I’ve finally realized how regularly people ask me to explain RuneQuest, HeroQuest, the Chaosium, and Glorantha, specifically because they’ve bounced hard off the apparently extensive setting and apprently impenetrably insider-oriented fanbase. It’s usually private, and they often present the question as if it’s their last fatigued try at finding out what “there” is there.
After the latest event of this kind, I tried out some written work at the Patreon, then combined the result with some other material I had lying around from a past game. Then I asked some Chaosium people to look it over, re-wrote it, and then went to the social media haunts of people who say “Dagori Inkarth” or “Lhankor Mhy” as if that were normal, to get responses there.
The written version is attached and I kind of like it, although perhaps just a bit more sanding and slicing can reduce its length. Given permission for a little art, I might even put it out as a fan-love download. Since sanding&slicing can only do so much, I decided to try for a less-detailed but on-point video presentation too, for which the document would serve as the “full” version.
The video is still pretty rough, and I think of it as a work in progress for some later refinement, much like the Phenomenology presentation. Toward that end, I’d appreciate responses from people who fit the target audience: the “Glorantha-RQ-HQ curious,” who may have been put off in the past by the apparent volume and detail, or by all-too-expert internet venues.
Gloranthaphile feedback is only partly welcome. Since the document has already been combed over by those same experts, I can assure you that I’ve “forgotten to include” nothing; if it’s not in there, then I don’t want it to be. What I’d love from this zone, though, is to see more accounts of play.
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33 responses to “Presentation: Why Glorantha (and its games)”
Good Sumary!
Love it Ron! I wrote an article in the latest edition of Escalation! fanszine more or less trying to break down the essentials of how to "get" Glorantha for beginners. It hits on a lot of the same points you do. I added that diversity and contradictions in the setting is a feature and not a bug. It gives you creative license to be different from published material and other player groups because; "Hey! It even contradicts itself!" I'll share a link to that article if anyone wants to read it.
/ulf
Page 61-66; The Severance –
Page 61-66; The Severance – Escalation! Issue 7 – The Divine
I’m not surprised we worked
I'm not surprised we worked on this topic more or less simultaneously, because for me, it comes directly from our conversation about "today's Glorantha" on my back porch during your visit. You may recall that I was trying hard to ask, say, or understand something, and not succeeding very well.
In retrospect, I was wondering whether Glorantha is past its time. Not whether it's good or valid or meaningful today, but rather, whether it has any useful pull for role-players who aren't already familiar with it or who don't have personal reasons to care about any aspect of its system, setting, or publishing history. Maybe all of our aging-fanboy effort to "spread the word" is merely generational, and a little pathetic. Maybe Glorantha was a hump in role-playing-history, but we are now on the downslope, and there's no point grabbing younger people and trying to pull them backwards in time, up the slope to wherever one of us thinks the top of the hump is. Maybe even publications like the modern RQ, the modern HQ, Mythras, and 13th Age: Glorantha are nothing but pathetic nostalgia (old guys trying to be relevant by rewriting stuff written by an older guy) and ultimately rather cynical branding (pumping hot gas into a trademark). Maybe we should accept reality and let younger people create their own magnificent fantasy in their own way, and let the hobby activity do its own growing & developing, rather than trying to control it with our various personal claims to super-fan status for this particular thing.
So you and I apparently have been providing our answers or positions about that – which is good, because at the time of that conversation, I was feeling a little bit down about it.
Hmmm… a lot of different
Hmmm… a lot of different impressions flying around in my head that I need to try to structure here. I'm going to fail misserable but bare with me.
I don't think so… I mean we are old and nostalgic, for sure but there is a quality to Glorantha that is still to this day, rare, and precious IMO. It is raw, naked and sexual without being sexist. It is tribal, colourful and ethnic without being racis. It treats all it's myth religions and cultures with respect even when some of them are percieved to be "bad". It celebrates diversity and the individuals right to break traditional bonds on the same pages as it talks about age old traditions and why they are the way they are. It is morally flexible in a lot of areas but rock hard when it comes to pure chaos. It mirrors us humans in a way that no other game to date (that I know of) has done.
I will take it one step further. I think in todays world where oposite extremes get more and more agitated with the existance of "the other"… maybe a game like this is even more important than ever? All the kids nowadays who mess around with their pronouns and gender identities, would proably find Glorantha SUPER welcoming and accomodating! In a way that leaves DnD tropes in the dust 20 years back.
I don't know if I managed to unpack that in a good way… there's more but I have to think a bit. ๐
/ulf
I agree! Your points may also
I agree! Your points may also be why I am now much more interested in playing Black Horse County, or perhaps a game set entirely among the inhabitants of (not visitors to) Alkoth, than the classic "good tribal guys fighting bad imperials."
I could be Glorantha curious. ..
…so here are my thoughts on this.
