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.

This was a pretty quiet week. I’m still catching up from all the stuff I missed while I was at ChaosiumCon, and there was also a confluence of other unrelated things (such as playing a live gig with my band last Saturday, which feels good after several years of, well, not playing live gigs…)

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Heroquesting

James Coquillat (which we interviewed on the podcast!) talks to Jeff Richard about heroquesting, that elusive activity that is so important to Glorantha and yet isn’t really explained in the rulebook. Well, you know how the joke goes… (if you don’t, send me a message!)

The two main elements of a heroquest outlined by Jeff are a good start:

1. It sends the PCs into the world of myths, where gods live and weird shit happens. Someone turns into a swan to have sex with a princess and together they have kids. That same someone gives birth to a fully armed and adult daughter which comes out of its head. Time jumps around as needed, space is malleable, causality is optional. That kind of shit.
2. It lets PCs come back with powerful, non-rules-approved powers and magic items. And curses, too, if you mess up.

One element that seems to vary from table to table are the laws of heroquesting, that is: what’s possible and not possible to do via heroquesting.

This is a bit like, say, time travel. The first thing to know about time travel is “what are the laws of time travel in this game/story/etc?” Does time travel create parallel timelines, or is there only one timeline that keeps changing? If the former, can you jump to these parallel timelines or does your time travelling contraption lock you to a single timeline? Do small changes to the timeline tend to fix themselves through equivalent events, or do small changes to the timeline tend to snowball into a giant mess? Do paradoxes resolve themselves by erasing people out of existence, or do they completely break the space-time continuum? And so on.

There are equivalent questions to ask about heroquesting, and I get the feeling that different gaming groups handle it differently. How separate is the God Plane from the Mortal Plane? That is, can you change things in the normal world by changing things in the myths, or can you only bring back magical powers from the myths, which are then used to change things in the normal world? If the former, how hard is it to change the myths? We’ve got precedents like the God Learners’ “goddess switch” (in which they switched two goddess as objects of worship to see what would happen) or Prince Snodal’s murder of the God of the Silver Feet (which started the syndics’ ban, effectively a magical fog that prevented all travel and communication around that part of Glorantha). How much magic would your players need to throw that kind of shenanigan, is it a dozen Rune Points and a few good rolls away, or does it require thousands of followers and as many magic points?

You get the idea. And this in turn affects whatever house rules you might be using… at least until the official ones arrive.

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.

Late Stages of the Hero Wars

Jeff looks down the Gloranthan metaplot, all the way to 1639-1648, almost 20 years after the “starting time” of RuneQuest Glorantha:

One of the most interesting periods of the Hero Wars is the Lunar decade of 1639-1648. A new mask, Invictus, becomes emperor after the set backs and defeats of Argenteus, Kazkurtum, and Renovus, and rapidly rebuilds the empire. Like Khosrow II or Ashurbanipal, brought the Lunar Empire to its greatest height in 1645 before presiding over its collapse in 1646-1648.

Argenteus is the “current” Red Emperor (in the RuneQuest Glorantha timeline of 1625), but I have no idea when or how, in the Hero Wars, he’s supposed to die. He’s apparently succeeded by the several people name-dropped by Jeff here but I can’t find any references to them in my PDFs. If you’re shrugging, know that I’m shrugging too.

I can however save you a few clicks with a brief explanation of who Khosrow II and Ashubanipal are.

• Khosrow II was the last great king of the Sassanid Empire, a 3rd-to-7th century CE empire that encompassed modern day Iran plus a few other territories. If you reach for “ancient Persians” tropes, there’s a good chance it’s them.
• Ashubarnipal was much earlier. He was the last great king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, a 10th-to-7th century BCE revival of the older Assyrian Empire. That empire had declined and withered (especially with the Late Bronze Age Collapse), but the Neo-Assyrian kings succeeded with redevelopment and reconquest for a while.

Invictus ends up being completely destroyed by Sheng Seleris. The whole 1645-1655 period is one like the Twilight Period in the GPC.

By “GPC” here Jeff refers to the Great Pendragon Campaign, with its “Twilight Period” starting 48 years into King Arthur’s reign. All magic is going away, or is already gone, from the realm. All remaining major NPCs die or disappear, it’s the dramatic end to the Arthurian saga. Just watch Excalibur again, I guess.

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.

Coeur de Runes Gets an English Translation

We had already mentioned the free Gloranthan game system “Coeur de Runes” (and again here), which comes from the French side of the Gloranthan community. Its author Uzz has now done a first draft for an English translation of the rules.

You can get the PDF over here and send any corrections, feedback, and/or praise over here. You can also find Uzz on most of the Gloranthan Discord servers. If all else fails, send it to me and I’ll relay the message!

Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web

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

A Malagasy Eurmali Tale

While listening to the latest season of the History of Africa Podcast, I rushed to my notebook to write down this tale of Malagasy mythology/history that can perfectly double as an Eurmali heroquesting power: a mighty rotten egg!

Okay so first let’s set the stage: we’re on Madagascar in the late 1500s, in the central highlands of the Kingdom of Imerina. Look for the “Merina” ethnic group in the map above to get a rough idea where there were.

The Kingdom was still pretty new at this time, having been founded in 1540, so its second monarch, Ralambo, needed a great idea to secure his legitimacy to the throne. Malagasy people at the time had magical amulets called “ody”. These were common and everybody had them, since they provided useful protection or blessings for every day life. Think utility Spirit Magic foci. But Ralambo came out and said “oh yeah you have some cool ody, but me? I’ve got some sampy“. These sampy are basically exactly like ody, but they’re super more powerful. They have magical powers that can affect an entire village or even, hey, guess what, an entire kingdom. And the king has them. What do sampy look like? Exactly like ody. But the king knows the difference, trust him.

Check out some ody and sampy:

So King Ralambo gets twelve super sampy (I’m sure the PCs in your Madagascar game were tasked to retrieve them, that was the whole premise of the campaign!) and gets them to be worshipped almost as individual guardian spirits of the community. These items would, under careful study by chosen adepts, “reveal” secrets that the King and his buddies could use to great effect. Think heroquesting powers provided by wyters, or something.

According to “oral history” (which very often steps into “complete myths”) one of the first sampy was called Kelimalaza. When some warriors from the nearby Sakalava tribes planned an attack on an Imerina village, King Ralambo said it would be easy to win the battle. He would simply throw a rotten egg at the coming army and Kelimalaza’s powers would do the rest.

Lo and behold, Ralambo throws a rotten egg at the one of the Sakalava warriors and magic happens! The warrior and his two buddies on either side step back to avoid the stinky projectile. Doing so, they impales themselves on the weapons of the second rank of soldiers. Those, and the soldiers around them, are spooked by this! So they also step back and impale themselves on the third rank! And again and again! After a comical wave of surprise followed by impalement, the entire enemy army was vanquished.

So there you have it: if your Eurmali adventurer heroquests for a great battle power, give them a rotten egg!

Thank you for reading

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

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

This week’s newsletter is shorter than usual because I was at ChaosiumCon 2023 for the most part of last week… and in fact came back home very early today around 1:30 AM. I had a few naps to catch up on that missed sleep today! Big thanks to Joerg for writing a couple of short guest entries and make my life easier.

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Chaosium Con 2023

The annual gathering of fans of Chaosium games in the USA has taken place in Ann Arbor for the second time, with most of the Chaosium crew and many fans from all over the world assembled. There will be a full blog post about it some time in the next couple weeks, similar to last year’s post.

For now, here’s a quick bullet point summary:

• It was as great as last year. The small size makes it easy to meet new people that you run into a few times, and to catch up with people from last year. And of course, it makes Chaosium staff very easily approachable.
• I played more games and went to less seminars than last year, and I hung around more with the Call of Cthulhu and 7th Sea crowds than last year’s almost exclusive RuneQuest crowd.
• The creator community was great and very supportive. Bridgett and Nick did a great job selling a lot of POD books, too.
• I have the Prosopaedia! It was available on sale as expected. During the Chaosium auction I also bought Eldarad: The Lost City! If you are facepalming right now, that makes me happy.
• There were a few preview copies of the first three Cults books, and they look just about how you would expect. I only got to skim them quickly though. If you want to see a bonus feline, Noura has you covered.

Six Ages 2 Art Preview

Here is a great piece by Jan Pospisil for the upcoming video game Six Ages 2, in which you lead a tribe of Solar worshippers through the God Time’s Great Darkness.

A-Sharp, makers of the game, detailed their process:

Our process is typically: one-sentence description, detailed description (possibly with art reference), rough thumbnail, pencils, inks, and colors.

Jan Pospíšil’s illustration of battling ancestors developed from writer Robin Laws’s “In our clan hall, the spectral forms of our Rider ancestors on one hand, and our Ram ancestors on the other, square off as if reenacting a long-ago raid.”

You can see the original sketch and in-between steps from Jan’s art process in the original tweet. You can wishlist the game on Steam while waiting for it release.

You can also see more of Ian’s great art here.

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!

To Hunt a Much Bigger God

Austin Conrad’s farewell issue to the Monster of the Month series was “To Hunt a God“, featuring the Old Woods of northern Esrolia and its protector god. It took a bit longer than expected by Austin has now completed the second half of the book!

This 139-page publication includes:

• The longform cult of Hrunda, God of Bluepaw Monkeys, including rules for creating new adventurers, new Rune spells, and path to shamanhood.
• The macabre Temple of the Bones at which humans and animals worship Gods of Nature.
• A 50+ page adventure which sees the adventurers heroquest into the Old Woods—a forest near Dragon Pass inhabited by elves and talking animals—to perform an act of divine euthanasia.
• Extra encounters, magic items, and more!

Disclaimer: I have a few illustrations in this book. There are some things that might seem related to me but are just Austin fucking with me (check out “Ludvik’s Liquor“… enough said!)

If you have already purchased “To Hunt a God“, the new PDF is already in your library as an update. If not, what are you waiting for? Get this now! Also, you can get all the Monster of the Month issues in two bundles, here and here.

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.

Outlining a Campaign 20 Years from 1625

Guest entry by Joerg

Jeff shares his latest Gloranthan idea, a game during what he calls The Second Lunar Occupation of Dragon Pass:

Jotting down a few notes for my RQ and Cthulhu games I’ll be running at Chaosium Con, and had a crazy idea of doing an RQ short campaign set around 1645, during the Second Lunar Occupation of Dragon Pass. Everyone would play characters born around 1624, heck maybe Yanioth’s kids could be the among the pregens.

[…] I’m fascinated by the Twilight period in both Pendragon and RuneQuest, and am really interested in playing around with it more.

If you want context for what Jeff is talking about, check volume 2 of the Guide to Glorantha, especially the Takenegi Stele on p.744, the Black Mountain Pictoglyphs on p.747-749, The Fourth Inspiration of Moonson (p.749) and the excerpt of Ethilrist’s My History of the Black Horse Troop on p.750.

Some of the earlier imagery of the Takenegi Stele is found in the history section of the Sourcebook:

• The Battle of Grizzly Peak on p.26,
• The Fall of Boldhome on p.29,
• The Building Wall Battle on p.30,
• Starbrow’s Rebellion on p.31,
• The dismemberment of the Holy Country on p.34,
• The Battle of Auroch Hill and the overthrow of Queen Hendira of Nochet on p.36,
• The Battle of Pennel Ford on p.38,
• The Dragonrise on p.39,
• Kallyr’s failed Lightbringer’s Quest on p.42.

As artistic counter-propaganda goes, these pieces of art are almost completely impartial in their presentation, showing both Lunar triumphs and defeats.

Jeff is giving a preview of what the occupied Dragon Pass is going to have to suffer:

Even if you start the campaign in 1645, we still have a lot of story to go!

Argrath’s disappeared, the Empire is aided by broo, vampires, Vadeli, Ethilrist, dwarf mercenaries, and more. All of the True Dragons are awake. The elf forests have expanded (although the Red Emperor has destroyed much of the new forests in Peloria and Fronela), the trolls raid far and wide, and many can speak with the dragonewts.

And much of that may be the result of the actions of your players in your campaign.

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.

Found Counters of Dragon Pass

The Kraken convention (which Joerg knows very well) has done many “fundraiser chapbooks”, a lot of which are now on sale on the All Rolled Up store.

