This time we interview Gloranthan newcomer Joel Bridge, who thinks we’re intimidating but also nice! Joel is originally from New Jersey but currently lives in San Diego. You can find Joel on Discord as @sirjamesfriendofthecolonel, and also sometimes on the Glorantha-related subreddits r/Glorantha and r/RuneQuest.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (26.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

For this new initiation series episode we are happy to welcome Aaron King!

• Aaron is the designer of SpeedRune, an OSR-esque rules-light game of Gloranthan community adventures. Get it here, it’s free!
• There are even now a few supplements available for SpeedRune, including some things we discuss in this episode. Check out Aaron’s itch.io store!
• Aaron also co-hosts a TTRPG podcast called “RTFM” with Maxwell Lander. If you’ve ever dealt with the Linux and open-source community in your life, you definitely know what this acronym stands for… Anyway, Aaron and Maxwell read and discuss various game books, including RuneQuest in their September episode.
• You can also find Aaron on Twitter (while that still exists).

Show Notes

Things we discuss in this episode include:

• Minnesota being the “real birthplace of RPGs” (since that’s where Dave Arnison is from), and not Wisconsin (where Gary Gygax lived).
• Reading Dragon Magazine and figuring out how RPGs work from that.
• Playing D&D 3.5 and 4.0, and then moving on directly to full-on narrative games like Fiasco, Polaris, Firefly (and the Cortex system), Powered by the Apocalypse games, and more.
• Discovering Glorantha with King of Dragon Pass and loving the setting, with its faction play.
• Reading RQ2 Classic… but Aaron thought it was missing something, like it was referencing things the reader didn’t know.
• Finding a copy of HeroWars, which Aaron felt was “more accessible”.
• Treating the Big Rubble as Fortnite.
• Getting some Second Age books from the old Mongoose RuneQuest line, and also the newer RuneQuest Glorantha rulebook.
• A lot of players are put off by the size of Glorantha, and expectations of “homework” don’t help. See also: how the Marvel Cinematic Universe now “forces” you to watch many other movies and TV series to follow what’s going on.
• Trying to simplify Glorantha to just “you are part of a clan”. Introducing elements one by one from there.
• Aaron loves ducks in comics, and loves ducks in Glorantha.
• Aaron runs his campaign using SpeedRune, a free rules-lite system that he wrote. It’s inspired by Sledgehammer, a simplified version of Warhammer FRPG, and Cybermetal 2012. Player rules are on the character sheet, like in PbtA games.
• The appeal of seasonal games, like Pendragon and Sagas of the Icelanders, and the passage of time with PCs becoming old and having kids. This lets players make decisions on a grander scale of time.
• Expansions to SpeedRune are coming (some of them having been released since we recorded), including more Runes, and a non-Gloranthan expansion that lets you play in a campy ancient world setting inspired by the classic Xena/Hercules TV series.
• Speedrune is easily hacked, and able to bring material from other bronze age fantasy sources besides Glorantha.
• In SpeedRune, the GM never rolls. The D100 roll defines success, but also one dice is used for damage and the other for “fate”. Combat is pretty quick, but healing is not as easy as in RQG so there’s a slow decline over a season, inciting the player to go in downtime. Because rolls are all player-facing, there is not sitting around while the GM rolls attacks and parries and damage and location for each of the 8 orcs attacking the players.
• The community gets a character sheet like in Blades in the Dark or HeroQuest Glorantha, which is used during downtime actions.
