Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.
Chaosium News
Here are this week’s Chaosium news!
More Battle of Queens Aftermath
The Chaosium “house campaign” continues (and concludes) the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Queens. This is a pretty uneventful session, with some spider worship and sacrifice (hidden behind some “line and veil” to not disturb the arachnophobic players), some Sartarite politics in the background, and a great example of having a character’s Passions change during play (you may want to listen to our last podcast episode on this topic if you haven’t already!).
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!
Bearwalkers
Jamie Revell continues to look at the western Genertela with a short sourcebook on the Rathori, the “werebears” of Glorantha. Bearwalkers describes the titular people’s culture, society, religion, magic, and mythology. It has some material to create Rathori characters, useful for both RuneQuest and QuestWorlds. It also has a gazeteer of Rathorela.
Cups of Clearwine in Softcover
Beer With Teeth’s upper-class follow-up to Dregs of Clearwine is now available in print-on-demand! Cups of Clearwine describes a neighborhood of the Colymar tribal center in detail, with everything you can expect from such a sourcebook: NPCs and their households, maps and plot hooks, shops and more!
More Teasing for The Black Spear
Nick Brooke continues to threaten us with releasing his gonzo communist Hero Wars saga called The Black Spear on the Jonstown Compendium. It sounds like it might happen next month, and it sounds like it’s going to be a pretty sizable book! My money is ready.
Community Roundup
The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.
The Glass Cannon Plays RuneQuest, Part 2
I found this session a lot better than the first one, probably because all the players are getting in the groove of the difficult system that is RuneQuest. There is some good roleplaying happening, especially around magic and Passions, Joh Mith (of Griffin Mountain fame) gets a cameo, and the scent of Chaos is in the air. I’m looking forward to the third and final session to what looks to be the first scenario of the RuneQuest starter set!
RPG Imaginings’ Starter Set Unboxing
RPG Imaginings gives us a nice little surprise in these trying times with a (sponsored) unboxing video of the upcoming RuneQuest Starter Set! We already had seen quite a few pictures of its contents so there aren’t any big surprises here, but we do get glimpses of some occasional original art, NPC portrait, or whatever. I agree with the host that it’s really nice that Chaosium included a “What’s Not In the Box” blurb in the introduction sheet!
If you’re wondering how spoiler-free the video is, note that the SoloQuest and Adventure booklets are skipped except for the first couple pages, so you’re pretty safe, except maybe for the Rainbow Mounds player map near the end. The rules and setting booklets are flipped through so we see a few major Jonstown NPCs, locations, and items, but I don’t think any of these would qualify as spoilers. The rest of the running time is spent looking at the new gorgeous pre-generated character folios, accessories like the Strike Rank tracker, and the Northern Sartar Map.
Jess McDonell’s Starter Set Unboxing
If you want a much shorter video, you can also check out Jess McDonell’s own quick unboxing here! This is only a minute and a half though so you’ll only see very quick glimpses of the contents, but Jess says she’ll “hopefully” play this on her channel very soon.
A New Griselda Story is Coming
It looks like Fabian Küchler is currently editing and laying out a new Griselda story written, as usual, by Oliver Dickinson! We don’t know much about this story besides the title, and the fact that it may be longer than all the previous stories.
You can get all the original Griselda stories in PDF from Chaosium. There were a few other Griselda stories published as Kraken Chapbooks (like this upcoming one) that were also available from Chaosium, but they seem to have been taken down as part of the HeroQuest branding apocalypse. As far as I can tell, they are currently not available anywhere, but we can assume they will come back once the QuestWorlds rebranding has happened.
A List of Gloranthan Free-forms
Our own God Learner librarian has started a list of all the Glorantha “freeforms” known to have been played. We should really have an episode about those freeforms at some point, and especially what they are in the first place. I’m going to trigger Joerg into bumping that up the schedule by saying: as far as I know, they’re just another term for LARP. Let’s see if that motivates him…
If you have information that’s missing from the list, please comment on the RPGGeek page, or contact us directly.
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.
Undead Centaur, and Other Skeletons
Morgue Miniatures is running a Kickstarter for a variety of skeleton figurines, including an undead centaur which, apparently, is inspired by the RuneQuest adventure The Smoking Ruin.
On Shamanism in the Real World
This TEDx talk by Phil Borges talks briefly about real-world shamans, which is interesting to Gloranthaphiles for obvious reasons. Sadly, the audio mixing is horrible (check out the second highest comment under the video!). If you can’t stand it, there is a roughly equivalent text interview of Borges here. Thanks to Andrew Logan Montgomery and Jeff DE Luna for the links.
Making, Trading, and Consuming Phoenician Wine
This in-depth article will tell everything you need about wine in the Ancient World to spice up your game with cool details! For instance:
In antiquity, wine could be consumed unmixed, diluted with water or with the addition of other ingredients such as honey, spices, herbs or tree resins, which seasoned, enhanced and changed the taste of wines, improving their conservation, flavour, and psychoactive properties.
Maybe it’s time to check back on that Issaries trader interview document we found not too long ago in our tower… Thanks to Jeff Richard for the link.
Thank you for reading
That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!