In the latter we have chivalry, brave knights, tournaments, tests of resolve, spiritual love and monsters aplenty while the former concentrates on honour, warfare, castles and ninjas. All good stuff, and both score well on the atmosphere and historical ambience scales. As an aside, at the time of writing I have just finished playing and reviewing GMT's Samurai , a wargame of the old school - long, fiddly, hexey and loads of counters. Of the two games, HotS gave me just as much flavour of the period, played in a quarter of the time and is the one I would happily play again, despite its different approach to decision making. But times move on.
Quests has a quite involved system that neatly tackles multi player questing.
There is some down time, as you'd expect, but this is kept to a minimum by careful planning of the systems. Each turn you flip a card from the story deck. This could announce a tournament, in which case everyone decides whether to attend, it could be an event, or it could be a quest. For a quest to happen, one player must sponsor it - that is, provide the cards that the questers will face. In turn, those that decide to go on the quest can now do so, facing a series of unknown hazards in turn.