• Building your clan and finding a campaign framework.
• Being a “Glorantha varies extremist”. Aaron starts very small. He lets the players build their community and participate in the world-building, at least a few days’ travel around of the adventurers’ home. The Lunar Empire probably exists but Aaron also wants to include other fun things like Tanith Lee’s “ancient horny demon kings that come at night”.
• Aaron likes the Second Age books from the Mongoose RuneQuest line written by Robin Laws. He especially likes the idea of the magic religious pyramid scheme that the Empire of the Wyrms Friends setup.
• Using Glorantha as a big sandbox of cool ideas rather than as canon… possibly because it’s still all new. Aaron has encyclopedic knowledge of other settings like the Elder Scrolls, so it’s not a universal approach. And it probably also explains why Aaron got hooked with Glorantha, since a lot of it has influenced the world of the Elder Scrolls via people like Ken Rolston.
• One crazy element from Aaron’s Glorantha: an Iron God had its heart pulled out by a jealous dirt god. The heart was grabbed by a goose that was flying by, and it bled over the ground, leaving veins of iron in the ground. Where the goose dropped the heart is a large crater with a big giant metal heart in it, which some people try to exploit and guard jealously.
• Heroquesting as a reversal of roles between GM and player. Aaron says that “Heroquesting seems difficult” (ho ho ha ha). In SpeedRune, Aaron has the GM roll, and the players not, which is a total reversal of the usual mechanics. In fact, during Heroquests, the GM has to roll above the player skills, like a mirror reality. Aaron isn’t super happy yet about it however, and might tweak it further.
• One PC in Aaron’s game seems to have ascended as a star.
• Aaron like the multiple points of view of the people of Glorantha.
• Having a world reference outside of the mechanics. Aaron has good hopes about the (since then released) Cults of RuneQuest Prosopaedia. However, we also recommend the Glorantha Sourcebook to him, and maybe Trollpak since he likes trolls.
• We briefly talk about the very old RQ2 Source Pack books with several pages of stats. We also talk about Balastor’s Barracks and its nonsensical dungeon. We even talk about old horrible comicbooks drawn by Rob Liefield.
• Aaron reiterates his love for the Robin Laws/ Second Age books…. and even possibly recommends the main one as a first contact with Glorantha!
• There’s a trope of “ancient amazing empires long gone” in fantasy settings, and sometimes you do want to play in those times. If these were indeed amazing times, maybe that should be when and where games should be set! And these old MRQ books allow for that.
• The main MRQ Second Age book also provides information in a contained way, in one book, whereas a lot of Glorantha information is usually spread across many other books in other product lines. This Second Age book might also show the weirdness of Glorantha better than other books.
• Aaron talks about being a weird obsessive kid who would read the Marvel Comics encyclopedia entries first, and then the comic books second, and sometimes be disappointed that a certain story arc wouldn’t be as cool as it looked in the encyclopedia.
• Aaron asks about elements for which the canon has several versions of events/truths/etc based on different people’s perspectives, but no “official, objective answer”. Ludo talks about the origin of the Tusk Riders. Joerg briefly mentions the end of the Second Age, some other things like the nature of Yelmalio, and myths in general.
• We end as Aaron literally orders Trollpak, and talk about the myth of trolls as political refugees.