I wasn’t aware of this until now but it looks like the Kraken convention has also designed some extra counters for the Dragon Pass board game with Greg Stafford. As far as I can tell this was done in 2016, with a limited production run of 50 copies.

Anyway, this year’s Dragon Pass game at the Kraken convention was run with these extra counters! I can spot some elephants, maybe some other Teshnan, or Kralorelan units… listen, I’m not good at this kind of stuff, I’ll let the nerds figure it out.

Gloranthan Short Fiction

Guest entry by Joerg, edited by Ludovic

Austin Conrad (him again) describes an Ernaldan summoning rite in his short story “Calling on Ernalda“:

This week’s post is a short story I wrote to explore what the process of summoning and binding an earth elemental in RuneQuest feels like to the characters. Originally I was planning to set this at the Clearwine Earth Temple, but my fingers put it in Sylthi instead.

The great thing is that while the story describes what happens in-character, the section at the end goes over what happens in terms of RuneQuest mechanics.

Austin’s blog has other Gloranthan goodness, too, take a look around!

Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web

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

Bronze Age Female Beauty

Guest entry by Joerg

Dan Davis explores Bronze Age standards of female beauty in Bronze Age Europe, offering visuals from many archaeological finds.

Thank you for reading

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

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

Next week’s newsletter will probably be late, or skipped altogether, since ChaosiumCon is happening later this week! Wish me luck!

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Non-Human Adventurers for the RuneQuest Starter Set

The RuneQuest Starter Set has no character creation rules (although the RQWiki does have some simple ones for free if you don’t want to invest in the rulebook right away). As such, the box contained many pre-generated adventurers, more than enough to last all the adventures therein and more. But all these adventurers are human, and some people were curious about playing other races. Chaosium had promised a long while ago that they would release some non-human adventurers in PDF, and it looks like it’s coming up soon!

Jason Durall has posted a preview of one of these adventurers. As you can see above, this looks like a trollkin (or maybe young dark troll, but I think it’s a trollkin) with a cute little beetle companion. They sport a giant insect’s chitinous shell as a shield. The rose-tinted glasses and Moon Rune necklace seem to indicate this is a Seven Mothers initiate, which is quite uncommon for trolls, I think, so I think we’ll get a very interesting backstory!

Prosopaedia On Sale At ChaosiumCon

Chaosium president Rick Meints has confirmed, on the Glorantha Discord server, that copies of the Prosopaedia will be on sale at ChaosiumCon! Expect me to run and crash into the sales stand as soon as I can.

Good News For Us Canadians

Rick Meints (him again!) has posted on BRP Central that Chaosium is “a few weeks away from having our new Canadian shipping partner ready to process orders.“

You may remember that the previous Canadian warehouse contractor flaked on Chaosium, resulting in us Canadians having to order from the US fulfillment centres instead, which leads to higher shipping fees (plus custom fees!) It’s great to know that Chaosium went pretty fast with securing a new contractor. Fingers crossed! I hear we have quite a lot of new books to order this year…

Basic Roleplaying Out in PDF

We already said it was coming out, and now it’s out! If you get the PDF now, you’ll receive a discount on the physical book if you buy it directly from Chaosium.

While it’s not directly related to Glorantha, the BRP system did originate from RuneQuest, and this book contains many extra rules and sub-systems you may find useful if you want to tweak and customize your RuneQuest rules. If you don’t want to fiddle around with rules, or if you already have the Big Gold Book, you might not find this new release as useful.

Note that this is released under a draft version of the ORC license.

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!

Preview of To Hunt A God: Part 2

Austin Conrad has posted this preview (above) of part two of To Hunt A God! This amazing painting is by Laura Galli.

Part Two is a free update to the existing To Hunt A God: Part One, so if you don’t have it yet, grab it now! (disclaimer: I did a few drawings in there) Part two will add another 70 pages or so to the PDF.

Preview of Highways & Byways Remastered

Neil Gibson’s Highways & Byways is getting remastered ahead of getting a print-on-demand run! Look at those maps! Did I ever mention I love maps? I feel like I may have kept this to myself all this time… anyway, this is just a sneak preview courtesy of Neil. He says that it will contain “extra content and high resolution maps“. Yay!

I have used Highways & Byways a couple times already in my game to figure out travel times. The only problem is that my players are currently “off the map”, down there in Caladraland trying to fight off Greymane’s army… oh well, they’ll get their ass kicked soon enough and go back to Dragon Pass, right?

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.

Boats of the Pelorian Riverfolk

Peloria, where most of the Lunar Empire lies, has a big river and lots of wetlands, which makes reed boats a popular way to get around:

The Diros or Yestendos boats used by the Riverfolk and Weeders of the Lunar Heartlands are mainly reed or wooden in construction, with curved bows and sterns. Although we often associate that with ancient Egypt (such as the Khufu boat), we could also associate them with the reed boats of the Andes or other Native American groups.

Diros the Boatman is one of the earliest gods related to ships and river navigation. It provides magic to propel boats safely and quickly, and is often friendly with river cults, such as Prax’s Zola Fel cult. Interestingly enough, Diros is also related to the famous “Boat Planet” which disappeared when the Closing of the Oceans happened. It seems like maybe Dormal, who spearheaded the Reopening of the Oceans, made Diros come back… or found a way to treat the oceans like a big-ass river? Oh and during the heyday of the God Learners, we sort of subsumed the cult of Diros inside that of Wachaza, our seafaring war god. This is useful when all your ships are warships!

Yestendos is just the god of the reed boats. Not much else to this guy except that he’s a husband of a couple of wetland goddesses of Peloria, which sounds about right if you want to take your reed boat around a marsh.

The Khufu boat is from ancient Egypt, and named after the monarch who erect the pyramid in which it was found, dating back to around 2500 BCE. It’s a “solar barque” which means it’s associated with the Sun God Ra. It’s obviously firmly in the “wooden” barque category.

For the “reed boat” category, Jeff points us to the Andes. See for instance this traditional reed boat above on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia.

Collectively, the cults of Oslira, Bisenslib, and Surenslib number some 320k members, of which maybe half are Riverfolk or Weeders. They speak some variant of Boatspeech, thought to be more related to the language of the Zola Fel Riverfolk and the Right Arm Islands than to any of the Pelorian Farmer Languages (including New Pelorian).

Oslira is of course the goddess of the Oslir river, which dominates the Pelorian basin of the Lunar Empire. Bisenslib and Surenslib are those two wetland goddess I mentioned before. Surenslib is associated with the heron, too.

The Pelorian Riverfolk and Weeders can be found along the Oslira and Acos Rivers and their tributaries from Oraya to Saird, and a related group along the shores of the Sweet Sea and the Janube and Poralistor Rivers.

The Beast People

As the saying goes, nobody complains about minotaurs and centaurs, but everybody’s got an opinion on ducks! Well, there are way more ducks anyway:

There are some 25,000 Beast People and another 10,000 Ducks in Dragon Pass. The Beast Men include centaurs, ducks, minotaurs, satyrs, manticores, tiger-men, bird women, fox women, bug heads, and often many different shapeshifters.

Outside of the ducks, the largest number of Beast People are centaurs, some 8250. Now that is a LOT of centaurs! Most stick around Beast Valley, but bachelor bands can be found throughout Dragon Pass and beyond.

I hope one of those bachelors is a player character in your group… or maybe you have an all-centaur band! Centaurs are the most important after all: the King of all Beast People is the centaur Ironhoof (details and stats are available in The Smoking Ruin and Other Stories)

There’s also a lot of minotaurs, some 6250, in many small herds throughout Beast Valley. Male minotaurs tend to be dominant and defend the herds, and female minotaurs raise the children. Both male and female minotaurs engage in displays and fights to determine status among them. Minotaur herds often cooperate with centaur herds.

It’s surprising to see how many minotaurs there are, given how the Travels of Biturian Varosh make them sound super mysterious… I guess they are mysterious if you live in Prax and have never visited southern Sartar. Note that, still according to the Travels of Biturian Varosh, there are small enclaves of minotaurs in select elf forests.

Satyrs are a little less numerous, with some 4250 throughout Dragon Pass, although most reside in the Beast Valley. Although it is usually assumed they are all male, there are female satyrs as well as male. The female satyrs are generally considered better behaved than the male!

There are surprisingly many manticores, with some 2000 throughout Dragon Pass. They are very independent and individualistic, but do follow Ironhoof’s directives.

Finally there are some 4550 other Beast People, including tiger-men, bird women, fox women, bug heads, and other shapeshifters.

Note that the Glorantha Bestiary has short sidebars for creating centaur, minotaur, and duck adventurers! No sidebar for other Beast People adventurers though, but it shouldn’t be hard to come up with something based on the NPC stat block.

This is the first time I hear about tiger men. Sounds fun! Bird women and bugheads are mentioned here and there in published material but without any more details, so feel free to make something up. In fact, among these 4550 miscellaneous Beast People, I’m sure there’s room for any horrible chimera your imagination can summon!

And now, for your free license to sprinkle Beast People anywhere you want in your games:

A handful of Beast People have decided to live among the humans. There are some satyrs in the woods and hills, a few bachelor bands of centaurs and minotaurs, and the occasional manticore hunting livestock. There are also those Beast People who serve as mercenaries or bandits. And then there are the truly unusual Beast People like the famed satyr gourmand who lives in Boldhome or the centaur who joined Lhankor Mhy.

Beast People largely avoid human contacts. The Ducks are an exception of course, as they are passionately loyal to the House of Sartar.

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.

Dave Thaumavore on the RuneQuest Starter Set

Dave Thaumavore reviews the RuneQuest Starter Set, or at least the overall box and the Rules booklet (a follow-up video will look at the Glorantha booklet).

I found myself nodding a lot while watching this video… the good points of RuneQuest are the setting and the mechanics that tie the characters to it, the gritty combat, shamanism, etc. But Dave doesn’t shy away from pointing out things he doesn’t like, many of which I don’t like either: the resolution tables, the augment mechanics slowing down play, the (too) long list of skills, and Strike Ranks being, well, Strike Ranks. Dave even says Strike Ranks might be a barrier to entry to some beginners: I agree with this, but every time someone mentions it, fans and Chaosium people come out with anecdotes of newcomers who love the system. I’ll just put this link here and let you figure out what I think of that…

If you like Dave’s stuff, check out his Patreon.

Broos on a Dune

It’s been a while seen we’ve featured some Gloranthan miniatures here! Thankfully, Gabor Nagy (aka GabORK) has posted about painting some broos miniatures on their blog. This includes a short break down of the creative process behind it:

I had to keep two important things in mind during the process:

• Runequest is a bronze-age setting, so – instead of steel – I used bronze, copper and brass for the weapons. Initially, it felt restrictive but I soon started to enjoy using these colours.
• The Broos are the creatures of chaos. Normally I use a more or less uniform colour scheme for a warband but in this case, I did the opposite and aimed for variety. I picked multiple colours for their skin and fur, so that no two figures have the same colour combination.

There are a lot more details, and photos of more Broos (including a winged shaman one!) over at the OrkAngel blog.

Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web

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

The Assassin’s Teapot

Here’s a short video on a cool thing commonly called “the assassin’s teapot”. It’s a teapot with two chambers for storing liquid (with one being presumably poisoned of course) Using science, it lets you pour from one or the other chamber.

A cursory search on the interwebs indicates that the origins of this teapot are, at best, murky. It might originate from the Ming dynasty in China, but this sounds to me like some salesman’s hastily made up sales pitch. If it’s true, though, this is technically “too late” to put in a “bronze age world” like Glorantha, but when did this ever stop anybody, including the game designers? If you want to keep the teapot’s Asian origins, you can of course say that it comes from Kralorela or Teshnos, and somehow found its way to a scheming Esrolian grand-mother, or an ambitious Lunar politician.

But why would Gloranthans bother with this kind of stuff when they can, you know, use magic? Well I think that not using magic is actually of great advantage in Glorantha! Your schemes can’t be exposed by detection spells, guardian spirits, or whatever. I think you can for example easily circumvent the effects of a Create Market or Warding spell with this teapot and carry out assassinations in broad daylight at the market! And one of the players in my group is playing an Issaries merchant… mmmh. Trouble is brewing!

The Neverending Storm

This rather dramatic video shows the “Catatumbo Lightning” of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. The name Catatumbo (which means “House of Thunder”) comes from the Catatumbo River, which empties itself into the lake. From the Wikipedia article:

[It] occurs for 140 to 160 nights a year, nine hours per day, and with lightning flashes from 16 to 40 times per minute. […] The phenomenon sees the highest density of lightning in the world, at 250 per km².

