(Robin Laws, Greg Stafford, Roderick Robertson, Shannon Appel, 2000, $19.95 and $14.95)
Presentation: F
Style: B
Value: C+
Game: B-
Narrative: A
Simulation: C-
It was almost twenty years after the promise of Hero Wars before it actually made it to print. The promise of a game, set in Greg Stafford's rich world of Glorantha, that would be a compatible evolution to the highly realistic and simulationist game RuneQuest which, at the time, was the serious contender to Dungeons and Dragons. Contrary to the claims of some, the high levels of simulationist realism and the otherworldly depth of the setting did not make the game a "schizophrenic experience", rather it meant it satisfied both narrative and simulation orientated players. RuneQuest was a great game, and is quite possible still the best role playing game ever produced. But it simply didn't work when characters were at the amazingly high-powered levels required for Hero Questing. That's what Hero Wars is supposed to be about.
Glorantha deserves a brief and special mention. Unlike generic worlds common in most fantasy role playing games, the quasi-medieval-Conan-Tolkien soup, Glorantha is truly special. It's a bronze age world, where bronze is the bones of dead gods, and crystals are the remains of their blood. The world is flat, floating on the sea of the eternal cosmos with a giant whirlpool in the centre of the world. Elves are walking, sentient plants, dragons go through a unique process of evolution and reincarnation, trolls are cursed with inferior breeding and the entire world is threatened by the potential return of Chaos. Everyone is tied to a religion, their culture and has some magic.
Hero Wars takes this setting a level further in the game. This is the proverbial "it", The End of the World, a situation originally hinted in the original RuneQuest, and heavily emphasized in the RuneQuest: Genertela, Crucible of the Hero Wars. Starting characters are placed in Dragon Pass, where all the trouble starts, as it often does. Characters are considered to be of medium experience, and ready to take on the troubled time, although the system readily adapts to novices and experts.
Before getting into the game system proper, a note must be made about the format and presentation. To be blunt, it's awful. The artwork, both interior and cover, is average-good but that's the high point. The Table of Contents is extremely brief providing chapter headings only. There is no Index, which is utterly unforgivable. Further, there is insufficient grounding or signposting in the setting and the rules, making reading the book and understanding how the game works a difficulty in itself. It simply does not have a clear, intuitive structure. There are character encoding errors, tables that split across pages, and it's released in trade paperback format, further exacerbating the time taken to find something.
That said, the writing style is quite good. The introduction is short and to the point. Sentences are unambigious and clear, written in a manner that neither insults the intelligence of the reader or forcing them into period of intense study. Examples are relevant and illustrative and the use of icon markers throughout to key points is quite helpful. Indeed, had the book been structured differently, designing and introducing characters to play would be a trivially enjoyable task.
Character generation is based around a one hundred word narrative description or a list of ten keywords. Nearly all characters will have, for example, a culture, an occupation and a type of magic which generates a wide range of abilities. An important innovation is the abolition of the traditional role playing distinction between traits (e.g., strength, dexterity, intelligence) and skills (swordfighting, climbing, mathematics) into simple 'abilities'. If an ability is not specified it is assumed to be normal. Whilst one can certainly appreciate the notion of keywords and the simplicity of abilities over the traditional trait/skill distinction, is is also equally clear that the latter is open to significant abuse as calculating players would choose wide-ranging abilities. Whilst a narrator should make these wide-ranging abilities less effective than more specific ones, exactly how less effective is not a subject which the game provides particular elaboration.
