Communiqués from the Wizard Caste

Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Ossi Hiekkala on the Weapons & Equipment Guide Cover

Cover artist Ossi Hiekkala blogged about his work on the upcoming Weapons & Equipment guide, which is absolutely wonderful.

Instead of the obvious choice of showing gear porn, I painted the group of pre-gen characters camping and enjoying each other’s company after their previous encounters and before the eventual hard adventuring the next day, a scene that must be very common for any RPG group, but not often portrayed in the cover art. I am delighted Chaosium was happy to go with this kind of unorthodox cover image.

Joerg was telling me recently that the German RuneQuest community was analyzing this cover and linking it to the action scene depicted on the cover of the Starter Set… for instance, is the damage on Harmast’s armor related to how his fight against the Krarshtkid went? The answer lies with Jason Durall!

The Starter Set is already out (although I’m still waiting for it to arrive…), and the Weapons & Equipment guide is coming out in PDF on December 10th.

Chaosium Hosting New RuneQuest Player Stream

On November 30th, Chaosium’s Twitch channel will host a RuneQuest game with a diverse cast of new players. James Coquillat (of Chaosium’s YouTube channel fame) will play along, and Brian Holland (Chaosium’s Marketing Director) will act as Gamemaster.

I assume they will play one of the Starter Set adventures, but who knows? I’m pretty excited to watch this!

Jonstown Compendium

The Jonstown Compendium is Chaosium’s community content program for all Gloranthan games, hosted on DriveThruRPG. Disclaimer: all the relevant links are affiliate links that hopefully will let us cover some of the hosting and maintenance costs for the website and podcast! Thanks for using them!

Monster of the Month’s Burning Engines

It’s the end of the month so that means a new Monster of the Month! The penultimate one, actually, and it gives information about Burning Engines, some dwarven machines meant to protect their catacombs. As always, you get more than just a few monsters since this one includes adventure seeds and other cool stuff like sorcery spells to control one of those things! I’m pretty sure having a big robot as a pet would make you famous.

Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass Now in Print-on-Demand

Martin Helsdon’s monster book has been made available in print thanks to the no-doubt herculean layout efforts of Nick Brooke. Martin received the Greg Stafford Memorial Award for Gloranthan Fandom in part for his work detailing all the warriors, soldiers, and mercenaries of Dragon Pass and its surroundings. If your players are getting involved in the Hero Wars, this is a must have source.

Note that the print version is in black & white. The PDF remains in colour, but I don’t think we’re missing much, since the colour parts were either illustrations taken from the Guide to Glorantha and other existing sources, or colored tables and text boxes. All of Martin’s core work, featuring illustrations of almost every possible fighter type, was always in black & white.

Sandheart Volume 4 Now in Print-on-Demand

The fourth volume of the excellent Sandheart series is now also available in print-on-demand!

Thanksgiving Sales!

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There are many Jonstown Compendium books on sale for the holidays! Including the books from the “Nick Brooke Cinematic Lunar Empire” (A Rough Guide to Glamour, Life of Monsoon Book 1 and Book 2, Citizens of the Lunar Empire), the Andrew Logan Montgomery campaigns (Six Seasons in Sartar and Company of the Dragon), the Sandheart books (Volume One is here but check out the other ones too!), the Beer With Teeth collection (such as the Dregs and Cups of Clearwine), Martin Helsdon’s aforementioned big-ass Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass, and more!

Jeff’s Notes

Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.

About Aeolians

On BRP Central, Jeff shared a lot of information about the Aeolians. First, some background: Heortland is the area of the Holy Country that is South-East from Sartar, and from where (roughly) many of the Sartarite tribes originally came from (e.g. see the Colymar tribe’s history in the Gamemaster Screen Pack Adventures).

While most of Heortland is historically inhabited by Orlanthi people, the Southern part of the area is where the Esvularing people live, from Leskos to Mount Passant and all around the Bandori Valley where Refuge is located (see map above).

The Esvularing were atheists long ago (like the people from God Forgot, further South), but now they follow a henotheist variation of Malkionism which is called Aeolism. Basically, they worship the Invisible God as the Supreme Creator (like the Malkioni), but acknowledge the Orlanthi pantheon as “emanations” of this Supreme Creator. So they participate in Orlanthi rituals as well. When you’re not sure who’s correct, you might as well do both, right?

Jeff suggests looking at the Druze or Mandaeans as source of inspiration for Aeolians. From the very little I can tell about them, the Druze are monotheists who built their faith from a variety of other Abrahamic religions, and are mostly located in the Levant. The Mandaeans are originally from the Mesopotamian region but have now spread among several western countries. They feel closer to how I picture Invisible God-worshipping people in Glorantha: they are Gnostics who believe in a supreme formless “Entity”, along with various derived deities and spirits, all of which are part of cult secrets.

However, Jeff also warns to not “overplay the influence of the Aeolians”, especially since Heortland is quite big. The Orshanti might have a lot more importance, since this is where important figures like Sartar and Colymar hailed from originally:

Presumably the Orshanti remained an influential kinship group in Heortland, linked by blood, trade, and religion to the House of Sartar.

The geographical, cultural, and familial proximity can’t be understated:

[…] Volsaxar and Vandarland are going to have lots of ties and influences to Sartar. Marriages, shared cult, language, and culture, and trade are going to mean that the people of northern Heortland are virtually indistinguishable from Sartarites.

And yet, Belintar is the beloved God-King here because he brings the God Realm into proximity of the mundane world. Heortland is part of the Holy Country, while Sartar is carved out of the wilderness.

Meanwhile at the southern tip of Heortland, we have the Aeolians of Esvular, who are clearly influenced by both the Orlanthi and the Malkioni of God Forgot.

Awesomely enough, Jeff also shared some historical maps of the region to illustrate this point:

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It shows the exodus of the original Sartarite tribes (Colymar, Balmyr, and so on) in the early 14th century, the rise of Belintar as God-King, the founding of the Royal House of Sartar, along with other population movements and important events. I believe that the last map shows the Lunar invasions and retreats around the Holy Country. Of note, and according to the Guide, the Bandori tribe was not put under Lunar occupation like the rest of Heortland. Instead, it sounds like they had a “tenuous independence from the Empire”, which I suppose was negotiated by the sorcerer rulers of Refuge.

Meanwhile in central Heortland many customs such as a mounted elite warriors that are selected from aristocratic families and their status approved in assemblies, are clearly influenced by the Malkioni, while at the same time the culture is very similarly to the Sartarites. These mounted elite warriors supported Rikard the Tiger-Hearted’s short lived kingdom (1618-1620) and now many serve as mercenaries. 

As for picturing the cities of Heortland, and Mount Passant in particular, Jeff suggests looking at Pergamon and Priene (respectively by Anasynthesis and Rocío Espín Piñar):

Broos Are People Too

A thread on BRP Central asked whether Broos are considered people or not… You can bet that such a poorly phrased question immediately caught fire and devolved into the kind of nasty dispute better reserved for Thanksgiving family dinners, but hey, guess what? American Thanksgiving is today! (at the time of me writing this of course… oh and by the way, unsurprisingly enough, the thread was locked after several pages demonstrating the downsides of Gloranthan fandom)

Anyway, why do I bring this up? It’s because Jeff dropped by the thread in its early hours (yes, I was surprised about this too) to provide a few nuggets of wisdom. As always, any answer to any question depends on who you ask in Glorantha, and as always, the Lunars are the most open-minded:

“Personhood” is a complex philosophical question with all sorts of legal and political ramifications. The only group I can think of that might appreciate the question and its implications are the Lunars – for them, all self-aware beings are “persons” and are capable of embracing the Lunar Way. That includes broo, ogres, and even things like vampires or self-aware jolanti.

The Lunars have had some success with it:

Now some Illuminated Lunars believe that if broo are taken outside of their awful conditions and taught the Lunar Way (including self-discipline and social skills), they can be useful members of society. The Lunars have been able to constructively negotiate with Ralzakark, and are able to send caravans through Dorastor to Ralios without molestation. But even within the Lunar Empire, most people hate and fear broo, and things like the Seven Troubles from Dorastor are within living memory.