Section one is and understandable and obviously necessary overview but, and I can belive I'm writing this, maybe it could use a bit of detail about what and why people want to argue on the Internet and are driven to create new editions. I mean, I realise "gamers (eyeroll)"is probably the answer but it would be good to understand if there's something more going on. For example arguing about strap types on lunar armour based on pictures in a 30 year out of print source book would be different to arguing that culture x must be matrimonial because that's going to be so much fun as they rub against culture y and cults z and x and will help make actual play "better".
This links to my question about part 2, which also relates to your discussion with Ulf, which is basically "why this setting"? Specifically what does it bring that I wouldn't get binging on Tanith Lee and then filling note books while listening to prog rock? I get that it's "proper" fantasy – as opposed to pink slime – but what is the Glorantha specific grit that needs chewing in play and ends up producing pearls? I realise this is maybe difficult to answer without being too prescriptive for newbies.
Final point, and also I realise a bit outside what you set out to do, but if I was thinking of setting up a game, as opposed to showing up at somebody elses table, what are good entry points, rather than trying to drink down all of Glorantha in a single go? And related, what are good ways to intro players to the content – though I guess that's really the same question we've been talking about re. your non-Glorantha RQ game.
Hope these don't seem too critical / confrontational, I did find both the videos and the document really interesting.
Final point, and also I
I don't know how others feel, but regardless of whether your interest lies in RQ, HQ, or 13A, I would suggest starting in Apple Lane.
Apple Lane is a fun set of adventures in a town called Apple Lane. The reason I recommend this for new people is that it is a light introduction into Glorantha. There is an interesting cult, Uleria, that is an introduction to how diverse cults can be. There is one adventure that introduces some of the creatures as allies and antogonists. And there is a bit of a more traditional that deals with a local troll that reveals how different trolls in Glorantha are.
When bringing in players from other fantasy systems and worlds, it eases them into the differences in expectations. For completely new players, it eases them into what Glorantha can be. From Apple Lane you can tackle the more hard core Glorantha adventures or the HQ books or whatever 13A is doing.
maybe it could use a bit of
Eeeeeeyaaghhhhh!
I aimed hard at the concept of non-linear editions, in the "spray" concept … but also, I think the big culprit here is licensing. Technically, the original (counting nominal 2nd ed) was the only version ever made by the Chaosium proper. Everything else, officially published or not, is just fan-love or an outsourced assignment. I guess one could even say there are no editions of RuneQuest, just the original and a lot of user-base opinions.
Final point, and also I
Very common question! And always a good question. My advice is to make it simple. Start by taking stock of your group. Are they classic dnd types that usually play straight dungeon-delving? Or do they prefer/lean more towards PbtA type-games where your draw relationship charts etc before and during play? This will give you an idea on where to start.
If they like the second version here, I would start super small, by defining their clan and important people there. This should be done a group activity so that everyone has a say and can suggest ideas. And you (having read more than them, maybe) can guide them and make suggestions. Once you have some rough idea about what this clan is about and where they are located you can start to come up with trouble that threatens it, and presto! you have a game.
If they like more straight lines you can simple have the chief send them away on a mission… The Dark Tower in the in the center of the Uppland Marsh has been showing up in the visions of the clan Godtalker lately, something is brewing there. Get a Duck to guide you and go there to investigate!
And you can of course mix and match these as you go along.
In both cases I would focus on ONE culture, Sartarite Heortlings, ONE clan and preferable ONE place (on or close to the Clan Thula), and only a few CULTS… Orlanth, Ernalda and Humakt. Just to narrow down the cognitive load. Once these things become familiar to all of you, you can branch out.
/ulf
Hey Ross, I realized I hadn’t
Hey Ross, I realized I hadn't given your questions a fair shake and finally got back to this.
The most cynical answer is that a great deal of present-day Glorantha fanwank-and-rage was formed by and ultimately dominated by people who were jockeying for inclusion in the property as IP, for which “canon” is a stand-in and rather deceptive term. Therefore it became less about play and more about naked power and demonstrable social status, which again, in those specific period terms, meant controlling the narrative via internet-specific interations. Arguing about “what’s right” didn’t have much to do with playing the game for fun, or aesthetic preferences about the setting, but instead meant using those topics as a cover.
One pessimistic view would be that today’s fantasy hobby culture has no idea how to binge on Tanith Lee (or any suitable author) and fill notebooks while listening to prog rock (or any suitable music), meaning, how to do those things so that you are driven to create a genuinely trippy-and-meaningful fantasy through play. Therefore it’s reasonable to suggest that Glorantha is one of the best we have so we might as well use it as the teaching model instead of trying to force people through a time-travel reboot to do it from scratch.
But accepting for the moment that perhaps that’s wrong, and that anyone of whatever age and generation could do it, then your question is pretty strong: why is Glorantha itself a good example of doing this? Since my own enjoyment of it is embedded precisely in the geography and era of its creation, I’m probably not able to answer.
