Hi all!

I've been lurking on SG for a while now, and thought I should finally jump in with a first post. Recently, I ran my first session of the new revised edition of HeroQuest, and figured that was good fodder for an introductory post. If you're into this game, or interested in it at all, read on... (note that I posted a very similar version of this to RPG.net throughout the process of prepping and running the game.)

So, last week I was asked to run a game for a friend's group. The GM (my friend) hadn't had time to prep his game, and knew I'd been wanting to run HQ, so he asked if I could. Problem was, the game night was the very next day, and I had nothing prepared.

Pregame Prep

Not to be thwarted, I used this as a test to prove my theory that HeroQuest is a great 'make it up as you go' RPG. The morning of the game, I e-mailed the players five settings to choose from, and decided that when we got to the table, we'll not only detail the setting (ala "Mortal Coils") but just hit the ground running, using the "Make it up as you go" character option.

For what it's worth, the group was comprised of 6 guys, most of whom have only played 3.x D&D and GURPS. HQ was going to be a very different experience for them.

Here are the five settings I pitched to them:

1 - Mystical Ice Age mammoth hunters with one foot in the spirit
world.

2 - "Heavy Metal"-inspired album art fantasy world. (ala: http://www.rodneymatthews.com/recordcovers.htm#)

3 - Horror in the Old West

4 - Traders and pirates of the spacelanes

5 - Myth and fantasy collide on the mean streets of the modern world.

And after a couple of hours back and forth via e-mail, they settled on #5 (Myth and fantasy in the modern world).

Of course, I was sort of hoping they'd go for either #1 (Ice Age) or #2 (Album art fantasy).

So, this ended up serving really well as a test of how well the game works with just about no prep at all, because I had already started thinking up ideas for 1 & 2, and had nothing at all for 5.

For those who're interested, here's the 'Make it up as you go Setting Detail system' I used. It's somewhat inspired by my vague memories from reading the "Mortal Coils" RPG a few years ago.

I gave each player three glass bead tokens. Then starting with the first player to my right, I'm going to ask him to pay a token to cement one 'Fact' about the world.

At that point, any player can chime in and spend a token to augment or alter his fact. I kept a cache of 6 tokens of my own for this.

So, maybe someone could say "People can cast spells". And then it could be augmented by me or another player saying, "But they have to spill blood to do so." Or something. Keep going until we've got enough of a framework to get moving.

Game Night

I arrived to the game with nothing but the rulebook, blank character sheets, dice, a notepad and my custom GM screen. The other players had brought along miniatures, bags of dice and other acoutrements d' gaming. Once we had everyone at the table, I just sat down and started explaining the barest bones of the system. Mostly at this point, I focussed on the setting creation system we were going to use.

After about twenty minutes back and forth, this is what we ended up with. Note that any fact with a double-hyphen preceding it is a modification of an existing fact.

Core: Myth and Fantasy collide in the mean streets of the modern world.

Facts:

Gods have a true language, and it can affect reality.
-- Supernaturals can speak it.

Wood is more flammable than in the 'real' world.
-- but fire is rarer.

"Sacred" places express themselves more, and are 'thinner' barriers of the spirit world.

The Wisdom of Children is under-appreciated.
-- Dreams of young children portend the future.

THere is only 2 hours of darkness per day.
-- but only the SUpernaturals notice this.

Magic calls out for blood.

All illnesses are from demons and spirits.

Non-incinerated dead rise in 12 hours.
-- only human corpses
-- spirits of cremated animals walk with Heroes
-- the spirits of cremations reincarnate in 1 year exactly.
-- If a hero reincarnates repeatedly, it conjoins with its animal spirit companion.

There is Machine Magic

The internet is mature enough that AIs roam free.

"New Souls" can use magic an know god-speak.

After that, the players got to the business of making characters. I quickly ran them through character generation, and about half an hour later we had the bare bones of:

A Deformed Deranged Demonologist

A Badass Motorcycle Ninja

A Banished Werepanther

A Murderous Lizard Warrior

An Arrogant Professional Wrestler

So... after we came up with all that, I just took a step back and thought about it for a few minutes.

To kick the thing off, I decided that:

The Demonologist was experiencing time gaps/loss of time

The Werepanther was being ignored by cats

The Lizard warrior hadn't dreamed in a month

The motorcycle ninja... everywhere he went, children would notice him, and watch him inscrutably.

The Wrestler was being watched by televisions. Whenever he went anywhere there was a TV, the people on the TV (even cartoon characters) would stop whatever they were doing, and watch him.

And from there, it got weird...

Running the Game

So, the PCs all decided that they were among the only "Supernaturals" in the city, and once a month they met at the home of the demonologist to discuss news and events that might pertain to them. They were just starting their monthly meeting when the game started. The first thing that happened, was that the demonologist's cats all wandered away and completely ignored the werepanther.

All of them brought up the strange things that had been happening to them over the last month, and agreed that something was indeed affecting each of them. Why was the big question.

The demonologist and the werepanther went to his Occult Workshop, and decided to contact the Outer Spirits to tell them what was going on. Rolled some dice, and a hole opened up in the floor of the room. Cancerous, slimy, bubbling, and very, very sentient ooze started bubbling up from the hole, until it filled the summoning circle, and was about the size of a large dog.

The two PCs didn't know what exactly to do, until the thing started speaking right into their minds, asking them why they'd summoned it, etc. They asked some questions, then felt it tugging at their minds. The Occultist resisted, but the werepanther felt his mind being sucked in to the mass... cut to...

