The Religion and Magic of the HeroQuest World

[torilen]

Okay - another new topic - religion in heroquest
In another thread...

It all depends upon how pseudo-religious you want to be.
If you don't care at all, then any magician can work his magic simply by knowing secrets others do not. Or having some special talent or organ that lets him tap into other dimensions and energies that others cannot. I kind of like this way, as it depends on no unseen gods at all.
If you want to go heavier on the gods path, then any magic user will indeed have to appeal to some higher being of some sort to work the impossible. While any good scientist will realize this merely adds a step to the same problem of "where does the fantastical energy for these feats come from?"

I wanted to add this thread, and see what others thought about things. First, we all know the HQ game system basically uses the idea of Chaos as the evil side of things, but doesn't really explain the good side of things. We can assume, I suppose, that the good side is Law. If you want to expand this a bit, you make the good side Good and Law, and the evil side Evil and Chaos.

Typically, I go with the idea of 5 head gods - Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, and Neutrality. From there, you can leave it as that, or they can have minor gods that work under them that represent how they interact:
Good/Chaos, Good/Law, Good/Neutrality
Evil/Chaos, Evil/Law, Evil/Neutrality
Neutrality/Chaos, Neutrality/Law

those of you who play D&D - this looks familiar probably.

Now, for those of you who want to go lighter on the higher being side - here is an idea for you

Code: Select all

Good Magic                                      Evil Magic
From a Higher Being (somewhere out there)       From a Higher Being (somewhere out there)
From a natural power within                     From a natural power within
From study of words and movement                From study of words and movements

And of course, if you want to do away with higher beings totally from the game, you could simply get rid of the row that says,
"From a higher being (somewhere out there) - but then you really have to do your own background work on who Zargon is and
why he does what he does, since Chaos is no longer in the picture.

[el_flesh]

Sure it is - you just remove the extra step of some uber-powerful and ethereal being that is, in the end, simply another life form.
Uber powerful simply = a god, as a term of distinction.

But Zarquon is simply 'an agent of chaos', which, when it becomes disruptive to agreed upon laws of social prosperity, is labelled as 'evil'.