This is a translation of the first few documents from a large stack belonging to Saranioth The Wanderer. According to our cross-referencing, Saranioth was a traveling sage originally from Alda-Chur. He left the Lhankor Mhy temple there in 1603 and started walking across Dragon Pass for some as-of-yet unknown reason, although we assume he just wanted to gain knowledge in general. As far as we can tell, Saranioth disappeared in 1623 after being caught in an avalanche in the Northern Dragonspine Ridge, but his body was never found. Thankfully, he had stashed all of his personal diaries up to about early 1622 with a colleague in Quackford at this time.
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.
The Dirty Stream
I talked to a young boy on the way to Two-Sisters. He was carrying a basket full of dirty clothes, and was on his way to wash them in a stream uphill. At this time we were standing near a lake, and I could see the boy’s small village near the shore in the distance. I asked him about washing the clothes in the lake, and he said that the spirit of the lake didn’t want that.
Curious about this affair, I asked for hospitality at the village, which I learned was called Eilian’s Landing, after the naiad of the lake. I was able to talk to Eilian rather easily, although she refused to face me during our conversation. She said that she was once a great spirit of the Water Tribe, and that she was stranded here in Stael’s Hills a long time ago. She wanted mortals to give her the respect she deserved, and indeed the local population seems to propitiate her every season with small offerings sent on leaves over the water. Eilian wants her waters to be pure, and nothing dirty is allowed to go on the lake. She requires the people of Eilian’s Landing to do any “dirty business” down at the “Dirty Stream”, which flows down from her lake. Still, Eilian confessed, she sees dirty waters coming in all the time, and this irritates her.
I got the impression that, if not for the gifts the receives every season, the lake naiad might flood the entire valley in anger. The youth of the village told me they can’t swim in the lake until they have washed themselves clean at home, so they usually prefer to play in the Dirty Stream, which has many pools and waterfalls and play areas.
I later went to this so-called Dirty Stream. I camped there for less than a day when the stream’s naiad responded to my calls. She was a playful and quirky naiad called Eilior, and she was Eilian’s younger sister. When I asked if her sister was always so demanding, she laughed and splashed, saying: “this is what makes it all the more funny!” I wondered what she meant by this, so she put a finger to her lips, and told me to follow her stream, starting from her bigger sister’s lake. I would understand, she said.
So indeed I walked from the lake shore down the Dirty Stream. I walked past the boy, who was back there washing more clothes, and I saw the dirt flow down the current. I followed Eilior’s twists and turns and ups and downs. I was getting a bit lost, to be honest, for this was one of the most crooked streams I had ever walked along. And as I was trying to find my bearings, I came upon the lake again. I smiled and I laughed. The stream splashed and I heard a laugh echo mine. I turned around and left the lake alone, still smiling.
Jaleria Umda
While walking past a hamlet near Fox Hollow one evening, I saw woman engage in a strange little ritual around her infant’s cradle. The baby’s face was covered with dark makeup, making it look like it had facial hair. The woman did a little dance and, from what I can recollect, spoke these words:
Go to sleep now, dear child, you had a busy day! Working so hard, herding the sheep, picking much hay! Almost a man, yet look like one, in bed you snore Go to sleep now, dear child, tomorrow work some more
Then she took the child inside, presumably for it to go asleep.
When the woman came back out, I asked her what this was all about, and she told me about the local stories of Jaleria Umda.
Jaleria was a member of the Culbri clan several generations ago. She was having trouble conceiving, and had gone to many Earth priestesses and Uleria temples in the hope of a good blessing. But the blessing never came, and her husband left her, for they had gone many years without a child, and she was becoming bitter and jealous of the other women. Some people think that she then turned to evil blessings, for she hadn’t been seen at the good Orlanthi worships in quite a while, and yet she was now pregnant with child even though no man was sharing her bed anymore. But tragedy struck near the time that she would have delivered the baby. She died of some unknown ailment, and yet when the clan performed the funeral rites she was not with child anymore. People say that she gave birth after death, and that the child was now living a cursed half life, although that is a different story.
People in the area say that Jaleria is still looking for her newborn. There are stories about a woman coming to steal infants from their home at sunset. Her feet and hands are backwards and her hair covers her face, so the parents think she is walking away and let their guards down. To protect their infants from Jaleria, before they put their babies to sleep, the locals draw facial hair on the baby’s face and say a poem that makes Jaleria think that the baby is all grown up, and thus not hers. Parents typically do this during the first two seasons of their child’s life, although more superstitious families do the rituals for up to a full year.
I wasn’t able to confirm that any newborn abductions had indeed been attributed to Jaleria Umda based on witness accounts, although the local scribes weren’t very helpful. When I looked into their poorly maintained population records, I did note disturbing rates of infant mortality, but with little complementary information. Further research is needed.
The Mole Bat
I met the Mole Bat about an hour’s walk Northwest of Hidden Valley, after being told by some local kids that this was a popular spirit with them. As far as I could tell from their increasingly outlandish stories, the spirit had giant claws to dig through the dirt, and could see through walls and rocks.
I camped near the Mole Bat’s cave for three nights. The local kids who pointed me to it told me to not go inside, for the Mole Bat didn’t like that. Indeed, it seemed to me like this was a pretty shy spirit. Luckily enough, on the fourth day, the spirit came out to accept my offerings, in exchange for its story. It didn’t say much, but I gathered that it was a spirit of Darkness who had been summoned, bound, released, and so on by several trolls from a local Indigo Mountain tribe. Its mistresses were killed during a fight against “evil wolves”, after which it was free to roam the area. It settled in this cave when humans took all the lands, which I assume would set the date of his freedom to the late 1570s.
The Mole Bat had mostly stayed hidden in this cave until some children found it in the early 1610s. They sacrificed small things to it every season. When one of these children got trapped in an underground cave a couple years later, the Mole Bat somehow came out of its cave and saved it. Ever since, children of the Bachad tribe give it offerings during Dark Season. A local shaman told me that she keeps a cordial and seasonal relationship with the Mole Bat in case its services are needed again.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
This document is a collection of folk stories, travel anecdotes, and miscellaneous items compiled by a scribe named Kothenia Blackfingers, who may have lived in Western Esrolia in the late 16th or early 17th century. As far as we can tell, Kothenia used a variety of sources for her work, including other scribes’ documents, travelogues of merchants and philosophers, and her personal notes. This is a large collection but a lot of it suffered water damage. Here are the few stories we were able to recover so far1.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really honoured to be a Voice of the Storm, but… you know, I remember seeing two spirits sent for me during the ritual. I think I… picked the wrong one. He really gets on my nerves. Have you ever seen a Priest of Orlanth change their… shit, wait, I see him coming back. Let’s continue later.
Interview with a new Storm Voice
Tenant Instructions
Do NOT forget to feed the crack in the basement floor once a week.
Instructions for house-sitting thane Meleros Toothgap’s estate in Belernos
Patrol Report
We got some complaints from the hamlet of Downstream-On-The-Left, where several people reported sights of some “evil spirit”. When we arrived to investigate, they pointed us to a large rock near the main trail, a couple hundred paces south of the last field. I asked what the problem was and the farmers told us that the rock “looks at them funny” when they walk past it. None of them could tell us if the rock had always been there. Molekarl jokingly hit the rock with his heavy mace and yelled: “Stop looking at people funny! Or I’ll split you in half!” We had other more important matters to attend so we left it at that, but when we came back a week later, the rock was gone. When I asked the locals about it, they said: “What rock now?“
Interview with a thane of the Yellowstone tribes
Ad From The Kosh Market
For sale: left greave. Worn once.
Author unknown
Brick In The Corner
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
Love Is A Battlefield
He was a Storm Bull boy. She was a Humakt girl. It was love at first fight.
Discarded note, Nochet Dorandar theatre
Incident Report In Skase
Incident 3 (Clay/Fertility). Skase (two hours north of Alone). Building was found crushed. Nearby buildings intact. Locals tell us this is because other buildings have a spike in their roof, so Giants can’t stomp on them. Asked if Giant was spotted, locals said Giants come at night, they only heard the crash. Pointed me to a Giant’s footprint northeast of the town, saying they always leap from there onto village buildings. Footprint inspection: the heel shows marks of adze use in my opinion. The representative from the Alone Confederation Roof Builders’ Guild recommended to go back to the city before dark. Case closed. The owner contracted the Guild at premium level to rebuild the tenement with a spike.
Excerpt from Bakusun Ubarra’s “exceptional incidents” log of the Alone Confederation
1 Ok so what really happened is that Diana/Berra asked for blogging prompts on the Chaosium discord, and Mirza suggested “why small stories matter”. I’m not sure what that meant but Diana ran with it and wrote a few absolutely wonderful sort-of micro-fictions. So I’m doing the same here!
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.
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.
Runic Rants: Experience Checks (Parts 2 and 3)
I got a bit too enthusiastic about this topic so instead of a two-part series it became a three-part series.. . The good news is that part 2 and part 3 have been published this week, so you can bask in the glory of my fancy graphs!
Chaosium News
Here are this week’s Chaosium news!
The RuneQuest Starter is Really Really Coming Out Soon We Promise
The Chaosium marketing machine is currently busy with a Call of Cthulhu-filled Halloween season, since this year marks this amazing game’s 40th anniversary, but they took some time to update us on the much awaited RuneQuest Starter Set box:
The RuneQuest Starter Set is now in four of our five Chaosium fulfilment warehouses (US, EU, AUS, CAN) but we’re still waiting to get it into the last – UK. The shipment to the UK is on the way, but the latest advice is it may take another 5-14 days to arrive, depending on UK customs and truck driver availability at the destination.
Thanks, Brexiters!
RuneQuest en Francais
Not quite Chaosium news, but Chaosium-adjacent: Studio Deadcrows, the French licensee for RuneQuest, has received the first physical copies of their RuneQuest translations and extra contents (besides the rulebook and bestiary, that is, which are already out there).
Top left are some handouts and reference sheets. Middle top is a magic spells reference book which is not the Red Book of Magic — instead it’s just a reference booklet for spells found in the rulebook and bestiary, and in fact it was announced before we even knew about the Red Book of Magic.
Bottom left is the Glorantha Sourcebook, of course.
Top right and bottom right are the Dundealos-centered campaign called “Enfants de la Flamme” (“Children of the Flame”). This book (whose PDF is available to backers) contains a history of the Dundealos tribe, an in-depth description and map of Swentown, and six scenarios set in 1625 and 1626 that take adventurers from Swenville to Prax to the reconquest of ancestral Dundealos lands, and to a meetup with Argrath.
