The short summary of what you should definitely read is:

1. Skim the section on Hero Improvements.

2. If you’re new to HeroQuest:

   1. Read the beginning of the section below on abilities, including the part about ability ratings, then skim the rest of it.
   2. Read the beginning of the section on Contests, including the subsection about shared features across all types of contests. You can pick up the details of the different types as we go.
   3. The section on Contest Consequences is pretty short, so might be worth a look.
   4. Skim the section on Modifiers and Augments.
   5. Probably eventually look over the sections of the Relationships rules that cover the kind of relationships your character has, but it’s not really a pre-requisite.
   If you’ve played HQ:G, instead look at the list of differences and read the stuff it suggests.

3. You’re good to create characters and play and stuff, but feel free to look at the rest of the doc later for reference or if you get curious about something!

Abilities

Abilities are the defining features of HeroQuest characters. Some of them come from keywords, packages of abilities that people in a particular occupation or from a particular culture or such have all learned, while others will be more unique to your character. They can be just about anything your character can do well, use effectively, or otherwise benefit from. They’re what you’ll use to try to win contests (described below).

They can be mundane abilities like particular skills, personality traits, relationships, or wealth; or they can be magical talents, spells, etc. They can also be things like possessions or special items.

Ability ratings

Abilities have ratings that range from 1 to 20. Higher numbers are more powerful, since they’ll be used to set the target number you try to roll under in contests.

When an ability exceeds 20, it wraps around back to 1 and gets a mastery, which will essentially bump your level of success on rolls up. Each mastery represents 20, so ability ratings go like 1, 2, 3, …, 20, 1M, 2M, …, 20M, 1M2, …. For a quick sense of how good a mastery is, if you’re rolling your Punching 13M versus your opponent’s Brawling 13, you’re gonna win about 75% of the time. If you’ve got Punching 13M2 instead, it’s more like 95%; at 13M3, you’ll be nearly guaranteed to win, and at 13M4 it’s an actual certainty, although if they’re very lucky you might not beat them too badly.

If you’re doing something for which you have no relevant ability, you’ll use the default ability rating of 6; although some things you just might not be able to do at all without a relevant ability (e.g. reading an unfamiliar language).

Types of abilities

There are several types of abilities that HQ distinguishes, although most of them don’t have any special handling in the rules. Followers, magic and flaws are the main ones that do. All of the types are divided into either mundane or magical abilities.

A skill is a mundane ability that lets characters do something. Some are physical, some are mental, some are social, some are hard to classify.

Notable personality traits can also be abilities. They can be used in a contest or to augment other abilities, but sometimes they might also function as a flaw. There are some examples on p. 29 of the rulebook, and in the “typical personality traits” part of your keywords.

Relationships

Personal ties and commitments can be represented as relationship abilities. They have two parts (in addition to the rating every ability has): the type of the relationship (e.g. Love, Hate, Leader of, Member in), and the object of the relationship (e.g. your spouse, temple, retainers). Relationships can be with an individual or a community. Your keywords will have suggested relationships, although you might also have a different variant on those suggestoins.

Relationships with individuals can be with either a follower or a supporting character.

Followers

Followers are characters controlled by the player. The relationship starts at 13 (or 17 if the follower is listed in the Typical Followers part of your keywords), but the follower also has one or more abilities of their own. Followers are either retainers or sidekicks.

Retainers have a single keyword at 17. They are relatively uncommitted and un-individualized followers; they might be paid servants, distant relatives, soldiers in your command, or such. You also don’t have to have a separate relationship with each of them; you could for example have a single “Leader to Followers”, “Commander of Retainers”, etc. ability.

Sidekicks are more individual and more personally connected to your character. They have a keyword at a rating of 17 and three abilities starting at 13 each. You then get 15 points to increase those abilities (adding at most +10 to any one ability). They absolutely need a name and personality, and you need a separate relationship ability with a sidekick. During character creation you can only get one sidekick, although you may be able to acquire more in play.

On your character sheet, you should record both the relationship ability, and the follower’s abilities, with the latter marked off in some fashion to indicate they belong to that follower. The details of actually using their abilities will be described in the Relationships section below.

Supporting characters

Supporting characters are controlled by the narrator. If you want to get help from them, it’ll require more convincing and interacting. They don’t have abilities written out on your sheet because they narrator’s the one who plays them, and they get to handle that the same way they would any other NPC. HeroQuest divides supporting characters into five roles (adversary, ally, contact, dependent, patron) described below.

Magic

In the HeroQuest rules there’s a lot of special stuff around a few different types of magic; we won’t be using them for this game so don’t worry about them.

Flaws

A flaw is a special type of ability that usually causes problems rather than helps. This isn’t an objective feature of an ability name: for example, for one character something like Flighty might be a mostly beneficial personality trait that leads them to duck out of situations before they turn dangerous, while for another it could be a flaw that gets in the way of being reliable in their personal relationships. Basically, a flaw is an ability you want to mostly hinder your actions or need to be overcome in order to succeed in them. If the word “flaw” is troublesome for something you want to get the rules effects of a “flaw”, feel free to call it something that sounds less judgmental or whatever.