According to the NASA’s Lightning Imaging Sensor, it’s the “Lightning Capital” of the world.

This phenomenon seems to be caused by the confluence of warm air coming from the Caribbean Sea and cold air coming down from the Andes mountains.

I wish Jonas Piontek’s video was a bit clearer about which shot was a timelapse and which shot was an real-time film of the lightning. But I assume that the shots featuring people staring at the lake were played at normal speed — and given the number of flashes visible in the span of a few seconds, it looks like an awesome thing to witness.

The implications for Glorantha are self-evident, although Orlanth’s most sacred places tend to be mountain tops. For instance, there’s the very, ahem, Gloranthishly named “Top of the World” mountain between eastern Ralios and western Lunar Empire, which is said to be where the Storm God resides. But I wonder what we would have if Greg Stafford started his world-building efforts with a Storm God that was associated with rivers and lakes instead?

Quickly looking into local mythology, I haven’t found what sorts of gods the people of northwestern Venezuela had… But, somewhat unrelated, I found out where the southeastern Venezuelan gods lived! They lived on tabletop mountains which the locals called Tepui. You might not be surprised to learn that this means “House of the Gods”.

Anyway, Jonas Piontek has many photos of Catatumbo Lightning on his portfolio website, and you can order them in print if you want. More here and here.

Thank you for reading

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

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

God Learner Sorcery

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

Episode 22: People of Glorantha: The Lunar Empire

This week we welcome Nick Brooke, who tells us all about the Lunar Empire. We chat about what RuneQuest adventurers might know and think about the Lunars, the history of the Empire, playing a Seven Mothers initiate, and, of course, Chaos and Illumination!

As always, get our episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Some Book Previews

Just some pictures of a few upcoming books… some of the Cults of RuneQuest books, and the Meints Index to Glorantha in print (you can already get the PDF here)

As usual you can spot both the “normal” and “leatherette” versions of the books, although the Prosopaedia doesn’t seem to have a leatherette treatment here. I don’t know if it’s just missing from the picture, or if it won’t have it at all… I don’t care, I don’t buy the leatherette versions anyway. I prefer the pretty colour cover illustration, and I like having all my book spines looking the same.

Six Ages 2 Announcement

This isn’t strictly speaking Chaosium news, but it is “official licensee news” or something. The sequel to Six Ages (itself a, let’s say, “spiritual sequel” to the cult classic King of Dragon Pass) is now formally announced! There is no firm release date, but there is a fancy trailer (see above)

It sounds like you can import your clan data from the first Six Ages, or create a new clan. The new game is called “Lights Going Out” because you will experience the Great Darkness: some of your gods die, Chaos invades your lands, and bad things happen in general.

You can see more pretty pictures here and here, and add the game to your wishlist on Steam.

Tribal Compatibility Charts

Here’s a little tidbit of information on the upcoming Sartar Homeland book: it will have some tribal compatibility charts, similar to the one for cults:

In the forthcoming Sartar Book there is a Tribal Compatability chart showing the relationship between all the tribes. There are a lot of tribes with hostility towards each other, but other than the relationship between the Telmori and several other tribes, only the Dinacoli and the Cinsina are enemies. The Malani and Colymar are hostile, but are not enemies.

Jonstown Compendium

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

The Book of Doom in Print

Simon Phipp’s Book of Doom is available in print-on-demand! This is the book for people who always want more “stuff” in their RuneQuest games, like new spells and skills, new optional rules, new magical items, and more.

Jeff’s Notes

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

The Battle of Heroes

Jeff talks about the Battle of Heroes and the Hero Wars in general for RuneQuest:

During this period the setting changes. What was true in 1625 might be false 20 or 30 years later. New cults will appear. Some old cults will change or even die out. A lot happens and much of this is decided by your individual campaigns.

Now before anyone starts whinging about metaplots or other such complaints, remember that this has been the foundation of the setting since before RQ was even a concept. In fact, RQ was created for this – it is an unfortunate trick of history that it took fifty real years to get there!

[…] Anyone paying attention knows the basic contours of 1625-1628. Soon enough there will be guidelines for the whole Hero Wars period. I can’t wait to see what you all do with it!

I assume that, at the end of this quote, Jeff is talking about the upcoming “Dragon Pass Campaign” book he’s been working on for years. As far as we know it’s written in a style similar to the Great Pendragon Campaign, a generational campaign framework with a year-by-year high-level view of the “metaplot events”, along with many adventure seeds.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Chaosium will handle the RuneQuest timeline, and whether they will end up “stuck” in 1625 the same way previous RuneQuest editions were stuck in 1621-or-so. On the one hand, Chaosium promotes this upcoming world-shaking series of events, broadly known as the Hero Wars. On the other hand, we know the downsides of published products that advance the timeline: a book of adventures set in an Argrath-occupied Far Place, for instance, will be of little use to many people whose games have Argrath elsewhere, possibly still in New Pavis as per the RuneQuest rulebook.

My own naive prediction on the matter is that Chaosium will have one sequential line of books for the Hero Wars, and everything else being loosely tied to it or not at all:

• So there would be a series of “Dragon Pass Campaign” books, each advancing the plot by a few years. These are absolutely dedicated to the “metaplot”, but presented in a way that makes it easy to tweak the timeline as needed.
• All adventure books would be either loosely set in 1625 (the “starting” year), or have adventures that don’t get tied much with the political landscape. The “village threatened by a monster hiding in the woods” sort of adventure, with possibly some suggestions for integrating it with this or that year of the “metaplot”.
• And then all kinds of book independent from all this, such as the Cults of RuneQuest books, Gamemaster Guide, various Homeland books (which describe their areas “up to 1625”), and so on.

This way you get the benefit of the “metaplot”, but all tucked inside a designated campaign book that gets a sequel once every few years. What do you people think? What would you like to see from Chaosium?

The Two Suns of Glorantha

Technically, Glorantha has two suns (a bit like Earth having more than one moon):

To me, one of the more interesting celestial phenomena in Glorantha is the relationship between Lightfore and the Sun. Lightfore rises each dusk in the east, and sets each dawn in the west. It is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Red Moon.

[…] At the Dawn, the Little Sun set and the Sun rose. Many religions link the two, as Lightfore and the Sun follow exactly the same path. Some versions of the story have the Little Sun carry or pull the Sun through the heavens.

It’s super interesting to think about how the people at the Dawn would have reacted to this. They had only known the Great Darkness, with maybe Lightfore’s dim light as the only “natural” source of light. Maybe they remembered (or had stories of) the previous Ages during which it was just, like, day all day long. But now the Sun is back but it’s moving across the sky (“what?! that’s new!“) and then going away (“oh shit! not this again!?“) and then back the next morning (“phew! that was stressful! is this going to happen all the time now? what the hell?“)

To look into this kind of thing, Jeff points at The Glorious Reascent of Yelm (GRoY), one of the Stafford Library books. It deals with the Solar cults around the 3rd century. But Jeff also warns that it needs to be taken into that historical context:

One of the problems with GRoY is that it is a document from the mid-First Age when a lot of stuff was still being explored. […] It is trying to make sense of phenomena that from the Third Age perspective have long been resolved.

See also Jeff’s list of the brightest-to-dimmest objects in the sky.

Calyz, the Fire of Men

Teshnos is a place I don’t know much about. It’s a sub-tropical region in the southeast corner of Genertela… if you look at the map above and go northwest from Teshnos, you end up in the Badlands and other Wastelands east of Prax. South of continental Teshnos (off the bottom of the map) is the island of Melib, which is also considered part of Teshnos.

Teshnos has fire-worshipping people, a bunch of custom Sky Gods, cool exotic Hsunchen tribes (including tiger people!), war-elephants, rice fields, opium dens, pirates, many dwarfs, and a shitload of elves. Have I sold the place to you yet?

And this brings us to Jeff’s note on Calyz, one of those custom Sky Gods:

The most interesting of the Teshnite gods to me is Calyz, the Fire of Men, inventor of cooking, smelting, and sex. Calyz is beloved by the common folk of Tesnos and one of the most popular cults in Teshnos. He serves as a protective deity in many Teshnite households.

The cults of Teshnos include:

• Calyz, as already mentioned.
• Solf is the “lord of volcanoes”, and basically an aspect of Lodril. But Solf “burned himself out” (I assume Teshnos has many dormant volcanoes) and now he’s a “lazy god of decadence”. If you want to do drugs or other kinds of depravities, he’s your guy.
• Somash is the god of the Sun, plus all kinds of fancy things (government, warriors, poets, etc) Probably an aspect of Yelm.
• Furalor is the Cleansing Fire and Goddess of Death. Jeff says the God Learners identified her with Oakfed, which… is a bit a let down if you ask me. Someone probably messed up their thesis and nobody bothered to redo the experiments.
• Tolat is a war god, associated with the Red Planet. He might be an aspect of Shargash, the Dara Happan war god. He’s also related to some kinds of moon stuff… I don’t know, moon stuff gets complicated. I’ll just slowly walk away and mention that there’s a pile of material related to this guy in the Guide. Some reading for another day.
• Zitro Argon is the god of old people. I suppose you can worship him to get coupons for that all-day-breakfast place around the corner.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. The son of Solf, the God Learners identified him with both Gustbran the Workfire and Mahome the Hearthfire.

[…] Now Calyz is a pretty complex deity compared to Gustbran and Mahome. He’s an inventor and crafter, crafty and clever, and also one who cares about ordinary mortals.

I can’t find any good reference to Calyz being a son of Solf, but hey, why not. But it’s indeed interesting that Calyz is identified as two deities, here. Gustbran is a minor redsmithing god, and Mahome is a minor household fire goddess. How the hell do two minor deities fuse into a major deity in Teshnos? This opens up some… interesting avenues of research for us God Learners. I mean, can you Voltron-up a couple minor gods and make something cool? Or are Gustbran and Mahome actually inferior, partial masks of Calyz? Let’s start fucking around the God Plane… I’m sure nothing bad will happen.

By the way, Jeff also mentions that many Lightbringer cults are found in Teshnos, brought by the God Learners and by ongoing trade. I figure that Teshnos is a good intermediate stop between the Holy Country, Kralorela, and the East Islands. This means that a lot of silk, spices, and other luxury goods would be found transiting through Teshnos… something to think about if your players want to take their commercial business to the oceans! Watch out for those pirates, though.

Miscellaneous Notes

Here are this week’s notes for which I don’t have any commentary, or for which I ran out of time, but are still worth a quick read:

• Some notes on shamans, and how some practice their shamanism as a sort of side-gig to their main cult (like Earth witches or Kolatings), while other cults integrate shamans in their cult hierarchy as “shaman-priests” (like Daka Fal or Gorakiki).
• It’s not the size of the cult that counts, it’s the, ahem, place in the Cosmic Compromise, or something. Anyway, here are some more membership figures in Sartar (including the Far Place) for the “small cults”, along with a few comments. And a bonus note for the Valind cult.
• A reminder that Sartarite clans generally have mixed membership systems, as opposed to strictly patrilineal or matrilineal.

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.

Vistas of New Pavis

Matthew Cole continues his “Vistas of New Pavis” project, which includes the 3D modelling of New Pavis. The picture above is a view of Parade Way from the Pavis Temple on a day of some city celebration.

The Pavis Temple is that thing at the bottom of the map above, leaning against the old giant wall. Parade Way is the north/south street leading to it. You can get a nice PDF of this map of New Pavis here.

For another vision of Parade Way during a bit worship celebration, see the cover of the now out of print Pavis: Gateway to Adventure.

All Fool’s Day

It was of course April Fools day last week, and Austin Conrad, who loves playing tricksters, has an appropriate new bit of world-building on “All Fool’s Day”:

A Sartarite custom declared by the local chief or Rex’s bonded trickster on an irregular basis (usually some time during Disorder week of Sea Season).

On All Fool’s Day, the trickster priest declares themselves the new King of the Gods. They drag out the local Inner Ring wearing ox’s harnesses and begin ritual abuse of the council. This ranges from verbal mockery to physical assault. Chalana Arroy’s representative can ransom themselves with a kiss, but no one else is exempt.