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!
Jon Webb, author of the excellent Sandheart series of adventures, is showing us the cover of the imminent fourth volume, The God Skin & Mad Prax. It contains two adventures, one by Jon Webb and one by Michael O’Brien. You can grab Volume One, Volume Two, and Volume Three through these affiliate links!
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.
Lunar Tarsh Notes
Tarsh is a historically Orlanthi kingdom located northwest of Dragon Pass, but it fell under Lunar rule many generations ago — it’s now a Lunar province.
About 35% of the population of Lunar Tarsh are members of Lunar cults and a little less than 20% of the population of Lunar Tarsh came from or are descended from settlers from the Lunar Heartlands. Now that is a big number – about 60,000 people – and is mostly concentrated in Furthest (where they make up the majority of the population) and along the Oslir River between Kordros Island and Talfort, with a few colonies on the Kordros Island and around Stopover. This is sometimes called the “Maize Belt” – at least by Matt Ryan and I!
Jeff recommends looking at Ancient Greek colonies in Persia, Syria, and Bactria as a model for Furthest and its surroundings — an island of Lunar Heartland culture in an otherwise Theyelan land. More specifically, Alexandria Eschate (“Furthest Alexandria”) sounds like a direct inspiration for Glorantha’s Furthest: an Imperial outpost in conquered lands, meant to radiate its owning Empire’s language and culture in a semi-independent way.
This worked to some degree: the people in this Maize Belt abandoned Orlanthi clan structures and are using “Pelorian kinship organization”, where networks of kin and associates are maintained through the kingdom. Lands are granted by the (Lunar) King, not by the Earth temples like in Sartar. In Furthest proper, 70% of people are members of Lunar cults, “which is higher than pretty much anywhere outside of Glamour.” Most interestingly: “unlike Glamour, in Furthest Lunar authority is not filtered through the Yelm cult but is there directly.”
Outside of this area, however, Orlanthi traditions continue, including lands divided by clan. But officials appointed by the provincial authorities in Furthest are responsible for managing disputes and local affairs, instead of some Orlanth Rex representative like in Sartar.
MOAR CLAN MAPS
This is wonderful: Jeff has shared the full map of Sartarite tribes and clans. We already featured a similar map last week but this one contains The Far Place too, among other things… and this is actually throwing a big wrench in the world-building I did for my ongoing Alone Confederation campaign! But hey, this was bound to happen!1
Clans south of the Creek speak Sartarite, while those in the northern Far Place speak Tarshite. Jeff warns us that there might be errors here and there until Matt Ryan, Chaosium’s cartographer, makes this correct and pretty. Also, remember that this map only shows the terroritories “alloted to each clan by the major Earth temples”. In practice, “many clan members live in cities and settlements outside of their territories”, and herding can cross these lines. Of course, that’s not even counting contested territorial claims.
Among the top dozen or so most powerful and influential clans in Sartar would have be the Black Rock, Blue Jay, Heran, Ernaldoring, Orlmarth, Taraling, Orleving, Goodhaven, Red Cow, Danstarl, Jereni Bird, Vari, White Quartz, and Sigtani Clans. Some new clans with a lot of clout would have to include the Red Hands and the Sharp Knives. Prior to 1613, the Lorthing Clan would have been on that list, but not any more.
1It’s not too bad, I can adjust a few things if I need to (such as if I want to publish something on the Jonstown Compendium that is compatible with Chaosium’s Glorantha).
Cults Memberships
Jeff has confirmed that the still-in-progress Cults Book for RuneQuest will contain a break-down of cult memberships by homelands and elder races. These homelands seem to stretch across Peloria, Dragon Pass, and the Wastes. This includes of course the Homelands of the rulebook’s character creation chapters, but also various Lunar provinces, different Praxian tribes, and Holy Country regions. For the Elder Races, different sub-types of Aldryami are mentioned, a split between Dagori Inkarth and the Shadow Plateau for the Uz, and more. See the full list here.
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 Red Book of Magic is a resource in game and out, and thus any character–and thus his player or her Game Master—could consult its pages (barring technicalities such as literacy of course). Most of all though, with descriptions of hundreds of spells, The Red Book of Magic is a simple and accessible resource to have at the table, its size making it a lot easier to reference than the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha rulebook.
All three times I recall drowning rules going into action in my games, it’s been three instant knock-outs to the chest. That’s not really how it works – drowning is slow IRL and pretty horrible. Magical healing also takes the punch out of the damage to a particular location, if you get there in time. So I have an alternative, which I use in games where I want to be nice to my players.
These mini-adventures introduce players to Sartarite society via their adulthood rituals, which are separated between Orlanth’s “Rite of Passage” and Ernalda’s “Riddle”. Andrew wrote these adventures by heavily drawing from Greg Stafford’s pre-existing write-ups (available here and here from the Well of Daliath’s archives). This division of children in two camps obviously opens up many questions regarding sex and gender, and Andrew makes a good effort to answer them in this article.
In the Orlanthi mind, then, “biological” sex is simply about procreation. Humans and animals are born male and female simply for there to be an orderly continuation of the species. It has nothing to do with gender. In fact sex has little to do with the essential nature or being of a person. […]
“Gender” is something deeper. Unlike “shape,” it determines the inner nature of the individual, their role in society, and most importantly which gods they are called to.
It’s one possible way to think about sex and gender in Orlanthi society, but it’s mostly a very good designer’s note for any gamemaster planning to run Six Seasons in Sartar.
Sweet 3D-Printed Props
Over on Discord, Pig_Soldier showed us some really cool props any Glorantha gamemaster would love to have around the table, setting the mood!
Runic Rants is an irregular series of thoughts, opinions, and experiments about RuneQuest.
In the previous parts of this Runic Rants series, we looked at all the situations that give you an experience check, and at miscellaneous stuff like “check hunting” and house rules. So now you have your experience checks and you need to do something about them. This is what some people call “rolling your ticks” (as I learned recently). More boring people might call it “making your experience rolls” or whatever. I used to be boring until a couple weeks ago.
Doing this usually happens in some kind of “downtime”. As written, the rules recommend to have one adventure per in-game season (RQG page 8). This is because it’s assumed that the adventurers are busy with their various responsibilities for the rest of the season: cult duties, family duties, worshiping, farming, patrolling, training, research, meditation, and so on. So with that model, you “roll your ticks” after every adventure. Other people play it differently, however, but we’ll address that shortly.
So how many downtimes (a.k.a. “tick rolling” sessions) does it take to raise an ability? Let’s bust out some graphs! Hopefully my math is correct. Come yell at me if it isn’t and I’ll fix it.
Below is a graph that shows ability improvement starting from 50%, and POW improvement starting from 12. In both cases, the red line is the median of one thousand runs, going through 100 downtimes (on the horizontal axis). The adventurer’s score is obviously on the vertical axis. The reason I’m counting the number of “downtimes” and not “seasons” here will become apparent in the second half of the article.
A good way to interpret these graphs is to figure out how long it might take to get to Rune Priest or Rune Lord level. You usually need:
A few skills or Passions at 90%.
POW or CHA at 18.
Some of the required skills and Passions might be pretty high from the start, but it’s possible that at least one or two of them are at 60% or less, especially if the player didn’t think too much about their future when creating the character. So on average it will take around 40 of these downtimes to get there, assuming you get an experience check every time. This should be easy thanks to the easily-missed (and previously mentioned) rule in RQG p416 that grants every adventurer up to four experience checks in occupational and cult skills.
POW goes faster, as it takes only around 25 downtimes to raise it from a lowly 12 to the required 18, but of course this will be significantly slowed down by POW sacrifices such as those to gain new Rune Magic. There’s no easy way to figure out how long it will take to reach POW 18 in practice, but we can see that the player can adjust their POW sacrifices as needed when the other requirements are closing in.
CHA is improved with training, which takes 2 seasons in game. With a 1D3-1 roll, it averages around +1 point every 2 seasons, so there’s no need for a graph. If the adventurer is dedicated (i.e. they train every season!), they can go from 12 to 18 in 12 seasons minimum. Probably even slightly faster if they get CHA bonuses from cool gear and reputable acts. Even if we were to double that time, CHA increase would still not be the blocking factor.
Training Extras
If you carefully read the text for the ability Training and Research rules (RQG p416), you might realize that you can train or research an ability that you have already increased through last adventure’s experience. This is because Training and Research don’t use the experience check, they are their own thing, handled differently. If you don’t believe me, see the Well of Daliath Q&A.
While Training and Research are very useful for increasing skills that don’t have checkboxes (which is very relevant to, say, Lhankor Mhy sages), they have the downside that, for those skills who do have a checkbox, they stop working once that skill reaches 75%. Still, that can come in handy. The graph below shows the same improvement curve starting at 50%, but with the adventurer going through a handful of training in the early part of the curve:
You can see the curve is much steeper until the score reaches 75%, and the ability now reaches 90% in about 30 downtimes, compared to about 40. So this makes a little bit of difference.
Since I mentioned Lhankor Mhy sages, those have requirements for skills that don’t have a checkbox, so those adventurers have to train or research to improve. Research is super slow, but training has the benefit of not having the diminishing returns of experience rolls. This lets an adventurer become weirdly forever better for as long as they can find a teacher that has a better score than them! By training every downtime, which yields +2.5% on average, they can raise a 50% ability to 90% in about 16 downtimes. This might be spread among two skills, though, in which case the sage’s free time starts to be torn between many different obligations, and reaching 90% can take more than twice that time.
Adventurer to Hero
Things are obviously better if you start with higher abilities, and RQG definitely lets players make very capable adventurers compared to previous editions. This also includes having positive skill category modifiers, which helps with experience rolls. In fact, getting positive skill category modifiers becomes more likely with time because CHA and POW (which players need to increase to reach Rune Level) often count towards them!
For instance, a +10% skill category modifier helps a bit, lowering the ~40 downtimes to slightly over 30 downtimes to go from 50% to 90%:
Below is the same graph (+10% skill category modifier) but starting from a 65% ability, and POW 15:
Now a competent adventurer can reach some of these Rune Level requirements in less than 25 downtimes. And if you were wondering about our Lhankor Mhy sage, stuck with skills without checkboxes, starting from 65% lets them reach 90% in only 10 downtimes, so they’re pretty good on that front too.
Want to throw in a handful of training sessions in the adventurer’s early years in addition to all of the above? Here it is:
Yay, we’ve gotten down to 20 downtimes! Do you have tips to optimize it further? Besides cheating on your dice rolls to get into the higher part of the blue area that gets to 90% in, like, 5 downtimes? Send your suggestions!