Dorastor is the Chaos-infested region located Southwest of the Lunar Empire. It was Nysalor’s Empire of Light a long time ago until Arkat “cleansed” it and it became a horror-filled nightmare. Yay, good job Arkat! Ralzakark is the Broo ruler of the region.

Jeff adds that other people, and other Elder Races, seem to treat Broos as dangerous monsters. Clever, yes, but monsters nonetheless. They must be killed or protected against or, at best, used as a weapon against enemies:

Most Gloranthans view broo as something like the Xenomorph from Alien – dangerously intelligent, but with no higher goals than self-propagation and infliction of pain on others. That is not actually true but it is true enough.

I figure that most Broos encountered as “roaming monsters” in a game are bound to be “feral Broos”, with not much more to them than a one big guy who tells them where to raid and kill. These would indeed be the “Xenomorph-types”, with their INT mostly allocated to predatory intelligence, and on the lower end of the curve.

Ecologically feral and wild broo are disasters. They impregnate as often as they can (think xenomorphs or parasitoid wasps) in order to propagate their species – domestic animals such as cattle or sheep are easiest, but humans or other beings also work. They have a hardy larval stage that matures rapidly, and few broo spend any resources socialising or educating the larvae (also it is rare for a broo to have any idea who its father is). Broo larvae are normally only permitted what they can take or steal. Surprisingly few die from this mistreatment but that is more due to their hardiness. The overwhelming majority of broo are unsocialised young adult males whose main goal is to survive and create a new generation of broo larvae. They are meat-eaters and are perfectly willing to eat their fellow broo. When there are too many broo in an area, they tend to kill and eat everything they can catch and need to move to a new region for food.

Another type would be “wild Broos”, which are nominally less savage than feral ones… but probably just enough to know how to say “I’ll kill your whole family” in Tradetalk, and have some Rune Magic from worship of Thed or Mallia.

Wild broo have cults and some social traditions (usually imposed by powerful and more long-lived broos), feral broo are little more than their life cycle.

But yet other Broos might be more “civilized”, such as those who are brought up as part of a complex society of Chaos worshippers, or those who form war bands employed by, say, the Lunar Empire. Sure, these Broos would still be nasty creatures who routinely commit atrocities that any Gloranthan society would punish with their worst sentence, but they have INT 2D6+6 and they can be reasoned with — the Lunar Empire and even some Praxian tribes did exactly that.

On a welcome practical gaming note, Jeff mentions that wild Broos would rarely ransom captives (or if they do, it’s a vicious trap!), but these “civilized” Broos are different:

Generally when honorable people fight broo they assume the rules of honourable combat don’t apply. That’s because most broo are feral or wild, and are treated like rabid animals. They give no quarter and ask for none. Nobody blinks an eye.

But sometimes the broo offer to parley. They sometimes offer ransom. They sometimes don’t molest their prisoners. Maybe that’s because they are civilised, or illuminated, or cleansed. Or maybe they are under orders from something they fear greatly. That’s when things get interesting, because the rules of honour require that they be followed. But at the same time, they are broos, and many cults treat them as Enemies. 

And then there are the outliers, such as the “cleansed” Broo of the Zola Fel, who was freed from his Chaotic taint by the water god, or the allegedly Illuminated Wild Healer of the Rockwood Mountains, a Broo initiate of Chalana Arroy who has saved many lives, but is often mistaken for a feral Broo and hunted on sight.

Ultimately, it’s up to each gaming group to find what Broos are good for in their stories. Feral Broos are great for an hour or two of fun monster bashing every now and then, while more civilized Broos can add nuance and internal conflict to heroes whose convictions and world-views are tested against a bigger picture. As Jeff said: “that’s when things get interesting“. And I hope your games are indeed interesting!

Honour and Combat

As part of the aforementioned BRP thread on Broos, Jeff shared an excerpt from the upcoming Cults of Glorantha book on the topic of honour and combat:

Humakt demands that Death be wielded with honor and his cult upholds the code of honor in combat and war. This code is strictly adhered to by Humakti, but also generally followed by other honorable war gods such as Orlanth, Polaris, Yanafal Tarnils, Yelm, Yelmalio, and Yelorna. 

Note how the Humakti follow this code “strictly” while the other cults only follow it “generally”. We know that several members of these other war-cults have committed war crimes, such as Harvar Ironfist, a Yelmalion Rune Lord, who killed and pillaged many lands during his bloody coup in 1611 in the Far Point. Arguably he was “helped” by Gagarthi warbands who have no honour, so maybe he blamed most of it on them… but I doubt it. Harvar is a piece of shit.

Honorable combat is not fought for gain or selfish reasons. Although Humakti often serve as mercenaries for pay, that payment is not supposed to be dependent on the outcome of the battle.

I’m pretty sure combat is almost always for gain or selfish reasons (vengeance, getting more land, getting the throne, etc), but I’m also pretty sure these people think it’s all honourable in their heads!

The buildup and formation of battle lines is done with the full knowledge of the other side and no surprise attacks are made.

This line got quite a lot of discussion over on the Chaosium Discord, where people took this a bit too literally, going as far as “sharing the composition of military units and attack plans with your enemy is madness! You can’t even flank them?“

I think the text here is just talking about the dishonorable aspect of launching a surprise attack on a nation, Pearl Harbor style. In this case, the “buildup and formation of battle lines” refers to the build up to a battle that can last anywhere from a few hours to several days. In the buildup to the Battle of Dangerford, for instance, both the Lunar and Sartarite armies camped on either side of the Creek, in view of each other, with the rebels ready for the Lunar phalanx’s attack. However, within that battle, each army of course adopted classic military tactics such as flanking, surprise cavalry reserves, and so on.

As for other types of surprise attacks, e.g. at the skirmish level, I would say that depends. The “never ambush anybody” geas is a common one with the Humakti, so if you don’t have it, you’re probably OK with it. Maybe don’t raise that Honor Passion too high, eh?

In battle, two warriors may duel or engage in prolonged personal combat. Both combatants must be armed and may use Rune or spirit magic, allied and other spirits, elementals, etc. Groups of warriors may fight approximately equal numbers of foes. However, multiple warriors or magicians must not gang up on a single warrior. 

A warrior who surrenders becomes a prisoner of his capture and is under their protection. At the same time, a surrendered warrior must not flee his captor until ransomed or released.

This is all in line with what we see in epics, movies, and even the Starter Set SoloQuest, where protagonists fight a notable enemy while all the unnamed soldiers leave them alone, fighting their own smaller duels in the background.

Honor also dictates how warriors were to deal with noncombatants. No one should attack an enemy who has temporarily lost or dropped their weapon. The lives of noncombatants, prisoners of war, and farmers are also sacred. Pillaging the land is forbidden. 

This last sentence also got debated a lot in the Chaosium Discord. My own interpretation is that there’s a fine line between pillaging recently conquered lands, and negotiation supply logistics and agreements with recently conquered populations. Alexander’s military successes were often thanks to his ability to do the latter. It doesn’t matter if he was entering these negotiations with a clear position of force and intimidation: at the end of the day, you either burn down people’s farms or you don’t. Also, like I said already, maybe don’t raise that Honor Passion too high?

Failure to follow the rules of honor can trigger a test of a combatant’s Honor Passion or even result in immediate reduction to that Passion (as per RuneQuest, page 234). Failure to act honorably may also result in a visit from the Spirit of Retribution of the offender’s cult. 

Despite all of the above, Glorantha songs and stories are filled with examples of where a hero chose to act less than honorably where some other Passion (Loyalty, Love, Hate, etc.) dictates behavior instead of honor. Such conflicts are at the root of many a tragic hero.

Of note, players and gamemasters can also choose to just go with the dishonourable act without rolling anything, because they want the story to explore the adventurers coming to terms with the consequences… sometimes, the narration trumps the rules.

