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Zero-to-Hero vs. Starting In Media Res

Posted on January 11, 2025

I’m a big fan of letting the players start with competent adventurers – and RQG (and indeed most games I work on) reflect that. This not only reflects the amount of sessions most campaigns actually get (far less than you might think), but it also reflects the assumptions of the sword and sorcery genre itself. Our adventurers start capable of having exciting adventurers – and we don’t need to spend the first half-dozen sessions achieving competence. We jump right into the action, with the next power level becoming a Rune Master (which now becomes a realistic and feasible goal).

Now I know there are those who like Zero to Hero, but that assumes longer games than most people get the chance to play. If you are someone who regularly pulls off twenty-plus session campaigns, that’s great! But it is hardly the norm for tabletop gaming. Zero to Hero greatly restricts what we can do for the first half-dozen or so sessions, which means that most people only get to play the Zero. Again, that’s cool if that is what you want to do, but that’s neither where most gamers are nor what the main theme of Glorantha and RQ is.

Also it is not terribly true to sword and sorcery or history for that matter. Conan is a fearsome fighter when he first appears in Tower of the Elephant. Fafhrd is naive and ignorant of the world when we meet him as an 18-year old in The Snow Women, but he is already a skilled swordsman and singer. Alexander was only 18-years old when he led his father’s left flank at Chaeronea. Harald Sigurdsson was only 15 at the Battle of Stiklestad, and was only 19 when he led his Varangians in Constantinople.

Anyways, if you prefer starting with unskilled characters and want to game through the whole process of becoming competent, go for it. But my strong preference is to start your game competent and have the character development be more about your adventures and achieving Rune mastery.

At the risk of being a little controversial, I think a lot of the fondness for zero-to-hero comes out of nostalgia for playing roleplaying games as a teenager with all the time in the world.

Now if you want to do Zero to Hero in RQG, that’s easy enough and the game even gives rules for starting with less skilled characters. But’s that’s not the default.

Running the same characters through multiple campaigns, in our experience RQG gets troublesome to balance and GM once characters have dozens of rune points. At least for us. Advice on how to handle this would be appreciated. Balance is probably being misused. A Rune Lord is a heroic figure, and is going to be a deadly threat to anything that is not a Rune Lord or otherwise capable of Rune Lord-like feats of magic and skill (so vampires, larger dream dragons, big giants, dragonewt full priests, etc.). When two Rune Lords meet, it is like a nuclear exchange – who knows what will happen.

So if you have a Rune Lord in the party, give them a real adventure like –

  • Go and wave our cult’s standard in front of the stronghold of its rival and attract its champion (likely another Rune Lord).
  • Go to some place at the edge of the world (the Genert Wastes, the Crack, Valind’s Glacier, Magasta’s Whirlpool) and bring back some famed item.
  • Track down the Rune Master that is unifying the local Chaos cults and kill it.
  • Impress the Queen of Esrolia with your power so that we can get an alliance with her.
  • Force our cult enemy to accept your challenge and beat the stuffings out of them.
  • Escort the princess or the princess to a far-off land so they can marry the ruler and we get an alliance out of it.

Those sorts of adventures might involve fighting your equal, dealing with things that can’t just be fought, or just going to the edge of the world. Its not about balance – it is about accepting that a Rune Lord is the incarnation of their deity in the world and so everything they do should feel like something out of a legend or epic.

If you are sending your Rune Lord to check out the ruins in Griffin Gate, you might be shooting a little low.

And nothing I described above would require new rules.

What if you have a game that doesn’t reflect that but instead lets characters go from zero to hero in less than 12 sessions? In a game like RQ you sure want to start with some competence. But in games where you progress much faster, it can be fun to start at zero. If that’s what you want to do, do it. In general, I am biased against Zero to Hero as I personally find it among the least interesting of story tropes. Interestingly, in other genres we are more likely to find “Seeming Zero who actually has the powers of Hero” rather than Zero to Hero. Look at almost every anime series – in Bleach, Ichigo goes from zero to hero in the first episode! After that it is a question of how awesomely hero he is. Same thing with Theseus – he is a seeming nobody, but gets dad’s sword and then proves his awesomeness to everyone, only to learn he is the prince of Athens.

In gaming, the design purpose of zero to hero is to let the players learn the system, but honestly it can just as easily go from “uncomplicated competent to complicated super-competent”. You want a few sessions to figure out how you want to develop your magic and so on, how to get spirits and magic items, and all that. But no reason not to start at being very competent in your core specialities and work your way out from there. Unless you really like the Zero to Hero as a storyline.

I think accumulation of Rune Points better tracks the feel of zero to hero than skill progression.

Low level play isn’t popular because that is not what our stories are about outside of TTRPG/video games. People want to play the protagonists of fantasy stories – and although there is a subgenre of “incompetent heroes” that is hardly the mainstream in myth, legend, epic, television, or movies.

So if we are playing the Mahabharata or the Iliad, we want to play protagonists in that story, not some poor suffering peasant levy. Same thing in Glorantha – we have a mythic fantasy setting of sword and sorcery warriors and magicians who strive towards becoming the embodiments of their cults in the world (e.g., participate in the Hero Wars). It is not unreasonable that the default setting is to get them right into that, rather than have them spend the first half-dozen sessions playing fresh faced kids.

Now again, do that if you want to. But that’s not the default.


Jeff Richard

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