[Glorantha] HeroQuesting and Will

I don't think you can take the Will = Hero Points idea too far, though they are related concepts. Let's see how far I can pursue this.

In the orriginal rules for Will I read maybe as far back as the 80s, the number of WILL points you had at any given moment was not the whole story. The real differentiation between mortal characters and divine or semi-divine beings was that mortals were Will generators. They could accumulate more Will during their lives, but when they actually started HeroQuesting and expending Will on the Other Side
 then their Will became capped and they could nolonger accumulate any more.

This model didn't really satisfy me at the time, because I don't think just going on a HeroQuest would freeze your Will in that way. You're still a mortal being and so IMHO should still be able to accumulate Will. To me it seems more sensible to cap Will when a character becomes immortal. At that point the character becomes a permanent fixture in the cosmic landscape and therefore unchanging in this highly metaphysical sense.

Going back to Hero Points, I think these are best viewed as representing a transient pool of Will the character has 'unlocked' for expenditure at that moment. Accumulation of HPs represent the gradual accumulation of Will throughout mortal life, so the real distinguishing feature between mortals and immortals is not the possession of HPs, but the ability to accumulate them.

In practice this almost amounts to the same thing. This could be tidied up by a rule that all characters, on becoming immortal, must expend any remaining HPs or lose them. Received on Thu 08 Feb 2007 - 12:24:39 EET