The rules of honor do not apply to animals, monsters, undead things unless they are capable of communicating or otherwise demonstrating that they do follow the rules of honor. 

The Spread of the Lightbringers Religion

Jeff tells us about the early years of the Lightbringers Religion:

In the First Age, the Lightbringers Religion spread from its homeland in Dragon Pass across much of Genertela. These areas are where the Seven Lightbringers and their associates (Ernalda, Storm Bull, Mastakos, etc.) and friends (Humakt) are best known and recognized.

In Prax, the Lightbringers entered in the first century of the First Age. In the later Second Age, many Praxians fled to the Wastes where Waha, Eiritha, and Storm Bull proved most useful. In most of these areas the Lightbringer deities have more or less the same names, although they often have local titles and variants. Nonetheless, an Orlanth worshiper from Sartar will be able recognize and participate in worship in Ralios or Fronela. Indeed, some of the most important historical developments of these cults occurred outside of the core homeland and were only later embraced in Dragon Pass (e.g. Orlanth Rex).

As far as I can tell, a lot of the HeroWars material, and many hard-core Gloranthaphiles, will use these “local titles and variants” freely, which can easily confuse newcomers and, well, myself. But I like the idea of occasionally using these variants (most probably by making my own because I probably can’t be bothered to remember the “official” ones) if and when my game ends up far from its homebase of Sartar. It might add a touch of “strangers in a strange land” which might lead to some fun roleplaying.

Anyway, if you wonder what kind of worship these Lightbringers displaced in the Dawn Age, it’s “whatever got the handful of survivors through the Great Darkness“.

Few of those spirits or minor gods provided much that was useful with the Dawn. The Theyalans brought social organisation, communication with outsiders, written records, agriculture and pastoralism, healing, and more. It is no wonder that the religion spread quickly across the Dawn Age landscape.

The Theyalans were nonetheless very good at proselytizing:

The Dawn Lightbringers had people who […] had great experience in recognising shared symbols and communicating that with [the locals]. The Theyalan Missionaries were probably the most skilled and successful missionaries in Gloranthan history (more than even the God Learners or the Lunars).

So when the Theyalans went out, they were looking for common points. Snippets of magical songs, secrets of life and death, magical languages, shared wisdom from the gods, that sort of thing. They’d find the commonalities and help build a shared understanding of the Dawn. Things and ideas fell into place and people embraced the Lightbringers, their associates, and friends – and the Theyalans learned from the experience.

It was thus a shock when the Theyalan missionaries into lowland Peloria were killed by horse riding barbarians who worshiped the Son of the Sun.

And now the most important bits in my opinion:

The Theyalan missionaries are why sixteen centuries after the Dawn, you can call on “Orlanth” by more or less the same name from Junora to the Elder Wilds.

You can imagine how important Issaries was in all of this. And of course Issaries continued his speaking and trade missions across the world with the Middle Sea Empire.

Community Roundup

The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.

Unboxing the Starter Set in the Nook

Pookie gets some help from a (shadow?) cat and a duck to unbox the Starter Set!

Exploring Glorantha Episode 12

JM and Evan come back to their long-running “Exploring Glorantha” series to offer a walk through the scenarios and campaigns currently available for gaming in Glorantha. They take a look at both official Chaosium material and the best fan-made books on the Jonstown Compendium.

Let’s Look at Some Miniatures

Duff Paint suggests that these minis from Hasslefree Minis could be used as Maran Gor temple eunuchs:

Here are some scorpionmen from Pete Rowans and Richard Helliwell respectively. Pete’s models are 3D-printed.

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And last but not least, a Krarshtkid from Paul Baker!

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Thank you for reading

That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!

Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.

God Learner Sorcery

We are now occupying a nice little tower with a long history of previous occupants who have left behind documents, tablets, artifacts, and other kinds of junk. As we clean up and archive these things, we share the most interesting ones with you.

Initiation Series Episode 1: Ludovic, The Dark Eye, the Guide, and Maps

We released the inaugural episode of the “Gloranthan Initiation Series”, where we talk to people who came into contact with Glorantha and/or RuneQuest rather recently, and ask them about their experience and previous experience. In this episode, our own Ludovic (hey that’s me!) acted a guinea pig for our questionnaire, since he qualifies as a “newbie”.

We want to say thank you to all the newbies who volunteered to be interviewed for this series. Their interviews will start airing next month, on a roughly monthly basis in between “regular” God Learners episodes. We think these interviews are interesting: we learn where people are coming from, how they approach an old and complicated setting like Glorantha, and what their struggles and joys are. Hopefully this will also remind a few “old hands” what it was like to be a newcomer in Glorantha!

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Weapons & Equipment Is Coming Next Month

I’m still waiting for my Starter Set to arrive, and we’re already getting a notice that the next RuneQuest sourcebook, the Weapons & Equipment Guide, is coming on December 10th! I really like these covers by Ossi Hiekkala…

Play the Starter Set SoloQuest in your Browser

The Battle of Dangerford solo adventure from the RuneQuest Starter Set is now playable for free in your browser! This is a great way to get a taste of the world of Glorantha and the RuneQuest rules, and it’s easy to send the link to a friend. It’s also of course great if you are in a very boring online work meeting…

The RuneQuest Wiki is Online

It’s not really a wiki per se since only Chaosium people can edit it or see pages’ history, but hey, that’s what’s it’s called… anyway, it’s online!

The website is meant to be an easy reference for newcomers to Glorantha and RuneQuest, so there won’t be much for those of you who have all the core books, except for a couple surprises (see below). It will serve as a handy reference for players who don’t have the books, or are on the go.

Right now, the wiki has the Starter Set version of the rules, some setting information, equipment and weapons, a short version of the bestiary, and some quick links to buy the main products. Of note, there are some quick character creation rules, which is very welcome since the Starter Set doesn’t have any, and since they are quicker than the core rulebook’s. They even include random homeland and occupations if you don’t want to choose!

Magic in RuneQuest

This was released shortly before the last issue of the Journal and therefore slipped away… it’s a short interview of Jeff Richard by James Coquillat about the difference between the three magic systems of Glorantha, which is bound to slightly confuse players coming from other fantasy games where there’s only one system.

As always with these videos, there is nothing revelatory for Gloranthaphiles, but it’s a very handy resource to send to any new or prospective players.

Jonstown Compendium

The Jonstown Compendium is Chaosium’s community content program for all Gloranthan games, hosted on DriveThruRPG. Disclaimer: all the relevant links are affiliate links that hopefully will let us cover some of the hosting and maintenance costs for the website and podcast! Thanks for using them!

Anaxial’s Manifest

Jamie Revell released Anaxial’s Manifest, a bestiary sourcebook for RuneQuest Glorantha. It contains “a compilation of 46 Gloranthan creatures and embodied spirits not previously described in RuneQuest“.

I assume that the name of the book is a nod to the HeroWars sourcebook Anaxial’s Roster, which did something similar for the HeroWars system. Anaxial is a flood-myth figure of Glorantha, so this is sort of appropriate.

The Duel at Dangerford, in Japanese

Nick Brooke’s early Jonstown Compendium entry has now been translated in Japanese! It features some extra art and… that’s about all I can tell you about it because my Japanese isn’t nearly good enough!

Jeff’s Notes

Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.

The Maruts and the Thunder Brothers

Jeff points us to Vedic mythology (late bronze age northwest India) as a source of inspiration for the Thunder Brothers, the sons and daughters of Orlanth who are typically worshiped as part of his broader cult. He points us to the Maruts in particular, who are the sons of storm god Rudra.

A good real world comparison is the Maruts who follow Indra and serve as his followers and companions. Socially they are a model for the companions of the Prince, to whom their deeds are often attributed.

So Indra is another storm god, but what’s more interesting to me is the second part.

