Runic Rants is an irregular series of thoughts, opinions, and experiments about RuneQuest.

This article was originally written as a comment on the BRP Central forums, and has been heavily edited and expanded here.

A question that I’ve seen come up a few times online is that of game terms employed in the RuneQuest rules compared to what people on Glorantha would “really” speak about.

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Our guest for this episode is Austin Conrad, who last graced our podcast in episode 2, On the Road. Austin is the author of many things on the Jonstown Compendium, generally publishing under the “Akhelas” brand, while he is known as “Crel” on BRP Central, Discord, and social media.

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In this month’s Glorantha Initiation interview, Ludo talks to Bryon Ross without any Joerg present. Bryon is a long time RuneQuest lover, but he played mostly with the Fantasy Earth setting until the release of the RuneQuest Quickstart in 2017. He is also a retired marine, SCA participant, and regular Chaosium convention gamemaster.

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Art by Dan Barker, from the Broken Council Guidebook

We start this episode with a minor existential crisis on Ludo’s identity, followed by Ludo being protective of our usual guests by volunteering to take the brunt of Jörg’s incoming obscurantism and pedantry. Ludo accuses rather than praises Jörg of being a bright guy…

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This week marks the amazing milestone of the 100th issue of the Journal of Runic Studies! Sadly, this is also the occasion to announce that I’m stopping publication of the Journal… so I guess there is no 100th issue after all and I just lied!

Such is the role of the Trickster.

It’s been a pretty eventful couple of years since we started doing newsletters. The first one was Wind Whispers, back when the podcast was called Wind Words. A worldwide pandemic happened, and it was relaunched when the podcast mutated into The God Learners. If you look at that very first issue, and compare it to any of the last few issues, the structure hasn’t changed much. But other things have changed, including:

  • Chaosium designers, especially Jeff Richard and David Scott, have become very active online, interacting with the Gloranthan and RuneQuest communities. We originally were the only place attempting to archive all this information, but David stepped up wonderfully and it now gets almost all archived on the Well of Daliath.
  • The community content programs for Chaosium games have become an immense success. During the Wind Whispers run we saw the appointment of Nick Brooke to the position of ambassador for the Jonstown Compendium, which now has more than 250 titles.
  • The fan base has grown tremendously, with many old hands and newcomers alike (re)discovering Glorantha. We started our Glorantha Initiation series to interview the latter, and still have many more people to talk to (if you’re waiting for me to reply to your email, know that I haven’t forgotten you!)

Those of us who came to Glorantha with the new RuneQuest line might not appreciate it, but I’m told by 1990s gamers that it’s quite an amazing thing to be able to fill several pages of weekly content for such a niche thing.

In addition to that, I’ve been learning a lot about both Glorantha and Earth. I’ve become genuinely fascinated by the ancient world, not just for gaming potential (although that, too) but simply because it’s super cool. I hope that you enjoyed following me as I researched, discovered, and mused about both worlds.

This all takes a fair amount of time. It takes between three and five hours to make an issue of the Journal, depending on how much research (thank the gods for PDF searches!) or YouTube-watching or whatever else I want to go through on a given week. I was glad to do it because it gave me a good excuse to learn more about Glorantha, about ancient history, about gamemastering, and more.

But I’m creating more RPG content lately. I’ve got an increasing amount of illustrations to make, half a dozen manuscripts to finish, and a few other unrelated hobbies and projects I’ve been neglecting. To continue, the Journal would require two or three other regular contributors… so after taking a good long look at my ever-expanding list of fun things I want to do, I had to prioritize. Hence this final hundredth issue. Which, again, is not a real issue!

Here’s what you can hopefully expect this year from me in terms of Glorantha-related material:

  • The podcast continues, of course. Only the newsletter stops. Joerg and I will be recording the next episode this week-end, in fact.
  • “The Bloody Banquet”, the all-Telmori one-shot RuneQuest adventure that I ran at ChaosiumCon (pictured above), is likely to be my next publication on the Jonstown Compendium. It’s almost fully written: it needs stat blocks (uuugh) and a couple of editing passes.
  • My long coming “kids intro campaign” for RuneQuest is next. It’s nicknamed “Goonies in Glorantha”, and this should tell you all need to know. The real title will almost definitely not be as good. It’s designed to easily introduce both players and gamemasters to Glorantha. It’s about half-written, but I don’t know yet if it will all fit in one book…
  • You should see my art in a few other Jonstown Compendium books this year. If all goes well, you might even notice me getting better!
  • With a couple of extra hours of free time each week, you may expect a few more occasional Runic Rants, Found Documents, and other similar articles around these parts. Maybe.

Of course, the goal is to spend my time doing other things anyway — if you’re into Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, or Vaesen, you might see one or two things. If you’re into open-source development, you might too. And if you’re my neighbour, you might hear me playing more music.

I want to extend a big thank-you to everybody who supported the newsletter in the past, whether it was by subscribing to it, sharing it on social media, commenting on it, or sending us emails with corrections. Thank you for showing me I wasn’t just talking to an empty room! And on the topic of talking to an empty room, thank you to everybody who listens to and supports the God Learners podcast. Frankly, when I started it I genuinely expected to have only a dozen listeners for such a niche thing. Apparently, there’s more than a dozen of you giant nerds who want to hear people talk about an imaginary historically-incorrect fantasy world. Who knew!

If you want to follow what we’re doing, there are many options:

  • We are on Facebook, Twitter, and Mastodon. These are news-only accounts, so if you prefer my personal shenanigans, head over there.
  • You can also find Joerg and myself Discord. We hang around the various Chaosium and Glorantha related servers. If you need an invite link, contact us.
  • If you’re doing things right, you use an RSS newsreader and can subscribe to our main feed.
  • Hopefully you’re already subscribed to our podcast. If we do something really cool, we’ll probably mention it in the next episode. And you know Joerg: if it’s mentioned, it will be in the show notes!

Finally, please support us by using my affiliate DriveThruRPG code! Click here and start buying things! Hopefully, this includes my own RuneQuest adventures “A Short Detour” and “Bog Struggles“!

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

God Learner Sorcery

Here is what us God Learners were up to this week.

Episode 23: Arkat the Minmaxer

Our new episode is all about the legendary figure of Arkat, with Bud (from Bud’s RPG Review) as our guest! Together we talk nonsense about Arkat’s life, accomplishments, war against Nysalor, and legacy. Of course we give plenty of ideas for using Arkati lore in a RuneQuest Glorantha game. Plus: conspiracy theories!

Note: Joerg went a bit crazy with the show notes… he had some corrections to make, and of course a bit of pedantry to indulge in! We might have to do another episode on Arkat to get it out of system…

Runic Rants: Spreadsheet for the People

I wrote a thing about the value of spreadsheets! Yes, spreadsheets! If you know me, you might not be surprised…

It might sound very nerdy, but I think a lot of questions get answered by making a spreadsheet for your Glorantha setting. The first spreadsheet I made keeps track of the population in terms of cult memberships, villages and farms, spirit societies, and so on. […]

This exercise really helped me realize a few things. For instance, you very easily “run out” of initiates for any given cult once you’ve allocated 2/3rds of your adults to Orlanth and Ernalda.

You might have already read it when I posted it on the RuneQuest Facebook group. If not, read all about it here!

ChaosiumCon 2023: Podcasting 101 Panel

As I mentioned in my Chaosium Con report, I was in a panel on podcasting alongside much more clever and experienced people like the great Seth Skorkowsky, Michael Diamond, and Arthur Rothfuss. The panel was moderated by the equally great Emily Mills.

Well you can listen to panel now on the Old Ways podcast, or watch us over here on YouTube:

Seth is of course the host of his titular and super-popular YouTube channel (along with being a fiction and RPG writer, and co-host of the Modern Mythos podcast), Arthur and Emily are part of Under the Library, and Michael is part of the Old Ways Podcast. And I’m the useless guy on the left.

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Combat in RuneQuest

James Coquillat interviews Jeff Richard to get tips and advice for running RuneQuest combat, especially for newcomers to the game. The usual suspects are here: use augments, cast spirit magic buffs, do a volley of missile weapons before heading out into melee, etc.

By now you should be aware of my… conflicted feelings about RuneQuest as a game system, especially its combat. But I guess the good thing with this interview is that, in case you weren’t aware of it before, it should be clear that Chaosium considers the RuneQuest rules as entirely optional. It’s a rather substractive game system: an incredibly crunchy set of rules that you’re supposed to juggle and prune as needed to adjudicate situations. Most other game systems I’ve played (and like) tend to be, on the other hand, modular or additive, that is: you get some core minimal rules, and you add some improvised rules and rulings based on what feels right, or based on explicitly optional/extra rules.

Side note: there are a couple of art overlays during the interview, and I’m not sure if I’ve already seen them all in published material? Especially the one around 3:50? Has anybody seen that one elsewhere?

What Attendees Said About ChaosiumCon

Once again about my ChaosiumCon report, I linked at the end of it a bunch of other reports. But there are a few more! Chaosium has been keeping tabs on them and provided this short compilation of blog posts about their recent gaming convention. Of course my own report is on there. Feel free to check out others if you want more FOMO in your life!

Cover RuneQuest Maps Now Available for Download

Until now, the maps found in the inside covers of the RuneQuest Glorantha rulebook were conspicuously absent from the digital version. David Scott heard from the fans on Discord and fixed it! Yay!

Go to the Chaosium website, click on the “user” icon to login and access your account, go into the “Orders” tab, and find your order for the RuneQuest rulebook… this might require a bit of patience if you have as many orders as me. But once you’ve located it, you can click on the download icon and find the two new files!

David isn’t just helpful with digital downloads (he’s known to have fixed a lot of small issues with the RuneQuest PDFs), he’s also a great podcast guest! Check out our episodes on the RuneQuest Passion mechanics, or on Nomad Gods for more goodness from David!