I agree with Ulf’s reply above and also refer back to my 2011 essay Setting and emergent story – briefly, that you don’t “learn the setting” at all, but rather pick a spot and have a great time with it. The better the time, the more everyone seeks stuff out and incorporates it.
Hi, I feel I'm exactly the target audience of this post.I never played Runequest or Glorantha during my roleplayer "career", because it was just not much played in my social spheres. I remember very well the first time I encountered it tough, in one of those "24h of RPG day" that was organized in my secondary school. One of the guy was disguised and make a "in-character seminar" (those days were full of diy workshops, and games), talking about the metaphysics and mythology. The guy was funny and presenting that like some kind of crazy priest. For a long time, I confused Runequest with Rolemaster, just because of the names, and had no interest in Runequest. Most of my friends stil confuse them.It's really on adeptplay that I understood my confusion and what Runequest was, and readings about the HeroQuest game. I must admit Glorantha feels like one of the best fantasy setting ever made. This post, and Ulf's article, is really helpful. This year, I bout a second-handed book of Hero Wars, with the narrator's handbook and the Thunder Rebels book.Here are some naive questions and remarks about Glorantha to show you how I'm still a bit pushed off and looking for ways to get interested.1) I have no idea how to fill notebooks and "binge" Tanith Lee and listening to prog rock. I love Tanith Lee, it's totally inspiring, and I'm not much inspired by prog rock – I come from a totally different culture. But I don't feel like the typical new generation. I took interest in fantasy only a few years ago, after a long and long time focused on contempory horror in all its dimension. One of the thing that pushed me off from historical-inspired fantasy was the need to have educated researchs on how people would live. This is generally not helped by handbooks with police-guards and motel-taverns.2) Is Glorantha a good example for that? I don't know but I'm interested to explore. For the moment, I think Circle of Hands and the Thunder Rebels books are the most helpful books to help visualize how a village would work in this kind of settings, how to create a little part and not as an academic general statement but as "I have a good feel of how to portray it and play people" description. Also, not sure why, but S/lay W/Me is the most helpful game that helps me to get the "fantasy trip creativity". When I play it, it always creates some "Tanith Lee meets Ashton Smith" stories, with still some problems from my part (it often comes with epic escalading region-shaking events durint the match and the battle). I really think I "binge on Tanith Lee", to keep this expression, when I play S/lay W/me, and I play it for three reasons: (a) it's cool to play it, I really enjoy it a lot, (b) Its focus on framing techniques, sharing characters, going with what has been stated always helps me to play better for other games (c) It creates crazy fantasy stuffs, settings, stories, naturally, that are useful for further inspirations and games. I'll post about S/lay W/me in its own post to talk about this game. But I think it's relevant to write about in this discussion about "how to do fantasy".3) Exploring Glorantha. I think it's worth to try, really. I think the setting is worth it and I understand better how to do it with this discussion. I have a better sense of how Glorantha is embedded in its cultural and regional real world origin, and why it was so good at that time. I can't answer if it is a good teaching tools, but I honestly thing it was the try and then reflect on it. My preference would clearly go for Hero Wars and I'm pretty sure I'll play it, maybe not in 2021, but at least in 2022. I'm thinking about it, reading about it. The main put off is this one. Where to start? The "default" start seems clearly, as stated here, a sartarian tribe in dragon pass with those three cults, then see. But :a) what are the other interesting stuffs? My first reflex is to say, "ok, but there seems to be a whole interesting world, and all you can find is about a sartarite tribe against the lunar empire". So this big world seem to reduce to those two cultures when you try to open its door. Without having to "know" the setting, where could I look to have an overview of other parts of the world that is interesting. I've seen mentioned Black Horses County, but never seen anything about that before somebody wrote about it here.b) How do you present this little part (the sartarite tribe) in other terms than the "barbarians against the empire", which does not seem very appealing to me ? c) What would be the best resources to read for a total beginner such as me, having read a bit (a bit of cults of prax, a bit of thunder rebels, a bit of herowars), but really not so much, what are the other "pearls", innovative fantasy of this setting for you, and where to find bits of it?
My advice would be to not overthink it. Play is the thing and crashing into Glorantha is the best way. I certainly think it is worth it. But there are also a ton more places than Sartar and it has me thinking that would be a great intro game for folks not in that Lunar – Orlanth conflict. Lots of wonderful places to engage with the cultures.