Ok, we stared at enough graphs now to make this website look pompous and academic (we are the God Learners after all). Also my brain has started to shut down. I think we can basically sum up that it will probably take between 20 and 40 “downtimes” to get to Rune Level? Let’s go with that until someone finds an error.
Now don’t get me wrong: the goal of these graphs isn’t about minmaxing characters: it’s about managing expectations, and figuring out when, and how often, to insert these “downtimes” (‘tick rolling” sessions) in a campaign. And this leads us to…
Downtime Frequency
Seasonal Play
If we follow the rulebook’s advice of seasonal adventuring, we basically get one downtime after every scenario. Assuming an average of three sessions to complete an adventure (that’s pretty fast in my book but let’s be optimistic), playing bi-weekly, that’s about 8 adventures every year.
If we boil down all those graphs I went through the trouble of making to “it takes between 20 and 40 downtimes to get to Rune Level“, it corresponds to between 2.5 and 5 years of non-stop campaign play to get that in-game cult promotion. It seems important to know that when you make a character, if Rune Levels are important to you!
Also worth noting with seasonal play: after 30 adventures, you will have advanced the in-game timeline by about 6 years. So if your players wanted to be Rune Priests in the time of Argrath’s rise, you’ll need to make some adjustments…
Of course, you’ll have to adjust all these estimates based on how often your group plays, how fast they go through adventures, and so on. If you play weekly instead of bi-weekly, everything will go faster. My point here is that both the gamemaster and the players need to have the correct expectations. Not everybody can commit to a 3+ years game, so if they’ve read about these cool powers you get when you become Rune Lord, they might become disappointed if that feels out of reach.
Freeform Play
I suspect that many campaigns ignore the seasonal adventuring framework offered by the rulebook, and instead just advance time as necessary. The Chaosium White Bull campaign is one such game after all!
This is particularly suited to campaigns where the adventurers are mercenaries in a warband, soldiers in a military unit, merchants doing lots of traveling for trade, treasure hunters living near the Big Rubble, or the good old party of “murder tourists”. In these campaigns, downtimes and other fast-forwards occur whenever the players say that they are settling down for a bit.
Now, “rolling the ticks” doesn’t really need to happen during an actual downtime. They could happen between two adventures that occur just a couple days apart. But in freeform play, such as a sandbox game, it’s sometimes unclear where one adventure ends and another one starts… it’s usually all non-stop drama and action and burning down villages. So based on the seasonal play’s estimates, I’d say that the gamemaster should still have players “roll their ticks” at least every handful of sessions, whenever the opportunity arises (camping for a night, spending a day shopping around, etc). In this model, “rolling the ticks” will often happen independently from the rest of the “Between Adventures” chapter stuff: training, research, holy day worship, and so on, happen only when the players actually do it in game.
Speeding Things Up
Even with seasonal play, the gamemaster can sprinkle extra “tick rolling” sessions during long adventures to keep the character progression going. Whether this only involves skills, or also Runes, Passions, and/or POW is up to the gamemaster.
Just as with the “Freeform Play” model above, these extra experience rolls can happen, for example, during a bit of travel between the different parts of an adventure, after an investigation phase that lasted a few days in-game, or simply after what feels like the end of a narrative arc inside that adventure. If it feels like the adventurers could have a bit of spare time to reflect on their recent actions and learn from them, it’s probably a good time to some some experience rolls if that hasn’t happened recently.
So after all this number crunching, I think you’ll want to put some thought in your character’s abilities at creation if you’re eyeing a Rune Lord position in your future. For instance, get those five cult skills and POW or CHA as high as possible from the beginning, otherwise it will take much longer to reach 90% and 18. I know I said this wasn’t about minmaxing, but if you don’t at least pay attention to a handful of abilities, it might lead to disappointment later. Requirements for Rune Priest are a lot easier to reach, possibly on purpose because those characters tend to be more diversified than Rune Lords, but watch out for skills with no check box.
Also, there’s no shame in rolling for experience more often than not, such as once or twice in the middle of a big adventure. The worst that can happen is that the adventurers make Rune Level faster and the players have more fun earlier! And by “fun” I mean of course “more troubles, more responsibilities, and more deadly threats“. That’s the definition of fun, right?
If you have any comment about this Runic Rant, or some ideas for a future installment, please send them to us!
Runic Rants is an irregular series of thoughts, opinions, and experiments about RuneQuest.
In the previous part of this Runic Rants series, we looked at all the situations in which an adventurer can get an experience check on their character sheet. And if all these checks give you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, you’re not alone!
“Check hunting” (there are probably other names for this) is when some min-maxing player does random stuff just so they can get an experience check in a skill that doesn’t have one yet. This might happen more towards the end of an adventure or when the player knows that some downtime is coming up.
I haven’t encountered this problem much, so I don’t have any real good insights here. The only two players I know that have shown signs of “check hunting” are self-conscious enough to at least be upfront about it! So in my very limited experience there are really only two ways to go:
If what they’re trying to do is dangerous, dramatic, or risky in any way, I let them attempt it and suffer the consequences if they fail. It can totally derail the game, but I tend to be a Gamemaster that likes going with the flow, unless I’m specifically running a linear campaign (which is uncommon but happens… I’m running one now). This quite often ends up a few months later with something like “the adventurers are not welcome in Sartar anymore“, but that’s fun, right? No? Well in that case the gamemaster can warn the players of what might happen if it fails, can invoke Passions, or can have spirits witness their shenanigans and tell on them so that the players know to think twice next time.
If what they’re trying to do is inconsequential, mundane, or plain stupid, I say no. And by “no”, I don’t necessarily mean “they can’t do it” (although that can be the case too). I mostly mean that it just auto-succeeds. No roll, no check.
Check Generosity
The only difference between a “check hunting” player and well behaved player is that the well behaved one is, well, just well behaved. Inside, they all want experience checks just as much as everybody else. So how can the gamemaster be generous?
Augments
Your gamemaster lets you get an experience check for abilities used as augments, right? ’nuff said.
Fumbles
Sometimes, you learn just as much from succeeding as you do by failing spectacularly. So the gamemaster could occasionally award an experience check on a fumble, especially if that fumble put the adventurer in serious trouble.
Group Rolls
You might remember my article on group rolls (if not, go read it now!). I tried to address the very common RPG problem where more rolls increase the chances of at least one failure or one success, which is a problem with, say, stealth rolls and scan rolls respectively. The solution I offered was to do “group rolls” where one adventurer takes the lead with the “main roll”, and everybody else can, if they want, provide support with augments.
Some players might resist the idea of group rolls because they’re afraid this will “rob” them of some experience checks. In that article I therefore mentioned that the supporting characters get experience checks in the ability they used to augment the group leader, and that I was considering letting them get an experience check in the “main” group skill instead if they wish. So if an adventurer was helping the group Move Quietly with a Darkness Rune roll or a Scan roll, they could get an experience check in Move Quietly (instead of Darkness Rune or Scan), because the adventurer witnessed the leader demonstrate it in a practical way.
The gamemaster can twist and tweak this many ways, depending on how generous they are:
Supporting characters could get awarded an experience check in the “main” group skill even if their augment failed.
Supporting characters could choose to get an experience check in any of the abilities used in the group roll, not just choosing between their own augment or the “main” group skill. That is, they could choose to get their check in another supporter’s augmenting skill. The reasoning here is similar to getting a check in the “main” group skill: the adventurer witnessed a companion demonstrate that ability in a practical way.
Supporting characters could get awarded experience checks in both the “main” group skill and the augment skill (assuming the augment succeeded). In this case, you may want to let the group leader also get a second experience check, maybe in an ability picked from any of the successful augments.
I think that using these aforementioned rules can actually be good for group cohesion, incentivizing players to act as a team because that gives them up to twice as many experience checks. It also makes some adventurers effectively be teachers to the other adventurers, which adds roleplaying opportunities. Of course, it might also lead to excessive “group hugging”, another form of “check hunting” where your players do all kinds of things with group rolls to get more experience checks even when it doesn’t make sense… although that could also lead to interesting roleplaying: imagine a group Charm roll at the Uleria temple! Hey, I’m not here to judge! You do you!
Other House Rules
Austin Conrad recently told me about some ancient rule inherited from a previous generation of RuneQuest gamers, where a special success grants a second check, and a critical success grants two additional checks (so a total of three experience checks maximum). You could therefore be rolling for skill increases two or three times on the same skill between adventures.
Another player reported a variant of this rule, where special and critical successes granted checks in dedicated checkboxes… so to get, say, two skill increase rolls in the same skill, they had to get two different successes in the course of the adventure.
Joerg also just mentioned to me that if we wanted to be a nice gamemaster, he might allow experience gains of 1D4+2 instead of 1D6.
Do you have any other house rules for giving out experience checks? I’d love to hear about them!
Guess what, I got a bit over-excited with this series, and what I thought would be a two-parts series is actually a three-parts series! I hope you’re sitting down because the next and last (I promise!) part will have grraaaaapphs!
If you have any comment about this Runic Rant, or some ideas for a future installment, please send them to us!
Update: I had misunderstood Austin’s old group’s house rules. It has been fixed now.
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.
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.
Runic Rants: Experience Checks (Part 1)
A new Runic Rants article is out, and it deals with Experience Checks. In this first of a (probably) two-part article, I look at when to get award these checks.
RuneQuest Glorantha is one of those games that has many rules disseminated throughout their hefty rulebook. I often overlook or forget a detail about some rules (which is frankly a problem with this rulebook, but let’s not go into that rabbit hole), and one thing that is easily overlooked is the real rules behind Experience Checks. They are more complicated than you may think!
I’m hoping to write part 2 for next week but don’t hold your breath… We are the God Learners, we do what we want!
Get Ready for some Kraken News
Joerg is currently at the Kraken convention, gathering gossip, taking blurry pictures, and maybe even possibly interviewing a few people! Or, most likely, eating lots of upscale food, drinking beer, and gushing over the RuneQuest Starter Set copy he has gotten his hands on.
Chaosium founder and first Gloranthan heroquester Greg Stafford passed away on 10th October 2018, so this week was a “We Are All Us” kind of week. I hope you all played a game in his honour this week… I know I forgot to mention him in my weekly RuneQuest game! Aaargh!
If you don’t know what to play, remember that Chaosium has some free adventures for the occasion. Pendragon might be an even better choice than RuneQuest!
