This came out of a comment I made over at Ben Monroe’s/Bruce Baugh’s Something Wicked this Way Comes (the blog of their upcoming Horror Source book to be published by Moon Designs).
I’ve spent a good year musing about how to present adventures (and not a small amount of time pestering Jeff about it too). HeroQuest’s ‘statless’ nature has been a particular quandary.
In the Sartar books,putting a character’s rune affiliations right after their name, having a description and very little else (perhaps highlighting were a character may be very difficult or impossible to beat). The Gloranthan runes are a very specific area, since they are telling you what magical abilities the character has – and probably their cult associations. Unless you have a similarly cool powers/ability system in your setting, I would stay away from it in that sense. As far as abilities go the implication seems to be that you should pluck them out of the description yourself.
For Empires Rising (Nathan Barons’ grand Fantasy setting of clashing empires ) we’ve gone deliberately vanilla in our approach to game information. Partially this is convenience for us (ER was initially developed as a D100 supplement for OpenQuest) and partly so that someone new to HQ but years of traditional rpging experience has some familiarity with the format.
So game description (as I’m coming to refer to it) is given in box pull outs, be it Contests or Character information.
eg.
Malevolent Necromancer
Treacherous and cunning, the Necromancer smells of the grave and has the appearance to match. He will stop at nothing to see his mistress restored back to un-life.
Significant Abilities: Gloat at Enemy, Hooded Black Robe, Necromancer’s Grimoire, Poisoned Tipped Dagger, Read Archaic Languages, Serve the Mistress, Smell of the Grave, Sneaky and Devious.
Magical Abilities: Sorcery – Animate Human Corpse, Burst Flesh, Cast Back Hostile Magic, Control Undead, Poison Enemy’s Blood, Resist Physical Damage.
There’s also Exceptional Abilities for those really kick ass “you really shouldn’t beat this character, but you can try” moments.