Six Ages 2 Demo on Steam

If you’re eagerly awaiting the release of Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out, a demo is available on Steam right now! I haven’t checked it out yet so, err, that’s all I have.

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!

Shameless Plug!

The Jonstown Compendium has been a bit quiet lately so instead of just skipping this segment this week, why not do a bit of shameless advertising for my stuff?

© 2022 BOLT80 & Chaosium Inc.

A Short Detour” is an adventure in three acts that you can easily “sprinkle” on top of your ongoing campaign. It presents a tough moral choice to your players, and potentially introduces a cool villain! Plus, you get a whole deep dive on what exactly is Chaos, and rules for giving a Chaotic taint to your players! Errr I mean to your players’ characters!

© 2022 BOLT80 & Chaosium Inc.

Bog Struggles” is another easily inserted adventure in which the adventurers need to save a Newtling village from possible destruction. Spirit World horror meets cute amphibian people!

Both are Silver Best Sellers, and “A Short Detour” is actually getting into “possible Gold Best Seller” territory at this point. If you have already bought these adventures, a hearty “thank you” goes to you! If you haven’t, please consider making them your next Jonstown Compendium purchase! We don’t have a Patreon or anything like that for this podcast and this newsletter, so that’s how you can show your appreciation!

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.

Rule of Thumb for Gloranthan Demographics

I think I mentioned it already in the past, but the “new” rule of thumb for Gloranthan demographics is for about 2/3rds of adults and 1/3rd of children. Jeff confirmed this recently on BRP Central:

I used to assume as a short-hand that half the population of any given human Gloranthan community were adults, the other half uninitiated children. I’ve refined that somewhat, and now assume that about 60-66% of any given human Gloranthan community are adults, the rest uninitiated children. 

Now the reason for that comes down to lower children mortality, longer lifespan, and also that in most Gloranthan communities adulthood initiation takes place at around 14-17 years old. This ends up with the adult being initiated into a RuneQuest, although the full process might take several years.

For people making spreadsheets like me, this is good stuff! I did spot this change of statistics between the HeroQuest Red Cow books, the RuneQuest Gamemaster Adventures book, and the several clan statistics that Jeff kindly shared during the past couple years as a sneak peek into the Sartar Homeland book (see here and here, among others). I’ve been using this ~60-something% of adults in my world-building for the past couple years.

There are a couple other things to consider, which may or may not be “canon” but make sense to me:

  • Different clans and tribes might have different percentages of adults/children based on how they survived the Great Winter (aka the Windstop) and the Lunar occupation. If you used a 50% stat, congrats, you can add a sub-plot of many children having died during the Great Winter, and how that affects the community. Or, you know, just hand-wave it. The extra 10% of kids were grounded.
  • Becoming an adult is only one step in someone’s life. Children get initiated into adulthood between 14 and 17 years old, but then they undergo 2 years (sometimes 3) of apprenticeship with a cult. Maybe they stay in their village to work at the local Orlanth temple, maybe live in the city in the bigger Orlanth temple, or maybe they move away to Jonstown to be a junior scribe at the Lhankor Mhy temple. Either way, in my Glorantha, these young adults learn the cult’s skills and spirit magic during that time, and then they become initiate of the cult. So not all adults are initiated into a cult yet IMHO.

A few more rules of thumb come from last week’s post about Runemasters, which got a few more comments. I’m mostly interested in this one:

As another aside, I figure most initiates only make the single POW sacrifice and don’t continue going much deeper into the cult mysteries. They are likely concerned about other things like work, relaxation, sex, family, more work, avoiding work, feeding the chickens, etc.

It’s tricky to imagine why the average Gloranthan would not continue sacrificing points of POW to gain more magic, but not everybody is driven by a power-hungry min-maxing player. NPCs have a life to live after all, and sacrificing a point of POW takes a full week of prayer and meditation. Orlanthi farmers may not have the luxury of taking a week off, and may not get many opportunities to get a POW increase roll afterwards.

But in my opinion, a single Rune Point feels too low. Orlanthi farmers are also generally part of the tribal militia. Going on raids, fighting off trolls, and dealing with random monsters are all fairly common occurrences. This brings opportunities to raise one’s POW, and puts at least a bit of pressure to get some useful magic. After all, people worship gods because they provide useful spells, right? That’s often what we’re told.

So I figure most Orlanthi have between 1 and 4 Rune Points, depending on their age. They might be able to go meditate and sacrifice their POW once every couple years at best, probably shortly after winter started, or at just before spring. YGWV and all that, obviously.

Average Sartarite Clan

Speaking of cult demographics, here is an “average Sartarite clan” according to Jeff:

There are 157 clans in Sartar (not including the Telmori and Pol-Joni), with an average population of about 900 people per clan. About 600 are adults, and about 300 are children. The average Sartarite clan claims about 55 square kilometers of territory.

About 40 adults belong to the clan aristocracy of priests and thanes (and their immediate family), about 400 are full free members of the clan, about 100 are semi-free tenants and other adult dependents, and about 60 are unfree.

In times of war, the average Sartarite clan can muster about 200 warriors: 20 martial priests and thanes, and 180 militia.

Again, this is great data for world-building. Jeff even provides some rough cult membership for this average clan, showing how you have less than a dozen initiates of most Lightbringers’ cults. That’s the kind of stuff I put in my spreadsheets. Yes, I keep talking about spreadsheets this week… not my fault! It just happens!

Of course, these numbers assume that these cults are all spread out evenly among the clans, which is not the case. Yelmalio cultists tend to congregate into a handful of clans that are dominated by the cult. At least half of all Chalana Arroy, Issaries, and Lhankor Mhy cultists are in cities, where they make up a disproportionate percentage of the population.

There’s another set of cult membership figures for a Yelmalio-centric clan if you want to compare. That’s useful if you’re playing near Alda-chur for instance…

Surprisingly enough, I didn’t expect this from the upcoming Mythology book:

There are cult demographics for each homeland in the Mythology Book. Available soon!

Crown Tests and Chief Tests

The Orlanthi “Crown Test” is mentioned in passing in the RuneQuest Glorantha rulebook, as part of “Vasana’s Saga”. On BRP Central, Jeff shares a bit more about the requirements to become tribal king, along with some information on the “Chief Tests” and the similar requirements to become clan chieftain:

Keep in mind what a clan is – its an extended kinship group normally with a thousand or so people. The chieftain is the leader/protector of the clan. The title literally means “most important” or “big man.” The violent ethic of the Orlanthi lifestyle makes the chieftain a de facto warrior. He must also be just, to balance the many needs of his people; and strong, to represent them to the outside world. There is no gender requirement, but even if female, the chieftain is referred to as a “he”. He has the responsibility of being spokesperson and decision-maker for all members, especially in times of emergency. His success as community leader depends upon the support of the council and the folk, both of whom have separate methods of removing him from office, should the need arise. The clan chieftain serves as the speaker to the clan’s magical guardian or “wyter” and the recipient of the immense benefits and power that the community spirit may give.

Because of the importance of the Orlanth cult among the Orlanthi, the clan leader needs to have been an initiate of Orlanth for at least a year. Orlanth, not Orlanth Rex (they might be a lay member of Orlanth Rex as well or even a temporary initiate, but that is a tribal matter). 

If there is more than one candidate among the kin, then they have to prove their skills against each other in the Chief Tests.

And:

[…] A chief is not a mini-king and the Chief Tests are not the Crown Test.

So the “Chief Test” are basically proof that the candidate meets the requirements of being a candidate – remember that the assembled members of the community ultimately choose who among the candidate will lead them.

The “Crown Test” is a ritual duel, display of magic, or feat of adventure (like a raid or quest). The more impressive the Crown Test is, the more obvious it is that the gods support that person to be tribal leader.

And:

A clan is an extended kinship group, not a political district. So imagine the average clan in Sartar with about 600 adults. About 40 adults belong to the clan aristocracy of priests and thanes (and their immediate family), about 400 are full free members of the clan, about 100 are semi-free tenants and other adult dependents, and about 60 are unfree.

The chief is almost always going to come out of that group of 40, and most likely there are no more five or six potential candidates. Everyone in the clan likely knows who the potential candidates are. If there is more than one actual candidate, the 400 full free members decide who that is. But usually this is just decided by acclamation – everyone knew that Baranthos was going to become chief after his uncle died – his immediate family (who had led the tribe for nearly two decades) agreed that he was the family leader, the Clearwine Earth temple (led by members of his immediate family) supported him, and he even had ties to the Sartar Dynasty. There really was no other real candidate. 

Now among the Varmandi a few years back the choice was less clear-cut. After so much suffering from war and rebellion, the clan assembly was dominated by the women of the Ernalda cult and a wealthy (and peaceful) farmer was chosen instead of a Wind Lord (who had the backing of the Orlanth cult leaders). That happens, but it is relatively uncommon.  

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.

Unprofessional Unboxing of the RuneQuest Prosopaedia

Friend of the show Scott aka OrcusDorkus has a YouTube channel in which he does “unprofessional unboxings” (his words, not mine!) of various RPG products… well, his FOMO about ChaosiumCon was too great so I sent him a copy of Rivers of London and of the Prosopaedia while I was there. I’m happy to see that he received it in due time, and in good shape… this is your chance to get a good look at it until it’s available for general purchase!

Unprofessional Unboxing of Borderlands

Scott does another unboxing of a RuneQuest product in the same week! But here he goes back in time to 1982 with the classic boxed set of Borderlands! If you have the POD reprint, you might not know how it looked like in its original box, so check it out… boxed sets are super cool but sadly they don’t seem to be a viable form factor at the moment.

Exploring Glorantha’s First Age

This week, JM and Evan serendipitously talk about… Arkat! Just like us! Well, they talk about the First Age in general, but the synchronicity makes me smile. This was recorded before ChaosiumCon so Evan talks a bit about what he was planning to do there at the beginning.