After several online “Impromptu Con” conventions, Chaosium seems ready to level-up (or initiate?) into more “proper” conventions: those where you can actually get drunk with a bunch of other nerds.
It will be happening 8-9th April 2022, at the Ann Arbor Marriot Ypsilanti near Detroit. We don’t know yet if the God Learners will be there (we’ll update you on that when we know!), but if you have any more interesting questions about the convention, Chaosium has an FAQ page just for you! You can also sign-up for a special mailing list for news about that convention.
The Chaotic Chaosium Logo
Photo by Rick Meints
I love these stories and investigations from Rick Meints, Chaosium’s president and foremost collector. This latest article covers the origin of the Chaosium logo, and why it doesn’t always faces to the right…
How to Get Started with RuneQuest
James Coquillat continues his interviews with the Chaosium designers and line editors. He’s back with Jeff Richard, the creative designer currently behind Glorantha and RuneQuest.
This is a short video, as usual, with quick blurbs about what makes RuneQuest different from other games, what will be in the upcoming RuneQuest Starter Set, why it’s a good way to, indeed, get started with RuneQuest, and what are good tips Jeff can share with new players. There’s nothing any Gloranthan veteran hasn’t heard before, but it’s a short enough marketing video that you can possibly send it to your players to sell them on RuneQuest for your next campaign!
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!
It is also an adventure I would heartily recommend to a new GM. Bad Day at Duck Rock is written with terrific clarity and care, with support at every twist and turn to help GMs run it. Nothing here comes off fuzzy or half-baked. I get the definite feeling that in the years this was playtested, Hart took the opportunity to refine, retool, and clarify. […]
It is a terrific entry to the Jonstown Compendium.
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.
A Story Every Orlanthi Knows
I’m not going to quote the entire story here because it’s long (and it will end up on the Well of Daliath sooner or later), but that’s the kind of thing where I’m completely ignorant and useless. Deciphering these kinds of myths requires both an understanding of mythological patterns and of Gloranthan lore. I’ve got both of those skills near their default score so I’ll probably do a bad job at analyzing it… which is why I’m going to do it right now, in depth! And it will end up being longer than the original story! Yay! (You’re here for this kind of stuff, right?)
The story is a new and expanded version of “The Arming of Orlanth”, which you can find in King of Sartar (2nd edition, p68). It starts with Orlanth being unhappy because his wife, Ernalda, isn’t there, the food and drinks don’t taste good, the guests aren’t respectful, and so on. What a big baby. And instead of making a sandwich and binge-watching something on Netflix, like what any sane person would do on a sad Sunday, he starts brooding and losing his temper. Note that when he broods, that brings “Bad Rain”:
When he broods the clouds gather and do not drop their rain, growing black and grim. This is called “Bad Rain” and monsters can come with it.
At least, he protects his people from his own brooding monsters, so there’s that.
Now, people tell him all of this is because the “Grand Order” is lost, and needs to be found again. Lhankor Mhy says that the Grand Order is “a mirror of fire” which is “past the edge of the world”. I assume this “Grand Order” is the order provided by the Sun God, which is at this point dead since this tale supposedly happens during the Darkness. And so after getting all geared up and leaving some people in charge, he sets off from the Hill of Himself Victorious upon his quest…
So, err, is the Lightbringers’ Quest effectively triggered because Orlanth has left his home get messy, with only cold pizza in the fridge, when there’s no woman around to take care of groceries and house cleaning? What a loser. And I mean, sure, according to the other tales, there’s more to it, like the death of Kero Fin, but… still. Dude. Stop being so dramatic, pick up the vacuum and learn to cook!
Anyway, whereas the King of Sartar version has Heler arming Orlanth with all kinds of stuff, the new version from Jeff has Orlanth arming himself with different stuff, and Heler as a companion:
So Orlanth armed himself. He bore: • his Ring, • the Four Sacred Weapons, • Four Winds and a net, • the Black Spear and the Red Spear, • the Three Other Winds and a bag, • the Thunderstone, • the Blue dye, • the Spear of Truewood, • the Rare Flower, and • his First Knife.
Orlanth called his companions to aid him: • Heler, the Blue God • Mastakos the Charioteer • Crisis and Rage, his two stamping horses.
It’s similar to the King of Sartar version, but different enough to be noted. I’ve got no idea what most of this gear is besides random cool sounding stuff, plus some name-dropping. I know about Thunderstones (rocks going boom) and blue dye (magic nudist armor, see the Bless Woad spell). The Bag of Winds is something Storm Voices like to make in their spare time, probably to emulate Orlanth here. The Black Spear, is that the Colymar one? Is the “Spear of Truewood” one of the original “True (weapon)” feats? Maybe. I love these kinds of epic and evocative mythological names. Sadly, I’m bad at coming up with them myself.
Unlike the King of Sartar version, there’s nothing about leaving someone in charge at the Storm Tribe stead, but there’s more about the early journey. For instance we get a quick encounter with Humakt, and a visit to the “strong house of his mother“, which had been ruined and overtaken by wild dogs. Orlanth kills most of them except one, which escapes. This bit has more to do with Mastakos and Kang Rowl (the dog who escaped), and you can find that story in “The Healing of Mastakos” (King of Sartar 2nd edition, p61). Jeff is using some advanced heroquesting techniques to range from one myth to another!
Next, Orlanth visits Kero Fin, and has a quick word with his father, “the Prisoner God, tied to the Earth and Sky” (remember that Umath made himself a place in the universe by separating the Earth and the Sky, but then I guess he got stuck there, “punished by being chained between them for all eternity“).
“I cannot move. The Triad makes the wind. There is One calling you, follow it. There is Another hunting you, avoid it. There is the Third, Unknowable, which you fear.”
That bit comes from “The Belorden Fragment”, reproduced in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes (p196). The same goes for what follows, where Orlanth gazes upon the horizon and sees nine gods. It’s somewhat easy to figure out who the nine gods are (many are named directly, others are described well enough to make a guess or two), but I’m not sure what Umath means here. As far as I can tell, Umath is providing wisdom specific to the one asking for it, and the visions from atop Kero Fin are part of it. In the Belorden Fragment, for instance, the scribe mentions that they re-enacted this myth, and although the bit of wisdom is the same, the gods they saw were different.
So I guess among the nine gods, one is calling to Orlanth, one is hunting him, and one is that which Orlanth fears. I’ve got no good idea which is which. Jeff says: “we all have the Triad after all, we all move and change“. I wonder if there’s some kind of trick answer, with these three gods respectively being Ernalda (calling him), Yelm (hunting him), and himself (which he fears because he messed up the world… and remember that Orlanth Lightbringer is a different aspect from, say, Orlanth Adventurous, so one could run into the other in a myth).
Anyway, Orlanth follows “The One Who Called Him” which, if I understand it correctly, is a “kinsman to the west”. Thanks to Mastakos, who can run around the world super fast, Orlanth can also travel super fast by following in Mastakos’ foot prints:
He placed his left foot carefully upon the bootprint in the Smoking Ruins, and his right upon the edge of the home of Jarani Whitewall, the son of Ragorn, the son of Jorganos Archer, the son of Vingkot.
Wait, what? Are those the same Smoking Ruins as the ones in the South Wilds? The ones that wouldn’t be “ruins” until the late First Age, and wouldn’t be “smoking” until the 1200s? I’m confused. I guess we don’t care about temporal coherence when we’re in the God Time…
A technique developed by participants in the Tournament of the Masters of Luck and Death, these questers range at the edge of an ongoing quest or ritual and watch for events or entities. If this happens, they join that event and interact with it. Thought by some scholars to be related to the Waltzing and Hunting bands of the Empire of the Wyrms Friends.
Ranging is when you re-enact a myth, and then go from that myth to another myth that “crosses your path”, so to speak. It’s super dangerous because when you switch myths, you are currently Identified with deities and protagonists from that first myth — and unless the other myth has a very similar cast, you will have to also jump between Identifications.
And this is why questers who Range are so much more dangerous than those who simply re-enact existing stories; they discover new myths. And this is why the Lightbringers Quest is so dangerous and so powerful – like the Red Goddess Quest, it always involves Ranging.
In comparison, Ranging and Joining is less dangerous because you don’t go and play the main protagonists of the second myth. Instead, as I understand it, you just leave the first myth and “tag along” for the second myth, merely Identifying with minor characters or even unnamed “extras” in that second myth.
One watches at the edge of a story for a hint of another. An anonymous character gets a name and becomes adventure, or a passing mention becomes a story in its own right. This might provide a new key detail to an important myth, or might be a tangential eddy that swirls around wherever but becomes beloved by local storytellers.
And:
Ranging and Joining is dangerous, but considered less dangerous than pure Ranging, as long as the questers stay in proximity (whatever that means) with the main ongoing quest or ritual. In large heroquests, Rangers and Joiners are typically chosen by spirits, lot, or even just find themselves in the role due to the mysteries of the ritual itself – some say that is the Luck referred to in the Masters of Luck of Death.
There are several other such advanced heroquesting techniques that have spun out of the 22 Tournaments of the Masters of Luck and Death held in the Holy Country’s history. These techniques have then been “disseminated through the Holy Country, Dragon Pass, and even Prax”, and many people (including Kallyr and Argrath) participated in those Tournaments not to seek its prize, but to learn these techniques first-hand. Which is to say: don’t hesitate to have some NPC in your game know about that stuff!
Talk about synchronicity: my current game is going to feature, effectively, Ranging and Joining, only I didn’t know it was “officially” a thing, I didn’t know it had a name, and I didn’t know where it came from. Now I can sprinkle a bit of additional backstory and it’s all good!
For the Lunars among you, note this:
These techniques are different from those taught and used with such great effect by the Lunar Way, but are potentially no less effective.
About Caladraland
One of my favourite unexplored lands in Dragon Pass (they have magic to awaken volcanoes!) gets a bit of coverage from Jeff this week.
Most of the note talks about stuff you would already know from the Guide or the Sourcebook: that Lodril is a big horny Fire & Sky dude who came (in pretty much all meanings of the word) onto the Earth, warming it with his sweet, sweet love fluids, occasionally shooting through and spraying everything around. Well, I mean, Jeff didn’t say it that way, but I definitely am, because Lodril is a sexy dude and I’ve got the mind of a 13 year old…. anyway, after that, things go dark for Lodril (again, literally) as he gets chained down by Argan Argar (the troll god of the Surface) and forced to build a palace on the Shadow Plateau, in southern Dragon Pass. Again, that’s all in the main books, but the following bits may not be (I only found partial matches in my quick searches):
In the First Age, the worshipers of Lodril rebelled and broke away from the trolls. They received help in this from the dwarfs of Gemborg and from those people of the sea who claimed descent from Choralinthor, and received mercenaries from the barbarians of Wenelia.
