In this episode Joerg is still taking a break, but Ludovic is here to welcome Evan Franke and JM DeFoggi (not to be confused with JM DeMatteis!)

Table of Contents

Exploring Glorantha

Evan and JM are probably best known to listeners and readers of the God Learners as the hosts of Exploring Glorantha, the YouTube series that presents Glorantha in an accessible manner to the general public. But they are also part of Iconic Production, which does a lot more stuff! It started as a 13th Age actual play, but they now cover many other games.

Ludovic mentions that subscribing to Iconic Production’s Patreon gives you access to the Exploring Glorantha show notes, which are quite useful as a Gloranthan index when you need to look something up.

Jackals

For the main topic, we discuss JM’s bronze age fantasy game Jackals (available from Osprey Publishing), its worldbuilding, campaign framework, system, and what we can learn and apply to Glorantha gaming!

During the discusion, we talk about:

The Guide to Glorantha
Ludovic’s Glorantha Initiation episode
Jackals and its supplements Fall of the Children of Bronze and Travellers on the War Road
The Sea People and some memes about the Bronze Age Collapse
Putting the themes of the game and setting into the system (by the way, you can find Chaos corruption rules in Ludovic’s RuneQuest scenario in “A Short Detour“)
Pendragon
John Wick (the designer, not the assassin) and his games 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings
Robin Laws
The One Ring
The Jonstown Compendium
Improving “onboarding” into a fantasy setting by making it look familiar to Earth
GURPS Greece and GURPS Imperial Rome
Mythic Earth series for Mythras
Hellenistika
Harn
Approaches to building a fantasy setting: linguistics, mythology, history, cultures
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the Dwarf names taken from the Poetic Edda
The Lord of Spirits podcast
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God
Carl Yung
James Frazer’s The Golden Bough
The Stafford House Campaign
Don’t read complicated books just to play game… find out by playing
Adapting Jackals’ campaign framework to Glorantha:
- Resettlement of Dragon Pass and PenDragon Pass
- Griffin Mountain
- The Tournament of the Masters of Luck and Death
- Theyalans at the Dawn
- Resettlement of Pavis
Using Jackals’ Clash System in Glorantha
Call of Cthulhu’s 7th edition
John Wick’s “Stafford did it first” rule