Thank you for reading

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

Joerg and Ludo welcome Bud from Bud’s RPG Review, where we see his hands in a typical unboxing set-up, not just doing flip-throughs but also a whole series of explanation videos:

[1] It seems that since the episode was recorded, Bud fixed the duplicated RuneQuest video playlist… or maybe Ludo imagined it.

Another place to find Bud is the “Bud and Griff’s Gaming Creepshow” podcast, a “podcast about spooky gaming” (in Bud’s words):

Last but not least, Bud is one of the authors of the Miskatonic Repository bestselling book Viral: A Modern Call of Cthulhu Scenario, with Alex Guillotte. For those of you less involved with Call of Cthulhu, the Miskatonic Repository is the sister community content program to the Jonstown Compendium.

Bud states that his “Bud Explains” videos (which Ludo has faithfully linked from his newsletter) are really for beginners, since delving into the lore of Glorantha can be hard work. He promises more in the future.

Finally you can find Bud on Twitter, if that thing is still going by the time you read this.

Main Topic

Going to our main topic, Ludo says that you will find mention of that guy Arkat in many places, with plenty of lore to dig into. So who is this guy, and why is he cool?

What Does Your RuneQuest Character Knows About Arkat

Bud points out that many of the things Arkat did are kind of hidden.

Arkat is possibly most renowned for being the person who mastered heroquesting and for being the slayer of a god, whom he called Gbaji the Deceiver, but who was known to his worshippers as Nysalor.

Bud remains neutral on whether the deity slain by Arkat was the Deceiver or not.

Ludo gives the context that all of these great deeds happened about 1200 years ago (if you are playing in the normal 1625 time frame). To give a comparison from our world’s history, Ludo suggests a weird Arthurian hero, Jörg interjects that Charlemagne fits the time frame even better. Ludo jokes that Charlemagne was evil because he introduced the school system, but Jörg points out that his evil included the genocide of the Saxons, and that that may be why the peace price of the European Union is named after him.

Getting back on topic, Ludo points out that the Gbaji Wars ended with the blighting and destruction of Dorastor, formerly a beautiful and fertile land.

Bud calls Arkat’s action the rites of cleansing, even though they poisoned the land.

(Arkat did curse the land of Dorastor, and sort of bound the Chaos that had been loosed in the final phase of the Gbaji Wars to this ruined place. The land remained dormant for quite a while until both God Learners and EWF explorers took an interest, which seems to have awakened the land.)

Ludo then talks about Arkat’s star, which appeared when Arkat apotheosized early in the Second Age. Jörg claims that the star vanished since, because the God Learners hid the way.

(Doing some additional research after the podcast, the Guide p.646 claims that Arkat is a prominent constellation in the area of the sky called the Celestial Fields, between the Celestial Forest and the Celestial River.)

(The star map on p. 645 only shows a differently named constellation: the Doves, which is how the Dara Happans name the constellation. They were followers of Nysalor and have no love at all for the slayer of their god, whom they name Gbaji.)

(The list of constellations talks about the constellation of Arkat, stating that only one star was visible there at the Dawn, but that Arkat’s apotheosis caused three bright companions and a number of less bright ones nearby that some claim for the hero as well.)

So Jörg was wrong by remembering correctly that there is no constellation named Arkat on the star map.

Bud then points out that Arkat also is a troll god.

Ludo then sums it up: Arkat was several things to several people, he was some sort of either hero or antihero or evil war general. “He killed a whole bunch of people and did many awesome things.”

The Life of Arkat

Bud starts by telling us that Arkat was born in the elf forests of Brithos, interestingly during the Sunstop… or the Sunspot? Linguistic shenanigans ensue, and come to haunt us.

The Sunstop occurred in the year 375 S.T. (“Solar Time”, after the Dawn) when the Second Council (cooperating with the Dara Happan Empire) created Osentalka, the (presumed) Perfect God, in their capital in Dorastor.

(Several other contributors to the Sunstop include Malkioni sorcerers in Fronela casting a great ritual against the Hsunchen shamans, the Kralori Emperor meditating on a potent symbol – the Dragon’s Eye, and a hundred thousand Aldryami in Pamaltela calling on a good spirit to combat a virulent rot affecting them and their forests. See the Guide to Glorantha p.128 for the wider view. A good introductory read is the history from Cults of Terror, available on the Well of Daliath and reprinted in the Guide.)

Bud goes into detail on Arkat’s birth on Brithos, an island in the western Neliomi Sea that disappeared during the Closing (some say that its disappearance caused the Closing).

Arkat’s birth may have been the creation of the opposite to the newborn god in Dorastor, a balancing force brought in by the universe. The new god was born outside of the Compromise, making the birth of Arkat the opposition of the universe to this insult to Time.

Bud compares this to Argrath being the nemesis of the Red Goddess.

Arkat was fostered by the Aldryami of Brithos, and supposedly illuminated by them at a young age, which Bud thinks is another great irony. About 24 years later he was part of the 4th Brithos Army of Law,

Eventually he became known as the son of Humakt, Arkat Humaktsson.

Progressing through local wars (with the Vampire Kings of Tanisor still as Brithini soldier, then alongside the Seshnegi Men-of-All against the Nieby priests led by Gaalth, then joining the Orlanthi of the upper Tanier River in their fight against Gbaji‘s shock troops, the Telmori who had received Nysalor’s blessing to turn into magical wolves on Wilddays) Arkat became aware of the Riddlers of Nysalor.

In Seshnela, the priests of Nysalor apparently spread poison, or an unhealable disease, and offered healing and protection from it, thereby getting people to worship Nysalor.

Arkat saw and showed that Nysalor had a duality, that he wasn’t just a benevolent god who illuminated people and taught them a different way of thinking, he exposed the deity behind these priests as the Chaos God Gbaji. Arkat made it his life quest to slay Gbaji and free the world from the great Deceiver.

(Much of Arkat’s earliest activities are mentioned in the list of the Kings of Seshnela on the Well of Daliath to greater detail than in the Guide to Glorantha, where p.410 gives details about Arkat’s deeds in Seshnela.)

Skipping far ahead, eventually Arkat managed to invade Dorastor, the homeland of Nysalor, and slew the enemy god atop the Tower of Miracles in the City of Dreams. He supposedly dismembered Nysalor and had its parts scattered and buried around Glorantha.

However, slaying a god doesn’t come easy, and Arkat looked into heroquesting at various points. He brought the Unbreakable Sword with him, the original Death, to enable him to slay a god.

Supposedly when he was on one of his heroquests, he encountered himself as a troll and was wounded by himself, an unhealable wound that he carried with him for his entire life that caused him discomfort.

Also, Arkat is known to have mapped out the Gods’ Realm to enable passage for him, which explains how he ended up so ridiculously powerful.

Before he actually went to slay Nysalor, he underwent the Rite of Rebirth and became one of the Uzuz (the Mistress Troll Race).

There are various pieces of art depicting Arkat as an armoured troll fighting Nysalor.

Once Arkat had killed Nysalor, he created the Autarchy, a.k.a. Stygian Empire, in Ralios and modern Seshnela. Ralios lies west of Dragon Pass, south of Dorastor.

The capital of the Autarchy was Arkhome (on the Nidan river in Rindland, a portion of the ancient Ralian territory of Fornoar now belonging to the modern Kingdom of Seshnela. See the political map on p.417 in the Guide to Gloranha. It was the place where Harmast emerged with Arkat on his first Lightbringer’s Quest.)

Arkat eventually pulled a Thanos move and retired, his work done.

The destruction of Nysalor ended the Dawn Age, making Arkat sort of responsible for starting the cycle of Ages in Glorantha’s History.

Ludo picks up the Thanos comparison and also brings up Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now as another powerful archetype resembling Arkat.

Arkat, The Ultimate Minmaxer

Ludo recapitulates how Nysalor became the god of the Bright Empire, spreading a philosophy of participation and harmony, but on its fringes Arkat figured out that missionaries from the Empire were causing the problems that they professed to solve, resulting in Arkat vowing to destroy Nysalor’s Empire.

In order to do that, he initiated into a series of cults and religions.

(Ludo fails to mention his origins as a Child of the Forest, a bucolic existence in the forest like the happy end for Morag from Biturian’s travelogue, and his illumination experience there.)

Arkat was “initiated” into the Horali caste (his grandfather’s caste) on Brithos, the warrior caste of ancient Malkionism.

Then he moved on to the (Seshnegi-style) Hrestoli Man-of-All, mastering all of the Malkioni castes, and all the power, including sorcery,

Then he went on and became friendly with the Orlanthi, initiating into Orlanth, and then Humakt.

Then he needed anti-Chaos powers and became a troll (through the Ritual of Rebirth, initiating him to Kyger Litor) and joined Zorak Zoran for his final assault on Dorastor.

Arkat basically multiclassed like crazy, making him the ultimate mini-maxer in Ludo’s eyes.

Jörg counters that Arkat’s spiritual experiences resembled serial monogamy – whatever cult Arkat joined, he joined with all his being.

Ludo counter-argues that Arkat kept all the powers, and Bud claims that the reason for that was that Arkat was illuminated. Bud claims that this was due to the illuminates’ immunity to Spirits of Reprisal that would otherwise plague an apostate.

Jörg argues that the benefit of Illumination is rather a compartmentalization of the illuminate’s personality.

Bud continues that Arkat essentially ploughed roughshot over multiple cults, his aim being to accumulate as much power as he could to destroy Nysalor, and that Arkat was right, be cause he did it. (Which is questioned by Jorg.)

Bud feels that this is where Your Glorantha May Vary falls down slightly, when unlike the fluidity of the God Time, things go into the historical record.

What went on atop the Tower of Dreams? Nobody knows, nobody else was there. But everything else is part of the historical record, there are records of Arkat becoming a troll, the whole thing was written down by a troll who witnessed the event (and can be read in the Jonstown Compendium excerpt on trolls provided by the RQ3 Troll Gods box if you are lucky enough to own it).