Gemborg is a Dwarf city in Caladraland, a region south of Esrolia, leading to the ocean (bottom left quadrant in the map below… you can see the end Gemborg’s name, cut from the left edge).
These dwarves later exploited the volcanic area for the forges and workshops, the God Learners got involved with bringing worship of Lodril’s twin children, and Caladraland’s main volcano Veskarthan (supposed to be Lodril himself) erupted in 1050 in anger. Jeff has some more details compared to the Guide:
In the Second Age, the Lodril worshipers welcomed the reunion of Aurelion, Caladra’s twin, and allied with the God Learner province of Slontos against the Shadowlands and their EWF allies. The magnificent golden statue of Eurmal Lightbringer holding aloft a miniature version of the Sun was built by the God Learners at the Lighthouse. But Lodril aided the Old Powers in destroying the God Learners.
A big golden statue of Eurmal? Built by the God Learners? Now this ought to be good!
Later, Belintar came onto the local shores. For the newbies out there, that’s the hero/god/king who transformed the area into the Holy Country (also known as “mythical Disneyland fuelled by magical Battle Royale“… which is my favourite way of describing the Holy Country at its height). The Caladralanders tried to kill him “using both force and magic”:
But they failed, and Belintar used the powers of the Steam Demons to win his assault against their leaders.
Now, Caladraland is “ruled by the priests of the Volcano Twins”. I assume that’s Caladra and Aurelion, the aforementioned twin children of Lodril whose cult was introduced by the God Learners.
The population have adjusted their society around the needs and blessings of the vocano god. They are ruled by King Galerus, who was selected by the ruling council of clan chieftains for his ability to judge people carefully and his ability to lead armies. In 1620, Galerus refused to step down in accordance with tradition. Now called the King of the Diamond Diadem, Galerus allied with the dwarfs of Gemborg, the Demivierge of Rhigos, and the Warlord of Porthomeko. His kingdom has suffered terribly from a decade of barbarian invasions, but he holds onto power with the support of the Caladra and Aurelion cult.
Ok so the “Demivierge of Rhigos” has been Queen of Rhigos since 1610. Rhigos is a sizeable port city in South Esrolia, not far south from Nochet (again, see map above). The title is because the Queen is “sexually promiscuous” and yet still a virgin (“demivierge” means “half virgin” in French). Right. We’re totally buying that. But I guess that’s her loophole for keeping her position of High Priestess of Delaina, the “pure and restrained sister of Ernalda”, who is also the patron Goddess of Rhigos.
Porthomeka is the small but rich region located between Esrolia and Caladraland (see the cities of Steros and Oxnos in the map above). It’s ruled by warlords originally exiled from Caladraland, and it was once part of Esrolia. I imagine it has a pretty tense relationship with both its neighbours, and that’s why it’s a good idea to call yourself “Warlord” to make things clear…
Anyway, like I said, it’s a fairly unexplored (gaming-wise) part of the map, even though it’s rich in myth, politics, and cool things to do. I’d love to play some games there!
Wilmskirk
Jeff tells us that although people like to play in Pavis, Jonstown, or Boldhome, Wilmskirk is also “definitely worth a look“.
This was Wilms the Artist’s first masterpiece, designed by him according to aesthetic and philosophical principles inspired by the Jrusteli, and meant to be a true model city. The city was laid out to be both beautiful and function – and Wilms achieved this. It is a city of crafters, of artists, and is the center of painting and sculpture techniques in Dragon Pass.
So the Jrusteli are basically the God Learners, which everybody despises since they almost destroyed the world with their heroquesting experiments in the Second Age. But the God Learners also have a lasting legacy that people may not even realize is coming from them — the monomyth or mythical synthesis (because it’s “useful and largely correct”), the philosophy and arts, and so on. That’s one of those occurrences.
Here’s Jeff’s sketch of the city, which will probably be made pretty by Matt Ryan for the upcoming Sartar Homeland boxed set:
Wilmskirk is shared by the Balmyr, Locaem, Balmyr, and Sambari tribes and it is now ruled by King Vamastal Greyskin of the Sambari, who participated in Starbrow’s Rebellion and is part of the High Council. Vamastal is half-mad through heroquesting, and gained his grey skin on a harrowing trip through Hell. He was friends with Garaystar Flatnose, who was City Rex of Wilmskirk in 1610-1613 but was exiled along with Vamastal after the Rebellion’s collapse.
Here is what the half-mad King of the Sambari looks like:
Note that the previous City Rex was exiled, rather than executed, because that was Fazzur Wideread’s way of dealing with things (Fazzur was the Lunar Tarshite Provincial Administrator in Sartar for a while). Exiling leaders made it easier to assert legitimate(-ish) authority on the people. “Remember Fazzur understood the Orlanthi, unlike Euglyptus of Assiday”.
Greg Stafford on Heroquesting
Jeff shares an early manuscript from Greg Stafford on the subject of heroquesting (that’s a hot topic this week!). It goes over the basic concept: that the world of mortals and gods has been separate ever since the “end of the world” and the Cosmic Compromise. In this way, mortals exist within Time, which means that they are born and die, but also means they can change during that lifespan. Deities however are immortal, but cannot change.
The difference between the realms of the gods and of men is much more significant than mere mortality, for there are ramifications of great import. The most important is that mortals are born and die, but they are always changing, whereas the gods never change unless acted upon by an outside force.
The will of mortals allows a person to change themselves, change the mundane world, or even change the static world of mythology.
So when we say that gods can’t change, we mean that they can’t do anything themselves. Mortals can, and do, provide this “outside force” that changes gods. That’s what us God Learners did a whole lot of in the Second Age. It was pretty cool.
Greg writes (probably in the ancient pre-RuneQuest times) that heroquests are generally designed for “a single person to be the center of the action”. Any companions and followers gain “lesser benefits than those of the main quester”. Jeff wisely notes that this is the main challenge in bringing heroquests to RPGs, which are focused on a group of characters.
Heroquests generally take the form of a “path” which traverses a part of the mythical realm. It is presented as a starting place, a series of waystops where certain events occur, and then a climax. The climax is typically known beforehand because it is the specific act which will give the heroquester the thing they went off to get. This requires passing whatever test is appropriate, then the sacrifice of some part of them.
Jeff notes that this sacrifice at the climax is mechanically represented by a POW sacrifice in exchange for Hero Soul Points.
If you haven’t seen the White Bull campaign (Jeff’s game watchable on YouTube), which featured a preview of these rules, you may not know what these are. They’re effectively like a new pool of Rune Points, so you may have a Rune Points pool for your primary god, and then maybe another Rune Points pool if you have initiated with another god, and the Hero Soul Points are yet another point pool for casting Rune Magic. But while you replenish Rune Points by worshipping the appropriate deity, you replenish Hero Soul Points by having people worship you. This is such a cool mechanic, and a pretty unique one at that as far as I know.
Anyway, Greg talks about advanced heroquesting techniques, such as heading off from one myth to another and building a “map” of these mythic places and events.
However, the map requires that it be viewed in several different ways at once sometimes because of the interrelationships of certain mythical events. Successful heroquesters are able to switch from path to event and from map to map.
Jeff mentions that the Mythic Age maps from the Guide to Glorantha are helpful here, and I think there were most likely drawn by God Learners who did exactly that in their heroquests. Of note, Jeff also says that there will be more detailed maps in the upcoming Cults books.
The Guide’s maps (and the one from Greg visible above) are mostly geographic by nature, but I wonder if we will get narrative maps too, such as the paths leading from one important mythical event to another? Basically like a conspiracy theorist white board might look like if they were a Second Age God Learner? That would be interesting…
Thus it may be possible for a character to start at the Weapons Contest (between Orlanth and Yelm) and then follow the storm god until the Theft of the Sword (from Humakt) and then follow the Sword Myth through the hands of the gods that get it and enter the Underworld by marching with Zorak Zoran’s army, thereby bypassing regular checkpoints!
Finally, Jeff mentions that this kind of gameplay doesn’t have to require in-depth knowledge and review of Chaosium’s material. Gamemasters “can and should create their own mythic events that ‘fit’ into the themes and archetypes of Glorantha”.
Harmast’s Heroquests
Speaking of heroquesting (again!), there are short-form lists of Harmast’s heroquests in the RuneQuest Compendium (p6) and in HeroQuest’s Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes (p184), but Jeff just gave us a lot more details. It’s too long to share here (and, again, it will be on the Well of Daliath soon), but it’s a great inspiration for what’s possible with heroquests:
One thing that this list clearly shows is how heroquesting can move from “participating in big mythic battles” […], to events that are ultimately about the psyche of the quester […]. These last are likely the most dangerous – and most rewarding – but also the hardest to stage in a game.
A few things that stood out to me in Harmast’s list of heroquests:
Two common heroquests in an adventurer’s life are (1) for their adulthood ceremony, and (2) for their Rune Lord/Priest ceremony.
As far as I understand, when you’re participating as a “simple” initiate in a High Holy Day or Sacred Time ceremony, you will most probably be one of the many “extras” or “bystanders” in one particular event in a myth, which is a really cool way of starting small: “Twice he fought the star warriors at the Battle of the Thrinbarri Clouds. Four times he stood upon the Lightbringers’ Path: at the Bridge of Scythes, at the Crucible Gate, at the Bridge Over Corpses, and Where Kaarg was Defeated. At age twenty-one he was a spectator at the wedding of Orlanth and Ernalda.”
Things go bad in heroquests, and there’s a lot of cool/bad stuff happening here. Like “everybody died except Harmast” kinda bad.
Sometimes, you go on a heroquest just to get some advice from a mythical figure.
Other times, you go really deep: “[Harmast’s] broken pieces were purified and he confronted and overcame his Others: his victims – demon lover, his father, his mother; his obsessions, his tyranny, and the destruction he brought. Then he passed through the flames of the Band of Gold and entered the Dead Gods’ Court.“
Ok, now I need to get better at coming up with cool things like “The River of Corpses”, and at making my players do really crazy things like “reaching the Purple Shores of Luathela”. Maybe I should start drinking?