Credits

The intro music is “Dancing Tiger” by Damscray. The outro music is “Islam Dream” by Serge Quadrado. Other audio is from the FreeSound library.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (29.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

This new initiation episode features Matt, a school teacher who recently moved to Virginia and does the Lord of Chaos’ good work by introducing kids to roleplaying games.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (31.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (28.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

After a hiatus last month we are back with another Glorantha Initiation episode in which we interview a newcomer to the tribe. This time, Ludo is by himself due to some scheduling issue with Joerg (it was Ludo’s fault), interviewing Michael Bernth.

Michael lives in Europe’s first… no, second (probably?) happiest country. He is a multi-skilled designer (among other things) so if you’re working on a Jonstown Compendium book, he might be able to help with some InDesign layout work!

• Michael is on Twitter and Mastodon
• Michael’s portfolio
• Michael’s design company

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• Miniatures of the 1980s
• Comics like Conan the Barbarian (Barry Windsor-Smith’s run) or Prince Valiant
• Ivanhoe (1952)
• D&D Basic and Expert, followed by Advanced D&D
• Going bananas with RPGs: Traveller, Bushido, Golden Heroes, Rolemaster, and more
• Games Workshop’s RuneQuest and Broos miniatures
• Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, GURPS, Delta Green
• Avalon Hill RuneQuest, Sun County, River of Cradles
• The Grognard Files podcast and coming out of the “deep freeze”
• Jonstown Compendium, and in particular the Sandheart series
• Playing in Prax
• Not throwing too much at the players
• How to put all the lore and metaplot events in the game
• Dealing with the metaplot the same way you treat real history in Call of Cthulhu adventures
• Not being so precious about the lore
• Lots of gold lying around in the Glorantha materials… pick it up and do what you want with it
• Playing with new fantasy tropes, different from the usual Tolkienesque stereotypes
• Playing with rich cultures, mythology, and cults
• Glorantha is not about good vs evil or even order vs chaos
• Chaos is great, it can add a touch of horror in your fantasy game
• Where to start? Are there actually too many places to start?
• Lack of knowledge to “hang yourself onto”
• Broos are problematic, Morokanths may need tweaking
• Handwaving rules like ENC, varying crunch based on the story
• Spirit combat easily gets into a dealock, possession can lead to player agency issues, shamanism and sorcery rules are complicated, and… how does heroquesting even work?
• The rulebook has many editing issues, and its index could be improved
• Wishing for spell cards, god cards, and a Gloranthan tarot deck. But overall, wishing for Gloranthan novels and short story collections
• Romulus TV show

…and more!

Credits

The intro music is “Dancing Tiger” by Damscray. The outro music is “Islam Dream” by Serge Quadrado. Other audio is from the FreeSound library.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (30.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

In this episode of our Glorantha Initiation Series, we had the absolute pleasure of talking to Lee O’Connor. He came to Glorantha during the initial pandemic lockdown by way of his love for mythology and the fact that his middle-aged British gamer friends wanted to recapture the joy of their youth by playing RPGs again.

We apologize for Lee’s squeaking and cracking chair, which causes some background noise during the interview.

Where to Find Lee

This is where you’ll find Lee online:

• Personal website, and blog
• Instagram feed
• Twitter and Facebook
• Fionn Mac Cumhaill Graphic Novel
• RuneQuest campaign wiki (the PCs’ village is “Stoneroot”)
• All of Lee’s Gloranthan art is in this Facebook photo set

Lee contributed some art to the Duckpac sourcebooks for RuneQuest Glorantha.

Lee also has some more upcoming stuff for RuneQuest:

• Upcoming black elves book by Brian Duguid
• Upcoming Greydog clan book by Jonathan Quaife
• Upcoming “in-world” historical book by Jonathan Quaife

Show Notes

Here is a list of stuff we talk about in the interview:

• The medieval town of Totnes in Devon (UK) where Totnes Castle is
• Image Comics
• Games Workshop shops (say it three times fast)
• Warhammer and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (the latest edition is published by Cubicle7)
• Magic The Gathering
• RuneQuest (spoken in reverential tones by British people)
• Warhammer’s Beastmen and RuneQuest’s Broos
• Call of Cthulhu and the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign
• Cyberpunk 2020
• Savage Worlds
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Fighting Fantasy books and the RPGs that spun-off from them
• There are no tabletops in buses
• RuneQuest Glorantha Quickstart
• Agon, for playing in mythic Greece
• GURPS Greece
• Savage Worlds’ 50 Fathoms and Pirates of the Spanish Main
• OpenQuest
• Barebones Fantasy
• Jason and the Argonauts
• Cthulhutech: H.P. Lovecraft meets Neon Genesis Evangelion plus Guyver
• Too Good To Be True, a Battletech PbtA system
• The Regiment, another PbtA game
• RuneQuest Glorantha, and the wonderful cover by Andrey Fetisov
• Fionn mac Cumhaill (pronounced Finn Macool, because of course it is), and the similarities to the later Arthurian myths
• The Cattle Raid of Cooley
• Using the King of Dragon Pass wiki for heroquesting ideas
• Father Ted
• RQG Gamemaster adventures
• Understanding the RQG Family History and bringing it in play
• The big Dragon Pass timeline, playing along the metaplot, and whether to bring back Kallyr
• The Duel at Dangerford
• JRR Tolkien and his take on celtic mythology
• The Seven Tailed Wolf
• The Black Spear
• Using King of Sartar for the alternative timelines
• River river, Hill hill hill hill, and the “quadruple redundancy of tautological placename etymologies”
• Gloranthan bad names (Clearwine, Ghosts Around, Nochet)
• RuneQuest Starter Set and Infinity Engine strike rank trackers
• The too many skills of RuneQuest
• The complicated publishing history of RuneQuest and its edition wars
• The modularity of RuneQuest
• Too much bookkeeping of weapon HP
• Babies, adult themes, and X-Cards
• The Glorantha Sourcebook vs The Guide to Glorantha
• D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths
• The Percy Jackson & The Olympians book series by Rick Riordan
• The “Rick Riordan Presents” book imprint with, for instance, The Storm Runner, a middle grade/young adult fantasy book based on Mayan mythology
• Tales of the Reaching Moon

