Sat. 1/16/94
GS: Greg Stafford
GS: Good morning. My name's Greg, and we're here to talk about HeroQuest. I would be happy to sit here and jabber, but I could probably jabber with a little bit more direction if someone has some intelligent questions they could ask to start.
1st audience speaker: Several years ago at Gencon there were some test rules for heroquesting, where on the Heroplane in general all your abilities were divided by ten, so people with 100% weapon attacks had 10% attack. And a lot of those people on the Heroplane were there because they were enormously powerful. Our group ran into someone who took mercy on us and said, "I'm going to give you a test. If you can't pass this test, your failure will force you off the Heroplane because you are not ready to be here." Of course, we all ended back on Glorantha. Are you still considering rules along this structure, or have you taken an alternate approach?
GS: I've taken an alternate approach. The game that you are talking about is one of several similar games which I call Super RuneQuest, and it just did not come anywhere close to capturing the ideas and feelings that I wanted to convey through the game that used to be called HeroQuest. And so we're taking a totally different approach, and not lightly but seriously. I don't know when I will write HeroQuest. I'm not going to at this stage. I don't have time to. I'm just going to keep writing what I can write and explaining it without rules and without games. And let other people, at the moment, who are more astute, or perhaps they just have the time, to create a game and do the rules. And since that was such a good and intelligent question, I'm going to rave for just a little bit and explain what my current idea on this is going to be. All right?
Just being a Humakti is not enough to get to make you a Hero. You've got to be a good Humakti. You've got to kill things. You've got to be willing to die. This is something I rarely see in player characters. I have a Humakti Heroquest I used to offer to everybody, and at the end of it you're guaranteed to meet your god. Who could ask for more? I never had a player character take me up on this. So it's not just what you do, but how you do it. To be an Orlanthi hero, you've got to fulfill certain ideals, you've got to act a certain way. And if you act a certain way, the closer to your cult ideal that you act, the more power that you get for it. Some cults, of course, have a broad acceptance range. Being a good Orlanthi is significantly easier than being a good Humakti. Because Orlanth, being a cult in the center, that defines the center of the culture, has a broad range of possibilities. You can be a chieftain, and you can be a stingy one... oh no you can't, you've got to be a generous one for Orlanthi. But you can be a war-like leader and be a great fighter, or you can be peaceful. You can father 142 children and just plow your fields better than anybody else every year. And you can be a Hero. You're immortal. And your children will remember your name, and name all their children after you, and stuff like this, and talk to you centuries after you're dead. On the other hand, to be a Humakti you are required to have a fairly narrow range of action. (laughter)
So, the thing is, there are different realms in which a person needs to function as a Hero. If you want a good analysis of what I'm saying, I just got a good refresher course in the latest Campbell books. I think it's the first one he's written since... since he died. (laughter) I believe it's the second one in his table top series. (Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Harper & Row, 1988) The first one he did complete while he was alive. (Volume I : The Way of the Animal Powers) The second one was half done, and he died, and his students have finished it. (Volume II : The Way of the Seeded Earth) And I desperately hope that his students finish the other three in the series.
What I want HeroQuest to do is to give people the vehicle to interact mythologically through their characters in the realm. And there are three realms. The personal realm, a social realm, and the cosmic realm. And there are three ways, three powers. The Hindus say all gods powers can be divided up into three categories. And some gods are in all three. In Hindu, these are kama, dharma, and artha. The first thing that everyone wants, kama, not karma but kama, is desire. Everybody wants happiness and good. It's nice and simple. Everybody wants order and justice, divine order, that's dharma. And artha is power and prestige.
So, everybody wants to be loved. Everybody wants to be powerful, or at least recognized for whatever they are. What everybody wants is to live in a fair universe. And all the gods and goddesses that have ever been known can be categorized according to those three things. So those are, at the moment, sort of the stats for a god. Now, how much of of your being is dedicated to order and justice? This is a big thing in Orlanth, of course. It's not such a big thing for Humakt. How much of it is concerned with power and prestige? How much of your gods existence is concerned with love and desire? See, this is zero for Humakt. (laughter) I mean it. This has absolutely no concern for a Humakti. Humakt doesn't care how you act as far as your personal goals go. It's not his concern. Orlanth cares, because he cares about everything. He's in all three categories. Humakt is probably in two.
