First of all, I can pretty much guarantee that this question has been addressed at least once in the five movies, one animated movie, and three different televised series. However, I have no idea when or how, let alone what the answer is.

However, I will say that the only tabletop RPG campaign that I ever designed and DMed myself was a campaign of _Werewolf: the Apocalypse_ that used a rules set I downloaded off the Internet to include Highlander characters.

The protagonists were knighted werewolf secret agents who worked for the British Crown, and the goal of the campaign was to locate and fight former Swedish monarch Gustauvus Adolphus, who was a Highlander-style immortal with ridiculous stats who went around chopping people’s heads off and ran an international crime syndicate, Bond-villain style. British then-Prime Minister John Major was a central NPC.

The result of the campaign was pretty much as expected. Note: at the very beginning of your adventure, do not give the player characters access to the resources of even a mid-sized European military, no matter how irrelevant you think they will be to their overall goals. The characters pretty much flew around in helicopters all the time and blew up vampire hideouts with surface-to-air missiles, accruing absurd quantities of experience points or whatever. The campaign never got off the ground, so to speak.

Anyway, the point is that the rules to play Highlander characters in the White Wolf game system circa 1996 said that if a regular human kills an immortal, you roll a certain number of six-sided dice, and that determines whether the person becomes an immortal or not.

So that’s my answer and I’m sticking to it.

Final note: I had also found on the Internet a rules set for playing characters from the Disney afternoon cartoon _Gargoyles_. If they had ever let me DM a campaign again, I definitely would have used them, even if their powers turned out to be irrelevant because some idiot just gave them a bunch of Harrier jets.

It hit me when I was coming back from the gym, and once it hit me, I realized it worked perfectly.

The reason the Highlander line scans so awkwardly in this system is because it isn’t accentual-syllabic at all. Look at the following line:

I am CON-nor maCLEOD || of the CLAN maCLEOD

Obvious, isn’t it?

Connor is a sword-wielding epic hero from the British isles. OF COURSE he speaks in alliterative verse with hemistiches!!

It sort of hit me when I was thinking of what the line means — under my scansion, the word “only” is very de-emphasized. That just didn’t seem right, especially since “Only” and “One” start with the same vowel-consonant sound.

(it’s a very loose borrowing from alliterative verse — in alliterative verse, vowels are vowels and the specific one doesn’t matter, nor does the consonant following it.)

So, if I go back to the original Highlander line, I’m still putting a secondary stress on the first word, but I think there’s also a secondary or even tertiary stress on the first syllable of “Only,” and a very soft, almost glossed-over caesura. So it reads:

“THERE can BE || ONly ONE.”

So, yeah, it’s basically just four stresses, with one unstressed syllable in each hemistich, both ending on super-strong stresses.

This scansion adds several things to the reading –

1. The tension between the natural meter of the line and its various more conversational readings in the bazillion spinoffs is interesting to listen to.

2. The line sounds mystical — it is not only oddly symmetrical, but it also has a pair of “3s” in it, which I think does come out in the cadence, and which gives it a magical quality.

3. The first hemistich is a mess, with no alliteration, and the second hemistich is total resolution, with more alliteration than is generally ever required of a hemistich. This adds to the line’s powerful sense of building to a note of finality.

And the reason why the Hillary/Barrack line is both more comfortable and less powerful is because it is more Latinate (well, more French) — and just consists of either two anapests or a slight variation thereof. The jarring trochees that lead to an eventual transition into a more Germanic prosody just aren’t there when “be” is so de-emphasized.

Note how powerful the “on” sounds are in connecting and disrupting a more comfortable reading of the line.

Man, Highlander is the best.

I have a few more comments to add on Highlander later . . .

I’d call the Hillary/Barrack one anapestic, and I might actually make a case for the highlander one being three feet – an acephalic iamb, and iamb, and an anapest — or maybe just two trochees and an iamb.

The last one makes more sense, because I don’t get any of the lightheartedness that comes out of English anapests from that line.

ZING!!!

there can BE only ONE!
vs.
there can ON-ly be ONE!

From the above, you’d get the sense that the two phrases have the same cadence. But in fact, I think that the first comes out as two anapests
xx/ xx/
while the second is a dibrach followed by a choriamb
xx /xx/

Thoughts, Fenzel? I know you have more to say about this kind of thing than I do.

The one episode of “Highlander: The Series” that I watched all the way through was set during The Terror of the French Revolution. The only reason I watched it (other than that it was on in the timeslot after Saturday Night Live, and I was fourteen) was that it seemed like pretty much a given that one of Connor’s buddies was going to get his ass guillotined. Didn’t happen. I’ve been harboring a grudge about that for a long time.

Little Kid: What if someone cut your head off?

John Amsterdam: …that hasn’t happened yet.

And, honestly, I like the cadence of “There can only be one” better.