Clans and Tribes
Jeff gives a glimpse at how clans, tribes, and confederations fit together, which he can do now that he has all the correct spreadsheets and maps. For instance, see this map of the Culbrea, Kheldon, and Aranwyth tribes:
One thing that is worth mentioning is that there are several different clans with the same name. There are at least two Wildcat clan, and several Owl Clans. In some cases that might point to a common origin, and in at least one set of Owl Clans it is just that Horned Owls are mighty spirits!
Laying it down with roads, cities, holy sites, and such probably greatly helps with the basic blocks of world-building. That was actually my approach with my current campaign located in the Alone confederation (which, sadly is missing from the composite above). Sketching a map and making a cult distribution spreadsheet helped get an idea of the dynamic between all of the three local tribes. It probably doesn’t really transpires in play, but it was still fun to do!
Ancient Commentaries On Magic And Chaos
A God Learner text was “recently discovered in a warehouse in Berkeley”, a.k.a an ancient manuscript from Greg Stafford. It’s a bit hard for me to analyze and summarize (I’m still a newbie God Learner), but it basically deals with the multiple beginnings of the universe, the tension between Chaos and Existence, and what happens to the Runes as foundations of the world when left unchecked in the hands of Gods. Oh, and there’s a nice little Old Vadeli prayer.
The Vadeli are basically super ancient atheist sorcerer sailors (they hang around the Jrusteli Islands, the remnants of the God Learners’ original country). They claim to have been there at the First Beginning, when Existence broke away from Chaos, in the form of the “Grey Ones”. Every since, as far as the Vadelia are concerned, simply “being” has been a constant struggle against the entropy of Chaos.
If I understand this correctly, the other beginnings include, say, when the Runes came into existence. At first they were owned by single-purposed entities, but then they multiplied and cross-pollinated and this new World of Gods eventually turned too fat and self-centred and they almost broke the world and left Chaos back in. So there again there’s Chaos seeping through all elements but, err, that’s kind of necessary for existence, it seems? I’m not sure.
This, of course, allowed for the greatest sharing and positive exploitation of Uleria’s Net, and eventually led to the breeding between elements and bonding of the seams of the world. This all is confirmed by the Book of Zzabur, although the Brithini rejected its implications.
Empty Head’s Tale
And here’s another God Learner text: “Empty Head’s Tale”, which apparently exists in one form or another everywhere in Genertela.
Its widespread distribution is indicative of the truth which it contains. Brithini wizards claim to have found proof of the veracity of the tale in fragments of the Blue Book of Zzabur.
So the “Grey Ones” from the previous God Learner text are living in the Spike (which is the axis of the world in the God Time, the original perfect mountain). But meanwhile, somewhere else, there’s the titular Empty Head, who is minding his own business sitting on some giant dome call Eggshell which floats on the sea (I’m getting the sense that this old man was Zzabur or some other ancient sorcerer). Some people come live inside the Eggshell with his permission, and start digging and building and multiplying inside it. I guess that’s all the annoying Gods and their tribes and all that stuff, and the Eggshell is Genertela?
These people lived under the rule of “Quaterlords”, in a big castle called Hill of Four. My guess is that’s the four original Elemental Runes, before the arrival of the Air Rune. Which comes here under the very appropriate name of “Trouble”, supposedly as the son of two other Quaterlords. This Trouble guy asks for a place atop the Eggshell, but is refused. He throws a tantrum with his followers but gets his ass kicked.
Shortly afterwards he was crushed by the spearmen of his father and the axemen of his mother, and his followers fled. Trouble was tossed into the sea, left to swim around in the shoreless ocean forever.
Yet Trouble returned, and far more powerful than before. Amid the vast oceans Trouble had met Empty-head, and although the old man did not even know it, he carried a weapon against the Quarterlords. He did not understand it, but Trouble did. The weapon was the sword, and it was made by a Grey One or else was a son of Trouble. Newly armed, Trouble crawled back on the Eggshell. What followed was the Gods War, a terrible Darkness Age, whose consequences are still felt today.”
Ok so there are definitely elements of Orlanth getting Death/Sword from Humakt and/or Eurmal, only with different moving parts. It works nicely as a proto-version of the Orlanthi myth, with an atheist sorcerous twist on it. I may be completely off mark but that’s my take for now!
The Universal Lunar Empire
The Red Emperor “does not acknowledge the existence of other peers“, meaning that he’s the boss of everywhere that the light of the Red Moon touches… and hey, guess what, that’s the entire world! What a coincidence. However, the Red Emperor isn’t necessarily after ruling over the entire world. He’s OK paying far-away barbarians to “submit to him or at least to be allies”. “What is important is that they acknowledge his position as the sole pillar of legitimacy in the world”. See? He’s not totally a crazy megalomaniac… just, like, very much a crazy megalomaniac.
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.
Ardwulf’s Lair Unboxes the RuneQuest Starter Set
If you’re a fan of Harn1, Traveller, or wargames, you might be familiar with Ardwulf’s Lair, a YouTube channel that does reviews of, well, Harn, Traveller, and wargames, mostly.
1 Harn is another very old and very detailed gaming fantasy world which I love almost as much as Glorantha, even though you could say it’s practically its polar opposite!
Elf Pack Work-in-Progress
Shannon Appelcline, known among other things as an RPG historian and a Gloranthan elf-expert, is still working on some upcoming “Elf Pack” (like Trollpak, but for elves). He tells us that there will be, as tradition dictates, some encounter tables!
The Spirit of Lost in the Dark
Quickly becoming a regular around these parts, SkullDixon has a new thing for us: a short spirit encounter for use in RuneQuest.
One of the great things about Glorantha is that most things in that world have a solid spiritual connection. Disease in Glorantha is not caused by microscopic lifeforms, they are often caused by Spirits. […] So I thought to myself – what if the reason why people become lost in the dark was also because of a spirit who plays upon the mind of the traveler, making them confused and making it difficult to recognize where they are traveling through.
The article comes with a short RuneQuest stat block.
Miniatures Roundup
Let’s do some Gloranthan miniatures roundup!
Photo by Phil Leedel, miniatures by Bad Squiddo Games
So here i present Gerkalak, priestess of Kyger Litor and Gorakiki dancing the Summon Ancestor spell before the clan totem!
As far as I can tell, those are new models that are not available yet.
Miniature by Crippled God FoundryMiniature by Crippled God Foundry
Last, there are 3D-printable Minoan priestess models available from MyMiniFactory (thanks to Nick Brooke for the links). The two models (Ariadne and Pasiphae) are from Crippled God Foundry, which is such an awesome name.
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.
Arkaim, Southern Ural
Here’s your Middle Bronze Age site of the week: Arkaim, in Southern Ural (in modern Russia).
Arkaim consists of a fortified settlement from the Middle Bronze Age, constructed around 3.8-4000 years ago. Arkaim was a circular stronghold that housed 1,500 to 2,500 inhabitants with concentric bastions, constructed using adobe, a building material made from earth and organic materials.
HeritageDaily has more information for you. I particularly like this digital reconstruction to help picture what it may have looked like, because it’s quite unlike what I’m used to (as a layman) in terms of Bronze Age settlements:
Image by Jvtrplzz (CC0 1.0)
Scholars have some theories about this concentric design for the village, but in Glorantha, it wouldn’t take too much tinkering to make it look like a Fire/Sky Rune (for Grazelanders or Pentans), or an Air Rune (for Orlanthi).
Fans Wants Wizards of the Coast to use the Metric System in D&D
Yep, apparently it’s gaining traction, with one of those online petitions things (currently at more than 6000 signatures, for whatever that’s worth). Meanwhile, Chaosium cheekily reminds us that “Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin put the metric system into RuneQuest from the get-go (1978)…“. Yeah, I always wondered about that. I mean, as a European, I’m very grateful that this RPG uses the correct (yes, you read that right1) measurement system, but I wonder what kind of enlightenment made a bunch of Americans in the seventies come to that decision?
1 Ok so I commonly see arguments that “the metric system has no place in a fantasy game“, presumably because meters and kilometers are somehow not “poetic” enough or “too modern” or whatever. This argument is completely wrong on two levels.
First, these people are often the same ones that also argue that they’re not running a “strictly historical simulation” and should therefore be able have anachronistic elements in their worlds (crossbows, stirrups, gumball machines, etc). Well, yeah, duh! But not metric distances, for some reason?
Second, there’s a whole difference between what measurements the rules use, and what measurements your NPCs will be talking about in-world. Go ahead and have fun with your Issaries merchant negotiating the price for 250 shekels of dried food, or your chieftain asking for one guard to be posted along the wall every 12 cubits. Hopefully these all mean the same thing from one city to another! And even if it’s unified in, say, Sartar, it might be different between Nochet, Boldhome, and Prax! The only place for fun ancient measurement units in the rulebook is the Vasana saga text boxes, because just as players typically say “can I learn Bladesharp 2?” instead of “can I learn to focus on my sword’s hilt and ask Orlanth’s spirits to bless my blade with their magical wetstone?“, players will also talk and think about measurement units they know. And aside from, like, one or two countries in the world, that’s metric. So thank you Steve and Greg!
Thank you for reading
That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!
Runic Rants is an irregular series of thoughts, opinions, and experiments about RuneQuest.
RuneQuest Glorantha is one of those games that has many rules disseminated throughout their hefty rulebook. I often overlook or forget a detail about some rules (which is frankly a problem with this rulebook, but let’s not go into that rabbit hole), and one thing that is easily overlooked is the real rules behind Experience Checks. They are more complicated than you may think!
It’s tempting to reduce things to “get a check when you succeed a roll (if there’s a checkbox)“, but that’s not what it is. RQG p415 says:
Experience checks are not automatic whenever a success is achieved—it must involve a real risk or challenge, or result in roleplaying opportunities. The ability to reward or deny an experience check is an important responsibility for the gamemaster.
So it’s really up to the Gamemaster to allow getting Experience Check. I tend to be a generous Gamemaster who lets players get a check in many situations, but mostly because their characters are still under-powered at this early point in our campaign. Other Gamemasters may find that their player characters are getting too powerful too fast, and look for guidance in the matter, but we’ll talk more about that later (mostly in Part 2 of this article).
The key element in my opinion is the clause that says that the situation “must involve a real risk or challenge, or result in roleplaying opportunities“. For instance, if the party is negotiating some price with a merchant in order to save a few bucks, that’s not real risk or challenge, and it probably wouldn’t lead to meaningful roleplaying opportunities. It might be a fun little scene, but the outcome will probably not impact the storyline (they will just have to pay full price, or will refuse the deal and go see someone else). So most probably there’s no Experience Check in that scene.
