HeroQuest and Eclipse Phase – Miscellanea

Over the last few weeks, I’ve posted about using the excellent HeroQuest 2E rules to run a game set in the Eclipse Phase setting (post 1, 2, 3).

This week, I’m going to cover some of the various bits that I’ve left out until now. I’m not going to go into too much depth on these, but I’ll cover the major elements that will help you to play the game with HQ2.

Mental Health

Characters in HQ2 don’t have a Lucidity score and don’t receive mental stress points. Instead, any time that they fail a challenge in a conflict that inflicts mental stress points in EP, their “injury” should represent an appropriate mental effect.

For example, characters who are asphyxiated may take mental stress damage in EP if they fail a WIL test. In HQ terms, a character who is asphyxiated must engage in a simple contest against a Resistance determined by the GM, using any appropriate ability that reflects the character’s ability to remain calm in such a stressful situation. In this particular case—being asphyxiated—if the character fails the simple contest, then they cannot take any action and also take an appropriate “injury” based on how badly they failed the contest.

Other situations in EP are simply listed as automatically inflicting mental stress. For example, an async who stays in a pod, symthmorph or infomorph form without psychological assistance automatically takes 1d10/2 mental stress damage each month.

I personally would hesitate to automatically inflict “injuries” on characters without it being the result of a failed contest. You could choose to do that, but then you’re introducing something into HQ2 that isn’t in the core rules and doesn’t—I feel—add anything to the game. Rather, I would give the character at least a fighting chance by letting them engage in a simple contest against an appropriate difficulty. You can use the amount of mental damage listed in EP as a guideline on how high the Resistance should be for any particular contest (i.e. the higher the damage listed, the higher the Resistance selected for the contest).

Psi Abilities

Some players may choose to play characters with Psi Sleights—mental powers that allow the character to do very special things with their mind.

I’m just going to go quickly through some of the key elements in Eclipse Phase and show how they can be reflected in HQ2.

• Morphs and Psi (core rules, pg. 220): Infomorphs or synthmorphs do not allow the use of Psi powers. When inhabiting a pod morph, the character receives an automatic penalty of -6 to any Psi Sleights.
• Morph Acclimatization (core rules, pg. 220): As in the EP rules, for 1 day after the character has resleeved, they will suffer the effects of a single minor derangement. In HQ2 terms, the character receives an additional minor flaw that should be described as one of the derangements from the EP core rules (pg. 210).
• Morph Fever (core rules, pg. 220): For each month the async stays in a pod, synthmorph or infomorph form with psychological assistance by a psychiatrist, software, or muse, the character must roll a conflict against an appropriate Resistance using any ability that is relevant to keeping their mental cool in this situation.
• Psi Drawbacks (core rules, pg. 220-221): Asyncs automatically gain some additional Flaws when they gain their powers. The first flaw is a Vulnerability to Mental Stress. The second Flaw is one of the options listed under the Mental Disorder negative trait in EP. The third Flaw is Vulnerable to Infection by Insurgent Viruses.

Psi Sleights

Most the rules in EP about the use of Psi Sleights do not apply when using HQ2. In many cases, Psi Sleights work just any other ability, but there a few wrinkles that I will talk about here.

Passive sleights in EP are designed to be activated and then provide a static bonus to other skills. For example, the Ambience Sense sleight provides a +10 modifier to all Investigation, Perception, Scrounging, and Surprise Tests.

In HQ2, these passive sleights would be used entirely as augments on other abilities. You can choose to use automatic augments or roll them, as per your own preference in your games. In this way, passive sleights work similarly to Common Magic on page 110 of the HQ2 core rules.

Active sleights will almost always be used as part of a contest. For example, the Drive Emotion sleight would require the async character to succeed at a contest against an appropriate Resistance representing their struggle to influence a target’s emotional state. Success on the test could be rolled into an augment on a future test to get the target to do something (e.g. a major success to make a target feel fear would result in that target receiving an automatic bump down on abilities used to later resist an intimidation attempt by the character).

Most of the psi sleights listed in the EP rules can be used in HQ2 without issue. For those that present unusual conflicts, use common sense and apply the closest HQ2 solution to achieve a similar result that has a comfortable level of abstraction for you.

Psychosurgery

This is a great example of how the HQ2 contest mechanics can seamlessly replicate an element of EP. In the EP rules, psychosurgery is handled as an opposed test of the Psychosurgery skill against the target’s WIL. If the psychosurgery succeeds and the target fails, the surgery is effective and permanent. If the surgery and the target both succeed, but the surgeon gains a better result (i.e. wins the contest), then the surgery is effective but temporary. And if the target wins the contest, the surgery is ineffective.

Mesh and Hacking

As with everything else, you can use the EP rules for Subversion to provide a framework for how difficult a task might be (i.e. help you determine an appropriate Resistance).