So the game is a way for you to activate your awareness, your access, to these powers through your game play. Something funny occurred to me recently about Gloranthan heroquesting, and I was really struck by it because it seems so simple maybe it's just stupid. Gloranthan heroquesting is not too far different from terrestrial role playing. You take some certain part of yourself, activate it, become aware of it, motivate it, become conscious of it, go into a non-material realm, another place that everybody agrees on, where you interact with mysterious, hopefully intelligent, entities, and you come back and you've got a reward. I mean, you've got your check marks (laughter), you have the emotional satisfaction of having seen your character succeed. Or not. (laughter) And this is in a large way similar to Gloranthan heroquesting, except in a little more literal sense where they take some aspect of themselves that is most critical to this quest, go into a temple, have their priests and temple empower them, activate them, to serve on the other side in the invisible world, where you travel and try to achieve your objectives, to bring them back to the "real world", the material world.
So that's, in a large sense, what heroquesting looks like to me this morning at this stage of the conversation. (laughter)
3rd audience speaker: Could you clarify what the role of the Heroquester to his people or his supporters is? Can a lone person go on a heroquest, or does he require followers, and how do his followers influence the heroquest?
GS: Certainly. That's another critical and important question. An individual can go off into the Heroplane and quest and bring back, if he succeeds, what he wants. Joseph Campbell says no myth, no story, is over however until the hero goes home. And if you go home and you've done nothing for your community, if you've done it entirely for yourself 'cause you're the big shot, then the impact is far far less than if you go home with a gift that helps everybody in your community. Now, you don't have to go off with the support of your family and your clan and your tribe. But if you do there is an advantage to this. Typically, on a heroquest, it being a difficult thing to do, you go around and you ask people for their help. You go to your wife and your kids, say "Hey, I'm going to the other side. You with me or not?" And if she's with ya, this is a good thing. If you're going off, and you're wife is behind ya, it's a lot better than having this nagging feeling that she's going to be unhappy when you get home. All right? (laughter) It could be that simple. Or it could be a little more complex. You go to your clan, or your household, and you say "Hey! I'm going off on this Heroquest, I'm going to the other side, and I'm going to go across the River of Death. Are you with me or against me? Will you help me?" And if they don't want you to go, you're in deep trouble because you don't have a lot of support. If they are on your side, they can commit to a certain level of commitment. They say, "Well, that's O.K., we'll give you one mistake and that's it." On the other hand, on the other end of the spectrum, they may say "We're with you 100%. Anything you do is OK with us, and we give you all our resources to support you." What this means is, while you're off gallivanting around in the invisible world, which is of course visible to you, your clan and temple are all sitting back doing whatever is necessary to support you. They're doing ceremonies, they're doing rituals, they're remembering you, they're doing daily prayers, they're doing whatever is necessary to support you. In King of Sartar, when Orlanth is off on his Heroquest and he is in the Underworld, and he is killed, he's dead. All right? He's dead, at one point. A feather drifts down - swish, swish, swish, swish, swish - and he picks it up and he remembers what his purpose is, and he gets up, and ... I forget exactly what he does next, he liberates Trickster, I forget... but he comes back to life. That feather is his support from back home, from Elmal and all his family that he left behind. They are supporting him. They're saying "We're with you 100%. Do whatever is necessary." So, he is able to draw upon their energy, their power, their psyche, their spirituality, to help him in the Underworld. This is good, because when he comes back everybody who supported him benefits from his effort. At the same time, everybody who supported him loses exactly the way he loses as well. All right? So he is acting for the community.
If you go off on the Heroplane, and you act only for yourself, and you come back, you're the only one who benefits. But if you go off and you act in the name of your community with their support, then you come back, they benefit.
