From: G. Fried (address.removed@nowhere.tld)
Date: Mon 29 Nov 1993 - 11:14:22 EET
Greg Fred here.
After a longish lull, I must GM my sporadic pseudo-Gloranthan campaign, and I would very much appreciate feedback from any of you on something I have never run before: a heroquest. This is a tricky one too, because the PCs are not the initiators of the HQ -- they are being drawn into it as ritual adversaries (as I have been led to understand is natural in HQing -- you attract the appropriate opponent).
Understand in all of this that I have succeeded in keeping my players almost ENTIRELY ignorant of Gloranthan material not IMMEDIATELY appropriate to their characters (who are from a remote and primitive society to boot). They have only heard oblique whispers about heroquesting. If it happens that they are drawn into one, they will get their minds blown at first. And I WANT this to happen! They SHOULD be amazed and that's what I'm shooting for in the roleplaying.
So... skim through what follows if it interests you to give advice, and advise me on making the HQing experience as good as possible!
The immediate plot background is that the PCs have journeyed far from their remote tribe to seek aid from a tribe of Agimori. In my campaign, the Agimori are even more clsoely tied to Lodril and volcanoes; my PCs freed a volcano godling on their home island. The PCs found the Agimori near a great volcano, Mt. Bathur, in a mountainous region. Bathur warms the land immediately around him and allows the Agimori to survive in this clime.
While the PCs were negotiating with the Agimori, an army of trolls appeared and challenged the Agimori to battle, on pain of surrenduring certain treaty rights (this is all connected to previous plots the PCs have gotten embroiled in, but this is not immediately important). The PCs were sent by the Agimori to defend a strategic pass. While on duty at the pass, the PCs and their Agimori companions saw saw strange blasts of snow and heard loud noises on a nearby glacier. Unable to venture out into the cold, the Agimori sent the PCs out to scout the glacier, known as Hrelk's Glacier. The PCs discovered a band of trolls at some exotic task on the glacier, and attacked. That's where we left it last time -- the PCs charging into battle (against trolls, whom they've never fought before -- the dumb yahoos!).
This is what the PCs don't know: The trolls are led by a troll priest of Himile. He is trying to create a gollem out of the ice of Hrelk's Glacier to send against the Agimori, since he knows how vulnerable they are to cold. He knows that he must heroquest to complete this task, and he hopes to attract ritual opponents to himself in a way that he can most effectively control.
The myth the troll wants to interact with is the following: before Time, in the wars against chaos, Lodril sent one of his sons, Bathur, up to the surface to scour a region clean of Chaos. Bathur did his father's bidding and now stands sentinel over the evil he has subdued. But during the Dawning, in the last epoch before the gods withdrew from the world and so fought to secure as much as they could for their own domains, the gos of Winter and Darkness encroached upon Bathur's lands. The greatest of these was Hrelk, god of a mighty ice-river. Bathur met Hrelk in combat and thwarted his advance. This is known as Hrelk's Demise, and now Hrelk's Glacier halts above the Agimori lands, melting into a lake known also as Hrelk's Demise.
The troll Himile priest does not (yet) dare attempt to reverse this mythic fight: he just wants to intervene long enough to grab a piece of Hrelk at the moment he shatters, and bring this piece back to animate his ice gollem. (Yes, this is a smart troll! Himile is a god of troll nobility as I play it.)
So, the players will be defeated in battle, but not killed (I will probably have them rendered unconscious by an ice-blast breath weapon the priest has acquired on a previous HQ). They will then be deposited in an ice-cell prison within the glacier, as the troll prepares his ritual.....
Elements of the ritual the troll needs to deal with:
Zurthk is crucial. He is intelligent and understands what is going on. He knows the myth, and he knows what the priest is attempting to do with him. He knows his only hope of surviving is to convince or trick the PCs into entering into the HQ and then fulfill the ritual function of betraying his own kind -- but the PCs must win. Then he may escape to live as an outcast, outlaw trollkin. SO Zurthk is the PC's ritual helper in the heroquest cycle, who must tempt them into the quest. And the PCs do the same for him! BUt he must cope with the natural suspicion the PCs will have for him. He will give only enough information to keep things moving. Of course, the PCs should wish to replicate the heoric deeds of the volcano godling!
I thought the crossing-over to the god/hero-plane might involve leaping off a ledge into a blinding wall of falling, driven snow -- to emerge from a huge snow-drift in the mythtime of the Dawning (David Dunhams suggestion).
So does this sound right? What should I include? What kind of reward could the ritual opponent in such a HQ earn? What would the troll's weaknesses be? How can I make this most fun for the players, while at the same time true to the spirit of heroquesting and RQ?
Thanks all!
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