First, the Thunder Brothers are models for “companions of the Prince”, which I assume is the Prince of Sartar. This means that if you’re followers of Kallyr or later Argrath (or whoever gets the throne in your timeline), you could try and “get in a role” of a particular Thunder Brother to add some roleplaying opportunities and some questing or sacred regalia ideas to your GM.

Second, the deeds of the Thunder Brother companions are “often attributed” to their leader, which means the Prince and/or Orlanth. The way I see it, when your PCs are companions of the Prince, they might do some really cool stuff but need the… ahem… politeness of letting their boss take credit for it. I hope the PCs have some high Honor and Loyalty Passions! But I understand it also as applicable to Orlanth himself. So one can imagine variations of myths attributed to Orlanth where it’s one of the Thunder Brothers doing the cool stuff. These variations might be taught in some parts of Sartar based on regional traditions, and when heroquesting, you may not have to identify with the big blue guy, you could instead identify to one of his children. It might not provide as big a boon as when heroquesting as Orlanth, but it might also be safer…

The Bad Rain

We already discussed before how Orlanth sometimes summons monstrosities and enemies out of his own bad moods. This is the “Bad Rain”, which is summoned in order to start a heroquest of the Lightbringers Quest.

The Bad Rain is the Shadow of Orlanth – the brooding, repressed darkness within Orlanth such as kinstrife, murder, and wanton destruction – and terrible consequences of Orlanth’s deeds. Orlanth conquered the world, but in doing so he let Darkness and Chaos into the world. As the Greater Darkness approaches, Orlanth broods and the Bad Rain comes.

In many stories this is linked with the emergence of trolls in the Middle World. When Harmast summoned the Bad Rains in 424, it was easy because “every rain we made was a Bad Rain then.” Angorsk Ig, a son of the Only Old One, was summoned, along with the “red trolls, the ones that came with heat” (Zorak Zoran cultists).

The Bad Rain and its monsters attack the ceremony, and it is not uncommon for participants to be killed. Harmast himself killed Angorsk Ig with the Manthi Flints by accident, out of desperation.

Orlanth isn’t the only one with a shadow, by the way:

This recognition of the Shadow is key to the Orlanth cults heroquesting and a source of power. This approach was rejected by the Fire/Sky cults until the Red Goddess herself embraced her Shadow as part of her Goddess Quest.

Jeff muses (but does not confirm) that Ragnaglar may be Storm Bull’s shadow.

Urain, a personification of the Bad Rain in some story, is not Chaotic, despite what might have slipped into some past publications. Jeff shares that some of Greg Stafford’s notes make it clear.

There is also some information about Kallyr’s failed Lightbringers Quest:

When Kallyr began her Lightbringers Quest, she also summoned the Bad Rain, which made manifest all of her subconscious fears and guilt. Many were killed, but the Bad Rain was driven off, and the ritual became a heroquest.

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Kallyr’s guilts, failures, and fears were great as well and she found it easy to summon the Bad Rain. Her fears of what she was bringing into the world – Darkness, Disorder, and Chaos – were made manifest and needed to be beat off at great price.

Two decades later Argrath barely had to twitch to summon the Bad Rain and his heroquest took him deeper than the Underworld.

The Orlanthi often say that a hero is made out of their failures, guilt, and fears. Without those, there is nothing to overcome and thus no hero.

This is a key to Greg’s storytelling. His protagonists – Harmast, Argrath, Arkat, the Red Goddess, Sartar, Tarkalor, etc., – all had failures, fears, and regrets that they needed to confront in order to be a hero. And that unconscious Shadow did not cease to exist as a result of the experience, but the hero could coexist with it and was no longer in danger of being destroyed by their own Shadow.

In some cases, like Arkat, the confrontation with the Shadow was quite literal – Arkat embraced his own Shadow and became a troll in order to defeat Nysalor.

So Jeff wants us to figure out what was Kallyr’s Shadow, and what was Argrath’s. The short discussion that follows points at Kallyr being too “literal and unwavering” about this, whereas Argrath, with his draconic connection, is better able to “embrace contradictions”.

Community Roundup

The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.

Awesome Custom RuneQuest Miniature

On the BRP forums, Scornado shared this picture of an awesome custom RuneQuest miniature.

It uses a modified Victrix chariot with Wargames Factory and Zvezda skeleton parts.

The miniature is designed for use in a published adventure (also available here) that I won’t name here to avoid spoiling it.

Down a Rabbit Hole with Milk

I love this: Varanis from Beer With Teeth went down a rabbit hole about Praxian mounts and the nutritional value of their milk. And it comes with graphs! Check it out, it’s awesome.

SkullDixon on the Disorder Rune

As promised, SkullDixon has written an article about what the Disorder Rune, and what it means for creating stories in Glorantha.

I feel that a lot of gamemasters and players see the Disorder Rune as just a source and cause for Misfortune. But I think it has a lot more to offer us other than being the source of ill luck and I want to try to explore that fully here.

Besides outlining his many thoughts about the nature of the Disorder Rune, SkullDixon also offers four adventure seeds with Disorder as the common theme.

Unprofessional Unboxing of the Starter Set

Hey this is not a judgement on my part, but merely the title of Scott’s video series!

Unboxings of the RuneQuest Starter are getting extremely common these days (everybody is getting theirs!) but that’s all I have until I can receive mine… especially since the recent floods in British Columbia are making shipping even more complicated!

On The Origins of Ducks

Jajagappa has some funny Eurmal-infused take on the origin of ducks over at BRP Central.

Eurmal, of course, thought this was all very funny. He had the bird folk perform all sorts of silly rituals. He had them hop on one leg across a river – without ever getting wet. He had them fly upside down so that the Sun would illuminate their bellies and the shadows would darken their backs (that’s why all the Ducks have white bellies, even now). He had them dive deep into the Sea to return with the seven Sea Snails – which Eurmal ate, of course, because he was hungry. And he had them perform even sillier rituals. At last, the bird folk grew tired of these tasks and demanded that Eurmal reveal the truth of the leaves.

Read the whole thing, especially if you have ducks in your campaign and you want to throw in yet another possible myth for them… that’s always fun!

Thank you for reading

That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!

Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.

God Learner Sorcery

We are now occupying a nice little tower with a long history of previous occupants who have left behind documents, tablets, artifacts, and other kinds of junk. As we clean up and archive these things, we share the most interesting ones with you.

Observations on the Chalana Arroy Infirmary of REDACTED

We continue to take writing prompts from the Chaosium Discord, and this week the topic was “Chalana Arroy”. I wrote some cautionary tale about what happens when you apply the Laws of Robotics to the pacifism of healers…

I didn’t share my concerns with the High Healer but I sometimes wonder about how we choose who receives the help of spirits and gods, and who receives simple bandages and herbs. Surely the most equitable way is to do everything we can for the first people who wander into the inner yard? Sister […] said I was extremely naive. That we needed to manage our resources “like managing our grain to last the winter“. I pointed out that nobles get more bread than stick-pickers, and that surely Chalana Arroy wouldn’t want such inequality. We pondered this for a while, but Sister […] only replied that the High Healer surely knew this.

You can read the whole short story here!

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Interlude: Unrelated to Glorantha but related to Chaosium, this month and week was the 40th Anniversary of Ludo’s favourite game, Call of Cthulhu! So if you want a break from swords and sandals, go check it out!

Out Now! The RuneQuest Starter Set!

Yep, finally, after several months of dramatic shipping hurdles, the RuneQuest Starter Set is here! You can order it from here and receive the PDFs right away. However, you’re also encouraged to support your local friendly game store, especially if they are part of the Bits & Mortar program, which also gives you access to the PDFs when you buy in-store. Ask them! And if they’re not part of the program, tell them it’s easy to sign up for it!

Warning: As of this writing, please note that demand for the Starter Set already outnumbered supply in the United Kingdom distribution center! I blame the vast amount of RuneQuest grognards in the UK… you know who you are! Will we be able to empty the other warehouses, too?

Starter Set Marketing Round-Up

Artist Mark Smylie had a few nice things to say about Glorantha, RuneQuest, and the Starter Set (all of which he’s been involved in). Artist Ossi Hiekkala also previously had his own take.