A game rule I thought of for this is that you may be able to, for instance, come back and you've got, lets just say, 100% sword. You've got a sword now that adds 100% to your skill 'cause you're really good, you earned this thing. You dueled with Humakt and he only cut your hands off. (laughter) So, now you're up +100%. You can come back to the Mortal Plane and now you're, if you're a typical RuneQuest player, 212% at sword. (laughter) And you are at 212% until you die, and then that 100% is gone. But if you go off and heroquest for your whole clan, and Humakt cuts off your hands, and you come back and you say, "I have this sword with my hands on it, and I give it to the clan to bless us all and benefit us all." The entire clan is now +10%, for as long as that sword with your hands stuck to it is kept in that temple. Because this is your payment, you've done it. And so now the whole clan, whenever they fight, is at +10%. I'm just making up these numbers and throwing it out as a concept, these are not game rules. This is an example of how it could work. All right? And, after you die, they are still +10%. All right? As long as that sword is there and they remember it, and they do what is necessary to contact the power in that sword, which is ceremony and ritual. This is how you become a Hero. You don't become a Hero by being the biggest, baddest bastard on the block, who everybody forgets in a generation. You get there by being the one that they still talk about 100 years later, because there's a sword there and we remember George. You know, George Missinghands. And whenever there's a fight, people go to that temple and say, "Hey, George Missinghands, we're gonna need ya again! We're doing this the way you told us to do it, and we're asking you now to do what you promised us." And that's how you become a Hero. They feed you on the Spiritplane with power, energy, sacrifices, love, and you do what you're supposed to do.
So, you don't have to do it for the community. But you're a fool if you're not, and you will never be a hero, a true Hero that will live beyond time.
5th audience speaker: What happens on a heroquest from the point of view from the ordinary mundane Gloranthan plane / what happens on a heroquest from the point of view of the Heroplane?
GS: From the point of view of the Heroplane? From the point of view of a person on the Heroplane?
5: What sort of things happen first in the place you are starting from, where they are giving you ritual support, and what sort of things happen in/to the Heroplane?
GS: Easy. Thank you. What happens on a heroquest? A heroquest is a reenactment of a mythical act. And so whatever happens on the Heroplane is whatever happens in the story. And you're ... so, choose a story, just spill one off.
6th audience speaker: Hercules.
GS: Hercules is very easy. If you were doing a Herculean Heroquest, um..., what's the first one? The Nemean Lion? So the first thing you do on that heroquest is you go to Nemia, the spirit plane Nemia, you look for the lion, you draw an ox and you kill it, you strangle it, and use it's claws to skin it and succeed thereby. Another way you might do it is change the act. You say, "Oh, I've got all these cattle. Now Geryon's gonna come and steal 'em. I hate it. It's a waste of time. I hate that guy. I'm not goin' to Italy this time. I'm just gonna bypass him, so he can't get the cattle." Can you do that? Yeah, maybe you can. You know, you might say,"Well gee, I've got these weird things on my wrists (referring to his own wrist braces). I'm never going to be able to strangle the Nemean lion. Maybe I can poison it." (audience laughter) So you can do this. You just choose a ceremony...
8th audience speaker: Or pull the thorn out of it's paw.
GS: Yeah, right, well. Which is another thing. I'll get to that. So you may do the whole ceremony, and you go to the Nemean Plane, and you fill an impala full of poison, set it out there, and hope that the Nemean Lion will come and eat it and that you'll have an advantage.
9th audience speaker: So it's sort of revisionist mythology?
GS: That's exactly what it is! Now, there's another way that you can do it too. You can go back to your books, find scholars, go to ancient lands, foreign lands where they know other things about this lion. Say, "Geez, I didn't realize that this was actually, for you people, the Sun God! No wonder I can't kill him with weapons." Right? "So, gee, you guys have this story about making friends with a lion by pulling a thorn out of his hand. I'm gonna do your story! It's a lot easier than mine!" (laughter) So that's what you do. And the story changes. They come back, and they say "Well, this is the lion lover." And if everybody goes on that story and records it as being the better one, the real one, well soon it's "Hercules and his 11 Labors, with his lion pal." (laughter) All right? But, this is a dangerous thing. Because you've reprogrammed not just the story, but everything connected to that story in your culture. And you can say "Well good. Now we've got the friendly lion, you know, but geez,...
10th audience speaker: ...how does he hold up the sky with...
GS:There ya go, something like that. ... You say, "But, it was important that the lion eat these birds that ..." It's a mythological ecology, and you can't change one part without inevitably changing another part. This is, of course, what the God Learners did wrong. They said, "Hey look, we can change all the stories and it doesn't even matter? Let's do it!" Right? So they went and switched them all. They said, "Lets switch these goddesses around. This is cool! I bet we can tap gods without harming them! They're so big and powerful, ya know?" And they did all this stuff without being at all aware of the consequences. And they changed the mythological environment irrevocably, and got destroyed thereby.