Flaws can start at whatever rating the narrator and player agree on, with ratings of 13 or 17 being pretty minor. If you eventually want to remove a flaw from your sheet, the usual way encouraged by the rules will involve gradually developing a competing trait up to a point where it’s stronger than the flaw.

Possessions and Wealth

Possessions are the things you have. Generally you’ll only want abilities for particularly prized or special things you have.

You’ll also have a Wealth rating that represents your total assets (both concrete like valuable property or business ventures and more intangible things like influential friends) and social status within your community. It’s less about spending money than your standard of living, public image, personal appearance, and financial dealings. It doesn’t get used to buy stuff, but for things like convincing people to lend to you, impressing a visitor, or acquiring prestige.

Your starting Wealth rating will be determined by your occupation, although you can buy it up with points like other abilities. The table below summarizes typical wealth levels (although the examples are of course more aimed at Glorantha).

Special and Magical Items

Items that can do remarkable things are generally treated as abilities. You can even have such an item who actual ability is only discovered during play. Improvements in the rating of an item don’t necessarily indicate the item itself becoming more powerful; it may also represent your hero becoming more adept at the use of it. Page 31 of the rulebook has some sample special items, although they’re mostly fantastic in flavor.

Hero Improvements

Hero Points are a currency that lets you improve a roll or permanently improve your hero. Below I’ll describe what the rules say, although there’s some stuff we may end up tweaking based on how well the RAW play.

Gaining Hero Points

HQ1 leaves a lot up to the discretion of the GM when it comes to giving out hero points. You’ll start with 3, and you’ll get new ones at the start of each “adventure”, but we’ll have to feel out the specifics as we go.

Using Hero Points

Fortunately using them is not so loosey-goosey. You spend hero points to improve your hero’s abilities, to make any permanent change in them. The rulebook says these improvements have to be done between adventures, but we may end up deviating from that.

The rules in the book say that improvements that don’t relate to previous events of play or established goals or backstory you have to pay double the hero point cost; we’re not going to use that bit.

Adding new abilities

You can add a new mundane abiltiy for 1 hero point. New abilities begin with a rating of 13, unless the narrator decides it’s part of one of your keywords, in which case it starts at 1 more than the keyword rating (usually 18). If we had magic in our game, then learning a new magical ability would probably be a bit more expensive. Gaining a new retainer costs 1 hero point like other abilities, but a new sidekick costs 3 hero points.

Improving abilities

You can also spend hero points to increase your existing abilities, 1 point to improve a mundane ability by 1. You cannot improve a keyword’s rating. You can also convert a retainer to a sidekick for 2 points, with the former retainer now gaining three new abilities at 13. You can change a supporting character’s role for either 1 or 0 points at the narrator’s discretion.

The rules have higher costs for increasing an ability by more than 1 point at a time: 3 points for +2, 6 points for +3, or 10 points for +4. We’ll use those to start, but we may end up adjusting if it doesn’t play well.

Cementing experiences

When you succeed at some goal (finding love, gaining wealth or treasure or knowledge, for example), it isn’t always stably yours. In a future situation you might end up losing it, even pretty summarily. If you really want to be sure it’s yours, you can spend hero points to cement the experience. If it’s something that already has a defined hero point cost, it costs the normal cost; otherwise it costs 1 hero point. It’s still possible to lose cemented benefits during the course of the game, but you’ll definitely get a chance to prevent that loss.

Core Rules

Now to get into the rules about play itself and stop worrying about character creation and improvement!

Contests

When your hero faces some sort of obstacle or challenge, it’s time for a contest, of which there are two or three kinds, depending on if you count automatic successes. An automatic success happens when the narrator judges that your action is something “no self-respecting hero would ever fail at” and you just succeed without an actual contest. A simple contest is the usual form of contest: you and your opponent or other resistance each roll once and the rolls decide who wins. When we want to really zoom in on something, we use an extended contest instead. First we’ll have an explanation of the stuff that’s relevant to all contests and then give the deets on each type.

Shared features of all contests

To overcome a challenge, you’ll choose the ability on your character sheet most relevant to what you’re doing (the narrator will work with you to make sure it’s appropriate). Then you’ll take its rating and apply any modifiers (whether from previous contests, other augmenting abilities, details of the situation, etc.) to arrive at a target number that will be the number you’re actually rolling again.

In every contest, your ability will be opposed by a resistance number; which might be an opponent’s own ability, a natural force, or more generally a measure of the difficulty of what you’re trying to do. A higher resistance will be harder to beat. The default resistance when there’s no clear other resistance is 14; your hero will sometimes be able to default to this when trying to resist others’ actions against you if you don’t have any better abilities.