Thanks Sean, that's my plan. Still, I'm really wondering which sources I should read to start a game. I'm sharing here my experience with the difficulty to get into Glorantha – after reading this post, hoping it provides insights. I'm sharing here how I'm getting in contact with the setting as I read this.First, it is very clear that my group would love to play hero wars. I've read the book fully now and it gets me really excited. But visually, I love the imagery of the new runequest – roleplaying in Glorantha. Both the Hero Wars/Quest system and the new Runequest art makes me want to play this game. And Ulf and Ron's presentations help to understand it better. But practically, it is still difficult to make choices.The two advices here are : "just pick a spot and play in it", and "Orlanthi with the three main cults". I tried them and I got into new difficulties.Firstly, which spot to pick? I'm starting out of nowhere, so it would be really cool to have a glance of the world – not a detailed description of everything – to see what spots could be cool. The Glorantha Sourcebook? Just go with the Hero Wars rulebook (but I feel, maybe wrongly and tell me if I does, that I'm missing all this richness of the setting we are talking).Secondly, starting with Orlanthi with three cults to lower the cognitive loads seems to be wise but leads practically to the opposite for me. When I say to myself "let's play a game" and I look for Orlanthi material :- I have the description of the Orlanthi in the Hero Wars rulebook, that points to the Thunder Rebels playbook. Great, I've found the Thunder Rebels playbook and I'm looking at it. I did not read it deeply but had a fast reading of the book for the moment. Two things catch up my attention: (1) there is something I really like, the framed write-ups p.18, 29, 47 etc that focus on one page of "what a clan looks like", "what a village looks like", "who do you pay taxes". It gives interesting information to portray a village without having a degree in archeology. (2) but it seems to be very focused on a "Orlanthi = Nortern Island" culture fighting the empire, at least in the visuals, which kind of pull me off. Am I wrong here?- So I'm looking for sources for the Orlanthi and I find: The Sartar Companion, a three volume campaign "Sartar Rising", a two volume "Gloranthan adventures" Orlanthi campaign, King of Sartar, Sartar Kingdom of Heroes, the Sartar Campaign Pack. It is like Glorantha has an elusive quality, everyone writing about how it is rich, but all I can find is a set of different interpretations of what is an Orlanthi campaign.Those difficulties could be summarize in the following question : What would be the narrowest list of source material for a GM and his gaming group, all new to Glorantha, to start a a few sessions with the Hero Wars system in a setting inspired from Mesopotamian/Mediterrenean bronze age civilizations (as opposed to Northern Ireland vs Roman Empire) ? The good news is that you all have given me to play and gm in this world, and to discover it!
I would just stick with what is in the HQ Glorantha main book. It gives you enough information to play with and a sense of the conflicts. But it will be centered around the Orlanthi/Lunar conflict. You could also grab this. Typically when people want to play Glorantha, I recommend Apple Lane. This is a HQ version of Apple Lane (an iconic intro to Glorantha). https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/96472/Return-to-Apple-Lane–Demo-Scenario
Greg, I think you're chasing your tail. When you say, "It's so rich!" then you can't pick a spot, and when you say, "I'll pick this spot," then you keep looking around to other spots because it's so rich. You'll just wear yourself out if you keep doing this.
The fact that's blocking you is simple: nothing in Glorantha is really a setting. It was a crazy-quilt or kitchen-sink all the way back when it was just in boardgames, and people have hurled spaghetti at it from every individual play-table or internet debate. Dragon Pass began overly full and has only become more and more stuffed ever since, and everywhere else has been variously interpreted or described, and has therefore become incredibly contradictory, ever since. As I said in the video, if you're going by RPG texts, then the best conclusion is that everything after 1979 is fanfic, Stafford included.
Therefore you will never find a real gazetteer or "the dictionary," i.e., if you pick a spot, then a lovely detailed account of precisely what is there and what is happening. You will always have to decide or make up at least 50% and more like 90% of what's there and what's happening.
Recently, this has changed only for the very latest iteration, RuneQuest Glorantha, which seems fairly set upon establishing exactly the kind of gazetteer you're looking for.
Thanks Sean and Ron.
Oh, it's clearer. And better. I think we missed each other's point, I wasn't really looking for a gazetter.There is two I think I would go with a glorantha campaign. a) starting with runequest 2nd + cults of prax, the map of Prax, and cult of terrors and makes things up from there. The interesting thing is that I think I would never arrive to the idea of a sartarite heortling such as described in hero wars for instance with this route (which would not be a problem), but surely something more like the runequest spelenhus game. That's something I want to do when I digest the magic rules of RQ2. In fact, that's the route I would go if I didn't read Hero Wars and felt it would really suit my group.b) going with hero wars, the map of dragon pass in RQ2, and sartarite orlanthi, but I'm pulled of by the "viking/north ireland" presentation, so I'll need to work everything myself, and I'm really interested how anyone presents the orlanthi as something else than barbararian vs the romans to a group (Ron you mentioned that in another post). Seeing how it went, I would prefer to take this discussion in vocal when we find time and post it after, if it's ok?
Appropriate a setting from the get-go!
