My campaign came to a point in which the PCs went on a hero quest, so I needed hero questing rules. Since there aren’t any rules for hero quests, I had to make my own.
The rules I made are inspired by and really copy a lot from Simon Phipp. If you haven’t already, you should check out his take from here:
https://www.soltakss.com/indexheroquesting.html#HeroQuesting
I have partaken in many discussions dealing with hero questing in discord and elsewhere. Therefore it is safe to assume that what was not inspired/copied from Simon’s page was rooted to my brain from those discussions and ended up here.
In short, I claim no intellectual ownership to any of this. I just think it would be useful to try and write a clear set of rules you can use for hero questing.
Basics
Hit Points
During a Hero Quest, your "Hit Points" are a combination of your Magic Points, Rune Points, Heropoints (explained later), and any additional points provided by community support rituals.
Community suppor rituals
When a hero quest starts with a huge ritual set up by the questers community, the questers should get boons from it. I have given them extra magic points (5-15) to represent this. (It could be good to come up with something more creative too, like a one use item they can use to bypass a known station maybe?)
No Magic Use
During a Hero Quest, you are unable to use any form of magic, including Rune Magic, Spirit Magic, or Sorcery.
Metaphysical Equipment
You won't have your physical gear during a Hero Quest. Instead, you possess what your 'metaphysical concept' would have. Likely this means that you look like what ever deity or hero you embody in the myth or you might look like yourself wearing what you would wear and carrying what you would carry, but since actions on the hero quests are handled differently your gear are important only in the sense of how they affect the story and how the PC's narrate their actions.
Structure of a Hero Quest
Stations
Hero Quests consist of "stations", or parts of a myth. Each station presents a challenge that has a standard resolution according to the myth. I won't go in more detail on the stations. You should really look at Simon Phipp's page if you do not yet understand the concept.
Resolution
To resolve a station, describe your actions and roll against a suitable Rune. The station also rolls (story opposes the questers effort to overcome the challenge), providing opposition strength based on the Quest's difficulty. This conflict is handled like spirit combat, but uses Runes instead of the spirit combat skill. Deplete the station's magic points to win. Some stations may be overcome with a simple success. If the station wins a round, the heroquester takes damage to their ‘hitpoints’, which can not be replenished during a quest. I have run this so that every quester has to combat the station taking turns and the station strikes back at each quester in turn. This means that every quester has to face each station which makes hero questing in general more difficult.
Path Deviation
If you deviate significantly from the myth's resolution, your actions could lead you into a different myth, changing the course of the quest. For the hero quest I created, I made up a couple of dangerous encounters for if the PCs decide to wander off from the relatively safe path of the known myth.
Failure
If a questers hit points are gone, they will fail their quest. Usually this means being dumbed out of the hero plane with some kind of negative effect. I haven’t drafted comprehensive rules for these, but in general each quest should have some stakes and if you lose, you lose what you bid. For example in my Money Tree quest the victory condition meant +25% to Apple Lane's prosperity roll for the next year. A failure of a PC would have meant -50% to that persons roll and if the whole quest would have failed, the whole community would have suffered that. Other quests should have other rewards and costs.
Other stuff
Each quest has a myth it is based on. If the hero quester handles the challenges of the stations according to myth (using their knowledge of it), the opposition should be weaker, or the quester should be granted bonuses to their rune.
For example, a station might be a challenge in which the questers have to fight a spider of darkness. The station has a darkness rune 75% and 25 hit points. In the myth the hero defeated the spider by cutting its web with the sword Death. Hence if a quester attacks it with death rune and describes their actions accordingly, they get +25% to their rune for this challenge.
In this challenge it would be practical to use runes to fight the creature, but someone might as well use illusion rune to misdirect the spider, harmony to talk to it or movement to escape it. Runes and methods which are far off the myth can work, but they should be penalized with negative modifiers. When creating a hero quest adventure with these rules, it would be advisable to consider different runes and how well they work on each station.
Players will probably want to use their strongest runes for every situation, but to be a successful hero quester, you need to have skill in different runes and know your myths. People with maxed 1 or 2 runes and no knowledge will end up badly on the hero plane.
Rewards and Consequences
Skills & Items
Successfully resolving a station can result in an automatic increase in a related skill, an item brought back from the Hero Plane, or a trick that you can repeat in the Middle World. I have given standard experience marks to the runes when they are used on the quests and another ‘special’ experience marks to a skill which corresponds to the action the quester is acting out. For instance in the combat example with the spider above, the quester striking with the sword death, would get a standard experience mark on their death rune and a special mark on their sword attack skill if they attack successfully.
The Special marks are special in that they will always grant the PC d6% in the skill. This means that doing a lot of hero questing will eventually raise your skills to superhuman levels.
Artifacts
Some quests could let you bring back artifacts from the hero plane. I haven’t created any quests which would allow this so I can’t give examples, but it’s worth mentioning anyway. Supposedly any items brought back would be powerful magic items. If you make quests that allow bringing artifacts, you should consider additional price for these. For example “The Sword Death”, could be a (Humakti) sword which does double damage, but to gain it, the quester would have to take 3 geases from the Humakti list of geases.
Hero Points
To gain the ability to repeat a trick you pulled off in your quest in the Middle World, you need to sacrifice 1 POW to your hero point pool after the quest. To be able to do this, you have to do something special on the quest as well. This is so because the hero point represents the quester making a mark on the hero plane and in a sense creating something that will make them part of the myth.
In play hero points are handled like rune points. They can be used to cast your character’s rune spells or the special hero tricks (which work like rune spells). They also give your hero more hit points on hero quests and when making divine interventions, you can use them like rune points.
To refresh the Hero Point pool, you require worshippers to sacrifice magic points to your myth in a worhip ceremony, effectively making you a demigod or a hero in Glorantha. These worshippers are re-enacting your actions on the hero plane and enhancing your presence in the myths, which replenishes your power.
In our game an issaries PC used harmony rune to talk to a bear that attacked the camp (clever use of harmony rune). He then got a possibility to sacrifice for 1 hero point, which would have allowed him to talk to animals in the middle world as well and make them do their bidding.
Community Boons
Successfully completing the quest often yields rewards not just for you, but also beneficial effects for your community. A +25% to harvest rolls is a good start. A lot of twins being born the next year could be a good idea. Maybe everyone could be naming those twins after the Questing PCs.
Finally
I do have one hero quest drafted as a GM memo, which I thought I could maybe pen down here. It’s the old money tree adventure with the original adventure played by me and my chums decades ago written as the myth. I’ll try to find time to write it down here or make a Jonstowm Compendium book from it.
And that’s it. That’s the structure of my hero questing rules. I would love to hear what you think and if you have good suggestions, please share them?
