Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha

I am a runquester, not a Gloranthaphile, but have been digging into the mythology as I have been developing my game.

For an initial post I am just linking my YouTube channel playlist for my Chronicles of Car’reen campaign which I started back in December 2018.

 

 

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2 responses to “Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha”

    • If I’m understanding right,

      If I'm understanding right, this began 20 months ago, so this is like a time-travel comment. I'll get most of my questions answered by continuing to watch – for now, I just completed the first piece, about the first session.

      I don't know if it matters, or what happens to it later if anything, but for that first piece, I really like your visual setup. The library, the specs, your demeanor – it's like when you go into a classroom, and after the person starts things up, you say, "Hey, this guy is pretty cool, I want to hear what this is about."

      Anyway, substantively, perhaps … I was just conversing with a friend about the role of information, its means of delivery, the question of whether it's to be extracted in a context of adversity, whether and how failure to get it is a functional event. So your reference to the players' failure to make a couple of investigative rolls captured my interest. If you can recall, how did "find out" apply to this session, in terms of process?

      Here are a couple of details that made me think you'd have some thoughts about it. First, obviously, that "they caught the guy" when you had planned otherwise. The very fact of planning any such thing, one way or the other, is of interest in itself, but putting that aside, this system clearly provides "now we find out" as a mechanical effect available to players.

      Second, that failed rolls mean something. What they don't know matters; in this case, it shifted play from "nose around, ask questions," to "bust out some serious magic." I agree with you that this could well have been more dramatic, but here I mean big D, not merely providing some cool visuals. I mean, they called on the god to find this murderer guy; in slang terms, they made a federal case out of it.

      So let's pull back from the historical you in the exigencies of the moment, figuring out the interface and struggling with the screen capture (full sympathy on that, by the way), meaning, I'm not saying this next thing as criticism, but as a reflection on bronze age fantasy and the rather direct, hard-hitting meaning of "the gods." It's not just a super-powered entity, it's about what the character means – it looks like invoking a god, but it's actually the hero identifying themselves as godly.

      Let's say you did that, or perhaps it's better to say, in terms of when you started doing that sooner or later, because in that context, the initial failed investigative rolls are a wonderful thing. Anyone can stroll around and ask questions. But because that failed, someone makes the choice to bust out godly activity, to say, yes, before, we sorta cared about this cooling corpse because we were told, but now, look out, I care enough to say that this god is going to care. The first was planned scenario, the second part is player choice about what to do next, i.e., doing what they did was one thing out of many that they could have done instead.

      I do hope we get to meet the baboon.

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