The trickster then holds open-air court, declaring judgments over any dispute brought before them. Once all judgments have been proclaimed, they leave to begin a secret ritual known to lay persons as “Getting a Head Start.”

After sunset the community typically frees their leaders. Any member of the Inner Ring not released by popular acclaim is surely doomed to lose their position!

Find more of Austin’s stuff on his website, and on the Jonstown Compendium!

Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web

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

Roman Road Construction

Okay so yes, yes, I know, not everybody wants their Lunar Empire to look like Romans but hey, it’s an easy pop culture way to picture parts of your Glorantha, and it’s the way our most recent guest, Nick Brooke, promotes in our interview with him. So let’s look at some Roman stuff! Namely, Roman roads!

At the height of the Roman Empire, there were 400,000 kilometres of roads. One of the most famous of these roads is the Appian Way, which connected Rome to southeastern Italy. But with its famous stone pavement, the Appian Way sort of gives the wrong impression about Roman roads:

It looks like only about 20% of all roads were paved, and that was mostly inside cities. The majority of Roman roads were made of packed material, as explained in those two short videos:

The interesting bit in the second video are of course the ditches, 20 meters away from the road on each side, to make life difficult for “unauthorized vehicles” and highway bandits. Feel free to add similar measures to your Gloranthan roads, whether it’s the Sartarite King Roads or the Pelorian highways…

But most importantly, you know those Hollywood movies where an action scene ends near a construction site for a highway bridge? Yeah, now I want to do that sort of stuff in Glorantha too, with out-of-control road construction animals, carts of big rocks knocked over in front of the adventurers, and people falling off an incomplete aqueduct!

Do you have more ideas for cool RuneQuest action scenes? Share them with us!

Thank you for reading

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

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

God Learner Sorcery

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

Review: RuneQuest Weapons & Equipment

I finally wrote a review of the RuneQuest Weapons & Equipment! This is a long-form review, but it’s maybe not as long as it may seem since there’s a lot of pictures too (the book is so pretty!) You might read things that echo what you’ve seen in other reviews, but you might also read a few new takes and comments on the book. Either way, I hope you find it interesting!

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

The RuneQuest Starter Set in Two Minutes

Do you want to convert your players to RuneQuest, but they have a short attention span? Noura Ibrahim, who played in the Glass Cannon RuneQuest game, has got you covered!

Pick up your RuneQuest Starter Set by @Chaosium_Inc today and USE THAT PROMO CODE! #runequest #ttrpg #tabletopgaming https://t.co/ARdrFXPdV0 pic.twitter.com/iBr3tKROnQ

— Noura Ibrahim 🔜 #PAXeast (@nouralogical) March 22, 2023

She has posted this sponsored two-minute look at the Starter Set, with a promo code at the end for ordering the box. Your players have no more excuses!

Interview with Jason Durall: Breaking the Lore

RuneQuest creative director Jason Durall talks about when to break away from “canon” in your game, and how much you can get away with. There are a couple nods to the usual “Your Glorantha Will Vary” motto but the interview is generic and broadly applicable to all games.

Chaosium Con 2023 Announcements

Guest contribution by Jörg, with some edits by Ludo

As the date approaches (13th to 16th April 2023) for the second ChaosiumCon, game slots have been filling up, more game are being offered, and various blog posts give details about upcoming events and panels.

The Cults of RuneQuest Panel will have Jeff Richard and Jason Durall presenting this milestone of Glorantha publications. Seth Skorkowski will be returning to Chaosium Con and star in three panels, one of which (Podcasting 101) will also feature our own Ludovic-aka-Lordabdul as one of panelists. There will be several other panels for other Chaosium games with luminaries from the respective fandoms, like the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

Prosopaedia Preview

Jeff shared these photos of the upcoming Prosopaedia book… looks good! I’m starting to suspect there might be advance copies at ChaosiumCon… fingers crossed!

BRP SRD vs Big Gold Book

We know that a new edition of the Basic Roleplaying book is coming out soon, but Rick Meints has also confirmed that there would be a free PDF containing just the BRP SRD (System Reference Document):

There will be a free SRD related PDF for BRP with no art, etc. That’s part of the ORC license announcement.

We will also be selling a hardcover full color BRP book with color art (PDF option as well).

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!

Edge of Empire in Print

Harald Smith’s Edge of Empire supplement on the Kingdom of Imther is now available in print on demand! If you want to know more about it, you can listen to our interview with Harald.

Edit: I forgot to note that the cover has changed for the print on demand version! Check it out below!

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.

Tartyra the Humakti vs. Anaxos the Horali

Jeff compares a Humakti initiate with a Horali soldier from the West. The Humakti, of course, goes into combat with the help of her Rune magic, spirit magic, and any bonuses or protection cast by allies. The Horali are similar in some ways, and different in others:

When Anaxos the Horali goes into combat, he is aided by friendly spirits to aid him in minor ways as well. He might also belong to a martial cult (if permitted by the local talars). Anaxos is Seshnegi, and his talars have enrolled a local (and limited) version of Humakt – giving him access to Truesword. Although he has good armor and well trained, he has less direct access to magic than his barbarian equivalent.

So Anaxos is a member of the Horali caste, i.e. the soldier cast in Malkioni society. The Talars belong to the noble caste, and the Zzaburi (see below) belong to the sorcerer caste. The last unmentioned cast are the Dronars, the farmers and workers. If you want some inspiration for the way Malkioni society works, you can for instance look at Vedic India and their Varnas, of which there are also four (surprise surprise).

It’s interesting here that the Talars can seemingly enforce “limited access” to a deity otherwise known “in full” elsewhere. I wonder how this is done? Maybe they only allow building shrines, which provide a single Rune spell?

But if the talars demand it, Anaxos is supported by the magic of their wizards, which if properly prepared is every bit as formidable as what [a Humakti] has, and maybe even more! Long term spells such as dampen damage, boon of Kargan Tor, or warding against weapons make Anaxos a terror on the battlefield. But only if Anaxos has the support of his talars and they command their zzaburi to cast those spells.

That’s how sorcery ends up working in Malkioni societies.

The great thing with sorcery is that, given enough time and resources, you can totally overpower spirit and Rune magic. Boon of Kargan Tor (available in the RuneQuest rulebook) gives a bonus to weapon damage, but unlike Truesword (which has a fixed, non-stackable effect) or Bladesharp (which few would have above level 4, and almost none above level 6), it can be boosted very high.

For instance get one sorcerer, three apprentices, and a few servants or magic crystals. The apprentices cast Enhance INT on their boss, each giving him, say, +3 INT. The boss normally has, say, Free INT 8, but now has Free INT 17. Assuming they have mastered the Death Rune and the Summon Technique (it’s their job to provide support to soldiers after all!) they can spend manipulate 17 levels of Boon of Kargan Tor. Let’s spend 8 of those on +2D6 damage, and 9 on duration, so that it lasts two days. Not bad… this is already, on average, better than Bladesharp 6.

At this point, each extra apprentice that can cast Enhance INT gives you an additional +2D6 damage for these two days… so grab those foreign exchange students who skipped your class earlier this week and force them to forget all their spells except Enhance INT. Lo and behold, your Horali goes out for their mission with +6D6 damage on their weapon! Try that with your stupid puny Rune or spirit magic, hah! And that’s even before we consider that this spell could have been written, partially or fully, in a grimoire!

But ultimately, it really depends on Zzaburi support:

Not [sic] that sorcery is very socially useful. It just is not as useful for free-wheeling adventurers. Or members of societies that don’t want to support a bunch of specialist sorcerers.

More here.

Also, yes, I’m totally expecting one of you to send me an email about some sort of sorcery rules mistake I made in the text above. Don’t disappoint me, people!

In Glorantha, Cults Precede Culture

Guest contribution by Jörg

Jeff addresses a couple of perspectives that are common to our modern western society but rather alien to the mindsets of the inhabitants of Glorantha.

To a very significant extent, in Glorantha cults drive culture. By looking at the significant cults (say more than 2% of the population) in any particular community, we can get a quick overview of some of the key components of that community’s culture. Now not all is going to be driven by the cults, but they are important drivers.

Major deities mainly worshipped by humans like Orlanth, Ernalda, Yelm or Lodril do suggest a certain direction of the underlying cultures, but variations can be great.

Across the Lozenge and its history, we have seen these deities followed and worshipped by very different cultures. Orlanth, Ernalda and Yelm are major deities for the Pentans, a patriarchal nomad culture riding horses and raiding sedentary agriculturalists and pastoralists, occasionally lording over them for varying periods of time. In the Grey Age the horse warlords even were bringers of civilization to the dazed survivors of Peloria, all the way to the Sweet Sea, laying the foundations for the urban cultures of that region. Nowadays those same horse rider tribes are seen as ruthless and often inhumane raiders and murderers by the peoples whose ancestors they saved from the lethargy of the Greater Darkness, who worship the same deities in totally different context.

Cults are a rather recent invention in Glorantha: they became necessary to bridge the gap between the everyday world of the mortals and the eternal God Time. God Time had no use for cults, although it knew sacrifice to higher powers… we know Orlanth underwent such preparatory sacrifices before he departed on the Lightbringers’ Quest.

So if Orlanth, Humakt, and Storm Bull are all significant cults in a community, that is going to mean something. Similarly if a third of the community is initiated into Ernalda, that is going to mean something. If both Storm Bull AND the Seven Mothers are present, that is going to mean something as well!

And yet the Storm Tribes of Pent following Dranz Goloi are very different from the White Bull Society, or the Orlanthi of Talastar facing the Chaos threat of Dorastor, despite having demographics fitting the description above.

In God Time, the Orlanthi were literally the people who followed Orlanth in his local presence, e.g. the Durevings on the Downland Migration, the Ram People who invaded Dara Happa under their king Elemalus (not quite Orlanth, but his loyal stand-in Lightfore), or Varnaval and his ordeed-drawn chariots in Pelanda, Their heroic and/or demigod leaders became avatars of the deity, and their mighty deeds often mirrored those of the one deity they all shared. A God Learner might spout technobabble about instantiation of core myths projected on local avatars who in turn get included in the mostly anonymous mass of Storm Brothers for pretty much everyone else worshiping (or following, in Godtime) the same Orlanth but in different local and historical context.

Culture was brought, exemplified or dictated by the cult entities and/or cultural (and cult) heroes. The cults with their rituals attempt to re-live the original establishment of their cult entities’ feats. And many things which are cultural achievements in our world (like e.g. grain cultivation) are divine gifts in Glorantha. Not gifts of the cults, though – at best the cults help in cultivating these gifts.

Now cults do change in Time – but that is a result of their followers continuing interactions and experiences with the God Time, aka heroquesting.

There is also an element of history and cultural exchange (or lack thereof) that will change a cult locally. The entire rabbit-hole of Yelmalio by other names (such as Elmal or Antirius) had diverging cults due to historical or even God Time differences, and saw unifications of quite dissimilar cults by heroquesting.

Why would a heroquester want to change the nature of a cult? 
That’s another post – but people tend to assume that hero questers intended the specific experiences they had. But the God Time is not so easily contained or controlled. 

More often than not, these changes are made when different cultures come into contact, and new solutions are needed.

And Jeff too points out that just because we know the name of a deity we cannot predict how exactly it will manifest.

More here.

Gods, Archetypes, and the Malkioni Perspective

Jeff reflects on Gloranthan gods:

[…] Each represents an archetype present in the world, is the manifestation of the divine in the mundane world. […]

Many of these archetypes contain contradictions – the Red Goddess is tainted by Chaos, Orlanth is a destroyer and a preserver, etc. – but to me that only enhances their fascination.

Gloranthans have little concern regarding theodicy – the gods are not all-powerful, all-wise, or all-good. They are worshiped because they made the world we mortals live in, and that their cults provide a means for mortal survival within Time.

This, I think, is one of the most interesting aspects of ancient world religion: they seemed to worship gods “as they are”, and not for some sort of idealized role model or moral guide. Most Greek gods were assholes, but they served a purpose and that’s why they were worshipped. It was a very practical thing, as far as I understand. In turn, that provides many roleplaying opportunities that I have yet to explore.

One exception to this might be the Malkioni. Jeff describes their perspective like this in another note:

The Malkioni posit the existence of something all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good (or at least all-rational) – the Invisible God. That entity is invisible to us – we can’t go “visit it” or be it. This all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being does not provide any magic or indeed it does not act, speak, etc. It simply IS. But by studying the world (including the lesser gods), we mortals (or at least those who specialise in sorcery) can impose our will upon the world made by the Invisible God. And this is also good.

