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Guidelines for HeroQuesting in Mythras

These are my guidelines for HeroQuesting in Mythras.

First off, my main idea is that everyone should be able to become a superhero. Argrath heroquested for his power, Kallyr Starbrow and King Broyan did too, I see no reason why the characters should stay on the "powerful clansman" level.

What I want out of them is:

• A way to raise your characteristics and skills in a faster but unpredictable way, potentially going beyond the limits of a normal person.
• A way to get Gifts and other special magic items like the Helm of Vingkot
• A way to change the world, basically rituals that bring serious consequence to the world, from just making rain to something more serious
• Something about as fun as a dungeon

Their main categories are:

• This World heroquests, when you go into a trance and see things differently but still is here
• Other World heroquests, when you go in the Hero Plane and follow the story as best you can
• And Freestyle heroquests, when you go in the Hero Plane, or possibly even another world entirely, and just go nuts

So what I'm thinking is some guidelines for heroquests using these 3 paradigms in each of them

• I think This-World Heroquests can produce either results that are within the limits of the world, or are temporary. If you want to have more Strength, you will gain points with this one, but you'll never surpass the human maximum. Gifts are beyond these heroquests.
• Other World Heroquests ignore the limits of reality and/or are permanent. If you want to have more strength, you will truly become as strong as a bear and stronger than any man alive - if you can survive the horrible trial. This is how you get Gifts and mystical aid, like the Magic Sword & Helm of Vingkot. Still, you can basically only do what someone else has done before you.
• Freestyle Heroquests are how you get THE REAL shit. Completely new feats are done, such as obtaining the aid of a Dragon, bringing someone back from Lunar Hell, creating a new goddess who is also the moon, etc.

In a way, I see a Heroquest exactly like a Boast from Wolver Upon the Coast: the character is saying "I am good enough to do this, so I want the whole clan to bear witness to my doing it". A Freestyle Heroquest is more like the Trojan War, it's just something you kinda embark on and hope you can get something out of the deal.

This also means that you must be strong enough on your own to do a HeroQuest. If you're not strong enough to kill a dragon in the real world, you won't be able to go to the Other World and kill Aroka on your own.

And the other element that is in Adventures of Glorantha is how they use the concept of Feats from HeroQuest Glorantha, of which I'm a big fan. Basically, you channel the god's power fully and can use Rune Affinity to do something with the full power of the god, so Orlanth's Thunderer feat channels the full power of Orlanth and lets you "destroy with the Great Sound", so someone doing that would roll their Rune Affinity vs. whatever defense the opponent can muster.

I think channeling these Feats is absolutely instrumental for someone on a HeroQuest, and you need to HeroQuest to find more, which again drives home that you are a person being able to do the deed of a demigod. Your character isn't built different, he needs to quest for his power.

The nut I haven't cracked yet is combat stats. For This World quests it's easy, just use the numbers from the person or spirit standing in for that character in the quest; but for Other World HeroQuests, things get dicy. I'll probably have to adapt stats from other books and draw inspiration from that. We'll see.

I also intend on using Stations. That is, you and the players draw up roughly what are the main events of the story, what are the beats you must hit, then you put in weird shit between them or make one happen first, things like that to make it as interesting as a dungeon would be, and also to make it alive. The player knows where the story goes, after all.

Or you can do this all in HeroQuest and not worry about any of it.

Some cool ideas from the BREAK!! backer kit

BREAK!! is this upcoming anime-inspired RPG with a ton of OSR pedigree. You can just feel that it drank deeply from the G+ days, and I found some pretty unique ideas in there stood out to me. ​

 

No spell lists! - This is a gutsy one, because the magic isn't open-ended like in the White Hack and others like it. Instead, every class has a couple feats, sorta like the foci from WWN. You start with a couple (3) and gain another of your choice on levels 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. The magic of the magic-user class (the Sage) comes from these feats.

In fact, your 3 starting abilities are: the Grand Grimoire, which allows the Sage to get clues from the DM as well as magically sketch stuff by describing it to the book and things like that; Sage's Staff, which allows you to push people and create light; and Prestidigitonium, which allows the Sage to animate an object (like enchanting a locked door to open or a medical kit to do surgery).

This also means that the Sage class operates under the exact same paradigms as every other class, they're all equally complex.

 

Mixing homeland with past profession - I'll oversimplify for the sake of brevity, but basically your Secondary Profession is tied to your Homeland. These give you 3 Purviews (which work exactly like the Secondary Profession), but they're more specific.

I quite like this, but this also necessitates a setting. For instance, for you to be a Knight Errant you need to come from the part of the world that has them, and they have certain unique skills (in thie example: Forthright communication; Knowledge of vanquished evils; Finding your courage). No one else has these skills, so it really paints a very specific aspect of each region of the world.

Another region might have, instead, "Holy Isle Samurai" with the purviews: Maintaining proper etiquette; Judging merit in another; Respecting ritual and tradition. So both characters can be fighters with a noble background, but the skill they have is different - it's almost like they have the same Secondary Profession but the cultural context changes its application.

 

The Allegiance mechanic - This one is very small but I enjoy it.

Remember how the "spells" are instead feats specific to certain classes? Some of these spells can also give you 'Dark' or 'Bright' allegiance points. Whenever you gain 3 of them, you gain a "gift", which is a change in your character's appearance.

Like, if you gain too many Dark points, you might earn horns, fangs, or a devil's tail; if you gain too many Bright points, you may find yourself with a halo, feathers, and prismatic hair.

These are mostly aesthetic, but I think it's cool! It lends a lot of personality.