Die rolls

To determine how well you do in a contest, you’ll roll a 20-sided die and compare the die with your target number, ignoring masteries for now, and hoping for low rolls. The narrator will do the same for the resistance. Here are the possibilities:

• Critical: if the roll is a 1, even if your target number is 1, you succeed very well and might get some fringe benefits for it.
• Success: if the roll is more than 20 but less than or equal to your target number, that’s just ordinary success.
• Failure: if you roll higher than your target number but less than 20, you fail.
• Fumble: if you roll a 20 (even if your target number is 20), you fumble. It’s the worst of failures!

We’ll end up comparing the degree of success or failure each side got to determine the outcome of the contest.

Bumps

Some things will bump your degree of success or failure up or down. A bump up improves the degree of success by one step—fumble to failure, failure to success, success to critical. A bump down lowers the degree of success—critical to success, success to failure, failure to fumble.

In a contest, masteries on each side cancel out until only one contestant has any masteries left. After that, the side with masteries remaining (if any) gets a bump up for each one. You can also spend a single hero point for another bump up, after masteries are applied.

If your result is a critical and you still have any masteries left over, each remaining mastery bumps down your opponent’s result by one step instead. Once your result is a critical and your opponent’s is a fumble, your masteries don’t do anything more.

Victory and defeat

Each contest type compares the degrees of success or failure of the opposed die rolls to determine a level of victory or defeat, although the different types do so differently. There are four levels each of victory and defeat: marginal, minor, major, and complete (in order of increasing severity); ties are also possible. These outcomes are symmetric: when you earn a major victory, your opponent has suffered a major defeat, and vice versa. The level of victory and defeat will influence the outcome of the result.

No repeat attempts

A contest represents all your attempts to overcome an obstacle. If you are defeated, it means that no matter how many times you tried to solve the problem with your ability, you were unable to. You can only try again with a different approach or if the situation changes significantly.

Simple Contests

Simple contests resolve things quickly, in a single pair of die rolls. They go like this:

It goes like this:

1. State what your hero is trying to do and which ability they use.
2. Calculate your target number using the ability rating and any modifiers.
3. The narrator selects the resistance.
4. Roll a die to determine your degree of success or failure, then apply any bumps. The narrator does the same.
5. Determine level of victory or defeat based on the Simple Contest Results table below.
6. Determine contest consequences and what happens.

Group Simple Contests

A group simple contest is a sequence of simple contests to resolve a conflict between three or more characters or forces. The contestant with the highest target number goes first and singles out one or more opponents for a simple contest. The loser is eliminated from the group simple contest. Then, if still in the contest, the second highest picks an opponent, and so on, until everybody has acted or is out of the contest. At that point if anybody remains who’s still opposed, then do it again until all but one “side” are out of the contest.

When both participants in a simple contest within a group simple contest roll fumbles, the narrator may opt to treat this as a marginal defeat for both of them to indicate that, although their results cancel out with respect to each other, their situation worsens compared to other contestants.

Extended Contest

Extended contests take more time to resolve, but can add some nice dramatic suspense and tension with the back-and-forth. An extended contest consists of one or more rounds, in which the contestants perform actions which resemble simple contest. Each round does not decide the whole contest’s outcomes, however, only who gains or loses advantage points (AP) this time around. The contestants keep taking turns, acting and reacting, until one of them runs out of AP and is defeated.

They go like this (although depending on the situation, a narrator character might go first instead of the player):

0. State your overall goal for the contest. You can potentially change that goal as the contest continues.
1. State what your hero is trying to do and which ability they use for their first action.
2. Calculate your starting advantage point total using the target number plus any source of additional advantage points you may have. This is equal to the target number you use for the first round of the contest, with each mastery adding 20 AP. Followers can also be used to increase your starting APs, as described below.
3. The narrator selects the resistance and figures its starting advantage point total. This works the same way. Since it’s based on the first round, it can be very effective if you’re initiating the contest to try to force your opponent to use a low ability as their resistance to your first action.
4. Carry out one or more rounds. Each round is an action and an immediate response, where the acting contestant risks a number of their AP to try to reduce their opponent’s AP. Then their opponent can do the same.
   1. State your hero’s attempted action, ability used, and advantage point bid. The AP bid should be based on how riskily you’re acting. If you don’t want to specify, the narrator can also choose based on how risky the action you describe is. The section on Sample Bids below may help you decide.
   2. The narrator selects the resistance.
   3. Roll a die to determine your degree of success or failure, then apply any bumps. The narrator does the same.
   4. Compare your result to your opponent’s using the Extended Contests Results table below to determine AP gains and losses.
   5. Now it is your opponent’s turn, which goes the same way but with the roles reversed.
   6. Repeat as long as both sides have positive AP totals.
5. Determine contest consequences. Once somebody reaches zero or below APs, the level of victory/defeat is determined by the final AP total of the loser: 0 to -10 is a marginal defeat, -11 to -20 AP is minor defeat, -21 to -30 AP is a major defeat, and -31 or below makes for a complete defeat. The victor has a symmetric level of victory.

Advantage Points

A key thing to note about advantage points is that they track who has the advantage at the moment; they are not hit points or such, even in extended contests where you’re trying to kill each other. Until you drop to 0 AP or lower, you’re not going to take any serious wounds/reputational damage/etc.