Bud acknowledges historical bias, but unlike the Gods Age where you can see things from different perspectives – how many versions of the Lightbringers’ Quest are there? – but when it is viewing things from the historical record, that’s really all you got to go off.

Jörg claims that the thing about the Gbaji Wars was a clash of realities.

His personal pet theory is that whenever Arkat looked in the direction of Nysalor, he saw Gbaji, Whenever Nysalor looked in the direction of Arkat, he saw Gbaji, the chaotic Deceiver God.

What Nysalor did (or what actually his creators from the Second Council and Dara Happa did using the Pseudocosmic Egg) was to create a new reality where everything was bright and shiny and harmonious (at least once the dissenting voices of the Heortling Orlanthi and the trolls and dragonewts had been muted), and Arkat was born on the other side of this effect. Arkat brought his anti-Nysalor effect with him, and so realities clashed whenever the forces of Nysalor and of Arkat met.

Jörg draws a comparison to the Glowline (which separates a magical reality full of Lunar glow from the drab mundane reality outside) because the Glowline is a bit of a copy of this Bright Empire thing. (Jörg fails to mention the Young Elementals from the Seven Mothers write-up as his evidence.)

Bud demands to expand that a little more, since the Glowline is something everyone can see (at least on days of the Dark Moon when it makes a difference). Jörg mentions the Dan Barker illustration in the Guide p.724 which shows Arkat and Nysalor, with different skin tones and expressions but otherwise identical faces (or at least beard styles).

Arkat’s Multiple Initiations and Mastery of Heroquesting

Ludo explains how this series of cultic initiations let Arkat experience a lot of “safe” (re-enacted) cult heroquests and gave him a unique experience of arriving at the same God Time events from different quests (including the one where Zorak Zorani Arkat wounded Hrestoli or Horali Arkat).

Arkat was the first heroquester who voluntarily went off-script in his heroquesting, exploring the hero plane seeing connected paths and creating a map.

Arkat greatly innovated the art of heroquesting.

Jörg compares a heroquest to a medieval road map which only shows one linear journey where you reach intermediate spots where you could go elsewhere, leading to your initial target.

Arkat would have followed two (or more) separate heroquests to a Hero Plane location (a Godtime event) and he would have known where both paths leading there came from, and where he could continue from that station.

Ludo compares Arkat’s method to a hex crawl across the hero plane.

Bud offers a different term than off-script: Arkat got to go back-stage, also getting an insight how all of this worked.

Ludo brags about his ChaosiumCon playtest glimpse of the ever-upcoming heroquesting rules for RuneQuest. Bud (jokingly) rejects the notion that such a thing exists.

Ludo goes on to describe how those rules have techniques reminiscent of the sorcery techniques in RQG, techniques like Ranging. Arkat developed these techniques, and later the God Learners put names on them.

Ludo talks about the relationship between Arkati heroquesting and God Learner heroquesting.

Bud points out that a lot what the God Learners did was based on Arkat’s work anyway.

Ludo mentions Arkat’s very specific philosophy that all heroquesting was to be “with respect and humility”.

Apparently, Arkat set up a heroquesting police that was basically patrolling the hero plane and slapping the fingers of any transgressors.

Jörg and Bud point out that the Arkati presence more often manifests as stationary guardians.

Ludo goes on to compare the God Learner heroquesters with Mad Scientists (TM) who got whatever they wanted and destroyed many of the remaining Arkati stationary guardians, exploring the Hero Plane without any ethics.

Ludo imagines playing a Dark Empire heroquesting game where you are the guardians, something Jörg compares to the Time Police. Bud adds that these police would make sure that you don’t mess with reality too much, but that’s the problem. The God Learners effectively wiped these guardians out and made the hero plane their playground.

Jörg points out that when you enter the hero plane these days, you will still find the black guardians at all the major crossings, suggesting that the God Learners failed to eradicate them all.

Ludo approves of their presence for games set in the 1625 era,

Bud claims that the problem about the God Learners is that there isn’t all that much written about them. Bud wanted to do a video about them and was stopped by the scarcity of material.

Arkat Went to Hell

Probably several times, but very prominently involuntarily so when Palangio the Iron Vrok killed and dismembered him in Ralios around 418 S.T. Arkat was sent to a special Hell he could not use his heroic powers to escape from, which since has become a tradition to do to the big bad anti-illumination guy.

That Hell was supposed to be inaccessible, but an Orlanthi hero by the name of Harmast Barefoot managed to get him back.

Arkat had basically two lives. (The Xeotam Dialogue in the Sourcebook p.74 calls this state of being a Kaelith.)

Bud points out that Arkat having been dismembered is what he went on to do with Nysalor. Ludo asks whether that was petty, but Bud calls that the ultimate revenge.

Jörg brings up dismemberment as a proven method to get rid of a god – citing the dismemberment of Umath even before the discovery of Death as proof for the efficiency of the method.

Ludo philosophizes that a lot of people get dismembered in Glorantha, which Bud counters with the predilection of people to lose their left legs in (RuneQuest) Glorantha.

A Hero’s Retirement

Ludo points out that Arkat had fifty years of fighting, and then fifty years of peaceful retirement, during which he sets up the Autarchy (called Stygian Empire by its foes). He spends those years teaching his secrets and benevolently overseeing the lands without much interference.

Bud replies Ludo’s question about the fate of the Autarchy that it fell in the end, to the forces of the God Learners (during the reign of Annmak Peacemaker, in 740 S.T.)

Jörg points out that the Dark Empire was the premier Malkioni (and Orlanthi, and troll) realm in Genertela. It ruled over the entire Tanisor valley (the land ironically called Kingdom of Seshnela in the Third Age) and Safelster, with the capital Arkhome situated in Rindland, the home Duchy of Bailifes the Hammer who founded the new Kingdom of Seshnela.

Jörg nerdplains that Autarchy roughly translates from Greek as Self-Rule, and that that was what he allowed the local potentates to do, the Archons who were basically his disciples who kept oversight over some of those places.

The term Archon still is used for the rulers of Safelster, where a city-state might also be called an Archonate.

Fast-forwarding to the Now of RQG (i.e. 1625 ST), what is the legacy that Arkat left behind?

Bud quips that there is one less god. Or at least Nysalor required a lot of patching together by the Red Goddess, as Ludo points out. Which Bud compares to a jigsaw puzzle with too many parts.

Jörg puts forward that Gbaji was dismembered at the same time as Nysalor, who was cut into 49 parts which the Lunars collected. When the Lunars collected the parts, they ended up with more than 50, and they made sure that they weren’t using any portion of Gbaji when re-assembling Nysalor.

Bud asks whether the Lunars could differentiate between the portions of Nysalor and Gbaji, and Jörg suggests that the Lunars know about Chaos, so he gueses they could. They say so.

Ludo corroborates that when the Lunar propaganda says so, it is probably true. Right?

There are still followers of Black Arkat active on the hero planes, doing things to heroquesters, and (on the mundane plane) to people they suspect of Godlearnerism.

These Arkati can pop up and jinx your heroquests, or even your preparations for those.

Jörg manages to confuse Arkat’s Last Fortress near Kartolin Pass (crossing from Ralios into Dorastor) with Arkat’s Hold in Esrolia, the city at the end of the Building Wall.

Ludo points to The Smoking Ruins which has information and stats on some Black Arkati from that place.

Bud points out that Arkat was in his seventies when he became a troll. Bud ponders whether Arkat underwent the Ritual of Rebirth because trolls are longer-lived than humans.

Jörg counters that Arkat was born as a Brithini, a race that doesn’t age when they maintain their caste restrictions (something Arkat definitely did not do), and age slowly if they did.

Bud mentions the years of war wearing down on Arkat, and his unhealable wound from that heroquest. By normal standards, Arkat would have been an old man yet unable to fulfill his life quest (writing this feels strange the day after the coronation of King Charles III), although by Brithini standards he was still a young man (according to Jörg just about initiation age, really).

Another aspect of Arkat is that as an Illuminate, he should have known better than to pursue his revenge so relentlessly. When you’re illuminated, you understand that Chaos is not always bad.

Jorg interjects that that is why some people claim that Arkat became a Chaos monster in the end in order to overcome Nysalor. Bud asks for citations, Jörg points out that no witnesses survived. (This could be inferred from the upcoming five-fold return of Arkat in Safelster, in the boxed text on p.385 in the Guide to Glorantha.)

Bud reports that the argument has been made that Arkat never became a troll, casting doubt on the reliability of the troll witness of his Ritual of Rebirth. Bud admits that when Arkat returned from his fight atop the Tower of Dreams, he was no longer a troll.

Jörg brings up another pet theory of his, that Arkat might have become a Kitori shape-shifter (in addition to joining the cults of Kyger Litor and Zorak Zoran), the adoptive species imitating the Only Old One capable of taking human, troll and dehori (darkness spirit) shape.

Ludo admits that Arkat did ally with the Only Old One in the Shadowlands, and that he might have picked up a trick or two there. Which would be also more multiclassing, as Bud remarks.

Jörg points out that after the Gbaji Wars, the Kitori were collectively called Arkati by the Orlanthi (at least in History of the Heortling People p.72).

We digress about the Hillbilly nature of Orlanthi, and that an argument (which is what you get when you bring two or more Orlanthi together) might the best collective name for a bunch of Orlanthi (much like a Murder of Crows).

The Illumination Bit

Ludo steers the conversation back to illumination, pointing out that Nysalor was illuminated too. (Cart before the horse, really, as Nysalor was the source for that form of Illumination.)

Ludo is getting more vibes of Anarchy vs. Law/Order than of anti-Chaos vs. Chaos. He feels that the two enemies had opposed philosophies and politics about what to do with the continent of Genertela, with one making everything yellow and bright with great cities and laws and imposed order, and Arkat demanding that everybody should rule themselves (making him the ultimate punk).

