fallback for.any ultra small skirmishes I want to run.

Do it! All the classic material is coming back.

I hadn't thought of using RQ as a skirmish game. Actually, that might be a great way of training up some young apprentices in the mechanisms (and reminding me of them): just do some tabletop skirmishes with 1-3 on each side. Hmm ... food for thought. The PDF for RQ2 is only £11, even at the current exchange rate. And I'm sure my son would love the flying limbs that Runequest games generally entail - and the chance to play a dragonewt.

How does the move work on a tabletop? I confess I can't recall that at all - just strike ranks and the percentages. And hit locations, of course. And fumbles ...

I bought Snakepipe Hollow (in pdf for £2, on a whim, last week), which really prompted some nostalgic imaginings. And I could easily cobble enough miniatures together to run the Rainbow Mounds with a certain tabletop flair.

But have you any experience with Heroquest? What really intrigues me about it is that it appears to offer a really fast-moving narrative campaign - so you might get a hell of a lot of story out of a single evening's play (rather than a juicy and vivid set of skirmishes, which is how I remember the bulk of my RQ games).

[psullie]

Hi Hobgoblin

HeroQuest is an excellent vehicle for storytelling. The system is very light and revolves around 'framing contests', focusing on the goal and how it will be achieved. So wether it's a combat, social dinner, political intrigue, sailing in a storm or climbing a wall it is is all handled the same way.
Character creation is smooth and based on key words, you then allocate a value (13 being average) to your keywords. So Fighter 18 is better than Fighter 9 for example. You also get bonuses with narrower keywords, Fighter 13 (Swordsmaster 19).
All rolls are opposed, each rolling under their skill to pass but the higher the pass roll the better. To use the example above if the Fighter 13 rolls and 11, the Fighter 19 would need to roll 12-19 to win.
Also there are no hit points etc. everything is measured as degrees of success or failure.
You have Masteries, skills above 20. If you have a skill Swordsmaster 25 you would write W5 (W being the rune for Mastery), a skill of 45 is 2W5 etc. Masteries cancel each other out, but if you have mastery you can shift your result up or down one level, sounds complicated, but it really is quite elegant and plays very fast as you decide how much detail you want.
Example: 10 broo attack the party
if this was just a random encounter you could resolve this with just one opposed roll and determine the results based on the level of success.
if this was a climax you could create an 'extended contest', multiple opposed rolls where the combined results determine the outcome

Also HeroQuest Glorantha is a great introduction to Gloratha and covers character creation in and around Dragon Pass.

One this HeroQuest is not is the crunchy game of RQ2 or RQ3

[psullie]

I've recently used RQ6 and OpenQuest and found them ideal for skirmish war-gaming, OpenQuest is the most streamlined of them all and works well and the basic rules are free:
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/127007/OpenQuest-2-Basic-Edition

[commissarmoody]

These are some great ideas. I actually just got Heroquest and the World guide PDF

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks very much, psullie, for the info on HeroQuest. It sounds terrific; I'll pick up the PDF in the near future. I nabbed RQ2 last Friday and played through a quick encounter with my son. He rolled up a crested dragonewt, and I put together a little scenario involving an Issaries merchant being attacked by a couple of trollkin. Of course, a pair of trollkin pose a real threat to a newly rolled adventurer, and he was lucky to survive. But he managed a couple of hits with his sling and dagger, and was able to progress in both skills. And of course he was rewarded by the merchant and has a bit of cash to spend on gear now.

[LeadAsbestos]

Perfect start!