Your AP bids need to reflect your action in the round: if you’re acting very boldly, that’s going to need to be a high bid, if you’re playing it safe, that’s gotta be a low bid. The narrator might suggest changing your bid or action if they don’t seem to match up.

By the way, if you want advice on the optimal tactical moves in extended contests, check out the “How Much Should I Bid?” sidebar on p. 68 of the PDF.

Followers in extended contests

Follower can act in several ways during an extended contest:

• They can augment your abilities.
• You can use one of their abilities as if it were your own.
• Alternately, you can simply add the TN from a follower’s relevant ability to your own for determining your starting APs. However, in this case, you don’t get to do either of the previous options during that contest.
• You may be able to command or convince your follower to do any of the above for an ally.

Sample AP bids

Here’s some examples to give you a sense of how much to bid for various levels of boldness. The categories are sometimes used to determine who made the more daring bid for action order in group extended contests. Reckless is more daring than determined is more daring than normal and so on.

• Inconsequential, it does not matter at all: 1 or 2 AP
  • Climbing: “I’ll just look for a way up.”
  • Combat: “I’m trying to stay out of it, but not running away.”
  • Romance: “I’ll glance at her.”
  • Social Conflict: “It’s no concern of mine.”
  • Tracking: “I’m being cautious and won’t commit myself yet.”
• Cautious, petty: Around 3 to 5 AP
  • Climbing: “I’ll take it slowly, finding good holds as I go.”
  • Combat: “I’m going to slowly whittle him down.”
  • Romance: “I’ll smile at her.”
  • Social Conflict: “Is that so?”
  • Tracking: “I’m going to take a look but not go too far.”
• Normal Engagement, trying hard: ¼ to ⅓ of starting AP total
  • Climbing: “I’ll push on and make some real headway.”
  • Combat: “I’ll commit myself to fight.”
  • Romance: “I’ll make small talk and joke with her.”
  • Social Conflict: “I doubt that.”
  • Tracking: “I’ll scout nearby, checking for good routes first.”
• Determined Effort: ½ to ¾ of starting AP total
  • Climbing: “I’ll try that short, difficult-looking part of the cliff over there.”
  • Combat: “I’ll go for the killing blow.”
  • Romance: “I’ll take her hands and kiss them.”
  • Social Conflict: “That’s a lie, I’ll tell him that right now!”
  • Tracking: “I’ll make everyone be still, scrutinize the signs and ways, and take as long as it takes.”
• Reckless: All AP are bid/Desperation Stake
  • Climbing: “I’ll climb up there fast as I can. Safety rope? Nah.”
  • Combat: “I’m going to jump on his head, holding my sword in both hands like this.”
  • Romance: “I’ll take her in my arms and kiss her.”
  • Social Conflict: “By Storm’s Bulls, Kallai! Leave or I’ll punch your nose off!”
  • Tracking: “After my careful exploration I can confidently say, ‘Follow me, no trolls here!’”

Group Extended Contests

When an extended contest involves more than two contestant, it’s a group extended contest. They work broadly similarly to ordinary extended contests, but ordering in each round gets a little more complicated.

At the start of each round, each contestant states their action and AP bid and says who they’re targeting. The narrator then determines the order in which the contests act, using one of these options:

• The contestants go in order from most daring to least daring bid, as defined in the section above. In ties, the higher bid goes first.
• The contestants go in order from highest bid to lowest, with ties going to the more daring.
• The contestants go in order from highest to lowest AP total, with highest or most daring bid breaking ties.

Then the round ends when everybody who’s still in the contest has acted.

In the first round, each contestant’s starting AP total is determined by the ability or resistance they use first (depending on whether they get to act before they are targeted by another’s action or not).

In some cases, such as if you get attacked or your target is taken out of the contest before you get to take your action, the narrator may let you change your action. You can also always choose to delay your action and let others act before you.

Special extended contest options

There are a few special things that you can do in extended contests.

• After defeating an opponent in an extended contest, you can act again immediately to try to make their consequences of defeat more severe with a parting shot. You bid AP and use an appropriate ability again. If you win, they’ll lose more AP. If you’re very unlucky and they win with a crit, the AP transfer might let them re-enter the contest, so it can be risky.

• You can bid a desperation stake of more than your current advantage points, to a maximum of your starting AP total. This allows you to attempt a desperate retaliation even when within a single AP of defeat.

• You can forfeit your action to do something unrelated to the object of the contest, an unrelated action, such as healing someone, opening a door during a fight, hauling equipment out of your bag, or augmenting an ability. Depending on the circumstances, you may have to engage in a simple contest to do the action.

• You can usually switch between abilities freely if it makes sense to do so. This doesn’t affect your AP total. In some cases (like switching weapons in a fight), you might need to take an unrelated action to do switch abilities, though.

• You can try to withdraw from the contest before beating defeated. If your opponent lets you, then you get out. Otherwise the contest continues with the same AP totals, but with different goals: you trying to get out, them trying to keep you in the fight. If you win the contest, you get out from the contest, although probably without “hurting” your opponent. If you lose, your opponent still inflicts consequences on you appropriate to their goal. The main tactical purpose here is if you think you’ll be able to use stronger abilities for withdrawal than for continued engagement.