Bud mentions his Illumination explanatory video and says that that is the argument against Illumination, and that the Red Goddess is taking the blame for adhering to a difference between Draconic and Nysalorean illumination (which is what the Red Goddess is spreading). Bud claims that when dragons become illuminated, they leave Glorantha, whereas when Nysaloreans achieve illumination, they stay around and use their power of illumination to build up more power, whereupon the universe creates an opposite power, and that where Nysalor was the action, Arkat was the reaction.

Jörg brings up the Nysalor quote “At the Edge of Light, there is always Darkness” as his reaction to learning about the spreading of the disease in Seshnela. Bud quips that that sounds like equivalent of “thoughts and prayers”.

Ludo thinks the dragons have the right idea, but Jörg cannot help to mention that the only dragon he remembers to have left the world was Obduran the Flyer, the only EWF Orlanthi who became a (full) dragon.(Details in History of the Heortling Peoples, p.44, 803 S.T,)

Back on topic, Ludo asks how to put Arkat into your RQG games.

Bud suggests that Chaosium should do an epic campaign, based on the idea that the Lunars put Nysalor back together, and then having Arkat return and deal with it.

Jörg mentions that he contributed to a game like that, the 1995 Freeform Rise of Ralios, a follow-up to Reaching Moon Megacorp’s 1994 How the West Was One, with the core idea that the five prophesied Arkats return.

Ludo asks whether that means that there were five aspects of Arkat coming back from the hero plane, like a troll Arkat etc.,

Ludo points out that when you are illuminated, Chaos is not necessarily bad, and a Chaos Monster Arkat could be useful.

Bud brings up that Arkat defeated the Crimson Bat at one point, and Jörg elaborates that it might have been called the Purple Bat before, a death demon of Rinliddi which Arkat flayed, which is how it became Crimson.

After taking a moment’s pause, Bud calls Arkat a bad-ass.

Bud asks whether there is any other hero in Gloranthan history who has accomplished what Arkat has accomplished. Jörg proposes Sheng Seleris. Bud complains that Sheng was killed, but Jörg replies that so was Arkat. We quibble about stars lost and returning.

Ludo points out that Arkat was liberated by the Lightbringers Quest, and then gives a metaplot spoiler that Argrath is expected to liberate Sheng Seleris with his Lightbringers’ Quest.

Jörg calls Argrath Arkat the Liberator. Ludo rambles on that much like Harmast being an Orlanthi hero performing a Lightbringers’ Quest liberating Arkat from Hell, Argrath is an Orlanthi hero prophesied to liberate Sheng Seleris from Hell, claiming that history repeats itself. Whether because of cycles of cosmic significance or because the designers run out of ideas Ludo doesn’t know.

Ludo points out that Arkat’s story was among the first Gloranthan pieces written by Greg, with the protagonist still called Argat, which only later morphed into Arkat, with the similarity of Argrath (both names meaning “Liberator”) intentional.

Jörg points out that Greg’s Glorantha at the time did not yet know Dragon Pass, When Greg decided to publish his Glorantha stories not as books but as a series of games, he took his character Arkat and put him in that board game called White Bear and Red Moon by a slightly different name.

Ludo stubbornly tries to steer us back towards how to use Arkat in your games.

One possibility might be the presence of pieces of Nysalor (or Gbaji) still lying around in some hiding places, as McGuffins for scenarios, claiming that Arkat might even have taken Nysalor’s own monsters and set them up as guardians of those bits.

Bud interjects that that implies that Nysalor was a thing of Chaos, and he says he wasn’t. Ludo refuses to be Deceived.

Now Bud admits that some say that it was Gbaji who walked away from the Tower of Dreams that day, but Ludo wants to delay talking about the crazy conspiracy theories a little longer.

Ludo points towards Safelster, where each city state may be the guardian of some pocket or snippet of Arkati knowledge, giving way to some sort of secret society/spy game shenanigans, whether in Safelster or carried into the Hero Wars in and around Dragon Pass.

Bud asks whether anybody knows where Arkat was buried. Jörg suggests near Arkhome, but draws a blank whether his body was buried, whether he was cremated, or whether Arkat ascended bodily. After all, Sartar did not leave a body behind, either.

Ludo suggests that he may have asked his followers do dismember his body after he left, hiding them away, and maybe that were some of the extra bits the Lunars found, so that they now have a Frankenstein Nysalor that may contain certain amounts of Arkat, making a Voltron illuminated god.

Jörg suggests that alternatively Arkat may have had a troll burial, becoming a funerary feast.

Bud ominously says “he exists within trolls” (and at least Jörg can hear the idea of hyena skins being sewn together transferred to Arkat and Mistress Race stomachs).

Ludo rambles about the fact that while Arkat ascended as a god, the God Learners installed locks that prevent people from contacting the hero in the God Plane.

Ludo correctly points out that there are still people maintaining these God Learner locks (check out the last paragraph on p.415 in the Guide, the city of Harsad near the ruins of Arkhome). This cripples all the many surviving (or resurrected) Arkati cults that claim they got Arkat’s power. Jörg points out that the greatest of the God Learners, Halwal, who had turned against his compatriots, had attempted to re-unite and return a single Arkat, and even he failed (which may be why he and his opponent Yomili ended up mutually eliminating not just themselves but many of their allies and foes, polluting the region of the Red Ruins to this day).

Ludo explains that when he gets his players into heroquesting, he plans to give them some God Learner or Arkati obstacles. Bud points out that there is supposedly a God Learner alive, as a prisoner of Ralzakark receiving daily torture.

Ludo states that whenever you see something phrased as a rumor, it will be true in somebody’s version of Glorantha.

Jörg repeats the slander that Belintar was a God Learner.

Ludo drops a spoiler for Andrew Logan Montgomery’s Company of the Dragon where your heroquesting players might come across a God Learner who got lost on the hero plane, without any idea how much Time has passed in the mundane world.

Jörg points out that Nick Brooke’s Scenario Duel at Dangerford has a Humakti guardian who might be sort of an Arkati heroquesting guard.

Bud proposes that the Arkati guardians at thresholds in the Hero Plane might not be guarding with death as the alternative. He brings up the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as having a possible parallel to the Arkati hero plane guardians, as Guardians who aren’t there to necessarily stop you but to prevent you from stumbling into things you aren’t prepared for yet.

And then the God Learners found ways of bypassing a lot of them, which is one of the crimes they committed.

Jörg mentions that one of the guardians removed by the God Learners was a raccoon, the Raccoon Guardian of Tusunimmi Ford, causing some hilarity when telling the story and mis-attributing it (not Cults of Terror, but the Glorantha Book of the RQ3 Genertela Box and subsequently the Guide p.136). Bud’s observation that this sounds like a pipe dream might be accurate given the work environment at The Chaosium at the time this was written.

Glorantha can be more than a bit gonzo, at the same time being this down-to-earth Bronze Age fantasy thing.

Crazy Conspiracy Theories

Bud declines to be first responder to Ludo’s demand for crazy conspiracy theories.

Jörg puts forward that Argrath is Arkat the Liberator, and his Lightbringer’s Quest liberating Sheng is also a way of paying back the cosmic karma to Harmast liberating Arkat.

Ludo asks whether that means that the other four of the five returning Arkats could be player characters, and Jörg agrees. (Played and tested in the 1995 run of Rise of Ralios.)

Jörg suggests that there will be more than five such people claiming to be Arkat. All of them KNOW they are the real deal, but several will be proven to be false.

Ludo’s theory involves the motives of the Second Council awakening Nysalor – to bring Harmony between Glorantha and the Void. Arkat ruined that chance of reconciliation.

Bud asks about the runes of Nysalor. There is definitely light (fire without the dot in the center, aka a circle).

Ludo brags about his brand-new copy of the Prosopaedia for Cults of RuneQuest that he brought back from ChaosiumCon and looks it up. It is Light and Mastery, and there is neither Harmony nor Chaos nor Moon.

Ludo (jokingly?) comes to the conclusion that the Prosopaedia was written by biased people and suggests to ignore it.

Bud finally comes clear that his theory is that Arkat was defeated on the Tower of Dreams, and that Gbaji deceived everybody by pretending he was Arkat, and walking away. That would also make Gbaji the founder of the Autarchy, the Heroquesting police, etc.

One “proof” is that Arkat no longer looked like a troll when he left.

When Ludo casts doubt – after all most that Arkat did afterwards was to settle down on a farm – Jörg suggests that that’s what THEY tell you. Bringing up pluripresence, Jörg states that One of Them (Them being Arkat, or Gbaji) went to Arkhome and settled down,

Bud suggests that that would have been the ultimate deception for Gbaji the Deceiver, deception for deception’s sake, but when Jörg suggests that deceiving everybody possibly included deceiving himself, Bud thinks that is going too far.

Ludo comes forward with another theory – Arkat did win, but only because Nysalor wanted him to win, to dismember him and spread him around all over the known world. Bud objects that the Red Goddess was not illuminated by the body parts of Nysalor but by the spirit of the god in Hell.

Jörg’s suggestion that the dismemberment of Nysalor could be seen as a version of utuma is rejected by Ludo, who wants to have some clear distinction between these two ways towards enlightenment.

Jörg points out that the core point of draconic enlightenment is to make True Dragons out of neotenic dragons, and that human adaptation of that has always resulted in strange things.

Bud refers to Company of the Dragon which has Andrew Logan Montgomery’s essay on draconic illumination, with dragonewts having problems to wake up to draconic reality while dragons spend their time sleeping before finally ascending.

This segues into what kind of illumination did Arkat have.

Jörg dodges this by tracking back where Arkat supposedly received his illumination, giving the aldryami of Brithos as the source, asking what kind they would have had.

Bud goes back into the Godtime, where Rashoran (an aspect or jigsaw piece of the reconstituted Red Goddess) was the source of all illumination. Jörg claims that Rashoran was effectively Nysalor pre-born, or that Nysalor was the reincarnation of Rashoran.

We discuss Rashoran’s credentials (illuminated Chalana Arroy and Humakt, illuminated the Unholy Trio who then killed Rashoran and created the Devil) and his role in the birth of the Red Goddess.