There is also the official “Chaosium Unveiled” video that shows off all the amazing contents of this ridiculously low-priced box:

There was a release party at the Otherland Bookshop in Berlin that Chaosium’s Jason Durall and Jeff Richard attended. You can find several videos of the event on their Twitter feed:

RuneQuest Release-Party in the Otherland @Chaosium_Inc pic.twitter.com/oaFBgAB1bb

— Otherland Bookshop Berlin (@otherlandberlin) November 13, 2021

Unboxing #Runequest from #chaosium in the Otherland.
First to Well 🖖💯😍 pic.twitter.com/o67KL09i4l

— Otherland Bookshop Berlin (@otherlandberlin) November 13, 2021

And finally, there’s blog post with recommendations about what to do after you’re done with the Starter Set. I like that Chaosium gives a slight preference to the Gamemaster Screen Pack, with its many resources and adventures.

Jeff’s Notes

Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.

Myth and History

Jeff wants us to know that myth isn’t magick’ed up distant history.

Rather it is a way of understanding how the archetypes and symbols of meaning fit together into a greater whole. The Runes, the Twins, Ouroborous, the Rival Brothers, the Mother and Child, and other archetypes are combined together in stories and make patterns, some eternal, some subject to change or reinterpretation.

One can learn and study myths but as their sources arise beneath the rational the best is to experience them yourself and assembly these symbols personally.

Horse Riders

A common motif in parts of Western Sartar (particularly around Runegate and Chormsland) is the Horse Rider and the Goddess. Most stories associate them with King Yarandros or Derik Pol-Joni and Sorana Tor or Kero Fin, or else with the Feathered Horse Queen and one of her suitor-husbands (Sartar or Tarkalor most commonly), although many of these images likely predate the Dragonkill War. The Yelmalio cultists claim that this represents Yelmalio and Ernalda (or sometimes another goddess). Many correct interpretations are possible, as this motif exists on many mythic substrata.

Some of these motifs, I suppose, go even further west and into Tarsh, or maybe originate from there. Yarandros was a King of Tarsh in the early 15th century, and the reason he might fit the “Horse Rider” archetype is that he stole a sacred stallion from the Grazelanders (which provoked a war).

Sorana Tor is a recurring Earth Goddess of sorts, and actually participated in the founding of the Kingdom of Tarsh. Sometimes she’s considered an avatar of Kero Fin, and some Feathered Horse Queens have been known to identify strongly to either of those figures.

A mistake that often happens is that people assume that there is a single correct interpretation of a mythic motif (and that usually whichever came first chronologically – which is obvious nonsense when dealing with the God Time) – but these symbols can be placed next to many others and still have power.

I think this is potentially important when Heroquesting, especially when I recall Jeff’s comments about identification being based on mythic motifs and archetypes, not on any actual names of deities. So I think you can see a tale or painting or bas-relief of a mounted fighter wooing a woman and say that this is “obviously”, say, Yarandros and Sorana Tor. But it could be interpreted differently, or told differently, and the magical mythical potential therein wielded for, say, some hero worship of King Sartar and Feathered Horse Queen Eneera Tor.

Same thing happened about four generations ago with Elmal. The old trappings failed but he gained new power as Yelmalio.

Community Roundup

The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.

The Gaming Gang Unboxes the RuneQuest Starter Set

You can already order the Starter Set for yourself by now, but maybe you’re on the fence about the it, and maybe all of the previous unboxing videos we’ve linked to weren’t enough? Well, here’s another one! It starts around about 33 minutes into the video, and it last for almost an hour of in-depth look.

Pixel Art Paper Miniatures

Over on Discord, Dipster has shared this awesome collection of character portraits and paper standees for their RuneQuest game… a game that looks quite fun, if the weird and diverse collection of adventurers is any indication!

RQStaffan Playing the Starter Set SoloQuest Adventure

If you’re available at next Friday evening, you can watch RQStaffan go through the Starter Set SoloQuest adventure on Twitch! The Twitch stream is here, and it will happen at 20:30 EST. I’m sure there will be a recording on Twitch or YouTube later.

Far Flung Duck Minitatures

Far Flung Figures is currently sculpting some models for producing duck miniatures. In case, you know, you didn’t have enough duck miniatures. Which seems unlikely.

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Most of these miniatures are spread across various fantasy styles and historical periods, though, so you’ll have to pick and choose. You can see their progress on their Facebook page.

Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web

Not everything is about Glorantha, although most things are! Here are loosely relevant things that we found on the interwebs.

Virtual Visit of Hattusa

Here’s a pretty in-depth visit of Hattusa, capital of the bronze age Hittite Kingdom. The gates, the big temple to the Hittite Storm God, and some general stuff about urban architecture and development will surely come in handy to add some flavour and details to your Gloranthan games!

This is What Moonfire Looks Like

Don’t mess with Lunar sorcerers because that’s how you get Moonfire all over your house.

Arnold Friberg’s Book of Mormon

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Arnold Friberg did these paintings inspired by the Book of Mormon. I think there are lots of cool visuals to steal for Glorantha in there!

How Bronze Age Horses Conquered the Old World

(…and eventually the new world, too)

The First Horse Warriors is a video about the introduction of horse riding into warfare. Dan Davis, an author of novels set in the Bronze Age, keeps putting out videos based on his background research that give good information on a period of history your school learning probably hasn’t mentioned.

One weird take-away from this are the Mesopotamian war wagons (I hesitate to call them chariots) drawn by donkey-onager half-breeds. Chariots like this are mentioned in connection with Gilgamesh.

Gloranthan horsemanship has moved past such initial experiments, though. The earliest mounted forces in Gloranthan myth may have been the Ratite Empire avilry riding augner war-birds, from a time when riverine Dara Happa still used fluffy-downed gazzam dinosaurs as their animal muscle.

Thank you for reading

That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!

Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.

God Learner Sorcery

We are now occupying a nice little tower with a long history of previous occupants who have left behind documents, tablets, artifacts, and other kinds of junk. As we clean up and archive these things, we share the most interesting ones with you.

The Travels of Biturian Varosh (Part 3)

Episode 5 of our podcast is now out! Joerg and Ludo are joined by guest Drew Baker, author of Rubble Runners and the QAD series on the Jonstown Compendium.

After an announcement on the upcoming Glorantha Initiation Series, and the usual ramblings on the past month’s news, Drew expertly guides his hosts through Prax. Picking up where the previous Wind Words podcast had left off, we follow the travels of Biturian Varosh from Pavis to Corflu, as told from the sidebars of the RuneQuest supplement Cults of Prax. Drew and Joerg provide many insights into what’s going on, while Ludo tries to keep up…

Found Documents: Collection of Spirits

We have started cataloguing and translating this collection of spirit encounters from the travelogues of Saranioth The Wanderer.

The particular stack of documents at hand collects his notes on the topic of spirits, with dates ranging from 1609 to 1616. These are all parts of Saranioth’s travelogue, but someone apparently grabbed any passage relevant to local spirits for some personal project. That individual also started what looks like an attempt at a geolocalized cross-referenced index of the spirits of Dragon Pass, but we don’t know yet which way is up and which way is down so we’ll translate and copy it later when we’ve figured it out.

We hope we enjoy these short stories, and maybe you’ll even feature some of these spirits in your own games!

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Meint’s Index to Glorantha Returns?

We had previousy heard that Rick Meint’s “Index to Glorantha” (often known as “MiG”) would come back eventually with a 3rd edition, but I didn’t expect it so soon! According to a recent article on Chaosium’s blog, we can expect the PDF for this new edition “this month”.

The back cover shown above gives some classic RuneQuest 2 vibes which are pretty cool.

The 256 page new edition of the MiG covers what was published (and not published) for RuneQuest and Glorantha from 1975 to 2015. We hope to have the PDF of the book for sale on the Chaosium website this month! It will be out physical print early next year: we might even do an official launch at Chaosium Con.

