We kick off this new season of the Glorantha Initiation series with the lovely Bridgett Jeffries, aka “the happiest voice in cosmic horror”!

About Bridgett

You can find Bridgett all around the internet, but in particular:

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

  • Playing AD&D, Champions, and Battletech as a covert operation in a basement with middle-aged men
  • Chaosium’s RuneQuest Starter Stream, and the New Hero actual play
  • RuneQuest 3rd edition, its fantasy Earth, and Glorantha as a separate setting
  • Moral ambiguity in Glorantha: nothing is straightforward, everything comes with the “weight” of the lore and the setting
  • Activating Runes or Passions to augment rolls is dope!
  • Having an assistant GM to help with the rules is great for a game like RuneQuest
  • It’s hard to relate to the Bronze Age, compared to other eras… what even is the Bronze Age?
  • The problem with gatekeeping by grognards (old fans), and letting newbies discover and play the game in their own way
  • Tropes vs lore (see also this essay I wrote on the subject)
  • The Rome TV series, Troy, The Ten Commandments, Alexander
  • Tropes of the Orlanthi: violence is always an option, no one can make you do anything, follow chosen leaders
  • Tropes of the Bronze Age:
    • Religion is politics (priest kings and such)
    • Cities with temples on hills, markets full of merchants and mules and slaves, philosophers on soapboxes
  • Tropes of Glorantha:
    • Everybody comes from their own culture, with their own reasons to do things
    • Use the Runes as a guide for how cults fit in the world, use archetypes first and lore later
    • Spirits are everywhere (shamanism, animism)
  • Getting used to magic being everywhere
  • Glorantha is flat, the Underworld is below, rivers used to flow upwards!
  • The Jonstown Compendium is awesome
  • Drawing Earth Runes on your face
  • Using the RuneQuest Starter Set‘s art as reference
  • The trolls are political refugees
  • Exploring Glorantha, your Glorantha 101 YouTube series

Credits

The intro music is “Dancing Tiger” by Damscray. The outro music is “Islam Dream” by Serge Quadrado. Other audio is from the FreeSound library.

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!)

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:

Where to Find Evan and JM

Credits

The intro music is “The Warbird” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “Cinder and Smoke” and “Skyspeak“, along with audio from the FreeSound library.