11th audience speaker: Are there any chances, even without the rules system coming out for Heroquest, of perhaps collecting known heroquests? Because we are familiar with major mythological events, but people aren't going off on Lightbringer Quests too often. It's those minor heroquests, those lesser in scope and more achievable, that seem to be what we're hearing hints about. Would it be easier perhaps to collect some of those stories? Some of us have come up with our rules systems, we just don't know the myths.
GS: Yes, that could be done. Submissions welcome. And, I don't want to just brush it off and not care about it. But in fact, I can't care about everything. I want to say here, you've got my permission to make up myths, and my objective at this stage is to try to present models. A minor myth is presented in King of Sartar... oh, geez, did it make it in there? About the Vanik Spear?
12th audience speaker: No.
Nick Brooke: It's in Tales of the Reaching Moon #7 though, so everyone here has read it.
GS: All right, so, it's in Tales of the Reaching Moon, you've all read it, the tale of the Vanik Spear, and you can get it there. Get Tales. And, the way to do it is to look at the list of analogies I've made. These guys as sort of early Saxon/late Celtish. Look at their stories and find out what they felt was important and useful. I will tell you that this stuff about mimicking the mythology isn't something I made up. This is the way Earth mythology works. All right? It is. You can look at modern religions. You can look at science. Any belief system works in much the same way. And you work it through trial and error, find out what works and what doesn't, and do it. So, if you want to find some story about getting a heroic weapon, pull out a book on myths and read it and see what it is, and just imitate it. Break it down.
13th audience speaker: When you speak of the behavior of the Heroquester, it reminds me of the Pendragon scenario, in the Tournament of Dreams. You know that one? Is that somewhat what you're thinking of?
GS: In a sense, yeah. In fact, all of Pendragon is like a heroquest. All of Pendragon, it doesn't matter... everybody's a knight, but what kind of a knight are you? And the whole Arthurian legend is heroquestish, in that sense. You might poison the Nemean Lion and not win, because this is a Hero's Quest, not a Trickster's Quest! So, you don't get the benefits, or you get something you didn't plan for, because you didn't behave properly. Does that answer it?
13: I was thinking particularly with that one scenario...
GS: Where they actually go to the Dreamlands?
13: Yeah, and their abilities are based on their behavior scores.
GS: I wouldn't make it that straight across. I envision a Heroquest being much like a regular adventure. There are trees, and people, and you walk around. It's a dream-like atmosphere, but not as straight-over where you're ....uh....
14th audience speaker: ...walking in a thing of dry-ice? (laughter)
GS: Uh, you might. But in the scenario that he's talking about, you get into dream combat and your chastity stat is equal to your sword skill for instance, and this kind of thing. I wouldn't make it that way, but it could be.
15th audience speaker: One of the things that I noticed that we as players translating in play - we're afraid of failure. And failure is just as important. I can see somebody heroquesting and failing, and you can have terrible consequences to the entire society for a thousand years and yet you repeat it to repair the problem. We were talking about how you haven't met a PC Humakti who was willing to "go all the way." I wonder would we not, as a group, run into the same problem with Heroquesting. There is no success without true failure as a real consequence, not just "oh by the way, you missed your roll, but I'll figure out a way to get you out of it."
GS: You're right. And in the Lightbringer's Heroquest it's mandatory that each person fail, and suffer miserably.
Nick Brooke: That is the whole point of the Hill of Gold Quest, isn't it?
GS: It's a big part of the Hill of Gold. You goof, you lose. And if you go on the Lightbringer's Quest and you don't lose, you might not succeed in the larger picture. And that thing about failing is a big thing. I wonder if it would be different if in RuneQuest you got checks for when you missed your roll to learn by? (laughter)
16th audience speaker: I understand that in Heroquesting you would want to reenact some of the actions from Godstime to get yourself closer to your god. Under that structure, how do you do something new?
GS: It's tough.
16: I've see an excerpt somewhere where Sir Ethelrist is traveling on his heroquest. It seems that he is exploring something he has never seen before and has no references. So, how do you do something new when everything you do is supposed to be a reenactment of a myth.