All the rare Gloranthabilia that you will never be able to find or afford, listed in one handy book!

ChaosiumCon Tickets On Sale Next Week

Early next week Chaosium will open up sales of tickets for the first CHAOSIUM CON, and they have a special mailing list for that if you want to be informed as soon as possible.

Ossi Hiekkala on the RuneQuest Starter Set

Ossi Hiekkala, who painted the absolutely gorgeous front cover for the RuneQuest Starter Set, has a few words to share after having received his physical copy. Well done Ossi!

Authentic Thaumaturgy with Rick Meints

Master Chaosium collector Rick Meints really knows the obscure bits of the company’s history. He delivers once again with some background on “Authentic Thaumaturgy“, a book published in the late 1970s by Greg Stafford.

Philip Emmons Isaac Bonewits described himself as “the world’s only academically accredited occultist”, with a B.A. in Magic from the University of California, Berkeley. Bonewits also was an Archdruid of the Berkeley Grove of the New Reformed Druids of North America. I can easily imagine that Stafford’s shamanic interests overlapped with Bonewits’ druidic ones because that’s just how San Francisco in the 1970s worked. On November 7th, 1977 they signed a contract wherein Chaosium would publish Authentic Thaumaturgy in early 1978. It would be Chaosium’s third RPG-related product, after the first two volumes of All the World’s Monsters.

I’ll let you read the rest on Chaosium’s blog, it’s pretty wild. I guess that’s the 1970s for you.

Jonstown Compendium

The Jonstown Compendium is Chaosium’s community content program for all Gloranthan games, hosted on DriveThruRPG. Disclaimer: all the relevant links are affiliate links that hopefully will let us cover some of the hosting and maintenance costs for the website and podcast! Thanks for using them!

Corallo’s Zenith Counters: Prax Pack #1

Unstoppable Gloranthan artist Dario Corallo has another Zenith Counters pack out focused on everything Praxian: bisons and impalas and sable antelopes and impalas, with or without mounted warriors, plus Morokanths and herdmen. These are all top-down views for use with a VTT.

Dorastor Map

Anders Tonnberg has another high-resolution Wonderdraft map that makes the Argan Argar Atlas maps pretty and bigger, this time detailing everybody’s favourite romantic holiday getaway, Dorastor. He also used Dorastor: Land of Doom and Secrets of Dorastor to complement the map with more landmarks.

Sandheart Series Sale

Amazing alliteration, Batman! Jon Webb’s fabulous Praxian police procedural series Sandheart is on sale, with small discounts across all first three volumes (Tales of the Sun County Militia, The Corn Dolls & Fortunate Sun, and Tradition). Disclaimer: I did a few illustrations a maps in there.

Community Roundup

The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.

GROGNARDIA on the RuneQuest Companion

The ever wonderful GROGNARDIA blog posted a retrospective of the RuneQuest Companion, this somewhat weird sourcebook from 1983 that basically collects a bunch of articles, similar to how Wyrms Footnotes did in fanzine form, until its demise in 1982.

The Companion, then, was intended to fill this particular gap, with the promise – unfulfilled, as it turned out, but then that’s nothing new in the history of RuneQuest – of a new volume of the Companion “whenever we have accumulated 64–96 pages of top-notch articles.”

James Maliszewski concludes:

Indeed, looking back on it now, what really strikes me about the RuneQuest Companion is how few of its pages are devoted to new rules. Chaosium clearly understood the main draw of RQ was its setting of Glorantha. That’s probably why I look on this book so favorably even now.

Indeed, Chaosium clearly understood this, even though it took them a few decades to be in a good position to do something about it. They won the 2015 Diana Jones “Excellence in Gaming” Award for the giant setting-only bible that is the Guide to Glorantha, and the 2019 Gold Ennie for Best Supplement with the (also setting-only) Glorantha Sourcebook.

Inspirational or mythically appropriate music shared on Facebook

There is a thread on the RuneQuest Facebook group for mythically or inspirational music for Glorantha.

Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web

Not everything is about Glorantha, although most things are! Here are loosely relevant things that we found on the interwebs.

Powerful Women and Magical Vaginas

And now for something completely different: folk legends of magical vaginas in 19th century. In case, you know, you wanted to really lean into “fertility magic”.

The väki of the vittu could be used to cast many different kinds of spells, but most commonly it was used for protection. One example of the power of vittu is the protection it offers from the forest beasts. In order to keep her cattle safe on the fields, the matron of the family would stand on the field with her lower body naked. When she bend over with her vittu facing the forest the beasts would run away from power much stronger than them.

Read more here.

The Everyday Role Women in Viking Society

In a more “safe for work” category, here is an article about the work done by Prof. Alexandra Sanmark on the everyday role of women in Viking society.

Prof Sanmark said: “Viking age research has to a great extent focused on men, the familiar raiding and pillage story and women’s lives have been side-lined.

“This is beginning to be redressed but we still have a long way to go. Women in the Viking age had crucial roles to play in society but this has not been stressed enough. We are talking about people who – to a great extent – were subsistence farmers. That is not an easy life.”

Prof. Sanmark notes that research on Viking women has focused too much on the exceptional individuals who became warriors and “ritual specialists”, and not enough on the crucial role of the average housewife — whose very denomination can already bring a lot of bias into historical research.

Prof. Sanmark did an online lecture on this topic available on YouTube:

Thank you for reading

That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!

Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.

God Learner Sorcery

We are now occupying a nice little tower with a long history of previous occupants who have left behind documents, tablets, artifacts, and other kinds of junk. As we clean up and archive these things, we share the most interesting ones with you.

Found Documents: Small Story Collection

Diana/Berra got the prompt for her wonderful “Small Stories” blog post (also featured later in this issue) from the Chaosium Discord, so I think it’s fair if we also grab it and run with it? We have our own first micro-fiction here. Here’s an example:

A brick in the back of the temple caught my attention. It featured the unmistakable prints of an alynx’s paws and buttocks, with a surprisingly well defined anus. I asked the builder about it and he said that one of the city’s felines was indeed responsible for this. The animal sat on a brick one morning while the brick (and many others like it) was drying in the sun. He did admit using his chisel to enhance the print, so he couldn’t really blame it all on the alynx. I asked him why he did that. He told me that the temple’s priest was “a bit of an asshole”, and that therefore his temple should have one too.

Excerpt from the travelogue of Olerian Marania

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

The RuneQuest Starter Set Gets a Date

Looks like we finally have a date for the release of the RuneQuest Starter Set! It will be available for order on November 10th. Tell your friends! Tell your FLGS!

Jason Durall even wrote a short blog post with some anecdotes and pictures from the Kraken and the Polish warehouse of Black Monk Games (which is now officially in partnership with Chaosium’s more-or-less “parent company” Moon Design Publications, by the way).

Katrin Dirim Gets a Well Deserved Award

Fabulously mythical artist Katrin Dirim, whose work graces many pages of both official and non-official Glorantha material, is the 2021 recipient of the Greg Stafford Memorial Award for Gloranthan Fandom! Congratulations Katrin!

The Chaosium blog has a short biography of Katrin, along with her acceptance speech.

Previous winners of the award include Lev Lafayette, Martin Helsdon, and Nick Brooke.

What’s New With RuneQuest?

This is not really official Chaosium news, but it involves Chaosium employees talking about Chaosium products, so it goes here!

The Kraken convention, which took place two weeks ago (Joerg was in attendance!) has put out their first panel video, which features Jason Durall, and Neil Robinson talking about RuneQuest.

It starts with the RuneQuest Starter Set, which we already know pretty much everything about by now. Later in the video, however, Neil points at the several pandemic-related problems that have affected production and shipping, such as shortages in paper and cardboard, delays at borders, and so on, not even counting the VAT headaches between boxed products and game books. We also later learn that the SoloQuest adventure in the Starter Set will be published online so that people can try it for free in their browser! That’s a very cool idea.