The Malkioni make many of the same arguments I see made [on forums and Facebook groups] – that the gods are inconsistent, that they fail to meet the same demands they place on their worshipers, that they are responsible for their degeneration of the world and the coming of Chaos. But those are Malkioni arguments – to most Orlanthi, Praxians, et al, such arguments fall on barren ground.

More here.

Heroquesting as Interaction with the Divine

Jeff re-frames heroquesting as “interacting with the divine“:

Let’s put aside the model created for the KoDP video game, and think about what a heroquest really is – it is a mortal directly interacting with the divine, outside of what is familiar (the temple, sacrifice, the safe home of your god, etc.), and making new experiences with the powers, archetypes, and events of the God Time. It is a dangerous and unpredictable thing.

Jeff first refers to the King of Dragon Pass video game, in which heroquests are reenactments of a myth: the participants try to impersonate their gods as well as they can, and then try to go through the motions of a myth they know. For instance, reenacting the myth of Issaries The Concilliator by going into the God Time and replaying through Issaries’ resolution of a conflict between two animal tribes (by the way, for more myth ideas, check out the KoDP wiki!)

This way of playing heroquests worked well for a video game, especially thanks to the replayability aspects. But it may have leaked into the RPG world with the release of Hero Wars (and its subsequent product line) the following year. This is quite likely since designers like Robin Laws worked on both games. The problem is that RPGs aren’t as conductive as video games when it comes to scripted gameplay.

Greg and I went over this a lot. And we ended up changing the way we described heroquests in order to better reflect his stories.

For RuneQuest Glorantha, it looks like Chaosium is re-framing heroquesting as, effectively, “experimental heroquesting”, where you explore the God Time in search of something new or different. “Safe heroquesting” might be what happens when, for instance, you obtain a new Rune spell. For instance, you follow the instructions given to you by a Storm Voice to go in the God Time and experience Orlanth stealing the Sandals of Darkness from the trolls. You come back with the Dark Walk Rune spell. There was little risk, because this ritual has been perfected over several generations, and you do it at a shrine or temple that has a strong connection with your god. So it’s hand-waved as “my adventurer spends a week at the Orlanth temple” and sacrificing 1 POW.

Going outside of these well-trodden paths lets you experience whatever other random thing Orlanth might have done during the God Time, and bring that back as a custom magical power:

A heroquester typically gains gifts and magic as a result of their experiences, but also banes and curses. Passions and runes may change, and the nature of their community may change as well. And remember, those changes are all unpredictable and fraught with risk. Since the end of the Second Age most people have been very reluctant to heroquest except in the most routine and traditional ways. Two notable exceptions include the Red Goddess and the Orlanth cult. And that helps drive the Hero Wars.

We’ve had a few glimpses into the ever-upcoming heroquesting rules, which indeed include mechanics to model these tropes. If you challenge God Time entities and win, you might be able to yield their magic in the mundane world. If you are defeated, you could lose parts or all of a Passion or Rune affinity, bring a curse upon your community (including probably disastrous Harvest roll modifiers), and of course die.

More here.

Lunar Spies

There isn’t any sort of “centralized spy agency” for the Lunar Empire, but there are many spy networks operating at various levels:

The Empire maintains multiple internal security and spy networks, including the Emperor’s Spoken Word, the Imperial Bodyguard, the Blue Moon Assassins, and various ad hoc groups that report directly to the Emperor’s household. Additionally, satraps, governors, and other powerful officials maintain their own network of spies, assassins, and informers. The Spoken Word also maintains a network of Imperial couriers who can relay a message 150 miles a day, and even faster if sent by Moon Boat.

This is really a snippet of text from the Guide to Glorantha, but since I’ve been looking at Lunar spies lately for my game, I figured I might as well use this opportunity to look into it a bit more!

• The Spoken Word was “inspired” by the Red Emperor around 1372. Its original mission was to uncover and monitor insurrectionists, while also cultivating a group of ultra-loyalists devoted to the Empire. This may have been in response to the loss of many territories to Sheng Seleris and various rebellions at the time.
• The Imperial Bodyguard is one of the four “corps” of the Lunar Army. It includes super bad-ass people like the Full Moon Corps (a magical regiment made of “demigod immortals” who come down from Red Moon and, when killed, go back up to be healed), and the Bloodspillers (Jar-eel’s personal regiment, dedicated to her and her “Moonsword cult”)
• Blue Moon Assassins are trolls from the Blue Moon Plateau, in the northeastern edge of the Empire. They are… well, secretive. You don’t see them coming. They have secret agendas involving the Lunar Empire and the Red Goddess. Unlike most trolls, they don’t mind the Red Moon’s association with Chaos. They have secret ways for moving around undetected. There’s not much information on them in the published material, which is probably how they like it. Fun fact: the Blue Moon is the goddess of secrets and potatoes.

Mmmh… which one of those should I send after my players? What did you say? All three? Sounds good!

Argrath and the Telmori

There’s a bit in King of Sartar indicating that Argrath might have wiped out the Telmori tribe from Sartar around 1928 (see the reference on the Well of Daliath). However, it doesn’t explain why he did so except that “King Argrath would not tolerate the wolfmen’s attacks“. Jeff provides a bit of extra information but still leaves the question open:

In 1628, encouraged by opponents of Prince Argrath, Telmori rebelled before Argrath’s army left Sartar to cross the Dragonspine. Rather than be distracted from his goal, Argrath ignored the Telmori. However, upon his return to Boldhome the following year, Argrath suppresses the Telmori uprising.

How the Telmori get suppressed is something that your campaign likely decides. Maybe Argrath sends in the Storm Bull cult and Humakti to do it, forcing the werewolves out of Dragon Pass. Maybe Argrath defeats the ringleaders and makes a new pact with the remaining Telmori. Who knows for certain, except in your campaign.

There’s also more here and here about the ties between Telmori and Sartar’s lineage (including several marriages, and friendliness with the Humakt cult). The second link even has an extra bit about how the Telmori gain their werewolf Chaos mojo:

It is the initiation that curses the Telmori, not the birthright. Since the time of Nysalor, human initiates of Telmor are werewolves tainted by Chaos to involuntarily take wolf form each Wildday. They receive the Chaos Rune at 20% but have no other Chaotic features.

So Telmori children don’t transform into werewolves and don’t have a Chaos Rune. You can find more about the Telmori from the Well of Daliath now that David Scott has nicely tagged everything, too.

Anyway, going back to Argrath and the Telmori, there are various wild theories, including the one where the Telmori don’t believe that Argrath has a legitimate claim to the throne and rebel against him. I’m not convinced, because the Telmori have had their ass kicked not too long ago and are generally anti-Lunar. They would therefore either be happy to fight with Argrath, or to just hang back and try to regain the lands they lost a generation ago… which is why I’m wondering: would their move to get Wulfsland back (taken from them by the Lunars until 1625) be seen as an act of aggression by the surrounding tribes? (who sort of have a tenuous claim to these lands too) They could therefore go to Argrath and complain that the mean wolf-people are “rebelling”. Argrath might say “ok sure I’ll take care of them“, especially if there’s something he wants that these tribes have…

Ian Cooper offers a possible solution: what these tribes have is heroquesting access to whatever is necessary to fulfill the prophecy of “bringing the aurochs back to Dragon Pass” (which is somehow key to Argrath destroying the Lunar Empire… again this is from King of Sartar) This is of course done in particular via the Cinsina tribe’s Red Cow clan, and their traditional heroquest described in Ian’s “Red Cow campaign books” (The Coming Storm and The Eleven Lights) This was Ian’s plan for these books’ sequels, so of course it’s building upon the same material. If you don’t play as part of the Cinsina, you might want to find something similar that puts your players’ community in the centre of the action!

Sartarite Architecture

If you have some questions about Sartarite buildings, Jeff has shared a snippet of text that, I assume, might be from the upcoming Sartar Homeland book.

Stone is the preferred building material in Sartar, although adobe and timber are perhaps more commonly used in rural areas. Basalt, limestone, marble, and granite are all used, depending on local availability. 

What follows are a few paragraphs about buildings in both villages and cities. There’s probably not much that’s new to any of you, but the section on urban buildings does have a short description of a middle-class freeman’s dwelling. Read it here.

What Happens When You Die

Joerg points out to me that the first half of this note is an excerpt from HeroQuest Glorantha (which is currently sadly out of print until it gets rebranded). This excerpt is quite likely to be reprinted in the Cults of RuneQuest series.

The text explains how the soul, separated from the body, lingers around for seven days (during which you can cast the Resurrect spell!) and then goes through various mystical places on the way to the Court of Silence, where you get judged by Daka Fal. There is some new text after that, about how this judgment happens, possible curses from shamans or sorcerers, the involvement of gods, getting lost and becoming a ghost, being devoured by the Void, and more… plus this:

Those few that have acquired a Hero’s soul have a permanent presence in the God Time, which can be strengthened through worship. Even though their soul may return to the world in a new body, their presence in the God Time endures—like the gods, heroes can be in more than one place at the same time.

In RuneQuest, you can acquire Hero Soul points after successfully heroquesting. This can be used to cast the magic you acquired in those heroquests.

I wonder if heroes that are reincarnated end up in a new body that doesn’t have all the same skills and magic that they had in their original body? You could play some kind of Altered Carbon game here, where bodies are just “sleeves”, and some of the game stats are tied to them vs other stats tied to your soul (like your Hero Soul powers and blessings). Plus, depending on how you were buried (e.g. you had offerings and personal items buried with you) you can bring more or less stuff back? Sounds fun to me!

More here.

Community Roundup

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

Orlanth Rex’s RuneQuest Vexes

Given the host’s name, I’m surprised it took 29 episodes to get to a Gloranthan episode, but here it is! Steve, aka “Orlanth Rex“, interviews his players (including Doc Cowie, which we interviewed ourselves previously) about their 5-year RuneQuest game.

The episode includes a few interesting discussions about what makes something “Gloranthan”, moving from RuneQuest 2nd edition to RuneQuest Glorantha to OpenQuest, using a hack of Blades in the Dark to run heists in Boldhome, and more! Listen here or in your favourite podcast app.

Exploring Glorantha Enters History

Guest section by Jörg

J-M and Evan discuss the First Age of Glorantha, and the grey period before the Dawn, known as the Silver Age in Dragon Pass and surrounding lands.

About halfway into the episode, J-M claims that theirs is “the Glorantha 101 show. For the Glorantha 200 & 300 level show, go check out the God Learners podcast.” No pressure, and thanks for the shout-out.

Tales of Tarsh Playtest

It looks like Simon Bray is playtesting some very interesting stuff… including two of my favourite things: Tarsh, and maps!

Fun with ChatGPT

Over on BRP Central, Styopa asked AI chat bot ChatGPT about Glorantha… the results are not super awesome, but they’re kinda fun to read:

In the beginning, the world was shrouded in darkness, and the gods were trapped in the underworld. The goddess Eiritha, mother of all life, decided that something had to be done to bring light to the world. She gathered together a group of heroes known as the Lightbringers and charged them with the task of bringing back the sun.

If you squint hard enough, it looks vaguely plausible… which is sort of what you get with AI-generated content in general anyway so far. At least all the gods seem to have the correct number of fingers!

Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web

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

Literature in Ancient Egypt

This article from the British Museum blog gives a glimpse of Ancient Egyptian literature, and it’s lovely! (you know, besides the part about British imperialism stealing historical artifacts from African cultures)

The picture above is an excerpt of A Tale of Two Brothers, a story that dates back to at least 13th century BCE. It’s… err… pretty messed up:

It begins by presenting an idyllic household consisting of Anubis, his wife and his brother, Bata. Their pleasant lifestyle is disrupted when the wife of Anubis unsuccessfully tries to seduce her brother-in-law. Upset by the humiliation of his refusal, she claims that Bata attacked her. Believing his wife, Anubis initially turns against his brother and forces him to leave the family. Anubis later discovers his wife’s disloyalty and kills her, and the brothers are reunited. Meanwhile the gods have fashioned a wife for Bata. Unfortunately she rejects him in favour of the king. To win her over Bata assumes a sequence of different forms, the last being a Persea tree. Bata’s wife orders the tree to be cut down. A splinter from the tree flies into her mouth, ‘she swallowed it and in a moment she became pregnant’. Bata is reborn, now as her son, and becomes king of Egypt. He elevates his brother, Anubis, to succeed him, overcoming the catastrophes that had beset the pair.