 

Combat Zones - These aren't new in the broader RPG world, but I haven't seen many games in the OSR using them.

For those unfamiliar with it, instead of using a grid or pure theater of mind, you draw a couple "areas". Say, the east bank of the bog, the stepping stones that cross it, the bog itself, and the west bank of the bog. Melee attacks can be made to those in the same zone as you; ranged can be made to enemies in other zones. You have a Speed rating and can move as many zones as your speed. Areas can have specific conditions - those stepping stones might require a DEX check to not fall down when you cross them, the bog might damage you per turn, etc.

The rest of the fights remind me a lot of the GLOG actually, because you have a certain number of easily recoverable HP and once you drop to 0 you start earning injuries and fatal stuff that is harder to recover - exactly like the dismemberment tables from Goblin Punch, but these are ranked by how many times you roll.

The first roll has chill results - the worst that can happen is getting knocked out. The second roll is more desperate, the worst possible outcome is a fatal blow. And the third roll is the worst one yet, the worst possible outcome is getting completely mangled and your body turning to minced meat.

This zone business reminds me of... actually, let's make this its own point.

 

Colossal Combat - This is what motivated me to make this post.

So, to expand on speed: characters can be Slow, Average, Fast, or Very Fast. Slow characters can't move out of their zone; Average characters can go to a nearby zone; Fast or V. Fast characters can move up to 2 zones.

When you're fighting a huge critter, you separate its body into combat zones. Let's say you're fighting an elephant-like monster with a big tail, the zones would be: legs, torso, tail, tusk, and head. Each zone has some HP, and you attack them piecemeal. If you're fighting melee, you need to use your movement to climb the damn thing up to the zone you want to attack... but if you're fast enough, you can just JUMP at the thing's head!

Every colossus has a Core Point which kills the monster when it's destroyed, like the inverted scale on a dragon's neck if you're a Delicious in Dungeon fan, but the players usually either can't access it, may need to destroy other zones to get to it, or may need to open themselves to being targeted by an attack to hit it. 

The colossus isn't defenceless either, it can make an attack that hits everyone in a certain zone - like swatting its tail relentlessly or stomping the ground and stampeding.

There's a table that says how much HP a monster has, colossi basically count as 1 monster with a bunch of different health bars. Your normal rank 7 monster has 5 HP; a colossus would have that in each of its body parts plus the core.

The combat uses auto-hit too, like Cairn et al, so it feels pretty modern.

 

Social Bonds - A teensy tiny mechanic.

The characters can take a week off as a Downtime Turn, where they can make different activities like healing from an injury, crafting, recruiting hirelings, etc.

One of these activities is "Socialising", where you gain +1 HP total until your next downtime (characters have much less HP, think Cairn). When you do that, or any time the players and the DM find appropriate, you can create a Social Bond. You choose the nature of it (friendly, romantic, professional, competitive, you name it) and you can +2 on all rolls where your bond provides extra motivation. Some abilities even require a Bond between the characters to work.

As I said, it's not much, but I like it, it gives personality. It's these little things that can make for a pretty memorable game.

 

So yeah, these were the mechanics I wanted to talk about. It's not a perfect game by any means, but I don't feel like lingering on the flaws because it has a lot of heart. You can really tell people put a lot into this. To me it feels like a lighter Errant, because it has quite a few simple "procedures", but they're very context-specific, unlike Errant which is more scattershot and toolboxy.

I can already tell I'll be stealing the colossus fighting thing lol though it does seem like it would only really work with the auto-hit thing and the small HP numbers.

RRPG Firecast - An eulogy to one of the strangest parts of Brazilian TRPG culture

In Tim Rogers' very long Boku no Natsuyasumi review, he tells an anecdote about an older Japanese man saying that he felt weird about Tim, an American, playing Boku no Natsuyasumi because "it feels like you're reading my diary".

This is similar to that.

1dMany Old Brazilian Names

This one isn't tied to the broader setting, you can use it as a table for any civilisation that speaks a language that resembles Portuguese. Be advised that they'll come across as very old-fashioned.

I had a table of Franconigerian names prepared for this. Indigenous people would have a Franconigerian name to use socially, while Pericarnassians are given Franconigerian names at birth since Fan-Fan names fell out of favour over time.

Many of these names have an equivalent in English, but it's too many of them to provide proper translations. As a rule, Á is read as "ah", Ú as oo (like pool), Í as ee (like in pee), NH is pronounced like the Spanish Ñ or a very fast "nya" (or nyo, or whatever is the following vowel) where you barely pronounce the Y, and ÃO is read as "-on" (like John). It's fine to butcher the pronunciation.

Brasilis - Peoples of the Serra

 

The Franconegro Empire is immense, easily surpassing 10 million km² in area, and therefore many peoples and cultures live here. Despite that, the main difference is still between those who live in the inner country (called serranos) and those who live in the city (urbanites): two people may be of the same culture, but if one of them lives out in the country, then she will have much more in common with her neighbour than with someone of her same culture who lives in Vila Real.

The main cultures are:

Brasilis - Introduction

 In October of 2023 I finally wrote up a little setting based on Brasil. It was the first time I took it seriously to write a fantasy setting based on my own country in a way that pleased me.

It ended up going nowhere, but this is the result. Names have been stolen with impunity, and much of it was based on Portuguese mythology much more than Indigenous ones.

I have chosen to preserve the names in Portuguese and add a little translation next to them. This is so you can adapt these names in your own head to your own tongue. The Serra doesn't belong to anyone.

You can read the Ç as an S like in "singing".