On the other hand, a character might take some “unnecessary” risks with the merchant, threatening to cut down his tent and stomp on his inventory, because that character is often roleplayed as violent and unstable (maybe high Air and Disorder Runes?), or because the merchant has some history with that character. In that case I might reward, say, an Intimidate roll with an Experience Check. Intimidate and Fast-Talk in particular are risky in my opinion because they can easily backfire, leading to local authorities getting involved on the grounds of harassment or fraud (unlike Charm and Orate which are safer but require more time). If this can take the story in a whole new direction, this is an indication that these rolls indeed include risks and rewards, and warrant an Experience Check.
Of course, if you have players who often derail the adventure with crazy antics, and/or you are unwilling to “go with the flow” because you have an adventure to run that you paid $50 for, you may not want to award Experience Checks in these situations. It’s a carrot, so use it sparingly.
Experience Checks Without Success
Runes and Passions can get automatic Experience Checks. In RQG p229:
The gamemaster might reward adventurers with a free experience check of the Rune when they roleplay in accordance with that Rune.
So when a character threatens an NPC they should leave alone (as in the previous example) because they are highly impulsive and violent, or have history with that NPC, that might call for an automatic Experience Check in a Rune or Passion (Air, Movement, Hate (Other Tribe), etc). Other examples could involve a pacifist character who stays calm even when action is required, a character high in the Illusion Rune who “can’t help” but insert lies and fabrications while reporting something to their thane or tribal King, or a character with a high Loyalty Passion who reports something to their thane or tribal King that would have been better omitted.
I basically see this clause as a “reward for good roleplaying“, although I’ll repeat that, in my opinion, it needs to have the possibility of taking the adventure in a new direction. One that would not have been taken if the player hadn’t said or done what they said or did. RQG p231 (under “Other Rune Experience Checks”) has an extreme example where a player decides that their character will lead an armed uprising. I don’t think it has to be that dramatic, but it should affect the storyline one way or another.
Experience Checks from Magic Use
Adventurers can get experience checks in Runes when they use Rune Magic. If you’re like me, however, I only make players roll for that if they’re in combat, or some other round-by-round action scene. If casting magic is part of the preparation leading up to a combat, or part of a non-action scene (like casting Charisma before an important meeting), I let players auto-succeed their roll. They may still ask for a roll if they hope to get a critical success (which means no Rune Points are spent), but the fear of getting a fumble (losing Rune Points for nothing) is usually enough to have them choose the automatic (normal) success anyway.
The idea here is that casting magic (Spirit or Rune) in a non-stressful situation is no big deal. And because it’s no big deal, I don’t give an Experience Check in that case. No risk, no reward.
POW Gain Rolls
Curiously enough, an Experience Check for the POW characteristic is called “getting a chance for a POW Gain Roll”, or some other similarly elliptic phrasing. I’m pretty sure everybody calls that a “POW check” or “POW experience check”.
Anyway, you get one such check when you successfully attack or parry in Spirit Combat, or when you win a POW Resistance Roll that was “hard enough” (below 95%).
You also get a POW check with some worship rituals where you succeed your Worship roll. In a nutshell:
Initiates only get that POW check on a High Holy Day or Sacred Time, or, maybe, when they do it all alone in a place they sanctified themselves with the Sanctify Rune Spell for the occasion.
Rune level adventurers can get a POW check in any Holy Day Worship situation if they are part of the presiding officials, which is probably often the case.
There are a few situations that may give or remove Experience Checks.
Firing a missile weapon with the Sureshot spell prevents you from getting an Experience Check on that skill.
The Arouse Passion Rune Spell, by virtue of provoking a Passion roll, can lead to an Experience Check in that Passion.
Experience Between Adventures
The last situation in which you can get experience is the downtime between adventures. Did you know that this seasonal downtime lets you get an Experience Check in up to four occupational skills and cult skills? That’s in RQG p416. Don’t forget this! That’s quite a good way to get checks in rarely used skills!
This last rule is interesting to me because it deals with a delicate part of game design: the difference between game time and real time… but we will look at this, “check hunting”, and more in Part 2 of this article!
If you have any comment about this Runic Rant, or some ideas for a future installment, please send them to us!
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.
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.
Writing Adventures in Glorantha
Episode 4 of the podcast is finally out! We talked to most of the crew from the Beer With Teeth collective, who have written many great adventures and sourcebooks for the Jonstown Compendium. Diana, Dom, and Erin share their creative process and other tips for writing scenarios for RuneQuest Glorantha, in an episode full of ramblings and generally applicable RPG authoring advice!
Chaosium News
Here are this week’s Chaosium news!
Beginner’s Guide to Glorantha
James Coquillat interviews Jeff Richard about introducing Gloranthan deities to new players. It’s a nice video that you can pillage for short descriptions of the main gods… it might come in handy if, left to your own devices, you tend to rant for too long about Glorantha because you’re so excited about it! (I’m looking at you, you, and you over there… yes, you know who you are!)
And while some gods are easy to describe and grasp in one sentence (Chalana Arroy or Issaries, for instance), others aren’t that obvious. Funnily enough, the first non-obvious god that James asks Jeff to describe is our good old pal Yelmalio. Jeff also clarifies the differences between the different warrior gods, and what you can do as an Ernalda cultist.
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!
John Lawson gives us a companion to the Smoking Ruin & Other Stories with Korolstead: Secrets of the Smoking Ruin. This expands what can be done to the already hefty Smoking Ruin adventure by providing extra maps, scenario seeds, NPCs and factions, encounter tables, and much more.
A Bad Day at Duck Rock by Peter Hart, illustrated by Dario Corallo, places the party as escorts to a merchant carrying various metals from Dwarf Run to Manville in Beast Valley through Duck Valley. An easy task given to the characters while the merchant takes a short side-trip, what could possibly go wrong? Find out in a duck-laden scenario.
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.
Think of Classical Greece during the rise of Philip and Alexander. At first things aren’t too different from what they have been for the last century or so. We have our polis, and it is always the same major players – Thebes, Sparta, and Athens. And the Persian Empire is on the eastern shore and playing everyone off each other, a constant threat.
But within a generation, there is a Macedonian Empire, with generals who have made themselves kings, a a king who has made himself a god. And the polis are left making statues and obeisances to generals who rule armies, not lands.
And so something similar happens in Dragon Pass, i.e. a lot of change over a short period of time.
A snippet from the upcoming Sartar Homeland boxed set tells us about the many changes that Argrath enacted to his nation’s military. Before his arrival, Sartar’s armies were made of “inexperienced” tribal militia and “exhausted and semi-rebellious mercenaries” such as the various warbands that followed Kallyr for the past decade. But Argrath arrives with a competent cavalry that has years of combat experience together, and this changes things.
The reasons for this are several: 1. The existing warrior structure of Sartar had evolved to become rich, mounted noblemen (called “thanes”) leading armed mobs of freemen; 2. Dragon Pass, and especially the traditional friendship between the House of Sartar and the Grazelanders, was rich in horses; 3. Argrath’s own life and training was among the animal-riding nomads of Prax (except for the three years he spent as a Wolf Pirate) and he made brilliant use of the cavalry at his disposal (however, Argrath’s generalship always made excellent use of the forces he had at hand, even second rate infantry); 4. The magical powers which Argrath summoned to his aid were closely bound with wild rampages and shock tactics.
Argrath began assembling his army soon after he was driven from his home on Starfire Ridge when he took refuge among the nomads of Prax. Most tribes there had strict laws and customs restricting any foreigner from holding a position of authority or power, but there were several secret societies whose membership crossed all social or political boundaries. Incredibly, Argrath worked his way to supremacy among three of them. These units, the Twin Spears, Sword-brothers, and Bullocks, formed the kernel of his Free Army. After he received the gift of the Dragon’s Teeth, Argrath returned to Dragon Pass.The native Sartar tribal militia and the first initial units of the Sartar Free Army and the Sartar Magical Union, reinforced by Praxian nomads and some Holy Country volunteers, carried the weight of the early fighting.
From there the Sartarites grew into a unified army, alongside allies like the Grazelanders and the Tarsh Exiles, and mercenaries like the Sun Dome Templars, Dragonewts, and so on.
Of note:
Sieges were usually left to specialists which were organized and led by the famous engineer, Haraspac, rumored to be of dwarf blood.
Argrath’s friendship with the dragonewts extended to wyrms and even dream dragons. Such draconic allies were increasingly common in his later campaigns.
The Orlanthi encourage independence over centralization. They do not have faith in a single leader for all things, a single god for all things, or for a single rule to cover all eventualities. They know that their own rules may not be the same as others, and that difference is not bad or evil, and sometimes even has great good.
Justice is the “right way” of the world. Orlanth is the lord of justice, and his changeable nature indicates that justice too must be suited to the circumstances of anything being judged. The Orlanthi believe a single rule is not possible. Justice to one’s family, clan, tribe, and nation means to follow the ways of Orlanth. Justice to outsiders is determined by their actions, but requires curiousity, tolerance, and honest restraint on the part of the Orlanthi until the stranger proves themselves a friend or enemy.
There’s some more interesting follow-up notes:
Those who imagine the Orlanthi as being die-hard traditionalists who resist change, resent cities, don’t engage in trade with strangers, or who think think they favour a single leader, single god, or single rule – I think you forget who Orlanth is.
This openness to change is a key theme in the Hero Wars, as the Orlanthi undergo tremendous social and even religious changes from 1625 to 1655.
1. Proper social order. That means everyone is in their proper place, with the strong restrained from harming the weak (any more than is proper, of course), with everyone doing what is proper for the social position for the good of the community. This proper social order is derived from the gods, in particular Yelm, and entrusted to the Red Emperor to establish, maintain, and defend.
This is all written down in rules and laws.
2. Vengeance against those who have wronged. The wheel of vengeance will eventually crush all those who have wronged others. One must suffer, that is part of existence, but in the end, justice requires that those who suffered unfairly must be avenged. This is derived most strongly from the Red Goddess, although there are clearly Carmanian and Spolite antecedents to this. This is usually entrusted to the Red Emperor and his family.
This explains why, for instance, the Red Emperor’s daughers like Hon-Eel and Jar-Eel are often sent out to kick some ass around the Empire, depending on the Emperor’s mood.
Of course, this is directly opposed to the Orlanthi:
Unlike the Orlanthi, the Dara Happan culture favors the idea of one ruler for everyone (the Red Emperor), one set of rules for everyone ideally, and at times even flirts with the idea of one supreme god (or goddess).