The papyrus owned by the British Museum even has an attribution to “the scribe Inena”. And speaking of scribes, the article talks about literary works being copied, preserved, and reworked from one century to the next. One of the museum’s exhibits has nine versions of one work, the “Teaching of Khety”, also known as “The Satire of the Trades“, also known as “what passes for shitposting in 13th century BCE Egypt“. The author mocks many professions. The article does have a passage from the story, but I find the other passage from Wikipedia funnier for some reason:

“His apron is mere rags and the rest-house far behind him. His arms are dead from wielding the chisel, and every measurement is wrong; He eats his food with his fingers and washes once a day”

By the way, some of the copies of the Satire were on papyrus rolls, but most have been copied on my new word of the day: ostraca.

An ostracon is a piece of pottery or stone that was broken from off and used for scratching some quick writing onto. Ancient people didn’t have post-its, but they did have shitloads of pottery. So if you needed to write something, you’d look in the “discarded pottery” basket and grab something there.

There are a couple of other Egyptian tales mentioned in the British Museum article, including some that have been reworked and adapted all the way into modern times.

Thank you for reading

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

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

There hasn’t been a Glorantha Initiation Series episode this month… my apologies! I was too busy with too many things and didn’t have time to do the audio editing. Rest assured that we have a few interviews already recorded, just waiting to be cut up in a DAW, and we have many other people patiently waiting for me to schedule something with them (if you’re one of them, again, my apologies!)

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Basic Roleplaying, Universal Game Engine

Fresh off the press, Chaosium has announced a new version of their venerable Big Gold Book, which we mentioned last week is now available in print-on-demand:

This release serves as an update to the core BRP system. Under the new Open RPG Creative License (ORC), game creators are free to use the BRP rules engine to develop their own games, royalty-free and without further permission from Chaosium.

The Big Gold Book was released as a generic system to be used by gamers at their own table, i.e. it didn’t include a license to re-use its text and terminology in other products. This new version, however, looks like it’s meant for creators, since it is released under Paizo’s ORC license. As such, I expect to see three types of changes in this book compared to the Big Gold Book:

1. The removal of mechanics that they don’t want to see in derivative products,
2. The addition of generic versions of the mechanics designed for Chaosium’s latest games (RuneQuest Glorantha, Call of Cthulhu 7th edition, Rivers of London, maybe even Lords of the Middle Sea),
3. Updated rules and texts, a few new illustrations, etc. (including, of course, the ORC license)

Of course, 1 and 2 above sound sort of contradictory but, to clarify, I expect for instance to see CoC7e-inspired rules like percentile characteristics, but not pushed rolls. This area was a bit murky under Chaosium’s previous license, so I hope this new edition of BRP clarifies things.

Worldbuilding Too Much?

This interview with John Wick isn’t directly related to Glorantha (although of course it gets referenced), but it has a lot of relevant topics to your gaming.

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!

Duckpac in Print

The first three volumes of Duckpac, the sourcebook for the best Gloranthan species, are now available in print-on-demand!

Volumes one and two are combined in one book (although, confusingly enough, you will only get the PDFs for volume one if you purchase it in dual-format… I understand why it’s like that, since it’s under the existing entry for volume one, but it’s no less confusing… get volume two’s PDFs here). This book contains all the background information on the Durulz, along with character creation rules, making it a great purchase for a player wanting to play a duck!

Volume three is the soloquest adventure, “Redfeather Dreaming”.

Note that the “player book” is a hardcover, while the soloquest is a softcover… is your OCD flaring up yet?

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.

Human Sacrifice in Glorantha

A quick answer from Jeff about human sacrifice in Glorantha:

Human sacrifice is pretty rare among the Orlanthi. The tusk riders perform it, which is one of the reasons they are so disliked. Zorak Zoran is infamous for the deaths that take place during his ceremonies.

“Pretty rare among the Orlanthi” means that it does happen sometimes. The main references I can find for this come from the now retconned HeroWars and HeroQuest material. These point to the very small cult of Ana Gor, the goddess of human sacrifice for the Orlanthi. Some say she was created when the first death occurred, which would be when Humakt killed Grandfather Mortal.

As far as I can understand, her priestesses are the only ones who can, legally and magically and cosmically speaking, lead a human sacrifice ceremony without it turning into a Chaos-fest. Orlanth and Ernalda still don’t like this, and only a few cults (Humakt, Babeester Gor, Maran Gor, etc) tolerate it under very specific, yet unspecified, circumstances.

The interesting note here for Tarsh fanboys like me is that Ana Gor can be found incarnated on Glorantha as Sorana Tor, which you might know as the co-founder of the Kingdom of Tarsh with Arim the Pauper. They started the Twins Dynasty together with their kids in the mid-1300s. She reincarnated a few more times to marry and have children with other historical figures… including possibly Argrath himself. She might have reincarnated even more times, left undocumented, so feel free to have her show up in your game!

The Tusk Riders are of course horribly awesome — we have a whole episode about them. They routinely sacrifice people for the Appease Earth Rune spell, which keeps their giant tusker boars tame. Without it, they might go back to the old days when Ernalda was pissed at them and used a giant boar to try and wipe them out… or something. The history of the Tusk Rider is (on purpose) rather murky, and that’s why they’re awesome. Again, listen to the episode!

But the Tusk Riders also kill people to turn them into spirit magic servants using the Death Binding Rune spell. This lets them use a lot more magic than their otherwise low CHA allows (well, in terms of RuneQuest mechanics). This can potentially be considered a form of human sacrifice too.

Outside of the Orlanthi and the Tusk Riders, we can find some references to human sacrifice here and there in the Guide to Glorantha. These tend to be obscure old traditions of a specific place, rather that widespread traditions of a whole culture or nation. For example, the Cursed City of Central Fronela, the cities along the banks of the Red River in Northern Kralorela, the yearly sacrifices at Natha’s Well in the Lunar satrapy of Oronin, and more.

You can easily place human sacrifice anywhere in Glorantha by having a particularly nasty spirit demanding it as a form or propitiation.

Now Hon-eel loves blood sacrifices and has deadly gladiatorial contests to satisfy her.

Hon-eel indeed loves human sacrifices, as this seems necessary to preserve a connection to some of the old Moon Goddesses, in particular Natha and Gerra. I don’t know more than what the Glorantha Sourcebook says about them:

• Gerra used to be a nasty little Moon goddess who did nasty things. Now associated with the Dying Moon Phase, she apparently likes lots of people to do nasty things to themselves.
• Natha is a Moon goddess of balance, now associated with the Empty Half Moon Phase. She likes to do opposed things, bringing Life and Death, Light and Darkness, Peanut Butter and Nutella, and so on. People sacrifice themselves and each other to her because, well, I don’t know, people are crazy like that.

Cult Relationships

Jeff clarifies what the “hostile” cult relationship means:

Some people seem to assume that mutually hostile cults simply end up murdering each other if they have an opportunity. That’s not really the case – between hostile cults, relations are strained, and the historic tension complicates peaceful dealings. There are difficult moments when hostile cults meet.

Remember that there’s a worse relationship type than “hostile cults”, and that is “enemy cults”. Funnily enough, as far as I can tell, this relationship is explained in the rulebook, but none of the core cults are actually enemies. At least I can’t find any “E” in that table page 311.

If you go check out the old Cults of Prax, however, you’ll find some enemy cults: Zorak Zoran is an enemy of Yelmalio, the Seven Mothers are enemies of Zorak Zoran, and Aldrya and Zorak Zoran are enemies of each other.

Remember that the cult compatibility table is not symmetrical! So while Yelmalio really really hates Zorak Zoran, Zorak Zoran is merely “hostile” towards it. I’m reminded of this Mad Men scene.

The Seven Mothers and Orlanth cults are mutually hostile. They can co-exist, but that co-existence is fraught with tension that sometimes spills over into violence. More often it involves the cults deliberately tuning the other out, refusing to interact with each other, segregating into separate communities, and that sort of thing.

In the cities of the Lunar Provinces, the Orlanth cult is discouraged by the ruling Seven Mothers cult, but that does not mean that there are bands of soldiers stopping the rural population from worshiping Orlanth. The Lunar Empire simply doesn’t possess the resources to do that.

There are indeed a lot of ways that to express hostility besides outright violence. Everyday racism, institutional or systemic prejudice, and biased representation are but a few ways this hostility can materialize. This is the same as with the Hate Passion, which totally doesn’t necessarily mean you have a 60% chance of wanting to kill someone.

The Seven Mothers cult can do a lot of things to “discourage” Orlanth worship without having to reach for armed soldiers. They can build tourist hotels where sacred Storm sites are (the view is great from up here!), raise taxes on Orlanthi temples (I’m sorry but your Summons of Evil rituals often cause material damages and we need to cover those costs), create discriminating rules for common services in town (your beard must be this short to get into bathhouses: it’s just good hygiene, and also our drains kept getting clogged), and so on… which, in turns, might give you ideas for fun adventures!

A Single Community of Gods

Some people were asking about the views of one pantheon’s worshipper towards another pantheon. Jeff replies by quoting Amanda Podany’s “Weavers, Scribes, and Kings“:

“Suppose a priestess had arrived in Uruk, having traveled from Northern Mesopotamia, or Iran, or even Anatolia or Egypt. Even then she would not have doubted the power of Inana. Back at home, this goddess probably had a different name, or she might not even been worshiped at all, but this didn’t make Inana a false god in the mind of the visiting priestess. No gods were false; all were members of a single community of gods that extended to all lands. They could not be separated from the world they controlled, and the products of the world all existed primarily to satisfy their needs.”

So in the ancient polytheist world, and in Glorantha, there’s no such thing as denying the existence of another person’s gods — that’s a concept that monotheist religions like Christianity popularized. You maybe question the power of another person’s god, especially in relation to yours, but both gods, and many others, exist almost as a matter of fact. Although don’t take it too far:

Note that this isn’t henotheism. You have a special connection with A deity, but that deity is not a supreme god. Not even Orlanth or Yelm makes such claims.

I’m not sure if henotheism implies anything about your god being superior to the others, but you get the idea. Jeff expands a bit on what it means in Glorantha, including:

People can and do worship all the deities that are useful to worship – but can only wield the magic of that deity they have a deep connection with through initiation. That is a much deeper and more intimate connection than merely lay worship, and few people bother with being initiated to more than one deity.

Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web

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

The Diets of Ancient Europe

Guest segment by Jörg

Dan Davis, author of a number of novels set in the Bronze Age, takes a deeper look back into prehistory and investigates the diet of these early humans. This gives a nice parallel for a number of Gloranthan cultures that are in this spectrum.

The Dragon Bones of Wadi al-Hitan

The Egyptian national park of Wadi al-Hitan has a whole bunch of fossils, including many of these dragon-looking things above. Of course they aren’t really dragons, and the name of the place gives it away if you speak Arabic: “Wadi al-Hitan” means “Valley of the Whales”.

The place is littered with aquatic fossils from the Middle Eocene period (about 45 million years ago), when North Africa was underwater (see above). These fossils are incredibly well preserved, which makes them super useful for archaeologists… and this is where it starts to get weird.

The dragon bones you see in these pictures aren’t skeletons of any sort of whale. Most of them are from an older species called Archaeoceti… a whale with four legs. Because you see, aquatic mammals evolved from land mammals who went back into the oceans.

Atlas Obscura notes:

But since their discovery in 1902, the fossils of Wadi al-Hitan have tended to raise more questions than they’ve answered. While the hundreds of archaeocete skeletons provide a rare and valuable snapshot of whales in the final stages of losing their hind limbs and transitioning to a marine existence, evolutionary biologists are still left puzzled over the identity of the whale’s earliest ancestor.

Similarities in tooth shape led to the long-held belief that whales were related to mesonychids, carnivorous hoofed mammals that closely resembled wolves. It wasn’t until 2005 that a team of American and French scientists finally discovered the missing link between whales and their closest relative, the hippopotamus. This discovery, supported by another collection of cetacean fossils located in Pakistan, placed the whale in the different taxonomic group of artiodactyls, which includes such unexpected relatives as camels, pigs, and giraffes.