Jason follows quickly with what’s in the pipeline:

• The Weapons & Equipment Guide seems to be the next release.
• The Sartar Homeland Set is well advanced, and a bunch of other Homeland Sets (Esrolia, Lunar Tarsh, Grazelands, Prax, Heortland) are still in writing.
• The cults book is a slipcase set, about the size of the core rulebook one. The main two books are illustrated by Loic Muzy and Agathe Pitie. The third book is the prosopaedia and is apparently about 130 pages, which is longer than expected originally. As such, it has gained Katrin Dirim as not only the illustrator but also graphic designer.

Jason mentioned that the cults books are pushing the “standard” RuneQuest graphic design to the next level, which means that future books will get more pretty and more ambitious in terms of layout.

Chaosium is considering releasing smaller products (possibly PDF-only) in between the big book releases, such as a collection of non-human adventurers for use with the Starter Set. They’re also looking at releasing card decks for RuneQuest (Rune and Spirit Magic, monsters, encounters, etc.), similar to the Call of Cthulhu Keeper Decks.

Eventually there will be updates to Elder Races. For example we know Shannon Appelcline is working on an “Elfpak”, but there will be books for Trolls and Dwarves and so on obviously. Maybe even Dragonewts, as Jason and Neil were hinting that just because these races are “strange and unknowable” doesn’t mean RuneQuest players can’t handle them correctly for their own Gloranthas.

Jason has more than a dozen adventures that have gathered up on his desk and will probably see the light in a new scenario collection similar to the two that are available right now.

Jonathan Tweet’s RuneQuest book, “The Dragon’s Eye“, is still in progress. However, it looks like the “Glorantha May Vary” aspect that was originally pitched (where various locations and figures would have several possible backgrounds and gaming avenues for gamemasters to pick) has been dialed down. This is now a collection of detailed adventure sites with just sidebars for possible “variations”, which was deemed a more practical and usable approach.

The Gamemaster Guide is still ongoing, with one of the hold ups being ironing out the Battle rules (these were previewed in Jeff’s game on YouTube and I extensively annotated them in a previous Journal issue). The chassis is Pendragon’s Battle system, but it needed some changes to work with Earth-elemental-summoning priestesses and Flying warriors sending Lightning Bolts onto enemies. Jason’s goal is to make this Gamemaster Guide fit in the core rulebook slipcase where the Gamemaster Screen Pack currently is, but of course he has to deal with too much cool stuff that makes the page count balloon up.

The heroquesting rules have been delayed due to the pandemic, as the principal writer Chris Klug had shifting priorities with his day job. Jason sounds pretty excited about the mechanics, which include a way to assemble a heroquest using some kind of building blocks. Because of that, Jason is aiming for a boxed set where these building blocks would take the form of cards we can use at the table. The aforementioned Gamemaster Guide will most probably have a very lightweight form of these rules — it was supposed to have the full rules, but Jeff delivered too much material to fit in there.

Robin Laws’ Pavis & Big Rubble manuscript has moved to editing.

On the digital side, in addition to the online SoloQuest adventure, Chaosium is working on a small Glorantha wiki that is targeted at new players and game support. Keep in mind here that it won’t have the “openness” of traditional wikis (only Chaosium people will be able to edit pages), and that it’s meant to be minimal rather than exhaustive. It will include basic lore information, “fast” character creation “packages” to more quickly create RuneQuest characters, spell references, and so on. It sounds like this new infrastructure will be used for other Chaosium settings besides Glorantha, too, and that it’s a key part of Chaosium trying to catch up to the wonderful online support you can find in other game systems (Neil mentioned Pathfinder here).

Finally, now that Chaosium has acquired the Dhole’s House, a very popular character creation website for Call of Cthulhu, they’re looking at offering similar tools for RuneQuest in the long term.

That’s it! Phew! Gianni Vacca has his own comments on the panel over at his blog.

QuestWorlds Update

The Chaosium blog has a short update on the new QuestWorlds book! It features a bit of art and some excerpt from the rules. This is the system that first appeared as HeroWars and later HeroQuest, for Glorantha, but the new edition will be generic, featuring only some custom “example” settings such as super-heroes and science-fiction.

The blog mentions that the mechanics “remain unchanged” from HeroQuest, but last time I checked the SRD, there were enough changes that I would describe QuestWorlds as HeroQuest 2.5. Pretty much all of those changes are great in my opinion, as they strive to simplify and unify parts of the system that were previously unclear or fiddly — Ian Cooper ran many open design discussions online and it was always very interesting.

Jonstown Compendium

The Jonstown Compendium is Chaosium’s community content program for all Gloranthan games, hosted on DriveThruRPG. Disclaimer: all the relevant links are affiliate links that hopefully will let us cover some of the hosting and maintenance costs for the website and podcast! Thanks for using them!

Sandheart Volume 4: The God Skin & Mad Prax

The fourth and last volume of the Sandheart series is now out! It contains two scenarios, one by the main series writer Jon Webb, and one by Michael O’Brien. Many other people contributed (disclaimer: I did a tiny little bit, as with the other Sandheart volumes) so there are many names to credit but hey, the best way is to go buy and read it!

The Salt Man

This month’s Monster of the Month entry has been released and it’s The Salt Man! A Praxian abomination that shouldn’t exist! Learn about it, worship it, fight it, propitiate it, deal with it!

Corallo’s Artpack #3: The Seventeen Foes of Waha

WAHAAAAA!

This is another one of Dario Corallo’s “artpacks” for use by Jonstown Compendium authors or, I guess, gamemasters with free time to make fancy handouts. This one contains all the titular foes of Waha, plus a few extras. Besides the other artpacks, Dario also has a whole bunch of stuff such as VTT counters for use in online gaming.

Jeff’s Notes

Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.

Orlanthi Marriages

A question on the RuneQuest facebook group prompted Jeff to give quite a few interesting answers about marriage and children in Sartar.

First, when two people of different clans and tribes get married, they stay members of their respective clans. As they live together, one might of course be outside their clan’s territory, but their belonging to their original clan creates very important ties between these clans. These ties might even be more important when these two clans end up on the verge of a feud.

[…] remember that you know these people. You are related to them. Sure you belong to the Jereni Bird clan, but dad is from the Duroli clan, and so are your uncles and favourite cousins. And if you have a problem, you might also go to the Duroli clan for assistance.

Clans are not hermetically sealed like they were presented in Thunder Rebels!

Figuring out who goes where and what clan the children will belong to depends on the type of marriage. This is all explained in RQG p427, but these are just guidelines. Personal experiences and practical matters add a lot of deviation:

[…] I think there is a larger communal role in child-rearing than we commonly would assume in Western culture. So ambitious Ernalda initiates might have their first child quite young, and that child is reared by the extended family more than by the initiate.

Joining a Clan

Speaking of clans, there were also a few questions about joining or “being adopted” into one, which Jeff addressed:

Although every clan traces its origin to a common founding event, spirit, or other occasion which forged the clan, outsiders can and often do join a clan. This is so common that many clans only have a minority of members with biological kinship to that original founding. A new member must be “adopted” by another member (often a clan leader) and swear loyalty to the clan ring, placing themselves under its protection and promising to support the clan against all others. The new member is brought into the clan cult and becomes at least a lay member of the local cult of Orlanth and Ernalda, and pledge themselves to the clan patron deities and spirits. This places the member within the magical protection of the clan spirit, but also opens them to retribution if they betray their oaths. If the outsider merits it, they might be given land or other rights. If not, they are expected to be the tenant of someone else.

It’s an interesting that the clan wyter effectively operates like a cult in that leaving your clan leaves you open to a spirit of reprisal. In fact, Jeff gives some extra information on it:

Leaving a clan and renouncing those ties has consequences similar to leaving a cult. The clan spirits become hostile and may attack or curse those who have renounced the ties of kinship. Such spirits will especially go after former members of the clan ring that abandon their clan. It is possible for members of a clan to leave with the permission of the clan council. Such commonly happens when there is widespread disagreement within a clan and the clan splits to avoid bloodshed. The terms of disassociation are usually agreed upon and the former clan members may leave with no ill-will from the old clan or its spirits.