Unlike Colonel Kurtz, however, Arkat gets to retire on a farm “in Ralios, protected by his ferocious Zorak Zorani children, parceling out his wisdom and epigrams to any who will listen”.
Now this part gets interesting:
Unlike Hrestol, who slew his irrational unconsciousness and destroyed his shadow in order to bring forth the rule of reason and will, Arkat rationally embraced his unconscious and became his own shadow. In the end, Arkat fully embraced the Darkness in order to extinguish the Light of Nysalor.
One might […] view the Red Goddess as an attempt to create a synthesis of Nysalor AND Arkat. Of Nysalor AND Gbaji. Of the Full Moon and the Black Moon.
And perhaps Argrath creates a synthesis of the destroyer and the balancer.
Dendara’s Runes
The Guide to Glorantha continues to gather small “errors” as some details get revised in new material. Is there a Guide to Glorantha errata somewhere? I don’t think so?
Anyway, those with the upcoming RuneQuest Cults of Glorantha preview noticed that the Runes for Dendara have been changed, from the Guide’s Light and Harmony Runes, to, effectively, the same set or Runes as Ernalda (Fertility, Earth, Harmony). Jeff replied to this succinctly:
Yeah, well I have done a lot of thought about Dendara specifically since I wrote the Guide. She has the same runes as Ernalda. Indeed she is so similar to Ernalda that the God Learners were absolutely convinced that they are the same deity.
We at the God Learners are indeed convinced of that. Right Joerg?
Except when she isn’t. All that Dendara = Entekos = Sedenya stuff looming…
Dart Wars
Jeff writes a note about a little played aspect of Glorantha: the cloak and dagger conflicts between noble houses of the Lunar Empire known as the Dart Wars:
The combatants in these secret wars are spies and mercenaries, analogous to ninja, that are hired by the houses. The Red Emperor himself is rumored to actively participate in Dart Wars and is the likely the single biggest employer of Dart Warriors. It is rumored that there are entire clans of Dart Warriors, training in secret.
As a result of the Dart Wars, the noble houses absolutely do not trust each other and prevents them from allying against the Red Emperor.
The most obvious result of a Dart War is when a ruling family of a satrap is replaced by a new family; but Dart Wars often involve control of a powerful temple or rule of a city.
Among the four campaign ideas that sprung to my mind when I discovered Glorantha, one of them was definitely a spy action thriller set across the Lunar Empire… I’m still hoping to run it one day! But even if you play in good old Dragon Pass or Prax, you can include a bit of the Dart Wars in your game:
The background presence of Dart Wars can explain some of the erratic decisions of the Lunar Army in the Provinces and elsewhere. They keep the ruling families divided and make it easier for the Red Emperor to assert his authority, which is far more important than some barbarian province.
It also means that much of the actual administration of the Lunar Empire is not so much in the hands of the powerful noble families with their Red Goddess initiates and temples, and weird ambitions, but in the hands of Irrippi Ontor clerks who just keep their heads down and issue papers.
Dwarf Danger!
Here are Jeff’s suggestions for weird dwarven things to throw at your players:
Jolati with buggy pre-programmed commands. Gobbler seeking stolen gunpowder. Angry spirits escaped from a faulty Silver Dwarf energy matrix. Mechanical construct (tiktok) with limited self-awareness. Bound energy construct, abandoned by Silver Dwarfs.
My players already kind of know this, but Jeff also reminds us that “Dwarven mines and strongholds [are] full of weird things that the dwarfs used to assist them in their labor, sources of energy, or defensive systems”.
The strangest livestock in the Holy Country has got to be the pig variant popularly called the “Sausage Loaf”. These are huge animals – weighing up to 500 kg but exceptionally calm, gentle, and even submissive – and are famed for their incredibly tasty meat.
And another:
A runner up for strangest food source is the giant sloth found in the forests of Heortland and Esrolia.
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.
Lace and Steel on RuneQuest
Author and game designer Paul Kidd (aka “Pauli”, aka “Lace & Steel”, aka “Mistress Lenalia of Duck Point, Rune Priestess of Humakt”) made a video about RuneQuest, its history, its supplements, Gloranthan humour, religion, and everything they like about the game. You can also catch Pauli’s funny quips about RuneQuest edition wars, or insightful short comments about melee combat mechanics compared to real life melee combat.
Of course, the video eventually gets to the latest RuneQuest Glorantha edition, with Pauli giving a review of it. This review goes into interesting opinions, given Pauli’s big background in 2nd edition RuneQuest — the big increase in how much the lore and setting are described rather than hinted at, or the loss of “charm and comedy”, for instance. Pauli does however make a point of stating how much RuneQuest was innovative and influential in terms of game design, and concludes with “wonderful to have it back” and a toast to Chaosium.
If you have a glass in your hand right now, you can join Pauli in the toast.
Teelo Imara Gives Proof Before The Court of Virtue
Eff’s highly recommended blog Eight Arms and a Mask offers a new entry from the Zero Wane when the Red Goddess still walked the earth. The Goddess of Virtue has a planet in the sky, and while she is worshiped as one entity in parts of Peloria, the Dara Happans recognize two deities associated with the House of Virtue, Entekos and Dendara. This story has the Red Goddess incarnate use an uncomfortable truth about the goddesses to prove her divinity.
The disclaimer framing the story dates this as a sixth wane Imperial College research document of dubious (read: heterodox) provenance, the stuff that new heresies are founded on. Putting such a disclaimer into a document accessible to students of experimental heroquesting is of course an ingenious way of getting this research done without having to apply for imperial funding…
Austin Conrad has another blog article out following the latest Monster of the Month, Jallupel Goodwind, which was a collaboration with Beer With Teeth’s Diana Probst. It goes quickly over a few “behind the scenes” bits for that issue, and then updates us on Austin’s other projects. We have confirmation that MotM will, as planned, end with the current second series, and that it will include a “plus sized” issue, like last year’s Quacken. We also learn that writing on Volume Two of Treasures of Glorantha is underway!
In this article from the Smithsonian Magazine, scientists look at myths from Makin Island to help figure out how three huge out-of-place boulders ended up there. It’s also nice to think about it in reverse, too: how you can imagine what “really” happened, and make a myth out of it.
An Exploration of Ancient Pig Herding
This video offers an exploration into pig domestication in a region where pigs are now taboo, using archaeological data as well as the biblical research on Levithicus.
One interesting factoid brought up was that pigs roaming refuse-littered streets in crowded cities actually improve the sanitation by consuming all manner of refuse, including even nightsoil, and reducing the exposure to infectious material.
Thank you for reading
That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!
This episode’s guests are Beer with Teeth, at time in character:
Erin (aka Varanis, a noble of Sartar lineage)
Dom (aka Rajar, a huge Storm Bull axe fighter)
Diana (aka Berra, a tiny Humakti warrior)
We also learn about their original GM Tom who is at fault, and about Kris who is the resident visual artist.
Why Beer With Teeth, and how they arrived at the logo.
Current Glorantha games played: one in the classical era, meant to end with the Cradle, one in the current timeline which had Kallyr come back after the Battle of Queens, and another such game run by Diana, currently digging into their characters’ previous history.
The campaigns combine published stuff and “making stuff up”.
Keeping several games’ plot-lines aligned when different GMs and parties advance at different paces.
Ludo talks about his games, and Dom discusses Cthulhu.
Using the Ars Magica trick of guest Gming in the main game (GMed by Tom), which is how
Use of passions, but also lots of rolls on the Battle skill.
Jeff Richard’s previews on Sartar Campaign material on Facebook
Erin learning stories and background, Jeff’s posts on Facebook.
Main Topic: Writing Adventures
Dom tells about his cooperation with Diana to create the interim scenario in their main campaign as guest GMs.
Erin talks about disappearing into those deep rabbit holes of research, and that writing game scenarios is somewhat different from writing stories.
Dom shares his (complete) notes from which he meant to run that scenario – about seven hand-written lines covering half an A4 sheet.
Diana tells how her lack of familiarity with GMing RuneQuest led her to pre-write a large range of tasks and challenges, and how that happened to be quite close to Chaosium’s submission guidelines.
Ludo points out investigative methods (like John Tynes’ concept of the Investigative Sandbox).
Nudging players rather than imposing railroad.
Diana talks about player characters working their way up from followers towards the movers and shakers.
Dom thinks in terms of cool scenes that he wants to inflict on the players which strangely are going to happen where the player characters walk.
Foreshadowing, plot hooks, or red herrings?
Introducing minor things that become useful hints later.
Red herrings created by players may be turned into plot hooks.
Prophecies – heroes fighting against one another, a test of strength of truths.
Themes
Adventures vs. arcs. Personal arcs and passions.
Lethality in the game
NPC stats.
Adjusting opponent ability, numbers and smartness to the player party.
Resurrection is always an option, both for departed player characters and NPCs.
Playing NPCs smart.
Creating NPCs as communities.
How much does the past reach into the design process. How much archaeology?
Finding something old (e.g. in Clearwine, which has history and pre-history), as items, or as shards and in middens.
Populating houses in Clearwine drawing a terrible map and then using “RuneQuest Cities” results as inspiration. (RQ Cities is really a reprint of Midkemia Press’ “Cities“, which is still available in all its OSR glory).
Researching ancient technologies – charcoal-making, glass-making.
Family structures in Bronze Age society – multi-generation households rather than core families.
Researching Bronze Age
Erin riffs about how writing game material offers her an opportunity to make stuff up rather than sticking to facts (and citing all the sources).
(If you don’t know it, The Motel of the Mysteries is a book about creative interpretation of archaeological finds. The pdf linked is a very short version for educational purposes)
Suggested reading lists cut, and Dom’s woes GMing for experts in their fields playing characters with those skill sets.
Dom talks about his role as the Glorantha grognard in the Beer With Teeth collective.
Cave walls with bronze bands – “yes, you are walking in the body of a dead god here”.
Glorantha is about magic, myth and belief, and conflicting truths may be tested against one another.
As the Game Master, your presentation of Glorantha defines the setting for your campaign. Your Glorantha will vary, possibly between campaigns you run.
The sense of community, manifest as the wyter entity, is a unique trait of the setting.
Use of Runes as hooks to pull player characters in
Runes creating personalities that lead to motivations, e.g. in The Gifts of Prax.
Horses with character (expressed as runes, though not with magic associated).
Making a campaign unique by changing one (major) feature in the setting for that campaign, like e.g. “Argrath is dead”.
Kallyr survives the Battle of Queen in the Beer With Teeth campaign, and the potential for story and conflict inherent in this.