  If you withdraw from a group extended contest and later rejoin it, you usually rejoin with the same advantage point total you had when you left. If your leaving and returning substantially changed the situation, you may get some AP back, though.

• AP lending lets you transfer some or all of your advantage points to another character. This is an unrelated action resolved as a simple contest. You use whatever ability you’re using to improve the target’s situation and state how many AP you’re trying to lend; the resistance will be equal to the AP you’re trying to lend. The effects are determined by the victory level:

  • Complete Victory: Target gains the intended amount of AP, you don’t lose any.
  • Major or Minor Victory: You transfer the intended AP to the target.
  • Marginal Victory: You transfer half the intended AP to the target.
  • Tie: No effect.
  • Marginal Defeat: You lose half the intended AP without the target getting any.
  • Minor or Major Defeat: You lose the intended AP without the target getting any.
  • Complete Defeat: Both of you lose the amount of AP you tried to lend.

• In a group extended contest where you’ve been reduced to 0 or fewer advantage points, you can attempt a final action as long as you’re not dying and are free from the opposition’s attention. It represents like, managing to get back up and into the fight when your opponent turns awayy to gloat or deal with somebody else. You can only attempt a final action at most once per contest, and even if you succeed you’ll still be suffering the consequences of the original defeat.

  You use a relevant ability in a simple contest against the number of advantage points you’re below 0. On any victory, you regain AP equal to the target nubmer of the ability used. On a tie or less than complete defeat, you fail and the contest ends normally for you. On a complete defeat, your level of defeat increases by one (marginal to minor and so on), with a corresponding increase in consequences.

Contest consequences

When a character is defeated in a contest, the narrator may impose a penalty to some of their abilities depending on the nature of the contest. The Contest Consequences table has suggestions of how big those should be:

In a contest involving your followers, they’ll suffer one more level of defeat than you do.

States of health

HeroQuest uses six “states of health” to summarize the how healthy, wounded, or defeated a hero is as a result of contests. Those states of health are called healthy, hurt, impaired, injured, dying, and dead. For non-physical contests, these states are more metaphorical.

• Healthy: when nothing is wrong with you, so no particular penalties.
• Hurt: results from a marginal defeat. You’ve been hurt but not too badly. You can have multiple hurts, each imposing a -1 penalty to some or all abilities depending on the nature of the hurt.
• Impaired: results from a minor defeat. You’re suffering from some noticeable wound or analogous harm. The mechanical effect is a -10% penalty to any appropriate abilities. If you have hurts penalizing the same ability as an impairment, the hurt penalty is applied after the impairment penalty.
• Injured: results from a major defeat. They’re serious injuries, public humiliations, debilitating diseases, etc. You’ll take a 50% penalty to appropriate abilities. If you have hurts affecting the same ability, then the hurt penalty is applied after the injured penalty. The rules don’t say explicitly but I think overlapping impairments are subsumed into the injury.
• Dying: begins after a complete defeat. In contests involving a risk of physical harm, “dying” is literal; in other contests, it indicates being on the brink of a similarly permanent or extreme harm appropriate to the situation. Dying characters are usually unconscious, imprisoned, inconsolable, or otherwise unable to act, but the narrator may let you gasp out a few last words. Dying characters rarely get better on their own, although they can hang on to life or hope as long as seems practical, potentially allowing allies time to rescue or heal or whatever them.
• Dead: is… dead. Non-violent contests won’t result in literal death, but in other similarly drastic effects.

Nonlethal combat

In deference to fictional tropes, HeroQuest lets you ensure you’ll not accidentally hurt your foe more than intended when trying to take them down non-lethally. If you say you’re trying to defeat your foe non-lethally and you win the contest, they’ll be unconscious and will be at most hurt, no matter what. Your described action needs to fit the non-lethality, although we can play a little fast and loose with that. At the narrator’s discretion, you might also be able to “non-lethally” attack someone in non-physical contests.

Modifiers and Augments

Modifiers add to or subtract from an ability rating when calculating somebody’s target number for a contest. A bonus (written like +3) adds to the rating, and a penalty (written like -5) subtracts. The narrator can apply modifiers based on circumstances, the appropriateness of your ability, or anything else that alters your effectiveness. You can also get bonuses by either yourself or another character using another ability to augment your ability.

If your target number in a contest is reduced to 0 or below by modifiers, you will automatically fail. If your target number goes up or down across a mastery boundary due to masteries, you do indeed lose or gain the mastery for the purposes of that contest.

