The animal species in which . . . the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development . . . are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. . . . The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
--Pyotr Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution”
“New York was always going to eat itself eventually.”
--Prometheus, issue 17
After a long-ish hiatus from the Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha duet, we jumped right to it when we started session 12 last weekend. And goddamn did we jump into the deep end. I’m going to relate the fictional events of play, then reflect on some questions of prep that the session raised.
Whew! Another 3 sessions of the Runequest, Roleplaying in Glorantha duet under our belts. Though we’ve had some delays between sessions, we’ve internalized enough of the systems and setting that we’re able to get right to it when we start playing. In that spirit, I’m going to dive into this report. Some seriously consequential events occurred in session 12, and I am quite excited to relate them later this week.
I’ve been fortunate enough to play six sessions of Champions Now with Sam and my brother Seth. I decided to refrain from writing a report until we’d seen the Now crest and crash a couple of times, and our last session brought our first arc to a conclusive, explosive end.
Our Statements are:
For you these lillies, these stalks of hyssop
for you this altar which is not an altar
in the ordinary sense but a stairway of song
to the unbearable ones
helpers in our need.
—Hjalmar Gullberg, “For the Demigods”
“I’m not so much a ‘morality’ superhero.”
—Fano
Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression.
--Frederick Douglass, “What To the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
I'm contemplating a game of Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. The core book alone is vast, a whole geography of world and system, and I have never played in Glorantha before.
Hi everybody, at Ron's suggestion I recorded a video conversation with the players of my recent Champions Now game. This kicked off as a text discussion, with Manu asking me after the close of the game if I had any insights, and me saying this:
Our Champions Now game continues; you can read about the start of it