For example, the Subversion examples table on page 259 of the EP core rules shows that there is no modifier to give orders to drones, interact with entoptics, make online purchases using user’s credit, open/close doors, start/stop elevators, move/manipulate cameras, sensors, use device functions. In HQ2, this means that you would use the base (Moderate) Resistance when a character engaged in a contest to achieve one of these effects.

For those effects listed on the table with a -10 modifier, just use a High Resistance (HQ2, page 125, Resistance Class Table). For those effects with a -20 modifier, use a Very High Resistance. And for those effects with a -30 modifier, use a Nearly Impossible Resistance.

Resleeving

In the core EP game, all characters normally suffer some negative effects for the first day when resleeving. The table on page 272 of the EP core rules shows the effects from the Integration Test and the Alienation Test (plus another table with a host of various modifiers that may apply to those tests).

Here’s how I would translate the table to have it reflect how things work in EP.

Integration Test Consequence Table

EP Result	EP Effect	HQ2 Result	HQ2 Effect
Critical Failure	Character is unable to acclimate to the new morph— something is just not right. Character suffers a –30 modifier to all physical actions until resleeved.	Complete Defeat	Character is unable to acclimate to the new morph— something is just not right. Character cannot take any physical actions until resleeved.
Severe Failure (MoF 30+)	Character has serious trouble acclimating to the new morph. They suffer a –10 modifier to all actions for 2 days plus 1 day per 10 full points of MoF.	Major Defeat	Character has serious trouble acclimating to the new morph. They suffer an automatic bump down on all physical abilities for 5 days.
Failure	Character has some trouble acclimating to new morph. They suffer a –10 modifier to all physical actions for 2 days plus 1 day per 10 full points of MoF.	Minor Defeat	Character has some trouble acclimating to new morph. They suffer a –6 penalty to all physical actions for 3 days.
Success	Standard acclimation period. The character suffers a –10 modifier to all physical actions for 1 day.	Marginal Defeat	Standard acclimation period. The character suffers a –3 modifier to all physical actions for 1 day.
Excellent Success (MoS 30+)	No ill effects. Character acclimates to new morph in no more than a few minutes.	Marginal Success	No ill effects. Character acclimates to new morph in no more than a few minutes.
		Minor Success
Critical Success	Lookin’ good! This morph is an exceptionally good fit for the character. No ill effects; gain 1 Moxie point for use in that game session only.	Major Success	Lookin’ good! This morph is an exceptionally good fit for the character. The character gains a +3 bonus to all physical actions while in this sleeve.
		Complete Success

Note that I’ve moved what in EP is considered a success but still results in a penalty for a day to a Marginal Defeat in HQ2. This keeps the scale on the same level for all elements in HQ2 and ultimately provides the same kinds of results.

Reputation and Social Networks

I touched on this a bit in last week’s post, as far as outlining that a character can have a relationship with one or more of these social networks as shown in an appropriate ability. The Community rules in HQ2 provide a great framework for how a character can gain resources (favors) from their social networks and how it affects their relationship. There is no need to translate every detail of how the social network rules work in EP over to HQ2. Rather, I would just replace the existing EP rules with those that already work well in HQ2 and just use those as is.

Gear

I also touched on the idea last week that I personally prefer the abstract nature of gear in HQ2. But gear in EP is a whole element of the game, and there are those who would prefer to delve into this in more detail.

I’ll be honest, this is something that just doesn’t interest me that much, and so I’m not going to into how to replicate it in HQ2. Depending on how detailed you want the gear subject to get, you can probably avoid adding any new subsystems to the HQ2 rules.

One possibility is to use gear as automatic (or rolled) augments on existing abilities. Another is to give a character a specific ability bonus (HQ2 core rules, page 51) if they have gear that is appropriate to what they are doing. This will give the edge to those who spend time selecting the right gear, but it doesn’t take up a lot of time and the rules remain simple and in alignment with the rest of the HQ2 rules.

Conclusion

And that’s it for my EP to HQ2 conversion. As I was delving into this, I was surprised at how easy it was to convert such a dense and complex game into a very abstract rules system. But I think that I’ve demonstrated that, while there is some work to be done at the beginning going through the key elements of EP and figuring out how the rules of HQ2 can replicate the general feeling (if not the same mechanics), it’s not actually a difficult job for the GM.

Transhumanity’s Fate was a book that took the EP setting and married it to the Fate Core rules. Once the HQ2 SRD is released, I would love to see a version of EP that used the HeroQuest rules. I think it would be a great resource that would showcase HeroQuest to new players who are unfamiliar with this excellent set of rules.

So what’s your take on this? Would you consider playing Eclipse Phase with the HQ2 rules? Was there anything here that was unclear or that you felt was missing? I’d love to keep this discussion going, so please share your thoughts in the comments.