The Heartwood certainly covered a vast tract, running for over 8 years with up to 8 players.
There were 6693 game posts by the end, meaning the average post-rate was around 2/day. Average words per post was very high though, around 400 though some threads averaged over 700! This extrapolates to over 2 million words in total. The record holder for a completed game on DreamLyrics and about twice the length of all Harry Potter books combined!! Good going, guys.
Here the GM,
Wolf will answer any of your questions about this remarkable game.
Okay, here you go Wolf. What happened to Squire Conrad Shannon, my toon way back when. Did he die a horrible death? 😀
And one very important clarification.
The Heartwood NEVER used the Basic Roleplaying System. There was an intensive investigation of the current gaming systems - and believe we, had a copies of every game system of the time from "Tunnels and Trolls" (Take That You Fiend!) to "Chivalry and Sorcery" (let's have a rule for everything).
Since that time, so many decades ago, the Heartwood was always RUNEQUEST.
Runequest was selected for several reasons:
a) the combat system was the best simulation of actual combat, having shared the same experiences the writers had on the SCA tourney and melee field.
b) The cult system. This was the heart of the decision, and what made it distinct from the basic roleplaying. One of Runequest's most intriguing facets was the integration of religion into culture and magic. It wasn't called Runequest - representing most characters' drive to become runelords and runepriests - for nothing. It was also pretty groundbreaking - few games had made any effort towards integrating the magic systems into the game world culture - where casting magic was more than selection spells from this book or that book.
While the Heartwood was not Gloranthan, if you ever got to look at any of the Heartwood's cult files you would have immediately seen how they built on Runquest's foundations, starting with lay membership, to becoming an initiate, to becoming a lord or priest or both. It also included the same series of signature cultic spells - very similar to what was in the original books and Cults of Prax.
c) Chaosium's original supplements were the best in the industry and provided an excellent model on how to set up and document parts of the world and adventures. These provided the examples used in creating the various portions of the Heartwood.
d) Yes, there were other influences, and these took the Heartwood even farther from Basic Roleplaying. Eastern Sorcery had deep Stormbringer roots. The Avalon Hill version provided the background system that's served for the template for creating characters in the game - though by the time we got to DL it had been watered down to better suit the player pool. Western Sorcery was straight out of AH Runequest.
So you can say many things about The Heartwood - but Basic Roleplaying?
Just No.
And Conrad probably didn't die a horrible death.
Most likely he went home, where Father would have nodded understandably about getting this "adventurer" foolishness out of Conrad's system, awarded him a small landholding (well, fine, "awarded" probably isn't quite the right word) and arranged a marriage with a minor Kierkegaard household to strengthen His family's political alliances.
The typical kind of thing that would befall a son of a minor Noble house.
Nice! Changed that to RuneQuest for you Wolf.
Thank you very much! Tis greatly appreciated!
actually there is a now a name for the next Heartwood story.
The Ballad of Fixy Biscuit