Going back to adoption into a cult, there is not really standard way to do it:

This process is very flexible and can be deceptively informal, until the pledges and oaths take place. These are watched by spirits and gods, and it is obvious to all present that it is an event of importance and even danger.

Boldhome Pockets Again

We’ve featured notes on Boldhome “pockets” in the past: those are the parts of the city that are built into the cliffs of the surrounding mountains. Jeff was nice enough to share some new illustration on those!

You can check back on previous issues of the Journal for more information on these pockets.

There are some additional notes about Boldhome. Unsurprisingly, Orlanth’s is the main cult in the city, with the Prince being the High Priest of Orlanth Rex for all of Sartar, with the commanding magic that brings.

The cult of Sartar himself is a sub-cult of Orlanth Rex, whose priesthood is traditionally restricted to members of the Royal House.

Back to Orlanth:

Boldhome is famed for its great temple to Orlanth, the largest in Dragon Pass. The temple has several buildings and holy locations, each dedicated to a specific subcult. The heart of the cult is the Flame of Sartar and Thunder Ridge, but the temples to Orlanth Adventurous and the various deities of Air are among the grandest Orlanth temples in the world. Most of the Orlanth temples were closed during the Lunar Occupation but were reopened when the city was liberated after the Dragonrise. Within the Pockets, Orlanth worship continued under the Occupation as the Breather Sisters, daughters of Orlanth whose dance circulates the sacred breath to deep within the earth.

So the Breather Sisters are worshiped – one at the East Pocket, the other at the West Pocket, and they circulate fresh air throughout the maze of rock-carved warrens that make up the Pockets. Their cult was hidden in plain sight during the Lunar Occupation, and as a result, even though the outer temples were closed by the Lunars, the Breather Within continued to be offered worship and sacrifice even during the evil year of 1621-1622.

Who Guards the Stead?

In the never-ending “Yelmalio vs Elmal” debates, on question was recently raised: who guards the stead? This is in relation to Elmal’s myth of guarding the Storm Tribe’s home while Orlanth goes out to be a hero. In my opinion, this kind of question tends to forget that deities are highly composite entities — Yelmalio isn’t necessarily becoming the guardian as much as someone is the guardian and that makes that person Elmal (or whatever name someone gives you when telling the story). If that makes any sense.

Either way, Jeff gave his answer, which boils down to “whoever you want!”: the Orlanthi don’t have a universal myth on the topic, as even the Lightbringers’ story has many versions where that is left unspecified.

In [other versions], he named a chieftain (not necessarily Yelmalio or Elmal – could be a grandson of Vingkot, could be Tada or someone else) to command while he was gone, and his people swore to remember and support him, and made the Eternal Ring, and set armed men to defend it all around.

Sounds like different clans and tribes will have different versions of the story, with some of them having Orlanth specifically naming someone because that’s somehow important for their traditions or claim of kingship or whatever. Others may not care.

On the more general and contemporary topic of guarding a village:

Who guards a Sartarite village when the militia leaves? It depends! Sometimes, some men and women are left behind to guard the village. Sometimes, the village gets defended by those too old or too young to go. Sometimes half the militia is left behind, and only the warrior society leaves. It just depends.

The Orlanthi are flexible about such matters. They don’t have a universal cult position whose responsibility is to Defend the Village When Most of the Men Are Gone to War.

Jogrampur, the Made Up Deity

I love this, because it matches my understanding of deities in Glorantha and, frankly, in the real world too:

We all know about the Machine God, that strange Saviour Machine experiment of the God Learners, but as part of an experiment with the University of Yoranday, the God Learners also created an imaginary deity Jogrampur, worshiped alongside other anthropomorphized sorcerer-deities such as Worlath, Ehilm, and Humct. In 901, the priests of these artificial cults displayed effective Rune Magic and destroyed the University of Yoranday, proving at great cost that any path to magical truth can result in real power – even that completely made up.

And while there is power in gods that are made up whole-cloth by “worshippers”, there is also powers in gods that are not (yet) known:

There are gods even without worship or belief. And they have power even if we do not know who or what they are

This all reminds me of Glycon, an “ancient snake god” that became popular for a while in the 2nd century Roman Empire. The main information we have on this deity is from a contemporary satirist who claims it was invented from scratch by a “prophet”, but that the god was really just a hand puppet. Contemporary worshippers of Glycon include legendary comicbook writer Alan Moore, which shouldn’t surprise you if you are familiar with his views on magic and religion.

Third Age Malkioni

Jeff Richard and Nick Brooke have some notes about the contemporary Malkioni of Seshnela and Fronela. Sometimes depicted in old material as some emerging medieval society with knights and everything, this is definitely not what Chaosium has in mind anymore (or ever).

The Malkioni are emphastically not medieval – but Moorcockian or Vancean sword and sorcery. Core to the Malkioni is conflict between the rationalists and the savages. Malkionism is obsessed with imposing reason on the world – non-Malkioni are barbarian irrational savages, even if they rule vast empires. Malkioni are always hyper-civilized, assisted perhaps by half-barbarians, but they themselves are always rational, reflective men (and women) of action. Their foes are always savage, irrational, superstitious, ruled by fear and ignorance.

This conflict between civilized reason and savage irrationality is core to the Malkioni self-image. Discarding the medieval paradigm lets the West be more Moorcockian and more sword and sorcery, with mendek wizards manipulating Moorcockian talars, aided by half-savage holari, and with all the work done by vast throngs of dronars that all get ignored by everyone else.

If you want to know more about these terms (talars, holars, dronars, and so on), the Guide to Glorantha is a good place to look. Very quickly, talars are the nobles who rule and adjudicate between these different castes, zzaburi are the wizards and philosophers, horali are the soldiers, and dronars (which form the vast majority of western culture) are the workers, laborers, crafters, and so on.

The archetypical hero of the Malkioni is a reflective hero who acts AND questions the rightness of his or her deeds (that whole Hrestoli chivalry thing) until realizing that these doubts are self-defeating.

I’m not super up to date on western culture but as far as I remember from the Guide, Hrestol is a hero from the Dawn and First Age who established the order of the “Men-of-All”, who have a certain code of conduct and can move between these castes. These were called “knights” at some point but I’m sure this term has been retired because it gives the wrong idea.

And then BOY DOES OUR HERO ACT! Meanwhile, our hero is aided (and frustrated) by the zzaburi who follow wherever their logic leads them to its conclusion. Together they face hordes of nearly mindless savages, ecstatic temptresses, and dark monsters.

Meanwhile, Nick Brooke suggests that the relationship between a typical Hrestoli and Zzaburi would be similar to that between Captain Kirk and Spock, which I think is a great analogy! He also shared a quote from Greg Stafford:

The West is my Gloranthan version of the Medieval paradigm of mythic reality. It is the root cellar of our modern way of thinking. It is where the mythological flaws and strengths of our Western way of being can be played with.

Community Roundup

The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.

Matt Ryan is Painting Genertela

Chaosium’s cartographer is apparently painting a small Genertelan overview for the upcoming cults book, using some good old traditional media! (“watercolour wash, and then gouache for details”) While listening to punk music!

Small Stories

The Beer With Teeth has a great little treat this week, as Diana “Berra” Probst gets a prompt to write “small stories”. They’re absolutely delightful, and I absolutely love the 3rd, 4th, and last ones!

The Runes the Govern and Shape All Things

SkullDixon muses on his blog about the role of Runes in Glorantha and how they can be used to help create stories around the table. The first Rune to look at is Disorder, and it sounds like this is the beginning of a series, with more to come in the near future…

Conduct of Non-Injury

Over at the Eight Arms And The Mask blog, Effy has the story of how Chalana Arroy came to be in the universe, in parallel with a slice of a healer’s life. This might give you ideas for playing initiates of this cult!

Thank you for reading

That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!