If you thought Gloranthaphiles were being funny when they say things like “horses are a kind of bird“, it’s nothing compared to evolutionary biologists being able to say things like “whales are a kind of giraffe“.

You see, this kind of shit places whales in the “even-toed ungulate” taxonomic order. That is, the animals that are, or descend from those that, bear weight equally on an even number of toes. Because obviously that’s a sane way to classify animals? I don’t know, people, I’m just discovering all of this. Of course you also have the “odd-toed ungulate” taxonomic order, because at least there is method in the madness. I can’t wait to classify worms and snakes as “zero-toed ungulates” or something.

Anyway, the second category (odd number of toes) includes all the equidae (horses and zebras and so on, who use just one toe), and rhinoceroses and tapirs (who use three toes). The first category, which we’re interested in here, includes a whole bunch of animals who use two toes: swine, sheep, goats, cattle, deer, llamas, hippopotamuses, and, of course, as promised, giraffes and whales. Oh and dolphins and other cetaceans of course, because there’s nothing I wanted to learn more today than a link between the majestic dolphin and the stupid goat.

So to celebrate this momentous occasion, and because we now have a link between orcas and wild boars, I present to you my newest Gloranthan creation: the Willy Riders, the aquatic equivalent of the Tusk Riders, but they ride Killer Whales! Because WHY THE FUCK NOT AT THIS POINT?

I hope you get the reference. Plus, if your adventurer is scared of them, you can say they give you the willies.

Anyway, enough of this nonsense. Wadi al-Hitan is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and you can technically visit it, but from what I understand it’s a bit hard to get to so it doesn’t receive that many tourists every year so far.

Thank you for reading

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

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

Last week David Castle’s book-club reading of the Guide to Glorantha began, and the Glorantha Discord server got a huge influx of people for the occasion. It’s great to see familiar names and new names alike on there. David has done a great job setting up a structured discussion, with many topic prompts for you to jump on. You don’t even have to show up at a designated time, the threads are still up for you to participate in!

David was also kind enough to make us a dedicated #god-learners channel on the server, so if you want to discuss recent episodes or newsletters with us, that’s as good a place as any! You can join the Glorantha Discord server with this invite link (only valid for this week).

Chaosium News

Here are this week’s Chaosium news!

Cover for Cults of RuneQuest: Earth Goddesses

After nicely letting us get a good look at his cover for the Lightbringers book, Loic Muzy shares the cover for the Earth Goddesses book! In the process, he once again reveals who those figures are!

They are Esrola (on the left) and Pelora (on the right). I was quite wrong in my previous study of the cover… I wasn’t sure between Esrola and Voria on one side, and I stupidly thought of Hon-eel for the other goddess instead of Pelora, who is I guess the land goddess that Hon-eel channelled or something? Anyway, I was in the correct ballpark, but still wrong. That’s what you get when Joerg isn’t there to watch over me.

Basic Roleplaying is Back in Print (on Demand)

Basic Roleplaying’s “big gold book” is now available again in print-on-demand via DriveThruRPG. It had been only available in PDF for a little while, likely after the last offset printing ran out (well, maybe, see the end of this segment)

This isn’t directly Glorantha related but since the Basic Roleplaying system (“BRP”) was invented with the first edition of RuneQuest, it’s sort of indirectly related. This “big gold book” basically takes what Chaosium learned with their many earlier games (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Magic World, Elfquest, Stormbringer, and many more) and puts it all in a generic rulebook full of options for your BRP games. It’s got a buffet of various rules for magic, combat, psychic abilities, super powers, meta-currencies, and so on… If you’re unhappy with a particular aspect of a BRP game, there’s a good change the big gold book has some alternate rules for you.

If you want to get cheeky, you could consider its “previous edition” to be the 16 pages booklet that was found in several Chaosium boxed sets in the early 1980s (pictured below)

Be warned that the big gold book is, let’s say, of a certain era. It dates from 2008, which isn’t that old, but this firmly predates Chaosium’s current era of the lush colour books. It is entirely black and white, with art of varying quality. Its layout is basic and arguably dated, although I genuinely love the baffling & cute “binary notation” of the chapters in the page bleeds. And of course it presents a 1980s game system complemented with, mostly, 1990s optional rules, so, well, manage your expectations.

But if you play more than a couple of Chaosium games, who likely all share this BRP DNA, you might very well find this book interesting! Check it out here, but note that US customers can order it directly via Chaosium. I have no idea if these are leftovers from a previous print run or if they are a new printing, and if so whether they’re from Lightning Source (which handles DriveThruRPG’s POD)

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!

Old Pavis: The City that Time Forgot

Ian Thomson and friends have released the second volume of the “Pavis & Big Rubble Companion, Director’s Cut”! The first volume was “New Pavis: City on the Edge of Forever“, and the new one is “Old Pavis: The City that Time Forgot“.

This material had originally been published in the series of “Pavis & Big Rubble Companions” in the early 2000s (see here and here). These are quite hard to find, these days. Ian Thomson has been tracking down many contributors to get their approval for a re-release, and along the way things have been edited and expanded.

Anyway, do you want expanded cult write-ups, city gazetteers and maps, character generation options, and scenarios set in and around Pavis? Of course you do! Grab this 240 pages tome of classic RuneQuest goodness here!

Call Up the Fyrd

Zed Nope continues their collection of Gloranthan stock art with some militia members drawn in “loose sketchy style”. You can use this art for your Jonstown Compendium or personal projects (with conditions).

Two Reviews for Children of Hykim

Brian Duguid’s Children of Hykim (the topic of episode 17 of our podcast) gets reviewed not just once but twice in as many weeks!

The first review comes from good ol’ Pookie and his inevitable Reviews From R’lyeh. Besides a “terrible, unforgivable pun”, Pookie sounds quite happy with the book:

The Children of Hykim is superbly researched and richly detailed examination of the Hsunchen and their world and world view, which although very much falling under the category of ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’, really feels as that should not be case, that it should be an official release. It may not be the official guide to the Hsunchen, but The Children of Hykim feels like the definitive guide until there is one. 

He does note of course that the topic and scope of the book may or may not be of immediate interest to your campaign.

The second review comes from equally good but not as ol’ Austin Conrad. As usual, Austin includes his “armchair vs tabletop” rating for the book, which tells you if this is more of a research/reference book for the gamemaster, or something you’d bring to the table and use during play. In this case, Austin would place it “closer to the armchair side”. The review is extremely positive, and as a complement to Pookie’s review, adds:

Children of Hykim shouldn’t be seen as a niche book about a niche culture. It’s a beautiful resource work which any gamemaster could utilize with ease in their own Glorantha.

Get the book here! The latest update (to celebrate reaching Electrum Best Seller) includes a full transcript of our podcast episode with Brian!

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.

Yelmalio and Elmal Again

You could bet your hat that, with the recent announcement of the Cults of RuneQuest books, somebody would be asking about this whole Yelmalio/Elmal business again… like, for instance, whether Elmal would show up in the Lightbringers book. Of course, he isn’t: it’s just Yelmalio, and he will be in the Sun Gods’ books, with a small sub-cult mention for Elmal.

Still, Jeff took the time to answer, and gave another summary you may find interesting about the history of the cult:

There is no Elmal v. Yelmalio. They are the same god, same archetypes, and fit in the same place in cosmic mythology. We all know Yelmalio – he’s that last light that survived after the Sun went to the Underworld. He’s in the night sky as Lightfore, the brightest planet in the heavens, which follows the same route as the Sun. 

In much of central Genertela, we have a network of Sun Dome temples which anchor the Yelmalio cult. We’ve got several in Dragon Pass, several more in Saird, one in Prax, a few in Aggar and Talastar, etc. Let’s say altogether that network has about 160,000 or so initiates. That’s a BIG cult. The cult really got rolling in the early Second Age, when it helped break the power of the trolls (lets call it the “mini-Darkness” following the Gbaji Wars).

After the Dragonkill War, the Hendriki of Heortland were cut off from that. And the Orlanth cult was SO predominant in Hendrikiland, their tiny Yelmalio cult found ways to claim an association with Orlanth to survive. They harkened back to the Dawn Age Orlanthi, when Yelmalio was worshiped in conjunction with Orlanth as “Elmal”.

But with the Resettlement of Dragon Pass in the 1400s and the resumption of trade with Peloria in the 1500s, the truncated (Y)Elmal(io) cult came into contact with Yelm (the Lunars helped with this). They looked to magical riches of Yelm and started joining that cult – and they started a civil war in Sartar against the Orlanth Rex cult. Monrogh went to the Hill of Gold and saw the fullness of Yelmalio. Yelmalio is Neutral towards Orlanth, and as long as Orlanth respects Yelmalio’s place in the world, Yelmalio can respect Orlanth’s. And guess what guys? We are already initiates of Yelmalio! No need to try to tie ourselves into pretzels trying to initiate to Yelm – we are already Yelmalio!

For the sake of people who really loved the KoDP video game, we kept a small Elmal subcult as a possibility in the Yelmalio cult writeup, but as far as I am concerned, that subcult is maybe a generation away from being extinct.

Jeff provides many more precisions and comments about Yelmalio, Elmal, and their relationships to other deities in the thread, showing pretty good patience with dead horse floggers. From what I can tell, it seems to really boil down to Elmal being a mostly King of Dragon Pass creation, and some of the official Gloranthan material ran with it to some extent as a “thank you” to David Hall.

Old HeroQuest players may also want to take note of this:

Elmal does not have fire powers. I screwed up in the description in Sartar KoH.

You won’t be surprised to know that the thread received a massive amount of traffic (more than I can follow) and was eventually locked by the forum admins. Gloranthaphiles gotta argue, I guess.

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to celebrate the 30 years anniversary of this essay by Greg Stafford about the “Birth of Elmal” or “Why I screwed up your Glorantha”!

The Spread of Cults and Temples

As an offshoot of the previously mentioned thread, Jeff compiled a few examples of how initiates of a cult can get worship services from a wide range of temples across Glorantha. He uses the RuneQuest Glorantha pre-generated characters as examples for this. So when it comes to Orlanth, we look at Vasana’s experience:

Vasana was initiated into the cult of Orlanth Adventurous (Vinga) at the major temple of the Colymar tribe (as is common). As an initiate she offers worship to Orlanth at all sorts of temples and shrines to the god and his aspects throughout Dragon Pass, Pavis, and the Holy Country. Vasana has traveled from Clearwine to Ralios and had no trouble offering sacrifices to Orlanth in the countless temples and shrines to the god along the way. Normally she recognises the regalia, the accoutrements, and the songs in Storm Speech – this stuff has been carried throughout Genertela over the last sixteen centuries.

On the other hand, Nathem is used to only worshipping Odayla the Bear God at a few shrines here and there between Tarsh and Sartar. But things change when he travels further north:

He travels to Syllila where there is a large and organised cult with as many people as the entire adult population of the Tarsh Exiles. It is an eye-opener, with new stories, new myths, and more. So Nathem keeps wandering, and eventually makes his way to Fronela. There he encounters the Rathor cult – and Nathem tries worship the Great Brown Bear there. Does he succeed or is that the point where the differences are too great? Dunno, sounds like a fun part of that campaign though!

The note also has a third example featuring a character named Berensor who was initiated into… the Elmal cult! Go read his short story, and that of his grandson Varthanic, to learn how initiates of Elmal and Yelmalio experience different temples in different regions.

The only annotation worth making for this is to say that the “Amber Fields” (mentioned in Berensor’s story) is the name of the location of the Sun Dome Temple in Southern Sartar. You can see it labelled riiiiiight at the bottom of left the “Map of Northern Sartar” from the RuneQuest Starter Set:

The 15 Sun Dome Temples

Jeff had already written, a long time ago, about the 15 Sun Dome temples found in Central Genertela around the time of the Hero Wars. Since Yelmalio was very much in fashion last week, he wrote again about it:

There are 15 autonomous Sun Dome Temples of the Yelmalio cult. The temples are uniformly shaped, although many vary somewhat in surprise. The most important Sun Dome Temples are generally considered to be that of Dragon Pass (in Sartar) and Saird (Mirin’s Cross).

There is a bit more information, including how important the Yelmalio cult is in the Lunar Provinces.

Tarsh

It’s map time! Look at this wonderful bit of the upcoming Dragon Pass map… oh my. And the funny place names like “Stop Here” and “Ferry”.