GS: You don't have to just do what's been done and reenact. Arkat's big secret was that he.... ... One of Arkat's lesser secrets (laughter) was that having gone through several initiation ceremonies, or heavy significant rites and rituals, he discovered that as a Hrestol knight ... I want to just step back one second and say all rituals and ceremonies are Heroquests. O.K.? Little ones. So, he in his Hrestoli ceremony at one point had to go to a certain place, I'll just say by the Red Rock, and he had to fight Orlanth, or a barbarian, and exit by the Thorn Bush. And he did it, of course. And he succeeded. Well, later on when he's being initiated as a Ralios Orlanthi, he discovers he has to go to this place by the Red Rock, fight this Western guy and exit by the Oak Tree. And he knows that by going to the Oak Tree, the next step, 'cause he knows the story, is that he's going to... I'm making this up on the spot, you know... is to cross the Green River where he's going to drowned. He knows that, as an Orlanthi he's gotta cross the Green River. Well, as an Orlanthi he comes and he's supposed to go out by the Oak Tree, and he says, "I don't want to go out that way. I want to go out by the Thorn Bush, because I've been there before." And he recognized this, that a lot of the conflict is cultural, and that he could cross myths. He could enter one and exit through another. And that's what he did, in order to do what he was able to do, that no one else since or before has been able to do. And that's how you make new things. By doing it and succeeding. Ethelrist made his own path, he was not following any specific individual. 'Cause he just sort of wandered around in Hell, kept coming back to life, and got out. And whatever he did to succeed then is a new story. And he tells it to his followers, and they say, "Well, you know, I want one of those demon horses too." And they do a portion of his story where he goes to the Underworld, conquers the Lord of Monsters, chooses the right animal, and brings it out with him. So that his followers then can do that little story that he made up.
17th audience speaker: My problem with the mythical heroquest is that very few involve gangs of heroes doing something, except the Argonauts. Heroquests are almost always one guy in a spotlight, and the other people are usually made to follow orders. It's very rare that our 3 or 4 player characters, who basically are like the Eurmali, all go off and decide they want to do this one thing and they all have the support of their clan and their church. It's a lot easier to have them just go to the Heroplane, which is populated by these creatures of myth, and see what happens.
GS: That's quite all right. And I think people do that a lot. I think everybody wants to succeed in life. A lot of people want to succeed the way Ethelrist did, you know, and do it and make up a new thing. And, the problem that you state that, of almost all these transformative myths and stories are about individuals... It's very rare, you know, to find a whole group of people doing this thing together. And that's a tough thing. My solution on it, on the Pendragon side, is that when we do the Grail Quest, each story at some point, is a solo scenario. Mandatory. In Pendragon, you know, they never do anything in a group that is spiritually significant, they always go off on solos, and you will have to do a solo in Pendragon in the Grail Quest to succeed. Because it is a problem, and it doesn't easily fit into our environment.
18th audience speaker: I think the problem is that in RuneQuest the game, every societal background has certain strengths and weaknesses. And invariable, as a party what you want to do is round that out and make all your strengths, everything a strength. So when you're talking about heroquests, you're talking about one society's vision, so therefore you're talking about all the strengths and all the weaknesses together, and it's hard to put all that together in a round circle, you know what I mean?
19th audience speaker: Well, you could just have a group of player characters go to a very dangerous place, have fun, and go home. (laughter) At the initiate level that could be that as well. At the Rune Lord/Rune Priest plus level there's nothing for them to do except go on Heroquests. And, frankly, the amount of work involved in generating a myth for each one of them is a bitch. Whereas, "Why don't we just go to the mythic magic level, kick some mythic butt, ..." (laughter) It's not nearly as meaningful as a true Heroquest, but it's a lot of fun.
GS: And it's an OK way to look at the game and to view it, and I think that even in Glorantha a number of people say, "You know, I'm not up to dedicating all of my life to getting to the Underworld, to going to Hell. Let's just go to the Black Mountain, and mess with trolls." (laughter) I think that's quite all right.
20th audience speaker: There was a story in the Cults of Prax about Biturian Varosh's travels in which Ruric appears and disappears, and supposedly he was on a Heroquest. Biturian Varosh could see a light in his eyes. Now, how does this correspond with this other world/invisible world business where he's popping in and out of the world doing various things?
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If so, you can find the rest of this transcript only in the RuneQuest Con 1 Compendium!
The RuneQuest Con 1 Compendium, with the classic Dan Barker cover of Harrek, also contains transcripts of the Lore Auction, Nick Brooke's Culture Exchange, and the Live Action Role Playing seminar, as well as seven stories from the Orlanthi Storytelling contest, and 20 narratives from the Home of the Bold freeform game.
To get your copy of this source of Gloranthan knowledge, you can order it from the man who brought us the RQ Con itself, David Cheng!
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Created: 27 August 1996
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