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (40.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

We kick off this new season of the Glorantha Initiation series with the lovely Bridgett Jeffries, aka “the happiest voice in cosmic horror”!

About Bridgett

You can find Bridgett all around the internet, but in particular:

• Founder of Symphony Entertainment
• Community embassador for Chaosium and, just as I write this, promoted to coordinator of events and outreach (congrats Bridgett!)
• Author and contributor to many things on DriveThruRPG, especially on the Miskatonic Repository
• Streaming on the Symphony Entertainment YouTube channel and Twitch channel, the Chaosium YouTube channel, and many others
• Co-host of the Miskatonic University podcast, and appearing in several other horror and gaming podcasts
• Check out Bridgett on Twitter!
• Also check out her Patreon!

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• Playing AD&D, Champions, and Battletech as a covert operation in a basement with middle-aged men
• Chaosium’s RuneQuest Starter Stream, and the New Hero actual play
• RuneQuest 3rd edition, its fantasy Earth, and Glorantha as a separate setting
• Moral ambiguity in Glorantha: nothing is straightforward, everything comes with the “weight” of the lore and the setting
• Activating Runes or Passions to augment rolls is dope!
• Having an assistant GM to help with the rules is great for a game like RuneQuest
• It’s hard to relate to the Bronze Age, compared to other eras… what even is the Bronze Age?
• The problem with gatekeeping by grognards (old fans), and letting newbies discover and play the game in their own way
• Tropes vs lore (see also this essay I wrote on the subject)
• The Rome TV series, Troy, The Ten Commandments, Alexander
• Tropes of the Orlanthi: violence is always an option, no one can make you do anything, follow chosen leaders
• Tropes of the Bronze Age:
  • Religion is politics (priest kings and such)
  • Cities with temples on hills, markets full of merchants and mules and slaves, philosophers on soapboxes
• Tropes of Glorantha:
  • Everybody comes from their own culture, with their own reasons to do things
  • Use the Runes as a guide for how cults fit in the world, use archetypes first and lore later
  • Spirits are everywhere (shamanism, animism)
• Getting used to magic being everywhere
• Glorantha is flat, the Underworld is below, rivers used to flow upwards!
• The Jonstown Compendium is awesome
• Drawing Earth Runes on your face
• Using the RuneQuest Starter Set‘s art as reference
• The trolls are political refugees
• Exploring Glorantha, your Glorantha 101 YouTube series

Credits

The intro music is “Dancing Tiger” by Damscray. The outro music is “Islam Dream” by Serge Quadrado. Other audio is from the FreeSound library.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (30.2MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

This twelfth episode of the Glorantha Initiation series brings us to the last of the interviews we recorded in the fall of 2021! We are talking to Chris, who discovered RuneQuest 2nd edition just last year and, only a few weeks later, upgraded to RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha! He doesn’t have an ongoing Gloranthan campaign yet but we talk about his sudden love for the setting, playing soloquests, and his plans for a future game.