Jeff gives a high level view of Tarsh, with its Lunar colonies centred around Furthest and Dunstop:

These colonies are overwhelmingly Lunar in character – in the city of Furthest almost half the adult population are initiates of Lunar cults, and in the rural areas around Furthest that percentage rises to more than half the population. Think the Greek colonies in Central Asia – these Tarshites are self-consciously Lunar. And not as converts to the Lunar Way – they likely claim (often spurious) ancestry going back to those who followed Hon-eel in the Fifth Wane, and the Maize Goddess is very popular there (indeed on the maps you can see this area as the Maize Belt).

Bagnot and Slavewall are different: they’re at the edge of the Empire’s Glowline, and have been properly conquered by the Lunars only in the past couple generations:

Bagnot in contrast has less than a quarter the city population initiated into a Lunar cult, but more than a quarter are initiates of Orlanth. In the rural areas around Bagnot, the Lunar percentage drops to less than 10%, while the Orlanth cult membership stays the same (increased percentages of Ernalda, Maran Gor, Babeester Gor, and Humakt make up the difference). Bagnot more resembles Lunar Occupied Sartar than it does the area around Furthest.

There is a lot more material in the note including a look at general politics of the region, Fazzur Wideread, why the Orlanth cult isn’t completely wiped out, the difference between Tarsh and Sartar, and more.

Holay

Let’s keep going north!

Directly north of Tarsh is Holay, which includes Mirin’s Cross, the great Daughter’s Road from Jillaro to Filichet, and several Sun Dome Temples. Holay is the most populous of the Lunar Provinces, with some 600,000 inhabitants, of whom 400,000 are adults. Some 120,000 are initiates of the Lunar Way, including 24,000 followers of Hwarin Dalthippa.

I’ve officially run out of time to analyze these notes, but I appreciate with summary of the Lunar Provinces’ political dynamic:

So again, you can see the common pattern in the Lunar Provinces – a Lunar core, probably originally settlers from the Heartlands, allied with Solar cultists and assisted by the Provincial Army, are able to keep the Orlanthi in check.

The “Solar cultists” mentioned here include a few thousand Yelm (and other) initiates, but mostly a whole bunch of Yelmalio follows. Forty thousands of them… changing their loyalties would greatly change the local balance of power!

The Grazelands

Like I said, I’ve run out of time for analyzing these notes (in exchange you get some stuff on marble quarries later in the newsletter!), but if you’re interested in the Grazelands, here’s some information, including how much of a political powerhouse the Feathered Horse Queen is:

The dominant cult in the Grazelands is Ernalda, with some 9250 initiates out of a total adult population of around 26,000. The Ernalda cult dominates the Grazelands like no place outside of Esrolia. The Feathered Horse Queen is the high priestess of the cult, and also recognized as the high priestess of Kero Fin for Dragon Pass. She is closely associated with the Maran Gor and Babeester Gor cults (with another 1575 initiates in the Grazelands between both cults). Even more impressively, Feathered Horse Queen is the focus of loyalty of the Humakt cult of the Grazelands, with another 1325 initiates. Together these cults serve as bodyguards, enforcers, and dangerous reminders of the power of the Feathered Horse Queen.

The Feathered Horse Queen (and Ernalda) is courted by both Yelm, represented by the semi-nomadic horse-riding “Pony Breeders” that you can play in RuneQuest Glorantha, and Orlanth, represented by the Barntar-worshipping farmers of the region.

Jeff explains in the note how the first Queen established a compromise between these two factions in order to prevent one exterminating the other, goes over her marriages, explains how her heroquesting helped establish her claim to power, and more!

There is also this extra note on the Pure Horse People in general: not just the Grazelanders but also the main two tribes from Pent.

Miscellaneous Notes

• Dragon Pass Pantheons: the rough membership numbers for the various pantheons map fairly well to the release order of the cults books!
• Cult Demographics of the Lunar Empire: a closer look at membership numbers for the Lunar Empire. Those are big numbers, with the big pantheons being more than a match for each other. Just don’t piss off the Earth Goddesses.

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.

OpenQuest Updates their SRD

In these days of exciting gaming legal news, D101 Games has announced that the OpenQuest SRD would now simply be using a Creative Commons license.

The OQ SRD is now CC BY and has been updated with the amends to the 2nd Printing, as has the downloadable text version. The POD version is currently being updated to the 2nd printing, will be available again in about a week or so.

We’re also expecting some license changes for Chaosium’s own BRP SRD, but if you want to make a game based on a slightly simpler RuneQuest-inspired D100 system, you might as well check out OpenQuest and even SimpleQuest (from the same authors)

Newt Newport’s RuneQuest Campaigns

Speaking of D101 Games, Newt Newport (who is both the founder of D101 Games and a giant Glorantha nerd) has updated his “Arkat’s Playground” blog with a list of his RuneQuest campaigns across the ages…

This is quite the list, with many unusual parts of Glorantha being explored in total “Your Glorantha Will Vary” ways. A lot of it sounds awesome, and some of it was written and published, although it might be tricky to find these days.

Did you run some really uncommon Gloranthan games? Then you should write a little something about them and share it with the rest of us!

Lee O’Connor Draws Some Black Elves

As you might already know, Lee O’Connor (which we interviewed on the podcast) is drawing some Voralans for an upcoming book by Brian Duguid. If you’re curious, you can watch him at work here on Instagram! With any luck, he will do more live-drawing sessions in the future…

In the meantime, check out these Black Elf jokes, also by Brian Duguid, complemented by some quick cartoony doodles by yours truly.

Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web

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

Ancient Greek Jewellery

I had previously posted a quick thing about ancient jewellery, but here’s a bit more. This list of Ancient Greek bling showcases the sophistication of Iron Age artists and crafters.

For instance, the gold hairnet above is from the 3rd century BCE, with a centre relief of Artemis, the goddess of hunting, wilderness, childbirth, and childcare (among a few other hats).

These golden wreaths above (the second being only a fragment) demonstrate the kind of very fine crafting that was possible at the time (also in the 3rd century BCE) By the way, I can’t read about “wreaths” without thinking about “wraiths”, so if some haunted jewellery shows up in my games, you’ll know why.

Can I interest you in learning my new words of the day? This above is a “Carnelian Intaglio”, a very popular (although luxurious) sort of jewellery that consisted of a carved gemstone mounted on necklaces and rings.

The first term, “carnelian”, refers to the carnelian mineral often used to make these pieces. Carnelian had been used for fancy stuff dating back to the 4th or even 5th millennium BCE, and I imagine that long distance traders across Europe and the Near East had quite a bunch of those rocks in their bags. Since wax doesn’t stick to carnelian, it was also a popular material for making seals, including Assyrian cylinder seals and Egyptian scarabs. You know… the kind of stuff that spies might want to steal.

The second term, “intaglio”, is actually in the dictionary. It’s “an engraving or incised figure in stone or other hard material depressed below the surface so that an impression from the design yields an image in relief.“

Anyway, the intaglio above dates, again, from the 3rd-to-1st century BCE, and features the head of Medusa. If you look for Ancient Roman or Greek carnelian intaglios in your favourite online image search, you’ll find a whole bunch more.

The last type of jewellery I didn’t know about are “cameos”, such as this Gonzaga cameo above (guess what, it’s also from around the 3rd century BCE, what a coincidence!)

My third new word of the day (what a day!) is therefore “cameo“, not in the classical superhero meaning of “have you seen Stan Lee’s cameo in Spider-Man Homecoming?“, but in the even more classical engraving meaning of, basically, the inverse of an intaglio. Intaglios have a “negative image”, i.e. the engraving is carved into the gemstone. In contrast, cameos have a “positive image”, i.e. they are a sort of bas-relief that “comes out” of the gemstone. You can find more examples of cameos here.

It’s not clear who the two figures are on the Gonzaga cameo above… they have been identified with several famous Hellenistic and Roman figures. But it sure looks pretty.

For more Ancient Greek jewellery, including bracelets and armbands, see here.

Carrara Marble

One of the many things I’d like to feature more in my Gloranthan games is evidence that the world of Glorantha is inhabited by people who work, play, create, and, well, live there. This includes “bits of ecosystems” such as, say, what goes into making these wonderful Esrolian or Lunar palaces with marble columns and floors or whatever you have in your Glorantha. From the people cutting blocks of marble, to those trading and transporting them, and then the artists and architects and priests involved in the final buildings, there are many opportunities for adventures and shenanigans…

But more importantly, marble quarries are super photogenic places for setting up an action scene! Imagine jumping up and down these giant blocks, smashing enemies into these grey walls, blowing up chunks of them with magic! Who cares about architecture or mineralogy, I want to blow some shit up! Yay!

Carrara marble takes its name from the city of Carrara in Tuscan, Italy (see the red dot above) where there are more than 650 quarry sites. Marble has been extracted from that area from all the way back to Ancient Rome. Romans really loved this beautiful white marble and called it “Lunar marble”, in reference to the moon. Guess who, in Glorantha, might have a similar name for a similarly popular type of marble, eh?

It get even better in terms of parallels, because the story goes that the Romans took possession of the mountains around these quarries in about 180 BCE after fighting off the Celtic tribes that lived there… sounds familiar? Of course, those Celtic hillbillies weren’t mining the mountains, and just living there. The Romans only later realized what they were sitting on, and marble excavation most likely started around 155 BCE.

Many Roman landmarks standing today are made of Carrara marble, including the Pantheon and Trajan’s Column (pictured above), which is made of 20 marble drums each weighing about 32 tons.

I haven’t found much information about how big those quarries were during the time of the Romans. I doubt they were as mind-boggling big as they are nowadays, thanks to all these machines we have… but even if you scale these quarries down, they must have been fairly sizable in the ancient world.

This article on the Carrara quarries mentions:

Once upon a time the extraction of the marble was entrusted to slavery, and their techniques remained unchanged for thousands of years. In the beginning, the miners exploited the natural fissures of the rock, and inserted wooden wedges.  These were then wet with water: their swelling, caused by the natural expansion of the wood, would cause the marble block to detach from the mountain. The Romans used metal chisels to cut blocks with a depth of about 2 meters. Metallic chisels were inserted into cuts about 20cm (around 9 in) deep, and after much continuous hammering, the block was separated from the mountain. Then, to cut the block into smaller slabs, two men would use a large handsaw while a mixture of water and silica was poured onto the block to facilitate the cutting process. It’s incredible to think that, each day, only about 8cm would be cut, and it could take up to two years from extracting the marble to transporting it to the coast.

[…]

Once the marble blocks were cut away from the mountain, another challenge lay ahead: how to transport the marble down the mountain, to the sea port. One of the most dangerous jobs in working in the marble quarries was to be involved in the transport. The marble blocks weighing about 30 tons had to be carefully transported down very steep slopes on a sleigh-type structure that would slide on wooden beams greased with soap. Ropes were used by about 10-12 men to try and control the marble and to resist the pull of gravity. Two other men had the job of transferring the beams from the back to the front and you can imagine how often accidents happened: many men were killed. Oxen were also used and the work was so strenuous for them that often they would die along the way.

You can find some pictures or illustrations of this kind of process, like for instance this 1852 illustration of Carrara workers. In Glorantha, the process might be facilitated by magic, from spells that increase strength and stamina, to elemental spirits commanded to help, and more. How much of this happens might vary greatly depending on your own take on the setting, of course, including how “high magic” it is.

If you want to look at more big white blocks of rocks, you can check out this short documentary on Greek marble quarries. It gives a good idea of how big and heavy marble is, and you can sort of extrapolate backwards from how the excavators work to imagine how people did it by hand a long time ago:

There might even be some historical movies featuring old excavation techniques? The Agony and The Ecstasy, an old Charlton Heston movie about Michelangelo, features Renaissance-era marble excavation. You can spot a few scenes in this trailer:

I’m not saying that the Romans would have used the same techniques, or even that this movie is historically accurate (it’s probably not), but I’m saying it gives ideas for how to include this sort of location into a dramatic story! It might be missing a scene with magical lightning blowing up half the quarry, though. You’ll have to imagine that yourself, but it shouldn’t be too hard?

The Alps around Carrera is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and you can visit some of the marble quarries on your own. Of course, multiple tour operators have organized visits too, such as this one. If you’ve been there, please share your pictures!

Thank you for reading

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