Crescendo: What Happens After?

I have been making a game about becoming a legendary hero for a while now. It’s mostly based off the works of Gene Wolfe,  because I think Wolfe is objectively correct about what a hero is: 

a person who can only do what he believes, no more and no less. 

This creates tumult as the world changes in response. 

What Wolfe understands better than anyone, however, is that being a hero is a transitional moment. At some point you become different. The world which you forced your will on adapts to your ways. Your actions, rather than being disruptive, are expected. Instead of being a hero, you are now a revered part of the establishment. Others build their ponzi schemes off you and move on. 

So what do you become in that new world that you made? A teacher? A scholar? An archmage? A king? Whatever it is, it isn’t a hero, because you fit with the world. Stagnation becomes a possibility, as the worst enemy of all rears its sweet head: comfort. 

Frequently you just die. Let’s see what happened to all the heroes post-Iliad, shall we…? Oh, right. Menelaus and Helen are okay. Odysseus gets ten years of journeys and a brief time with Penelope before his son by Circe kills him.

I think that’s it? 

Pretty much everyone else is a suicide or some form of horrifying death. Agamemnon gets boiled alive, and good riddance to him! One of the Ajaxes commits suicide, driven mad by the gods. Poseidon gets a bunch of them. The Age of Heroes ends with a whimper, not a bang. 

And let’s not even get started on Arthur and his knights. Gawain, the best one of them, can’t face death without flinching, unlike the woman he accidentally kills. The cyclical nature of reality is preserved 

Why do we ignore such a basic fact? Fiction is always a summation of belief, not a flight from it. So why do we assume that there is some linear process whereby the hero of the day is happy and well-adjusted tomorrow, nevermind remaining the hero?

Crescendo answers this question by ending the story before heroes have become legends in the setting. It is randomly determined what great deeds they accomplish. We determine how they remake the world so they may live in it comfortably. And then we end the game. We know what our long process has created, without betraying what the game is. We say goodbye before our heroes fall in love with spaceships or assassin redheads or something equally silly. And then we move on.

Heroism isn’t a a destination. It’s a bloody and tumultuous process with an ending. You don’t fit with the world, so you make the world capable of accepting you, however that shakes out. It is a fight for spiritual survival. And then, most of the time, if you have any conscience at all, you stop as soon as you can.