As I noterd at Discord, for my game in development, Im Reich der Nibelungen, I'm planning an introductory adventure which (a) immediately deviates from the original source and (b) involves the PCs in the deviation one way or another (i.e. their choices and luck will determine things). Admittedly, the Song of the Nibelungs isn't anybody's fan religion (as far as I know), like Glorantha or Middle Earth (though a base for academic dispute, as Helma pointed out).
I'm familiar with cries of "This violates canon!" from playing and running the German RPG Das Schwarze Auge which has shelves of supplements and decades of metaplot to look to … for inspiration (maybe) or oneupmanship (more likely). Around the time they began publishing novels I refused running it anymore because I wasn't interested in the novels and couldn't be bothered to keep up with the lore.
I wish game designers took a pro-active approach to the problem. It's not enough to say "Make this world your own!". Give us adventures which transform parts of the setting! I think James Raggi's Death Frost Doom is excellent in this regard and should work well if one limits the effects to a region. Put it in the Forgotten Realms and, say, likely nuke the Sword Coast or whatever and everyone knows we're not in Kansas/One-Faerun-To-Rule-Them-All anymore (and follow the implications for adjacent regions!).
Of course, (a) the fanboys might well respond by classifying formal branches of the setting, thereby hemming it in again and (b) coprorate schlock would be designed so that the branches don't matter beyond the adventure itself — I suspect WotC's Waterdeep: Dragon Heist with its four villains to choose from to fill the role of the Big Bad might be like that.)
I've certainly tried over the decades, especially regarding fantasy. But my aim has been toward anyone who might be interested, with no regard or goal toward anyone who isn't.
My question for you is what, after all, is "the problem" as you see it? The existence of a toxic, uncritical, commercially-captured fandom-customer base? As far as many or even most publishers are concerned, that's not a problem, it's their explicit goal. I see this not as a social or commercial problem to solve but rather as a personal risk to recognize and to avoid.
Although I don't dismiss what you're suggesting regarding Death Frost Doom, I also think it's trying to address the social scene for some reason, perhaps the classic ideal to "change it from within." If so, and I acknowledge this is ideological on my part, then I have a hard time seeing the point. The result is no less classic: to sink into the morass at best, or at worst, to become an agent of the problem. It's certainly happened plenty of times regarding Glorantha, arguably even for Stafford himself.
Appropriating a setting
What I have experienced in the past in various campaigns with other games and what I wish to prevent in my group with my game is this:
GMs designing an adventure either (a) in the margins of the setting so as not to step on perceived canon or (b) firmly within the setting but with an eye towards preventing a violation of perceived canon by illusionist control techniques (e.g. fudging).
The German RPG The Dark Eye even has a region with intentionally little detail so GMs can set their own adventures there.
I don't like this approach. It's like playing in Middle Earth but steering clear of Minas Tirith for fear of violating canon (e.g. by setting into motion events which would prevent later, canonical events, or filling in detail which fans might disagree on etc.). I want to leverage a chosen setting, i.e. engage with the cool stuff, with the understanding that the game will sooner or later take us out of established canon as the players' decisions and luck impact the setting (or a GM takes some detail of the setting and runs with it god knows where).
And I don't want to hold a big speech to my players but immediately demonstrate the above credo with my introductory adventure: See, the adventure we've just finished was directly concerned with an important figure of the Song of the Nibelungs, see, we openly rolled to see whether [he/she would die, marry someone else, be crippled etc.] and that roll had such-and-such modifiers or came about as a result of your actions. We're now in our own/unique/local version of the Song of the Nibelungs! Go forth and create your own cool adventures, so I get to play, too!
I'd like to look at designs with this approach but then your comment made me realize that I may be looking at traditional, commercial RPGs, i.e. looking in the wrong place. Can anybody recommend adventures or games that not just encourage appropriating a setting, but demand and support it? (Unlikely for 'beloved' settings, i.e. valuable IP, if I understand this correctly.)
Finally, I don't understand what is meant by the "no less classic" results of Raggi's and Stafford's efforts (the latter of which I am not familiar with).
The original presentation of Glorantha and RuneQuest meets the needs you describe, either using RuneQuest's magical and social template for your own Bronze Age fantasy or using their presentation of Glorantha as your own launching point to do something you please. This feature was lost almost immediately, as I tried to describe in the presentation. Those texts are available, however, and a number of people here have followed my lead in clearing their minds of fandom/internet underbrush and discovering the powerful system and concepts in them.
My own work has driven hard in this direction, if you are familiar with Sorcerer & Sword, Trollbabe, or Circle of Hands. All of them are simultaneously strong in setting but also refuse to provide anything more than launch points. Once at your table, the Crescent Land is yours and has nothing to do with anyone else's.
Not very many other titles have done this. The infrastructural ("industry") demand for constant splat was too strong. A lot of games which appeared only as a core book and maybe a supplement or two, then disappeared, are actually better to pick up and play because they didn't get spoiled.