Things mentioned in this episode include:

• BECMI red box D&D
• RuneQuest 2nd edition softcover and PDF reprint
• “Glorantha Classics” book collections, bundling RQ2 material
• Grounded and lived-in worlds
• The Mystara setting for D&D (more also here)
• BRP Central forums
• Telling smaller stories, about the simple villages and their farmers and crafters
• RuneQuest Weapons & Equipment sourcebook
• HeroQuest Glorantha (now out of print) and the new version of its narrative system, QuestWorlds
• The Red Cow campaign for HeroQuest Glorantha: The Coming Storm and The Eleven Lights (also out of print)
• Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes for HeroQuest Glorantha (guess what, it’s out of print too)
• Toning down the superheroes with BRP rules
• CSI vs James Bond
• Campaigns are TV shows, one-shots are movies
• Traveller (the latest Mongoose edition) and Traveller (the classic version)
• Mercator, a Traveller hack to play in the Roman Empire (scroll towards the end of the page)
• Men of the Sea, for HeroQuest 1st edition (out of print)
• Simplifying NPC stats by using the same standard numbers
• Tunnels & Trolls (physical and digital)
• RuneQuest Starter Set, with its soloquest playable online
• Traveller Starter Set (out of print, but the digital version is still available)
• “Alone against” series for Call of Cthulhu
• Solo games and journaling games: Thousand Year Old Vampire, The Broken Cast, Secrets of the Vibrant Isle
• Khan of Khans Gloranthan family board game
• Magic World (it seems gone from Chaosium’s website, but still available on DriveThruRPG)
• The D20 OGL
• Risus the Anything RPG
• GhengisCon in Colorado

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (24.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

In episode 11 of our Initiation Series, we chat with Juan Ochoa, an illustrator that fell in love with Glorantha with the most unlikely book you could ever start with. And he wishes he had started with King of Sartar instead!

Other things we chat about in this episode:

• The one RPG shop in Columbia
• Having a player buy more books than the gamemaster
• Running Glorantha with the crunch of RuneQuest, or with FATE, or with Mythras
• Playing in the west to avoid the “Argrath Cinematic Universe”
• How to deal with diverging from the metaplot
• Tekumel and Middle Earth as very linguistically developed settings
• The Hall of Blue Illumination, a podcast on Tekumel
  • Note: this interview was recorded before “the news” about MAR Barker… if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it won’t take you long to find out

Where to find Juan’s art:

• Portfolio website
• Instagram
• Twitter

Credits

The intro music is “Dancing Tiger” by Damscray. The outro music is “Islam Dream” by Serge Quadrado. Other audio is from the FreeSound library.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (17.1MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

Episode 10 of the Glorantha Initiation Series is with Chris Webb, who played RuneQuest 2nd edition once in the early 1980s, and gave up after saving Gringle’s Pawnshop from baboons. Him and his friends played without cults or magic because it was too weird and obscure.

This was with the British version of RuneQuest, which was a boxed set containing Apple Lane and a few other supplements in addition to the rulebook.

Much later, Chris was brought into a game of RuneQuest Glorantha by his younger brother Jonathan Webb, which you might know as the main author of the excellent Praxian police procedural campaign Sandheart.

During this episode, we discuss the following various things:

• The importance for a fantasy setting to have references players can fall back on
• Cults as football teams
• Playing outcasts, children, or other characters that “allow” players to not know much about the campaign’s setting
• The “house version” of the RuneQuest rules, and the value of being introduced to a game by someone who already knows how to play it
• The difficulty of reading and using the RuneQuest Glorantha rulebook
• Griselda’s tales and White Dwarf magazine
• The most powerful spell in RuneQuest!
• The Grogmeet online convention and the “Grogpod”, also known as The Grognard Files
• The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast
• Rules light RPGs and emergent settings: Troika!, Into the Odd, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Mausritter

And finally, Chris talks about putting Runes on a roof… well it actually happened recently!

Credits

The intro music is “Dancing Tiger” by Damscray. The outro music is “Islam Dream” by Serge Quadrado. Other audio is from the FreeSound library.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (24.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More