There are several sources of modifiers:

• Improvisational modifiers are applied when you use an ability that isn’t quite suited for what you’re doing, or an overly broad ability. They range from -1 to -20, with -5 as the default. If the ability would need more than a -20 penalty then you probably just can’t try to use it for that action at all, like trying ot fire a ship’s guns using your Vibrofencing skill.
• A wide variety of circumstances might modify your abilities up or down. This will be super variable depending on what you’re actually doing and can be quite significant for some things.
• Past events, including the results of previous contests, might grant a modifier.
• Armor, weapons, or tools may grant small bonuses (say, +1, +3, or +5) in relevant contests, depending on the item and its quality. On the other hand, they may penalize other contests (swimming in armor is hard, and carrying a gun might not make the best first impression on strangers).

• Facing multiple opponents at a time imposes cumulative penalties. If defending against multiple foes, you resist at an accumulating -3 penalty for each defense after the first.

  In an extended contest, you can act against multiple opponents in a round, at a -3 penalty per opponent past the first. You roll your die once, and each opponent gets a roll. The narrator rolls once per target, using the best roll to determine the outcome. If you win, you can divide the AP loss between the foes however you want.

  Followers negate multiple opponent penalties on a one-follower-per-opponent basis.

• Finally there’s augments, which get their own little mini-section.

Augmentation

You can use an ability to augment another for a bonus to the augmented ability’s rating, if the augmenting ability is relevant and helpful for the current situation. The augment bonus will last for the duration of the current contest. There’s two ways of handling augments; we’ll usually use automatic augments unless the augment is especially dramatic.

An automatic augment is quick and easy: you say what ability you’re augmenting with (possibly describing how it helps or how you bring it into play), and you get a bonus equal to one-tenth of the augmenting ability (rounding fractions of 0.5 or higher up). For example, Hate Lunars 18 gives an automatic augment of +2, while Jumping 14 could only give +1. Augmenting with abilities representing an actual action takes time and may require an unrelated action in extended contests, at the narrator’s discretion. In some cases, abilities (especially flaws) may also provide an automatic penalty, which is calculated the same way except it’s a penalty instead of a bonus.

You can also try for a higher bonus by rolling for a variable augment. In an extended contest, this will always require an unrelated action. The roll is a simple contest of the ability against a resistance equal to 5 times the desired bonus. On a marginal victory you only get half the bonus you were hoping for, but any other victory will give you the full bonus. Nothing happens on a tie. On a marginal defeat, you suffer a penalty equal to half the bonus you were trying for, and any other defeat brings a penalty equal to the full bonus you wanted.

You can also try to augment somebody else’s action with one of your abilities, with either an automatic or variable augment. Depending on what you’re doing to augment them, the narrator may require you to roll a variable augment rather than just using an automatic one. In an extended contest, augmenting somebody else will always require an unrelated action. If you augment somebody in a group contest and they lose, you’ll suffer the consequences of defeat as well, even if you only participated by augmenting them.

Healing and Recovery

There are four ways of recovering from wounds (literal or otherwise) in HeroQuest: mundane healing and minor healing magic (which are common and can help most wounds), major healing magic (which is rare but can heal a character completely), and time (which slowly heals anything short of dying or dead). The magic ones probably don’t apply for our setting unless we want to use some of those rules for some kinds of advanced medical technology. Although the rules are phrased mostly in terms of “healing” and “wounds”, they apply (with appropriate recovery abilities) to any kind of contest consequences.

Mundane healing can remove the penalties from hurts or impairments, but can only stabilize injured or dying patients. It’ll usually be resolved as a simple contest. The resistance for mundane healing attempts will either be based on the Healing Resistance table if the wound is from a simple contest or be equal to the patient’s final negative AP total from an extended contest. The effects are:

• On a complete victory all hurts and impairments are removed within a few minutes, dying patients improve to injured, and injured patients to impaired.
• On any other victory Impaired characters improve to hurt, and all hurts are removed; it takes at most an hour or so. Dying and injured patients are stabilized.
• On a tie or a less than complete defeat the wound is not healed, and only magic or time will help further.
• On a complete defeat the patient’s condition worsens: from hurt to impaired, impaired to injured, injured to dying. Dying may become dead. Only major magical healing or time can help further.

Minor magical healing is pretty common in Glorantha and can reduce the severity of any wound. It’s usually a simple contest against the base resistance of 14. The effects are:

• Complete victory: all wounds are removed instantly.
• Any other victory: dying patients improve to injured, injured to impaired, impaired to hurt, and hurt to healthy, instantly.
• Tie or marginal, minor, or major defeat: the wound is not healed. Only major magical healing or time can help further.
• Complete defeat: The patient’s condition worsens: hurt to impaired, impaired to injured, injured to dying. Dying may worsen to dead. Only major magical healing or time can heal the wound.

Major magical healing is mostly only available to specialized healing cults and practices in Glorantha. It removes all appropriate damage with any level of victory. As with other healing, the condition worsens on a complete defeat. After a tie or defeat with major magical healing, only time can help. This healing can often call for an extended contest.

Time

Without healing, hurt characters recover from one hurt per day if they’re able to rest, eat, drink, etc. normally, and don’t perform stressful actions. In other situations, they might recover more slowly at the narrator’s discretion. Impaired characters heal more slowly over an adventure or a week or so, but they recover completely when that time elapses.