Really, though, it's not about texts. It's about what you do with them. I appropriate anything which isn't too stupid to bother with, and it's a big part of my fun to grab a published adventure and use whatever I feel like toward no one's ends but our own at this table. A few decades ago I stopped noticing canonical settings, entirely, let along caring about them or debating them.
We can talk about my references to Jim and Greg another time.
A Bit of a Tangent
I recently re-read your Fantasy Heartbreakers article and the opening phrase caught my eye in a way it hadn't before:
One thing I wondered, for instance, was if by "fantasy" you meant literature or just fantasy in RPGs. The other, of course, what the specifics of "what has happened to most of it" were.
During the third video of this presentation, you also go into a small aside about fantasy and how Glorantha is different from what fantasy had been established to be during the 1980s.
I have my own opinions about the matter, having started to read fantasy with Tolkien and having quickly given up on it after finding most of what was marketed as Fantasy beyond Tolkien was just extremely derivative (mostly of Tolkien, but sometimes of very well troden popular culture tropes), whereas the term Science Fiction seemed to offer a much broader scope of works.
To put it in blunt terms, when I read about a very imaginative work of SciFi it would usually involve the incorporation of totally novel concepts be them technologies, supernatural phenomena or even ways of societal organization. When I read about a very imaginative work of Fantasy, it usually just meant that the Elves were coded differently, and that was for some reason mind blowing.
I titled this comment "A Bit of a Tangent".
This is a bit of a tangent both in the sense that it is not related to Glorantha per se, but also because it is not really about gaming but about literature.
However, to bring it back to the subject of this community, the more I learned about both fantasy and D&D, the more I started to suspect that some incestuous relationship developed between fantasy authors and the tropes of the game, to the point that D&D may be a lot to blame for the stagnation of these tropes in popular literature (and conversely, this type of literature for the stagnation of these tropes in D&D).
For instance, an interesting discovery for me was finding out that, during its development, the Dark Sun campaign setting, one of the most refreshing D&D products in my opinion, was originally not meant to incorporate any of the "standard" fantasy races, but TSR decided it was too risky not to provide these familiar tropes (hence we wind up with Elves… but coded differently).
So Ron, as someone who has an active interest both in the history of "D&D culture", as it were, and in the Fantasy genre, would you agree that their interplay was a major factor in creative stagnation or is my perception wrong?
(Also, I just ran with the assumption that by "what has happened to most of it" as quoted above was this proliferation of pseudo-Tolkienesque trope ridden derivative fantasy. Did I read that correctly or am I way off?)
My response is very much a
My response is very much a big Yes. Since writing those essays two decades ago, I've studied the topic of fantasy fiction/role-playing interplay and discussed it enough with knowledgeable people that I've turned it into an entire course, called Three Fantasies. The kind with assigned readings, homework, projects, et cetera. What I know and think about it is simply not communicable in any other way.
I’ll be on the lookout for
I'll be on the lookout for the next offering then!
I feel kind of bad turfing
I feel kind of bad turfing you to "pay me money and take my class," although I do look forward to the experience.
In the meantime, maybe this will be helpful or fun: the notion that we don't "play settings" at all. Setting is, instead, the effect of successfully playing situations.
I've utilized this concept in a variety of different starting points and procedures throughout my game designs, especially Sorcerer & Sword, Trollbabe, S/Lay w/Me, and Circle of Hands, and more recently, developed some schematic thinking about it which seems to be making sense for others. If you're interested, check out Situation: primary and primal.
Getting into it
I've recently been "getting into" Glorantha. I had no touchpoints for it at all until I read Stafford's King of Sartar a few years ago; I'd picked it up at a game store based on being intrigued by the marketing copy–praising the depth of Glorantha and the supposedly genuine literary/mythical quality of this book in particular.
I quite enjoyed it, though it also totally baffled me. It really felt like picking up a book from an alien culture; some things had meaning to me and some things had clear meanings but were opaque to me and it all felt intentional and realized.
Then in 2020 I read Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, and the game and the setting both seemed intriguing but also the game came across as kind of a morass of things; I could not understand why there were three types of magic and how they all interacted with one another or what they really meant in the setting, as set against one another. Watching the videos and reading the write-up made things much clearer. Ah, it's an extrapolation on RQ2 rules. For some reason, even though I don't know RQ2, that context made the book make much more sense to me. It's like the Rules Cyclopedia or something. I now feel more equipped to actually play and/or run. I have since gotten the RQG Starter Set, and that so far seems like something that will actually be very helpful in facilitating play.
Another thing I'm facing as I'm "getting into it" is what feels like the danger of reading too much about a setting as opposed to playing and possibly reading as a substitute for play. I bought the Guide to Glorantha, for Christ's sake. Glorantha is very exciting to me and so reading about it is very enjoyable, but I am afraid to maybe read too much and then either get gunshy in play about what I don't know (because I do know some things). I suppose I also can't get too worried about this, reading as it's enjoyable and stopping when it becomes anxiety about prepping enough.