Abilities are rated from 1 to 20, with success indicated by a roll of less than the ability on d20. A critical success is a roll of 20, and a critical failure a roll of 1, except when ability ratings are 20 or 1, in which case the results are simple failures and simple successes. Abilities greater than 20 are a level of mastery and are denoted by cryptic reverse notation such as 13w2. That rating is 53, by the way; 13 + 20 x 2. Each level of mastery allows a "bump" in effect. A failure becomes a success, a success becomes a critical success and so forth. In a contested contest, masteries cancel each other out. In rough simulation terms, a single mastery is an ability of a skilled occupation level, two masteries of a genuine master, three is of heroic level and four is demigod level. One effect of the static critical range is that as a character's ability rating increases towards 20 the proportion of their failures that are critical failures increases to 50% of all failed rolls and then suddenly falls to zero.
Four degrees of success or defeat result from ability tests. These include marginal, minor, major, complete with varying degrees of lasting effect. An ill-considered rule is the negative applied for group simple contests. Mathematically, as it stands, it is more effective to have a single skilled character engage in an activity rather than having a number of their less skilled friends assisting as their probably failures or fumbles will add to their group total. Imagine if you will, a tug-o-war under such circumstances. Again what is witnessed is a admirably simple mechanism with poor execution and lack of elaboration. The two pages of sample resistances and abilities is a useful start, but hardly sufficient by any stretch of the imagination.
The execution of abilities is perhaps one of the strongest narrativist components of the game. Whilst simple actions are a competition between relative ability ratings, the real excitement comes with extended actions, where a character's ability rating is converted into "Action Points" which are then bid in a number of contests against an opponent. Extended Actions and Action Points are like dramatic scenes in a narrative, where the ebb and flow of a conflict is given extra detail. A usual strategy is to bid lightly at first, to find an opponents weakness whilst not risking too much to one's own AP total, but when there is a degree of certainty, to deliver a "knock out". Whilst this does replicate a great deal of heroic literature (or film, or whatever) the acceptance of these narrative conventions is assumed as aesthetic pleasing. Those who admired the simulationist rules of RuneQuest where a trollkin with a sling shot killed the mighty Rurik Runespear with a lucky shot to the head will doubtless be disappointed, but those who thought that Heroes simply shouldn't be subject to such offensive realism because it ruins a story will be impressed. In a nutshell, Heroic characters are effectively protected from the truly mundane. This does work well as a narrative device.
Extended and group contests can be modified by augmentation (a modifier to the target number, e.g., applying another ability to assist, such as Melodic Voice to Oratory), an edge or handicap (a modifier to the APs bid, e.g., the use of a greatsword rather than a dagger), or lending APs (e.g., a friend inspiring a character on). The fact that only one of each can be used with a particular ability at a time is problematic; in all probability a character with Close Combat, Great Strength and Ferocity could use both their Great Strength and Ferocity at the same time to aid their Close Combat, not just one or the other as required by the rules. Of course, this would lead to an imbalance in the game. A workable alternative would be to reduce the effect by 50% for each additional augmentation (so the second is at 1/2 value, the third at 1/4 value etc).
Ability execution is simple, consistent, and adaptable. Time is expressly fluid, ranging from the handful of seconds of furious conflict to months for the debates of bickering tribes, with the system remaining exactly the same. However, like so many other aspects of the game it is flawed by a lack of attention to stated modifiers and a lack of elaboration. For example, the bite of a cat provides an edge of 0, whereas a blow from a greatsword provides an edge of +5. In a game where the medium ability scale is from 12 - 40, this is simply bizarre. Now whilst it is true that edges and handicaps are primarily a narrative device, the are also a simulation device as every narrative must maintain some sense of plausibility. The ranges suggested in combat weaponary push the suspension of disbelief a little too far. Again it's a case of a great idea, but poor execution.
The last six chapters, representing almost forty percent of the total text in the Hero Wars book, is dedicated to magic. There are four types, theistic, sorcerous, animist and mystical each with particular abilities. Theists, with their multiplicity of Gods per pantheon, have divine aid, affinities and feats, Sorcerers, worshippers of the single invisible God, have collections of related spells in grimoires which require a talisman, whereas Animists have integrated spirits, which grant the shaman an ability, bound spirits or fetishes which allow the use of an ability for a limited number of times per day (or even once-only for a marginal success). The new spell realm to RuneQuest players is Mysticism, where, by keeping a related physical, mental and spiritual ability in "balance" (i.e., within 10 points) they are able to engage in defensive "counters" or aggressive "strikes". In general, the magic system is flexible and fairly well described. One notable change is that the runes, once upon a time the dominant motif of Glorantha, have both increased in number and decreased in narrative importance.
