Were we anything like right?

[Thomas Devine]

A long time ago, a group I was playing with in the early 1980’s homebrewed our own HeroQuest rules. We were each playing a hero trying to become a Demigod/HERO! I always liked playing Ogres trying to reform their act. My hero was trying to become an Artist/Trickster God for the Lunar Pantheon. He actually had a cult center in New Pavis. His Runes were Moon (he was Lunar), Truth, Illusion, (he thought the best use of Illusion was to teach truth), Disorder, and Harmony (he thought the best use of Disorder was to clear the paths to Harmony).

I never read any HeroQuest stuff, is HeroQuesting about becoming a deity? Was the mix of Rune valid? Was trying to become an artist/trickster figure for the Lunars within the terms of that faith/mythology?

Please give me info.

[Joerg Baumgartner]

Truth and illusion are diametrically opposite runes. Having both at the same time requires full illumination, and then some… Same with disorder and harmony. In both cases, as a narrator I’d suggest you take the Trickster side of the pair (illusion and disorder), and let the other side result from your contrariness as a Trickster.

If he had moon rather than chaos, was he already somewhat “healed” of his chaos connection? Usually you’d expect an ogre to have the chaos rune, regardless whether he uses it or not. It is possible for lunar magicians to replace their moon rune with the chaos rune (that’s happening in one of the examples in the HQ Glorantha book), but I don’t think that they can reverse the process.

So, basically, in my hypothetical game, your character would be saddled with Chaos, Disorder and Illusion, and would undergo the arduous shift towards Moon, Harmony and Truth. He’d have had a Lunar mentor to establish the moon rune, possibly via illumination – and sitting in Pavis, why not use the Puzzle Canal as a tool to bring him toward Enlightenment.

He’d be suffering from irritating backdrops to his original runes during his struggle to be an artist demigod, falling back to the Trickster side. And I mean suffering – at least as much as his environment that gets tricked.

With the Trickster in mind, it might be possible to somehow protect the facade of the artist demigod, eating an unfortunate witness to the contrary ever now and then. The question remains (in any Trickster context) whether the professed ambition to be an entity of Moon, Harmony and Truth is a trick played on the cult following this character, or whether the character is tricked into believing this is what he is doing while pursuing the opposite. With Lunar illumination and mysticism around the corner, the character might make it to a presence on the moon, or he might transcend those pesky concerns and move on to the ultimate using the residual draconic magic of the Puzzle Canal, or return to the Chaos Void his ancestors came from.

The Empire wouldn’t say no to a new Lunar deity of art, but they’d think thrice before supporting a Trickster cult. The moon temples might care less about the Trickster aspect and support your character, but they would also likely field a rival or two for Lunar godhood that would like to take over your achievements for their goals. Then there is Gim Gim the Grim, the Lunar field agent on site who would be your likely contact, patron, or later rival, and there would be the events that lead Pavis into the Hero Wars like the Cradle incident and a few years later the Praxian beast riders under the White Bull conquering Pavis – unless you (and the rest of your group) managed to prevent that, YGWV after all.

Depending on the exact time frame of your adventures, you might have been at the Siege of Whitewall, the Battle of the Aurochs Hills, the Battle of Pennel Ford, and/or the Dragonraising. At times, not necessarily on the side of the Empire. As a Trickster, you might have been the catalyst for other nastiness.

The main twist to allow such a character into canon would be to limit him to three of those runes and use some sort of mystical questing to make them flip – or possibly to develop a split personality, a Dr. Jekyll artist with the runes of moon, truth and harmony, and his Mr. Hide ogre dropback with chaos, disorder and illusion, and possibly unaware of the other, possibly embracing this dualism. At some point, both of them might be present in body.

Anyhow – playing anything Trickster related is about suffering for your character and his victims alike.

Were you anything like right? I would say yes.

[Pentallion]

If you played this in the 80’s, you were playing RQ. Characters “having” Runes was not introduced in the 80’s.

[Thomas Devine]

Pentallion, it was a homebrew system that I haven’t seen since the first Reagan administration. I may have my terms wrong and we certainly were only accidentally like real HeroQuest.

[Thomas Devine]

Interesting analysis Joerg. Maybe I’ll get to use some of these ideas after I’ve been able to snag the books.

Thanks.

[Peter Metcalfe]

If you played this in the 80’s, you were playing RQ. Characters “having” Runes was not introduced in the 80’s.

There may not have been rules for it but the concept existed in RuneQuest. For example, the entry for the Infinity Rune in RQ2 went “He who possesses the Infinity Rune is almost a god himself”.

[Pentallion]

There may not have been rules for it but the concept existed in RuneQuest. For example, the entry for the Infinity Rune in RQ2 went “He who possesses the Infinity Rune is almost a god himself”.

Yes, but that was back in the day when we were all waiting for the rules for questing onto the Hero Plane and gaining those runes -along with the rules of how they worked – under the assumption they wouldn’t radically change game systems on us before they introduced it.

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