It's a goal to get either RuneQuest or HeroQuest to the table in 2023.
I was exactly there not long
I was exactly there not long ago (though I haven't read *all* of King of Sartar). If you are going to read for enjoyment, know that there is no One Glorantha, regardless of what the marketing says. The world presented in the Guide is not the same as presented in Hero Wars or my favorite setting book Dorastor: Land of Doom. I recommend bouncing around where fancy takes you and reading different voices as you can.
I am also hoping to gather some friends and make a Glorantha in 2023, but I am leaning towards The Riddle of Steel since *it calls to me*.
Very good points about not
Very good points about not worrying about the "one true" Glorantha. Luckily I don't think that'll be too much of a danger for me, because while details are cool, it's all the broad strokes of the setting (myth and magic as the basis of reality, the incursion of Chaos, the incipient Hero Wars) that get my blood pumping.
Another thing I’m facing as I
I do read game material for pleasure, more so when I had more free time. But I never thought it was dangerous to do so. My impression is that the play theoritician is someone who amasses the knowledge but is averse to the risk of creating a situation to put it into play, as opposed to someone who enjoys getting lost in the wonders of the setting. My big use of the Guide is for plucking ideas from outside of Dragon Pass for play or my own inspirations.
RQ2 and RQ:G were both on my list for 2022, but alas neither made it. I have no regrets but I am shifting plans in the hope of getting one or both in 2023.
Cults & Brotherhoods
Rather than put this on Discord it's here. About Cults and Brotherhoods.
I play Mythras. I steer clear of RQ and it's setting material. I make a disclaimer here: RQ is just not interesting to me at all. I realize that Mythras is the child of RQ. And, I respect people who play in Glorantha – peace to you friend. I feel Mythras is a much more elegant system and readily adaptable to any genre of roleplay. That said, moving on.
At the onset, it sets out that "Cult" or "Brotherhood" is merely a concept and can be applied to an adventuring company, a mystical order, a gang, etc. and then proceeds to discuss different elements of Cult. One of these is "how will society view the character if they are a part of this cult?" Good question. It goes on to a formulaic that guides you along and once you're done, you have a pretty good idea of this cult you've created. There's also a few examples in the text to look at and compare notes. I also flesh this out a bit more once I can realize the gestalt of what that cult represents in game, to the character and to me as GM and how it will interact with those elements.
I've used this method several times in other games, including d20, d6, d10 etc. based games. Most of the time players balk at creating and customizing a cult for their character. Once I show them how to do it, by listing some questions that build on the concept they initally created, they end up liking how it adds to their play experience.
EX: Let's assume a character wants to play a rogue/thief character and they want to belong to a Guild. This is a perfect opportunity to set up the cult/brotherhood that they will seek out in times of need. Something like a guild sets my mind in motion, as now I have an idea for a thieves' guild and a rival guild…moving on. I don't want to go into detail about how to create your own cults/brotherhoods. You get the idea.
So, what I like about Mythras is that it was purposely created apart from setting. Let me say that this doesn't mean it's a text only manuscript, it has some really great original artwork inside. There's some settings made for it: Lyonesse, M-Space, Odd Soot, Fioricita, Luther Arkwright, etc. My first games were homebrew, set in my own world of Avenir. I used a gritty sword and sorcery approach and we played for about 2.5 years in that setting. It was a ton of fun.
Hello, and thanks for posting!
What you've described is quite close to my reading and play for original RuneQuest (sometimes called 1st and 2nd edition). I see it as a role-playing game for creating Bronze Age Fantasy, with a bit of artistic wiggle room, for which Glorantha is strictly an example.
I've done this several times with great success, many of them described here in Actual Play posts and most of them with videos of play. As you may imagine, culturally, it is very difficult to engage with people who hold a binary notion of [RuneQuest in and only in Glorantha] vs. [some application of BRP], but as I say, it's based on a straightforward reading and I came by it honestly, on my own as a teen in 1980.
Having done this, by the time Mythras came around, it was fulfilling a need I'd already met on my own, so I appreciated what it was doing but I also prefer the untrammeled, raw 1970s content and feel of the original, and to some extent certain illogical or quirky features it has.
Anyway, I think you might enjoy a look at one of these games played about three years ago, which is very much old-RuneQuest-not-Glorantha. It continued for 26 sessions, if I recall correctly, and this link Archive Search | Adept Play will display all five posts . I’m including it here mainly in solidarity with you regarding the player-characters' cults and their development. You'll see it mainly in the attached files (at the posts) for the cult writeups. They began extremely sketchy, barely adequate, and evolved into quite a setting.