Bud wants to argue that if Rashoran was the earlier version of the Red Goddess, then Nysalorean illumination really is Lunar illumination, whereas Jörg insists that Lunar illumination is Nysalorean illumination. Which one was first, the hen or her egg?

Jörg agrees that the Lunars say that Rashoran was an incarnation of the Red Goddess, and that we know that what the Lunars say is true. They would never deceive us.

In reaction to this riddle, Bud spurts that if the Lunars know that Chaos is not necessarily a bad thing, then it doesn’t matter if their reconstituted Nysalor contained bits of Gbaji, and that their claims of being able to discern what was what was a deception.

Jörg calls that out as vile slander, and probably true.

In this huddle of confusion, bad puns and talking nonsens, we realize that we have reached the targeted length of this episode, and give Bud another chance to promote his presence on the interwebs.

Any further shenanigans (or pre-show banter) are not subject of this transcript.

Credits

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

Runic Rants is an irregular series of thoughts, opinions, and experiments about RuneQuest.

I originally posted this in the RuneQuest Facebook group, but of course I’m re-posting it here, lightly edited, for posterity.

It might sound very nerdy, but I think a lot of questions get answered by making a spreadsheet for your Glorantha setting. The first spreadsheet I made keeps track of the population in terms of cult memberships, villages and farms, spirit societies, and so on. You can make it as part of your campaign preparation, or you can grow it as you make stuff up for your game.

Over time, my spreadsheet grew beyond what would be considered “sane”, and nowadays I don’t even understand what’s going on in there (see above), but it was extremely useful.

This exercise really helped me realize a few things. For instance, you very easily “run out” of initiates for any given cult once you’ve allocated 2/3rds of your adults to Orlanth and Ernalda. There can be a certain amount of multi-initiation, of course, but in my Glorantha that’s quite uncommon. Allocating these numbers at the clan, tribe, and tribal confederation levels quickly shows you what kinds of shrines and temples you can and cannot have (based on the minimum number of worshippers from the rulebook). A clan can only support a temple to Orlanth and Ernalda, maybe one patron deity temple or shrine, and not much else. A lot of things will go up to the tribal or city level, where worshippers from many surrounding clans can gather and make a shrine (or more) viable. These are your minor cults (Babeester Gor, Chalana Arroy, whatever) whose members therefore live in the city and work for all the tribes, instead of being each “stuck” in their clan with only a handful of co-initiates and no good cult infrastructure. And even then you’ll often realize that some cults don’t even fit in your tribal confederation, and that’s when you’ll have PCs and NPCs travelling to another city for important worship and festivals and services.

This is similar to, say, the difference between the local countryside doctor, the specialist in the nearby town, and the hospital in the nearest city. Or the difference between your municipal police, state law enforcement, and federal agencies. Humakt is like the FBI, Storm Bull like the ATF, etc. The municipal police (Orlanth Adventurous clan warrior) is supported/complemented by the state (Orlanth Adventurous warrior from the tribal king’s retinue) You get the idea. In the amazing TV series Justified, Raylan Givens is a gender-switched Babeester Gor (US Marshall) who comes from the Harlan clan but now works at the Lexington city temple for the entire confederation… although of course he needs to constantly go back to where he grew up and deal with that drama.

This really helped me get a grasp on Orlanthi life.

Of note for the grognards among you, this is why all the little nitpicky cults from the old HeroWars books aren’t sustainable. They cannot logically be separate cults/subcults, there’s just not enough people. The spreadsheet immediately shows that.

But they can be used as narrative flavour for what happens inside a temple. These names and elements of lore can refer to cult heroes and cult spirits that are part of the main cult. They can be used to describe different “specialties” within this main cult. So you might have different types of Orlanthi cultists in the same way that you have different FBI agents. Data analysts, communications experts, and field investigators are very different, but they’re all FBI agents who work at the FBI office. You can use the obscure HeroWars names to describe different specialties within the Orlanth cult, but they’re still all Orlanthi cultists who worship at the Orlanth temple.

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.

God Learner Sorcery

Here is what us God Learners were up to this week.

Glorantha Initiation: Michael, Gloranthan Fiction, and Not Worrying About It

In our newest Glorantha Initiation episode, Ludo talks to Michael, who came out of the “deep freeze” with RuneQuest! We chat about old games, Prax, Gloranthan fiction, dealing with large amounts of lore, and not worrying too much about it.

ChaosiumCon 2023 Report

It’s April 2023, the Covid pandemic is still going, airline companies still suck, and the US is an increasingly dystopian place. So what can possibly make me take a flight to the US and spend time at some crowded indoors event? Well, it’s ChaosiumCon of course!

Here’s my report of what happened this year at the convention, I hope you like it.

Did you attend the convention and write about it? Send me your link and I’ll advertise it!

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!

Caravan Alley

© 2022 JK Revell & Chaosium Inc.

JK Revell continues his series of Praxian supplements with Caravan Alley, which focuses on the main trade route between Prax and Sartar. Just like the previous Day’s Rest, Caravan Alley is a medium-sized “mini-sandbox setting” that describes Praxian oases with NPCs, adventure seeds, and more. But unlike Day’s Rest single oasis, this one describes two oases: the Humakti dueling ground of Tourney Altar, and the fungus-riddled marshland of Biggle Stone!

Gloranthan Maps: Quivin Mountains, Heortland, and Skyfall Lake

Mikael Mansen is back with three maps: the Quivin Mountains, Heortland, and Skyfall Lake. Not much to mention except that it’s the usual quality and style that you’ve seen with Mikael’s many other cartographic offerings. I just wish there were more variety… for instance the Vale Of Flowers could have benefited from some unique colours and patterns?

Anyway, note that Skyfall Lake and Quivin Mountains get a bonus “winter layer” with a snow-covered style.

Coming Soon: The Queen’s Star

Austin Conrad, the author of (among other things) the Monster of the Month series, is teasing “The Queen’s Star”:

© 2022 Akhelas & Chaosium Inc.

A dream comes in the night. The shade of Kallyr Starbrow—once Prince of Sartar—asks the adventurers to be her hands in the Middle World. One of the noble Star Captains has gone missing…

This new site-based adventure for RuneQuest invites the adventurers to travel to the Cinder Pits in the heart of Sartar to discover the fate of a star who fell from the Sky. It’ll be around 30 pages.

This should be released in a month or two.

Interview with Nick Brooke in Never Mind The Dice Rolls

© 2022 Never Mind the Dice Rolls

Tangentially related to the Jonstown Compendium is this interview of Nick Brooke, in his capacity as Chaosium’s community content embassador, in the RPG magazine “Never Mind the Dice Rolls“.

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.

Celestial Gods Known by the Theyalans

The “ordinary Orlanth or Ernalda cultist” would know several “major celestial gods”, even though they don’t necessarily belong to the classic Theyalan pantheon, and even though they don’t necessarily find all of them important.

Jeff lists the following deities. I’m going to add a bit of information for those that I don’t know much about (which means maybe some of you don’t either):

  • Yelm is the sun god, and patron god of many Pelorians and Grazelanders.
  • Yelmalio is the part of Yelm that survived in the Great Darkness, brought light to many human, elf, and other communities. He is “easier to approach than Yelm”.
  • Dayzatar is god of the “Sky itself”… he’s obsessed with purity and detachment from material considerations.
  • Ourania is Dayzatar’s daughter, and Queen of the Heavens. She acts as Dayzatar’s voice (he’s not going to lower himself to, like, speak, right?) among other intermediary roles. Jeff also mentions the Celestial Chorus that Ourania leads. As far as I can tell, it’s a sort of choir that sings messages from Dayzatar to his followers. They have “angelic voices” and are called many names, like “Music of the Spheres“.
  • Polestar is the leader of the sky army, I guess. Or chief bodyguard of celestial gods. Kallyr Starbrow got the eponymous star gem stuck to her forehead from this guy.
  • Lokarnos is a “planetary god” (a planet instead of a star… so I guess you can land on them?) He invented the wheel, the wagon, counting, keeping time, and a few other super useful things for Yelm. He’s a Pelorian god of trade and travel, a bit like Issaries (I’m not sure if they’re friendly or not, though) If you check out the Red Book of Magic, you’ll see a couple of his spells, like “Coin Wheel” to… err, mint a Wheel coin from a block of gold, and “Hie Wagon”, which… err… makes wagons go faster? Yeah I know it doesn’t sound super amazing but I guess thoese are useful. Useful at least for teaching me the word “hie”!
  • Tolat is a war god who also is (or lives on) a red planet. Huh huh. I see what you did there, Greg. Tolat, aka Shargash, is a popular war god worshipped all around Glorantha. He’s a son of the Sun and the Night, and was born in the Underworld. He’s bad ass, has a big red sword, and he kicked Orlanth’s and Humakt’s butt a couple times.
  • Artia is the “Bat Goddess”. There are even Bat Hsunshen in Pamaltela who worship her as an ancestress. Bat people! Can you believe it? And since she’s a planetary goddess, you can point to her and say “Look! The bat signal!”
  • Moskalf is another planet, known as Entekos in Peloria. She’s the goddess of the calm, breezy summer air. She tells her brother Orlanth to take a chill pill and let the sun shine.
  • The Twinstars are weird: their associated deities allied with the Red Goddess in 1275 when some Imtherian hero named Jannisor almost sacked and destroyed Glamour. Part of his army was made of large number of Sable Riders. These people were somehow linked to the Twinstars, and whatever heroquesting shenanigans the Lunars did there helped “reveal” the association between the Sable Antelopes and the Red Moon. So the Sable Riders betrayed Jannisor and saved Glamour. Yay! If this all sounds super shady, it’s probably because it is. Anyway, these two planets change colours based on the Red Moon’s phase, a bit like Lunar traffic lights or something. Fun stuff.
  • Annilla is the goddess of the Blue Moon, responsible for the tides. She’s also good at hiding. Some trolls like her a lot.
  • And finally, the Red Moon of course. Not everybody likes her, but nobody can deny she’s there.

