Guidelines for converting Hero Wars characters to HeroQuest?

[Oracle]

While still in the process of preparing my first HeroQuest Glorantha campaign it seemed useful to me to use some of the already existing Hero Wars adventures (e.g. Babarian Adventures) for getting a start point in my campaign. This raised immediately the question, what would be the best way to convert NPC stats given in these adventures into the respective HeroQuest stats. While this does not need any changes in several places, there are areas, where I’m unsure how to handle given stats (e.g. edges and handicaps). So I did a bit of internet research and detected several references to conversion guide lines available online. The sad thing is, that given links either did not work anymore (e.g. http://www.heroquest-rpg.com/) or were not given at all.

So the obvious question is: are these guidelines still available anywhere?
And if not, any other hints how to proceed?

[Douglas Crawford]

The thing with HQ2 is that NPCs don’t have stats anymore – you just assign a difficulty rating based on the situation or the pass/fail cycle. I think for PC’s you are better off just generating them from scratch.

[Oracle]

I would wholeheartedly agree – as long as we’re talking about opponents and other obstacles. But what about allies or companions, especially if we talk about some well-established characters like e.g. one or two of Kallyr Starbrows companions? I wouldn’t even dare to think about inventing them new, so I stay with existing descriptions. But if the descriptions are only available in Hero Wars format, I would like to transfer the given data, abilities to HeroQuest too. It would be probably not too complicated to do it myself, but if there would be some helpful hints from more experienced Glorantha specialist, I would appreciate that.

Or maybe I’m just still too number-obsessed and not yet enough narrative-convinced :-). (I don’t think so, but you never know …)

[Christoph Kohring]

You said it yourself, Oracle, you’re “just still too number-obsessed and not yet enough narrative-convinced”! While it made sense to convert NPCs from HW to HQ1, it does not to convert them from HW/ HQ1 to HQ2 (either HQ:CR or HQ:G). What do you want to do with those “well-established characters”? Convince one of them? Set the difficulty just like for any other contest…

[Harald Smith]

Because those HW/HQ1 stats incorporated edges and lots of possible augments, they don’t transfer well. And as noted above, there’s not much reason to spend time doing so.

For characters that you want to emphasize, if you want to have some variability added in, give them a general ranking (Kallyr is Very Hard – reflects her magical and social level) and other rankings for an ability or two you think important (Kallyr is Friend to Orlanthi at Moderate, etc.). And that’s really if you want to have a static difficulty for them.

[Author]

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