Injured characters are even slower, taking at least one adventure spent on resting up. Even after being fully healed by anything short of major magical healing, they might still suffer a physical or mental scar that functions as a flaw.

Healing during an Extended Contest

During an extended contest, a hero with a healing ability can try to heal themself or others, using either the healing rules above (if the target has already suffered a wound), the healing ability as an augment, or (if healing somebody else) the AP lending rules.

Relationships

Every relationship has three parts: the nature of the relationship, the name of the person or group the relationship is with, and the rating. They’ll start out with a rating of 13, or 17 if they’re from a keyword.

Personal relationships

Personal relationships are individuals you have relationships with and can be divided into followers—characters under your control, sometimes accompanying you on your exploits—and supporintg characters—who are played by the narrator. Followers are further divided into retainers and sidekicks.

• Retainers are part of your hero’s retinue—the faithful servant or squire.
• Sidekicks are loyal but subordinate friends and junior partners of your hero.

Supporting characters are classified into five roles relative to you:

• An adversary is an archenemy or bitter rival.
• An ally is a friendly or helpful peer who appears from time to time.
• Many heroes have contacts in their profession, community, or religion. These are the helpful friend in the army, the street urchin, and the priest at the church whom the hero calls on for a tip.
• Dependents are the hero’s friends and family who mostly are there for the hero to rescue or take care of: the partners, old relatives, sick little siblings, etc. They do provide moral support and comfort and the occasional unexpected helping hand.
• A patron is a venerable character who often shows up to give a hero a task or to provide information or resources.

Followers and supporting characters don’t have to be people, necessarily. They could be a pet or even a (usually magical or otherwise (semi-)aware) item.

Followers

Followers are minor characters that are mostly controlled by the player of the character they’re connected to, rather than the narrator. Your hero has to have a relationship with a follower, although for retainers a single relationship ability can cover multiple retainers. Followers have their own abilities that you can make use of. Like any other ability, they’re considered part of your hero and go on your character sheet.

Retainers are relatively faceless followers whose commitment is not personal: they might be a paid servant or a distant relative or the like. Each retainer has a single keyword, rated at 17.

Sidekicks are more distinct individuals than retainers. They can act somewhat independently of you if you’d like, and you can use hero points to continue to develop their abilities over time. A human sidekick has a keyword at 17 and three additional abilities starting at 13. Nonhuman sidekicks gain the abilities of their species at ratings as well, but might not have a keyword. Either way, when you gain a sidekick you also get 15 points to spend to further increase its abilities, adding no more than +10 to any one ability. The narrator may also assign additional abilities or flaws to further develop a sidekick. You have to have a separate relationship with each sidekick.

You can change a follower’s role during play. You can “promote” a retainer to a sidekick at a cost of 2 hero points. With narrator permission you may also change a sidekick to a retainer or turn either into a supporting character. You don’t get any hero points refunded for that.

In contests, a follower may:

• Augment a character
• Use its ability directly instead of the hero’s
• Provide its AP for the hero to use during an extended contest (see above).

Followers will reliably obey and perform the task they are hired to do, but if you want them to perform outside their duties, you might need to roll a contest to convince them. The narrator will use the table below to decide an appropriate resistance:

Replacing followers

Followers are useful, but they tend to be more likely to die than heroes.

Between adventures, you can replace dead or otherwise gone retainers for no hero point cost, if a suitable pool of replacement candidates exists. If your hero has been treating their retainers poorly, then you might need to win a contest with your relationship ability to find somebody.

Sidekicks are more personal, but can be replaced with an equally experienced replacement by spending a hero point. If you take too long to replace a sidekick, the narrator may require you to create a completely new sidekick with the base ability ratings.

Supporting characters

Supporting characters are controlled by the narrator and generally aren’t as consistently involved in your day-to-day. They might have their own abilities, but those will be decided by the narrator like any other NPC, and don’t go on your sheet. Your relationship ability does go on the sheet and indicates how strong the relationship is, and how much you’re able to use it to affect them. Relationships with supporting characters cost 1 hero point to gain or replace. Hero points can also be spent to improve the rating of a relationship with a supporting character, but not their abilities.

An adversary is a supporting character who is opposed to your hero, whether a horrible villain or just somebody with some contrary interests to those of your hero. The rating of the relationship represents how intense the hatred/rivalry/whatever is.

An ally is a friendly character of comparable accomplishment and status to the hero. They might come to the hero’s aid when needed, if not too busy with their own life. Sometimes they might need the hero’s aid instead.

Contacts are colleagues, old acquaintances, that sort of thing: the kind of person you might be able to hit up for some information or other indirect aid. A They might be an individual or a category or people. The rating represents how likely you are to be able to find one of them and get useful information or a minor favor from them. Generally, contacts will only help if it doesn’t cost them much or you make it worth their while.

A dependent is a supporting character you’re obliged to protect or support in some way, but who can’t do much to aid you in return. Family members, romantic partners, your old army buddy’s husband you feel bound to take care of because you couldn’t keep his spouse alive could all be dependents (though of course nothing says your boyf or little cousin can’t be as capable as your hero, in which case they’d be an ally instead).