The second book of Hero Wars is the significantly shorter Narrator's Book. A little more attention seems to have been paid to character encoding and layout (there is still split tables), but it still suffers the problems of the impoverished table of contents, complete lack of index, and the trade paperback format - indeed the seventh chapter isn't mentioned in the table of contents at all! The first six chapters deal mainly with setting elaborations and hints. For example, the first chapter concerns itself with to narrate a game and describes some basic literary devices and describes the awarding of Hero Points, which are used for character advancement and direct game intervention. The third chapter examines in greater detail the nature of relationships that the characters have or build in the course of the game and the operation of community membership. Chapters four, five and six describe respectively, sample hero bands, various natural and supernatural creatures, and a brief history and description of Glorantha.
Properly considered, the chapter introducing Glorantha should have been very early in the first book to give readers a proper grounding in the world. It could have also done with a map of Dragon Pass and the neighbouring territory of Prax, seeming that's where all the action occurs. The creatures chapter shows some of the serious scaling problems when a narrative rather than simulation means of resolution is taken. A horse, presumably not an important character, has a strength of a mere 2W with a kick with an edge of only +1! The chapter on relationships really doesn't provide any information that is of earth-shattering importance, although the seven levels of support is a nice generic structure. The sample hero bands' chapter could have been reduced to one good example, rather than several mediocre examples. It comes across as merely filler, an exercise in typing.
An important chapter of the Narrator's Book, and considered separately in this review, is the second chapter on Otherworld magic. This describes the various difficulties characters will encounter on trying to reach and operate in "the other side" as they engage in the supernatural Hero Quests, which the game is supposed to be about. The multiplicity of styles of magic are replicated as multiple planes of existence, such as the God Plane, the Spirit Plane and the Sorcery Plane. The internal world of the Mystics seems to be missing entirely, meaning that mystics are considered to be in alien world in all other cases. One important rule contribution, and again a very effective narrative mechanic, is the use of carryover edge or handicap as a band of heroes goes from station to station in their Quest. The total carryover of the Quest determines what happens to the community who initiated the Quest - it is possible that the entire community is destroyed by a particularly disastrous quest, even if the characters are relatively unharmed!
The final chapter is a sample scenarios which can be potentially combined into a Hero Quest, The Rising Dark. Each scenario is designed to be completed over one or two game sessions and takes the opportunity to introduce players - and narrators - to key resolution and action methods in the game. The stories themselves are actually incredibly simple, but a fair bit of effort has been put into giving the story extra flavour and, in the case of the final scenario, quite a challenge.
Hero Wars is an extremely frustrating product to evaluate, let alone to actually read. The world of Glorantha has always been rich and magical and of course with this game there is no exception. There are some excellent ideas, especially in narrative game design and as an example of how to design with elegant simplicity. It does scale reasonably well, and particularly well for high-powered games. However which are hampered, indeed almost hamstrung, by simply not being thought out or tested fully enough or not being elaborated sufficiently. These facts will mean that Hero Wars comes as an enormous let-down to those loyal RuneQuest players who spent almost twenty years for the promise of a revolutionary role playing game. The problems in layout, structure and design further enhance the frustration and disappointment. Ultimately, it could really do with a complete rewrite, which is of course, exactly what has happened. However, from what I've seen whilst the rewrite does apparently deal with the more petty problems of layout and design byr certainly not all. It also removes Mysticism and it doesn't deal with some of the more fundamental problems mentioned in this review.
Last update May 24th, 2005