Air Gods Known by the Lunars

Okay let’s look in the mirror and see what air gods are known in the Lunar Heartland:

  • Orlanth, obviously. He’s big, he’s loud, he killed the sun god, fucked everyone with the Great Darkness, and then when he tried to fix his fuck-up he totally made it all about himself. What a jackass. Jeff adds this Lunar perspective: “Orlanth rejects Yelm’s authority and so the Red Goddess contends with him over the Middle Air, and many believe that if she succeeds, a new Golden Age will begin.
  • Valind is the god of the freezing winter cold. In theory, the Lunar Heartlands are far enough north that they should have very cold winters, with plenty of snow and ice, what with Valind’s Glacier nearby and all that. But Jeff mentions the Kalikos Expedition, which prevents this, or at least mitigates it. This expedition was originally setup by Emperor Reclusus in 1593. It’s an annual heroquest during which the best Lunar magicians and warriors go to the edge of the world to strengthen one of the four pillars that holds up the sky. Somehow that makes winters milder in Peloria? Go figure. It’s magic. Note that during the Hero Wars, Argrath also heroquests and fucks up the Kalikos Expedition to bring environmental warfare to the Lunar Empire. Because obviously that’s what heroes do.
  • We’ve already mentioned Entekos in the previous section.
  • Humakt is not really an air god but I guess he’s closely associated with them. “He is the Carmanian War God and is still worshiped there and in the Lunar Provinces. He was defeated by Yanafal Tarnils, who is the Lunar War God.
  • Storm Bull you also should know already. “He was the patron god of the awful Bull Shahs (and still worshiped by some Carmanians), and is worshiped by the hill tribes of Brolia and Talastar.

The Lunar Empire Armies

This follow-up note is about the war gods of the Lunar Empire. As expected it’s a lot of Yanafal Tarnils, Polaris, and Humakt, but also Shargash (which we just learned about above) and a guy called Avivorus, which I didn’t know before. He’s the “sun spear god”.

What’s interesting in this note is the break down of who worships who, between normal soldiers and ranking officers, and between different provinces compared to the heartland.

If you want to know more about the army, be sure to also check out this note on the military might of the Lunar Empire in 1625. The note compares the imperial armies to the other big powers of the time: the Kingdom of War, the Voor-Ash Pentans, Kralorela, Seshnela, and Loskalm. Sartar “barely even rates” at this point, but of course this will change.

There’s a lot of interesting observations in these two notes so I highly recommend reading them!

Thoughts on Gloranthan Religion

Jeff gets philosophical about Gloranthan gods and their worshippers.

Because the gods are powerful, but not all-powerful or all-knowing, the question of theodicy that so often consumes moderns just doesn’t show up. Ever seen a tornado close up? That’s divine power. Is it good or is it evil? It simply IS – a part of the cosmos. In Glorantha I can wield some of that divine power by initiating to the cult of Orlanth.

I was listening to a podcast about ancient Greece recently and this was a point that a guest historian was trying to make: that ancient Greeks did not really care much about whether this or that god was “good”. None of the Greek gods were “good”. Many of these gods were straight-up horrible people, and all made at least a few notable mistakes. The Greeks were aware of this, and did not hold up any of these gods on a pedestal…. well, ok, they did. They did build plenty of god statues on top of temples and so on, but I didn’t mean a literal pedestal, I meant a figurative pedestal. This wasn’t at all like modern religions that try to sell their god as being a perfect role model.

The Greeks, and virtually all polytheist cultures from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, only cared about gods that were somehow useful. Useful for everyday life, for work, for war, for love, and so on. In Glorantha, they are obviously useful since they let you wield their magic.

For those of you who keep referring to old HeroWars content (you know who you are!), Jeff also has some explanations:

Thunder Rebels really missed the point here – and Greg and I made the decision not to update it for HQ because we both agreed it really didn’t describe the Orlanthi religion in Dragon Pass. If it describes anything, it is the henotheism of the Chariot of Lightning movement in Ralios, where Orlanth is worshiped as the supreme god (instead of just “king of the gods”). But that is a topic for another thread.

Rule of Thumb for Rune Level Demographics

I’ve always hovered around 1% of a cult’s population at Rune levels (Rune Priest, Rune Lord, etc) but it looks like Jeff goes a bit higher than that for many cults:

[1% is] a little less than my usual rule of thumb. Most all adults are initiates, regardless of culture, and around 2% of initiates are Rune levels. So we’ve got about 1.2 million Lunar initiates (all cults) in the Heartlands, around 20-24,000 Rune levels, with around 10,000 Red Goddess initiates at max.

These are not hard numbers of course. Thanks to war, pressure, desperation, or whatever, with some cults the number might be over 2% and in others it might be closer to 1%.

So Sartar we have 34,000 initiates of Orlanth, but might have somewhere around a 1000 rune levels.

This is something you can keep in mind when doing some world-building for your campaign.

A Reminder About the Stafford Library

© 2022 Chaosium Inc.

Gloranthaphiles with too much free time often dig into the Stafford library books a bit too much, so Jeff sets the record straight about some of them:

The Heortling Mythology book was never intended to be canon. It just started from a desire that Greg had to have all the stories that appeared in various books in one place. He then added a bunch of additional stories, I added some more. It was a rough draft and notebook for what would eventually become Belintar’s book (which ultimately formed the basis of the Cults series). I proposed that we publish the book as a way of getting some revenue; Greg was ambivalent at best (just as he was about Arcane Lore) but went along with it. On retrospect, Greg’s ambivalence was well warranted.

Miscellaneous Notes

  • Gloranthan events in a historical context: this is another occurrence of Jeff putting Gloranthan and Earth history side by side to remind people that a lot of stuff happened “a long time ago” as far as adventurers and NPCs are concerned.
  • These photos of the Colorado History Center can help add a little bit of Western Native American flavour to your Glorantha. Plus, Jeff reminds people of the value of using multiple different real-Earth cultures to inform your world-building: “So for example, the Orlanthi concept of sex and gender is inspired by the Bugis people of Indonesia.

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.

Austin Conrad Reviews Duckpac

© 2022 Legion Games & Chaosium Inc.

Well, yes… what it says in the title.

In 1982 Chaosium published the innovative species-specific “splatbook” Trollpak. This boxed set detailed the culture, religion, history, and society of the Uz—called trolls by humans—thereby fleshing this species out as a player option, rather than a statblock. It seems rather fitting that a nice, round forty years later indie publisher Legion Games began to release their homage: Duckpac.

If you’re duck-curious, check it out and hopefully it will help you make up your mind before buying! Austin tells you about all the bits he likes, and the few bits he doesn’t. Not much, as you can tell by some of his conclusions:

Duckpac attempts to bring ducks to your RuneQuest table as a fully detailed species for players, and it succeeds admirably. […] In my mind, this is yet another book which is absolutely not “just” a fan publication. Rather, I would call Duckpac another indicator that the Jonstown Compendium is maturing into a full “indie” or “third-party” publishing platform for RuneQuest.

There is also some advice on which print-on-demand version to get (premium or standard), if you’re planning on getting a dead-tree version.

Lee’s RuneQuest Playlist

Lee O’Connor (which we interviewed on the podacast) has shared this Spotify playlist of music suitable for playing during Runequest Glorantha games!

Of course, everybody has different musical tastes, different visions of Glorantha, and different needs for background music… but hey, a playlist to start from is better than nothing to start from, right? Expect plenty of video game, TV, and movie soundtracks in this one, plus a few deep cuts of scandinavian folk music and australian gothic avant-garde dark wave ambient err something. There’s even some Philippe Glass!

Brace yourselves: there’s almost a thousand songs in there, enough for more than 24 hours of uninterrupted play!

Thank you for reading

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

As I write this it’s late April 2023, the Covid pandemic is still going on even though most people pretend it’s over, airline companies are still cutting costs by reducing leg space centimetre by centimetre, and the United States is an increasingly dystopian and depressing place. So what can possibly make me take a flight to the US and spend time at some crowded indoors event? Well, it’s ChaosiumCon of course!

Don’t Go To The Basement

A couple weeks ago was indeed the second iteration of Chaosium’s own convention, held in Ypsilanti, Michigan, near Chaosium’s Ann Harbor HQ. And by “HQ” I mostly mean Rick Meints’ house, I guess.

All packed up for gaming, I flew from Vancouver to Toronto, followed by a short flight from Toronto to Detroit… that second plane led me to the bowels of the Toronto airport, and at some point I wondered if I would step into some sort of urban portal fantasy…

Unlike last year, I didn’t stay at the Marriott hotel, where the convention is held. I was instead hanging out with my friends from the Sons Of The Singularity, at some Vrbo house that they rented for the occasion.

Sons Of The Singularity, or SOS for short (I’m not sure what happened to the “T”) are fairly well known in the Call of Cthulhu community for producing well researched historical campaign and setting books such as The Sassoon Files (horror in 1920s Shanghai!) or Journal d’Indochine (horror in French colonial Vietnam!) I wrote a scenario for the latter (look for it in Journal d’Indochine Volume 2, it’s called “The Parchments of Tam”) and did a few maps and illustrations. Their current project is the currently crowdfunding Blessed And The Blasphemous, set in North Africa shortly before the Second World War… think Casablanca, but with some Mythos in it. And they also recently released Between The Devil And The Deep, a GUMSHOE-based supernatural pirate roleplaying game.

Photo by Jason Sheets. Yes, I’m the weirdo on the left!

Anyway, we had this very nice house located in a rather, ahem, picturesque neighbourhood, complete with run down houses, roaming pitbulls, chain link fenced backyards, and leftover Republican election signs. High five to the person on the next block with a US flag featuring the slogan “kneel for the cross, stand for the flag“. When you also consider that our house had a weirdly empty and possibly recently painted basement floor, whose door had a lock on the outside (the kitchen), we were getting some strong Barbarian vibes, here.