A patron is a supporting character of greater accomplishment or social status than the hero. They might aid you occasionally, but they’ll likely expect favors or services in return. They tend to rely more on their connections than acting directly themselves.

Supporting characters will change over time just like anybody else, and their roles might also change. You can change a supporting character’s role, rewriting the ability name appropriately, by spending 1 hero point (the narrator may sometimes waive the cost). The books say you can only do this is the story is already moving that direction, but I’m likely to be fairly accepting of retroactive justifications.

Community relationships

Other relationships are with some community that can provide your hero with support of various sorts. The relationship is mutually dependent: the more support a community gives you, the more they benefit from your success, but the more they lose when you fail. Communities may refuse to support you or even oppose you in endeavors they view as too risky, but a closer relationship to the community will give you a better chance of getting their help.

Types of support

Communities can provide a lot of different sorts of mundane support to their members, depending on the nature of the group. Almost all of them will provide a sense of belonging and some room to trust your fellow members. They’ll often provide some forms of training or knowledge. In hard times, they may help you stay well fed, housed, doctored, etc. They might be able to bring political or social pressure to bear on your behalf, or ransom you if you’re captured by enemies. They may help to equip you with good weapons, armor, and other equipment, depending on the community and your social status within it. Mechanically, they might be able to give you a bonus from their support for just about any sort of contest, whether from community members helping you in a fight, investing money in your trade ventures, cheering you on to bolster your morale.

Communities can also provide supernatural support, typically during heroquests or similarly momentous rituals. This probably won’t be relevant for this game.

Levels of support

The level of support your community is willing to grant you is decided by the narrator, based on what aid you want, the possible outcomes, and possibly the results of a contest. Here’s the possibilities:

• Total Support: the community pledges itself completely to your existence, to the exclusion of everything else. Whatever happens to you, for good or for ill, will happen to the community as well. You’ll only ever get this when acting on behalf of your community and with a lot of respect from them.
• Extraordinary Support: the community supports the hero with all available resources, but without interrupting normal functions. The community won’t be directly affected by your good or bad fortune, but they may be affected by the events you set into motion. This level of support is often granted to heroes seeking to gain benefits they’ll use for the community.
• Moderate Support: The community supports the hero, but with only cautious or casual commitment. It is rarely affected by the outcome. This is usually the most help you can get for something that will benefit only yourself.
• Ordinary Support: The community doesn’t actively support or resist the hero, just provides its normal benefits.
• Objection: The community objects to the issue and/or the hero, even though the hero’s actions are unlikely to affect the community. Followers from within the community will need to be convinced to go against the community’s objection.
• Forbiddance: The community expressly forbids the hero from pursuing the issue. Followers from within the community may desert you for the duration of the mission, but will probably return afterwards.
• Condemnation: The community condemns the hero for even asking. If you continue, you’ll face penalties to your abilities from the community, perhaps even facing community members as enemies. You and anybody that supports you is likely to be expelled from the community. Sometimes your good fortune will directly harm the community.

Requesting community support

By default, a community provides ordinary support to its members: those people with an established Relationship to the community. If you don’t have a community relationship on your sheet, then you don’t have a home and can’t expect aid from them. Greater levels of support require convincing the community and its leaders. The resistances here might be stronger if the hero seems selfish or reckless, or weaker if the hero has previously exceeded expectations when it comes to helping the community. The level of support requested sets the base resistance, though. It might also be modified by the size of the group or other circumstances.

The size of the community determines the maximum possible bonus the community can provide, called the total support bonus:

The request for support will usually be a contest using the hero’s relationship to the community. The resistance will be 20M plus the total support bonus for total support, 5M plus half the total support bonus for extraordinary support, 16 plus 10% of the total support bonus for moderate support, and an automatic success or 14 for ordinary support. The effects of each outcome are:

• Complete Victory: you get one level of support higher than you asked for.
• Major or Minor Victory: You get what you asked for.
• Marginal Victory or Tie: Your request is turned down without any hard feelings on the community’s part. You still get ordinary support, and might be referred to another group for support.
• Marginal Defeat: The community provides limited resistance, but not enough to cause a penalty.
• Minor Defeat: the community’s response is objection.
• Major Defeat: forbiddance.
• Complete Defeat: condemnation.

The table below summarizes the size of the bonus and any other effects from each level of support:

You can request support from multiple communities if you have relationships with multiple. Each support bonus can only be used on a single contest, but if you have multiple you can use as many as you want per contest. It’s fine if the communities in question have some overlap if it’s not a hierarchical overlap where one is just part of the other, although you might be able to use the bonus from a smaller community as an augment when trying to convince the larger one.

If you fail at getting support from a community, you suffer normal consequences of defeat and the community might end up actively opposing you. If you do get community support and fail at what you’re trying to do, some of the consequences might fall back on the community as well.

Guardians and hero bands

Hero bands and guardians are somewhat setting or at least genre-specific, so I think probably we don’t need to worry about them for this game.