The Motorcycle Ninja decided he was going to work with the Wrestler to find out what was going on with the televisions. They put a TV in front of the Wrestler, turned it on and watched. It was playing some random "Court TV" show, and the characters were arguing about something, then everyone on the TV screen stopped what they were doing, and stared at the Wrestler. They started walking closer and closer to the screen, eyes going black, and just staring at him. The PCs then turned off the TV. When they turned it on, the people were in exactly the same positions.

Weird. Back to the basement/occultist room, and the Werepanther shook off the influence of the demonblob, and rended it with his panther claws. It let out one last psychic shriek, and said something about how it would have their souls, and departed. They went upstairs...

To find the Ninja and the Wrestler still fucking around with television sets. They tried the same trick on Youtube, and other internet things. Finally, the ninja used his "Machine Magic" ability to talk to the television. He found out that the Machine Mind was fascinated with the wrestler, and wanted to eat him.

That kind of freaked them out. So, they all decided to get the hell out of the house, and go to the local bar and talk more. On the way, they noticed kids watching after the ninja, as described earlier, and the 'loss of time' which the Occultist was having. It was literally like he'd just zone out for a moment, and walk along, having a nonsensical conversation, and then 'pop' back in twenty, thirty feet along. He'd just have no memory of how he got there.

At that point, they got to the bar, and talked some more. The TV people started watching the wrestler again, and he went up to touch the TV. As he did, one of them stuck their hand out of the TV, and the ghostly blue appendage grabbed his hand and started to draw him into the set. The ninja jumped up quickly, sliced off the hand of the TV person, and freed the wrestler.

The odd part, was that none of the other people in the bar paid them the slightest notice.

That was about the point we wrapped it up.

I spilled the 'secret' of the session to them at that point, figuring I might never get a chance to run a follow up. The basic premise I'd cooked up at some point, was that a malevolent entity was playing off of, and eating something important to each of them:

Secrecy for the ninja

Knowledge and perception for the demonologist

Family for the werepanther

And I can't remember how I explained the thing with the TV for the wrestler, but it was basically that television was the way he was known to his fans, but then the medium turned against him.

And I've not mentioned the lizardman through all this, simply because his player was beat, dead-tired, and kept falling asleep through the game. No hard feelings, of course. I knew he'd had a really long drive to the game, as well as a shitty day at work.

So, that was that. Again, what really impressed me the most about the game was how easy it was to run off-the-cuff. I had none of this stuff planned out beforehand. It wasn't the most interesting, or detailed plot ever, but it was really simple to pull stuff out of my ass as we were playing along.

If I did it again, I'd probably have gotten them out of the house earlier, or only had weird things happen to one of them. Or made the whole thing even more existential. Never let them leave the house at all, and see if I can turn up the heat to turn them against each other somehow.

All in all, a very worthwhile experiment. I'm looking forward to reading the game book again, to see what I was doing wrong (inevitably, I always screw up some rule here or there on my first few sessions).

That's that. For what it's worth, I'm gearing up to run another HQ game at DunDraCon next weekend. Nothing official, but getting together with a few pals to play. I'm doing a bit more prepwork on the setting this time, and coming up with the barebones of a 'quest' of some sort to throw at them. But I'm still going to use the setting creation system to let them affect the world in interesting ways. I'll report back on that one, as well, if anyone's interested.

Buzz --

Yes, indeed the whole game was pushed forward with the Pass/Fail system, as presented in the book. I really did run it by-the-book, modifying difficulties based on cumulative successes and failures.

That being said, my group was really rolling quite poorly. Even on the few instances when we came up with tied successes, normally the "World" had a lower die result than the PCs, thus getting Minor Victories over them.

It was an interesting first try with the game. I'm running it again at DunDraCon this weekend for some friends, and think that in this case, when there are ties, I'm going to default to "PCs Win". In other words, if I'm going to make the story about the PCs exploring the setting, I'm going to give them the benefit of things going their way more often than not.

The Pass/Fail cycle will still help with the narrative 'beats', because the cumulative successes/failures will still make things bumpy for them. All-in-all, though, I really like this system, and the players all had a great time.

Did the token economy work for fact-assertion? Did you loose any cool ideas? How often did you step in?

encourage players to use their HP more than they do in the RAW

I've so far seen Hero Points being spent more for doing stuff than for advancement, so I think the dynamic you are seeing probably isn't generated by rules only.

I'm not saying the dynamic I'm seeing is due to rules either -- just that the HP flow is subject to several pressures:

1) Difference between victory/defeat levels in narration: if there is a perceptible difference between Marginal and Minor Victory, people are more likely to spend the HP to make the boost.

2) Active teaching. While players are getting their feet wet, it can be worthwhile to remind them of the ability to spend HPs after rolling. "What's going to happen is X. If you spend a HP now Y will happen instead."

3) Awareness of expected campaign length. In short campaigns advancement tends to be less important, so people are freer with the HPs.

4) Amount of HPs used on behalf of the opposition, so people are enticed to counter those spends: this means they get to see the effects even if they don't use HPs themselves. (I reserve 1 HP per player per session for NPC spends, usable by any NPC.)

One trick that I've used in other games to get the spends rolling is to say that points cannot be spent for advancement until they have been spent on other stuff. That is, in HQ, player are given Hero Points, which become "Advancement Points" when spent on boosts. Waste not, want not. :)