Of course, for a while we were thinking of playing a Call of Cthulhu game in the basement.

Last year I was happy to have hung out extensively with the Gloranthan crowd, but I was also a bit sad I didn’t get to spend much time with the other part of the Chaosium fandom. This year I managed to spend more time crossing these boundaries, especially while hanging out with the SOS guys, but of course now I’m sad I didn’t get to chat with fellow Gloranthan nerds for very long. Oh well.

Thursday Meetup

This year’s convention was a day longer and started on Thursday. I wasn’t registered for any games since I landed in Detroit in late afternoon, so I went straight to the “social mixer”. Last year was a proper banquet with seats around tables and all that. This year was more of a buffet with standing tables, allowing more mobility between people during the evening.

As always, this social mixer is good to catch up with people you’ve met last year, and to put a face on those you’ve only ever talked online with. The highlight of that evening was probably getting a great rib-crushing hug from Bridgett (whom we interviewed once), one of Chaosium’s community ambassadors. I’m sure that’s the only kind of hugs she gives.

While the vendor hall was getting setup, I got to say a quick hello to Dustin, the ever-so-nice customer service guy for Chaosium. I hope everybody was nice to him too!

The hall had the usual things: a sizable booth for Chaosium themselves, another sizable one for Petersen Games, and a few other stands for various other third party publishers. Once the hall opened for business, it looked more like this:

There were many good things to be had, from fancy HPLHS prop sets to print copies of things like Bayt Al Azif, and more! I know what you’re going to ask and yes, the Prosopaedia was indeed on sale, along with the Meints Index to Glorantha and Rivers of London:

You could also, if you were lucky, dig through a Pendragon 6th edition Starter Set boxed set, but these were only sample copies or contributor copies. It wasn’t on sale yet, but the fact they’re printed means it should happen soon! And yes, it looks gorgeous!

Friday

The next day started with me being on a panel alongside Jeff Richard to get people to “stop worrying and make Glorantha theirs“. But there weren’t many people in the room, probably for two reasons: first, most panels scheduled at the same time as game slots were poorly attended in general (compared to panels scheduled at other times), and second, anybody attending a Glorantha panel at ChaosiumCon is bound to be well versed already in Glorantha anyway! But we did rant about varying Gloranthas, RuneQuest house rules, and more. I don’t know if it was useful for anybody, but it happened.

There was also Rick Meints’ usual “All Manner of Chaos” panel, in which he talks about the history of Chaosium through anecdotes and trivia, in his signature friendly and affable tone. Some of the stories had already been told last year, and some were new. It all depends on what questions the audience asks, so if you ever attend one of Rick’s panels, don’t hesitate to speak up!

In the afternoon was my RuneQuest game, “The Bloody Banquet“. I had run this last year already, but I slightly tweaked it to improve the finale. Here’s the game blurb to save you a click:

You are Telmori Wolfbrothers, from the fierce tribe of werewolves who live at the edge of Sartar. You have a strained relationship with the other tribes of the Kingdom, but the Dragonrise ushered a time of turmoil that you can use to your advantage. Your tribe wants to take back the hunting lands they lost to both Lunars and Sartarites over the past couple generations, and that requires negotiating with the neighbours. The problem is: you were invited to a banquet and you blacked-out. Now, you’re waking up, covered in blood, surrounded by corpses. What happened? How are you going to fix this? What are you going to do?

I think it went well? I don’t know, you’ll have to ask my players! I will probably release the adventure on the Jonstown Compendium in the distant future, since it’s almost all written up by now.

As always, I had some cheat sheets and references in case there were any newbies, but of course everybody was already a RuneQuest and Glorantha expert… so much, in fact, that we ended the game more than 30min ahead of schedule, since we spent zero time explaining the setting or the rules.

That evening was a 13th Age: Glorantha game by Evan Franke, the co-host of the Exploring Glorantha series. We got to play trollball with D20s!

Saturday

Saturday morning was fairly open so I looked for games with open spots at the last minute. I could have gone to some of the RuneQuest seminars, such as the one on the upcoming Cults of RuneQuest books, but like I said I wanted to meet more of the Call of Cthulhu crowd. So if there was a scoop to be had during those panels, I didn’t get them! What are you reading this blog for again?

I ended up in an absolutely great game of Call of Cthulhu, as we played through Paul Fricker’s My Little Sister Wants You To Suffer. It was a lot of fun and… well I won’t say anything to spoil the scenario but I won! Yes, it’s an adventure in which you can “win”. For a certain definition of “win”… I’ve already said too much!

Around lunch time there was an announcement from Sandy Petersen that he’s writing some Call of Cthulhu material again, including a Cthulhu-focused campaign. I didn’t stick around and instead had a lovely hour playing a very short demo game of Rivers of London with Lynne Hardy.

I really like how the BRP system (which, you might well know by now, I’m not a big fan of) has been really streamlined to an almost minimalistic level. It’s even simpler than Call of Cthulhu 7th edition. Of course, it was a short teaser adventure that is meant to leave you hungry for more, and it succeeded on that front.

Having some spare time before the next thing, I visited some more vendor tables. One of them was a demo of “Elder” the AI-driven VTT assistant for Call of Cthulhu, which Chaosium announced just after the convention:

It was pretty good, and you can definitely see how ChatGPT-like software can help run games… you could ask it for stats of Mythos monsters, rules clarifications, random afflictions for bouts of madness, and even descriptions of creepy locales.

There was also someone from Aetherworks showcasing some upcoming RuneQuest miniatures. They are really gorgeous plastic miniatures, with nice fine detailing. They are planning a Kickstarter for them, with the first offering being miniatures of the Starter Set pre-generated characters. The plan is to also have some variant miniatures for mounted/on foot versions, and to soon go into monsters and other NPC miniatures.

Last but not least was the lovely Katrin Dirim, who was on the podcast once (but we’re hoping to get her on air again!) She was selling prints of her equally lovely art. I got a few of them, as my luggage allowed!

The main event of the afternoon was of course the Chaosium auction, in which Rick Meints and Mike Mason expertly presented various near-mint items from Chaosium’s warehouse with funny anecdotes and personal stories.

Like last year, a few “professional collectors” were in attendance, decidedly snagging many items at outrageous prices. After all, these items were in much better shape than anything you can find on the second hand market, including some shrink-wrapped items. If you just want a reader’s copy, you might not need to pay the premium of a near-mint condition at Chaosium’s auction… still, the presence of these wealthy bidders was, at best, controversial among the rest of the crowd. I had spoken to one of those collectors at Thursday’s mixer, so I knew what their motivations were, but I also understand the frustration of those who can’t get any of the items on their wishlist.

I still managed to snag a few things, including a copy of the much reviled RQ3 Eldarad: The Lost City. Many people asked me if it came with a lighter… if you don’t get the joke, email me! But no, it did not.

The auction ran late which pushed my second panel a bit, as it was hosted in the same room. This was the Podcasting 101 panel, which featured Seth Skorkowsky, Arthur Rothfuss, Mike Diamond, and… errr, me. Mike recorded it for The Old Ways Podcast so you can watch us here:

All these people have much better and popular podcasts than our little humble God Learners podcast here, so I’m not sure if any of my contributions to the discussion were of any help to the people in the audience wanting to start their own podcast? I have frankly no idea what I’m doing most of the time, but it still more or less works out so I guess that was my main point: don’t worry about it, and don’t let it become a source of stress or hurdle.

It was a busy day so I only have a quick stop to see Nick and Bridgett selling Jonstown Compendium POD books. I’m told they did sell quite well! Plus, Nick and Bridgett really know how to celebrate other people’s work, the mood was very positive and supportive around the creator community. Even my SOS friends noted how little ego there was to be seen anywhere.

In the evening I played a game of Pendragon with Bryon Ross (who makes a lot of RuneQuest reviews and commentary on YouTube, some of which we linked to from our weekly newsletter). It didn’t start well: we almost had a TPK during the first encounter! Luckily, things went better after that and, although my knight died heroically fighting an ogre, the party managed to complete all the quests.

Disclaimer: my knight might not have actually “died heroically”. He might have died after taking a bench to the head while trying to cowardly sneak out of a castle. But the tales will totally say he died heroically!

The rest of evening was spent hanging out with many people from various crowds: Gloranthan nerds, 7th Sea cosplayers, Call of Cthulhu gamers, and many other random people. Like I said, I ended up not chatting that much about Glorantha, which was a bit sad, but then again I also got to meet more varied people and talk about more varied things, which is good!

Sunday

On Sunday I only had time for one game before heading out to the airport, and luckily I got a spot in a 7th Sea game that proved to be totally awesome. I believe that we even completely sidestepped the adventure, and the gamemaster ended up improvising half of it.

We fought thugs, met a ghost, broke a nun-fighting ring (yes), got swallowed by a giant sea serpent, and more!

After that I hung out in the lobby with a few cool people for an hour or so, and headed out to the airport for the long way home.

Loot And Achievements

I came out of ChaosiumCon with some cool loot, a mix of new books and auction items plus a few extras, like some prints of Katrin’s art, or a copy of Khan of Khans, a super great Gloranthan board game that Chaosium is getting rid of for free since their licensing agreement with the designer expired:

Second, I’m happy to have completed the achievement of playing every single currently published Chaosium game in one week-end: RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, Rivers of London, and 7th Sea. 13th Age was a bonus.

Oh and if you want to nitpick this and say that, I don’t know, Superworld is still officially published, I’m going to say…. “LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU“. Come on. I did it. Let me have this.

Finally, after much flying and waiting around in airports, I was greeted with the familiar Pacific Northwest native art of the Vancouver airport… I was home! And now you’re done with this report! As the saying goes: “sorry, I didn’t have time to make it shorter“.

If you want some better and shorter reports of the convention, check out:

Hopefully, see y’all next year!