[Oh yes! editing this in: A small post about a great combat scene (Runequest/Mythras) | Adept Play which shares appreciation for your preferred game.]
As a total Runequest virgin I found this post very useful. (I haven’t watched the video, only read the pdf.) It succinctly describes the pleasures of the game, some interesting features of its setting, and its publication history. The latter was especially useful, because I had previously tried to get into the game but bounced off the wikipedia and drivethrurpg pages hard.
It sounds like, for my purposes, the best place for me to start is some late 1970s or early 1980s Runequest rulebook. This is apparently the influential one. This is the seed from which the “spray of endpoints” stems.
On the other hand, you are nice and reassuring at the end of the pdf, telling me that any of the available versions online will be fine for my purposes. I like that. “Start anywhere, just start playing!”
I will say, the idea that there could be “one true Glorantha” is totally bizarre to me. This seems both impossible and undesirable. How could a community have built up around this concept?
Iโm glad it seems useful, and I also hope you watch the video; the file and the video arenโt the same and are intended to work together. If you’ll forgive some musings, regarding your final point …
Some ideals stuck hard and fast in comics and science fiction/fantasy during the cultural transformation and simplifications of the 1980s. One was canonical continuity within a given title (brand, IP). It may seem bizarre today, but no one cared in 1980 that the wide variety of Star Wars spin-offs failed to make any sense relative to one another; by 1990, people were ready to die on the hill of did or did-not regarding single-scene characters. Similarly, comics continuity was a fringe fan curiosity, playful at best in the actual comics; then, purported canon according to fans-turned-editors became institutionalized and aggressively marketed. Another was compatibility across unrelated properties, which โhadโ to be consistent to preserve the integrity of their marketed label. Another was the romance of the multi-authored shared-world.
All of these were features of fandom and fanzine fic in prior decades, but during the 1980s fandom itself became a commodity โ and one may look at politics and sports too โ far beyond the sales-and-markets of whatever one was supposed to be a fan of. They were also interrelated with role-playing, often among the creators, mainly invisible to most people but in retrospect fixing there even harder.
Glorantha was exciting for all the reasons youโre talking about, but also a black hole attracting all these weird ideals. Unlike D&D, it didn’t have any wider cultural acknowledgment, positive or negative, so maybe a given commerce/development community’s commitment to a perceived unity achieved a certain purist intensity. And maybe the collision of all these unities, discovering they weren’t so unified, resulted in trauma and perceived need to “resolve this! ack! ack!” in the 1990s.
Per Fischer asked a question on Discord to which I would like to chime in with my 2 cents on, and here seems most appropriate for it. I will quote it here: “Is there a setting book for Glorantha you would recommend, new or old, and, if any, what to avoid?”
I got started with Glorantha when I was a teenager and picked up a used book titled “Heroquest: Roleplaying in Glorantha”. It had obvious printing issues, I had no idea what on Earth was going on with all this detail, and as far as I was aware, it was sui generis. I was enchanted, especially by a map that appears early on and which copyright concerns make me a bit hesitant to reproduce. This map showed a continent, with little breakouts emerging from different places in the continent and trumpeting such events as “Five Arkats Return!”, “One King, One God, One Church!”, “The War Against War!” and the like. There was some additional text within each breakout, offering some clarification and many more questions.
All of this was to some degree or another reproducing the “lore” of the majority strain of Gloranthan fanfiction, as Ron puts it in the video, with more than enough information available somewhere to define it all in rigid detail. But I didn’t have any awareness of that, and wouldn’t for a few years, so I was left to play around with those intertexts as if they were open.
But what I did have was a couple of Zelazny paperbacks and yet more in my memory from library visits as a kid. I looked at the definition of “Heroforming” in that book and I immediately connected it to *Isle of the Dead*, a Zelazny novel where the protagonist incarnates one of the gods of an alien species and is sometimes taken over by the god, his form shifting to resemble him. I encountered an explanation that metals in Glorantha were chips and fragments of the shattered bones of dead gods, and I thought of Hayao Miyazaki’s comic *Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind*, where a distant postapocalyptic civilization relies on the molted ceramic shells of giant insect-like creatures for the uses we put metal to, and where separately, the bones of a dead god are rejuvenated to restore him to radioactive flesh…
So I think that for me, the most useful factor in playing with Glorantha is having familiarity with fantasy traditions outside of the mainstream of fantasy fiction, so that Glorantha remains visibly a hodgepodge of concepts that can and should be added to or subtracted from for playing and exploring. With that, you can take the most lore-heavy Gloranthaphile-pandering pseudoencyclopedia and get use out of it.
But beyond that, I also agree with Ron’s comment on Discord that the early *Runequests*, *Cults of Prax*, and *Cults of Terror* are highly recommended. They’re built on an underlying assumption you’ll use them to make your own materials and do your own thing, and they’re also in print and thus easy to acquire.
I hope this is helpful.