This episode’s guests are Beer with Teeth, at time in character:

• Erin (aka Varanis, a noble of Sartar lineage)
• Dom (aka Rajar, a huge Storm Bull axe fighter)
• Diana (aka Berra, a tiny Humakti warrior)

We also learn about their original GM Tom who is at fault, and about Kris who is the resident visual artist.

Why Beer With Teeth, and how they arrived at the logo.

Current Glorantha games played: one in the classical era, meant to end with the Cradle, one in the current timeline which had Kallyr come back after the Battle of Queens, and another such game run by Diana, currently digging into their characters’ previous history.

The campaigns combine published stuff and “making stuff up”.

Keeping several games’ plot-lines aligned when different GMs and parties advance at different paces.

Ludo talks about his games, and Dom discusses Cthulhu.

Using the Ars Magica trick of guest Gming in the main game (GMed by Tom), which is how

“A Tale of Woodcraft” came about – drawing plot cards.

Diana adds how Crimson Petals (Pegasus Plateau) came from that guest slot GMing

Ludo plugs our Newsletter “Journal of Runic Studies”

News

The Starter Set first observed in the wild at GenCon

Links to 3^rd party unboxing videos, Andrew Logan Montgomery’s review.

Glass Cannon play-through as an example how the RuneQuest rules may be tough for newcomer GMs and players.

On the virtues of starter sets.

The GM has to decide which aspect of the rules you pick for a given situation, and what you ad-lib rather than sticking to the rules.

About the complexity of the RQ rules – at least as initial hurdle.

Hero Wars/HeroQuest being too niche and not suitable for many old school RuneQuest players.

Erin mentions the “training wheels” for the Witcher system, and would like to see something similar for RuneQuest.

Diana proselytizes by “grabbing random people from the internet”.

Erin tells how she got drawn into the game: “Just for one night!”.

Print version of Cups of Clearwine

The elf-skin version of Cups of Clearwine makes our guests quite chuffed.

Jallupel Goodwind – The Whirling Moon

Myth of the Month Vol 2 issue 8 by Diana writing for Austin Conrad/Akhelas, including a scenario.

Preview of the Battle rules in the White Bull campaign

Use of passions, but also lots of rolls on the Battle skill.

Jeff Richard’s previews on Sartar Campaign material on Facebook

Erin learning stories and background, Jeff’s posts on Facebook.

Main Topic: Writing Adventures

Dom tells about his cooperation with Diana to create the interim scenario in their main campaign as guest GMs.

Erin talks about disappearing into those deep rabbit holes of research, and that writing game scenarios is somewhat different from writing stories.

Dom shares his (complete) notes from which he meant to run that scenario – about seven hand-written lines covering half an A4 sheet.

Diana tells how her lack of familiarity with GMing RuneQuest led her to pre-write a large range of tasks and challenges, and how that happened to be quite close to Chaosium’s submission guidelines.

Ludo points out investigative methods (like John Tynes’ concept of the Investigative Sandbox).

Nudging players rather than imposing railroad.

Diana talks about player characters working their way up from followers towards the movers and shakers.

Dom thinks in terms of cool scenes that he wants to inflict on the players which strangely are going to happen where the player characters walk.

Foreshadowing, plot hooks, or red herrings?

Introducing minor things that become useful hints later.

Red herrings created by players may be turned into plot hooks.

Prophecies – heroes fighting against one another, a test of strength of truths.

Themes

Adventures vs. arcs. Personal arcs and passions.

Lethality in the game

NPC stats.

Adjusting opponent ability, numbers and smartness to the player party.

Resurrection is always an option, both for departed player characters and NPCs.

Playing NPCs smart.

Creating NPCs as communities.

How much does the past reach into the design process. How much archaeology?

Finding something old (e.g. in Clearwine, which has history and pre-history), as items, or as shards and in middens.

Populating houses in Clearwine drawing a terrible map and then using “RuneQuest Cities” results as inspiration. (RQ Cities is really a reprint of Midkemia Press’ “Cities“, which is still available in all its OSR glory).

Pre-defining tension between the NPCs like in Dregs of Clearwine.

Erin foreshadows another Clearwine book.

Researching ancient technologies – charcoal-making, glass-making.

Family structures in Bronze Age society – multi-generation households rather than core families.

Researching Bronze Age

Erin riffs about how writing game material offers her an opportunity to make stuff up rather than sticking to facts (and citing all the sources).

(If you don’t know it, The Motel of the Mysteries is a book about creative interpretation of archaeological finds. The pdf linked is a very short version for educational purposes)

Suggested reading lists cut, and Dom’s woes GMing for experts in their fields playing characters with those skill sets.

Erin plugs Ritual In Early Bronze Age Grave Goods by John Hunter as one of her inspirations.

Dom talks about his role as the Glorantha grognard in the Beer With Teeth collective.

Cave walls with bronze bands – “yes, you are walking in the body of a dead god here”.

Glorantha is about magic, myth and belief, and conflicting truths may be tested against one another.

As the Game Master, your presentation of Glorantha defines the setting for your campaign. Your Glorantha will vary, possibly between campaigns you run.

The sense of community, manifest as the wyter entity, is a unique trait of the setting.

Use of Runes as hooks to pull player characters in

Runes creating personalities that lead to motivations, e.g. in The Gifts of Prax.

Horses with character (expressed as runes, though not with magic associated).

Making a campaign unique by changing one (major) feature in the setting for that campaign, like e.g. “Argrath is dead”.

Kallyr survives the Battle of Queen in the Beer With Teeth campaign, and the potential for story and conflict inherent in this.

Links

• Beer With Teeth website
• Beer With Teeth on the Jonstown Compendium
• Diana Probst on the Jonstown Compendium
• Diana Probst’s YouTube Channel

Credits

The intro music is “The Warbird” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “Cinder and Smoke” and “Skyspeak“.

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Our guest this (long!) episode is David Scott, who wears a number of Chaosium hats – among others convention presence, rules Q&A, and the web archives.

David talks about his work on the Well of Daliath – a collection of material posted on glorantha.com, slowly reconstructed from backups when stuff didn‘t migrate that well across platforms, and also chronicling current notes on Glorantha.

We hear some tales of woe about material lost to entropy, whether from natural disasters or from migration of the website.

News

Our only item this time (other than a shout-out to our newsletter) is the good bye to Steve Perrin, and the reactions of the community.

The Chaosium blog has links to a series of six blog posts by Steve on designing RuneQuest.

George R.R. Martin’s obituary on how Superworld shaped his career, Steve’s role in the first ever monster manual, and then there is Shannon Appelcline’s overview over Steve’s credits in the industry.

Remember to subscribe to the Journal of Runic Studies for weekly Gloranthan news.

Main Topic

We look into the introduction of personality traits into RuneQuest and other rpgs.

The first published version was 1981 in Griffin Mountain as the NPC record form (which Chaosium also put into the Thieves World box that was released the same year). However, David was able to track this development back even earlier, in (mostly) unpublished notes of Greg, and (other than to ultra-collectors, also unpublishable notes).

We cannot show you the glimpse into the “Unpublished RuneQuest” material David gave us, but we can attest that what we saw were scribbled notes (in more legible hand-writing than mine) without any grand revelations.

David shows us a few glimpses into the evolution of RuneQuest character sheets, and talks about the synergies between John Sapienza‘s character sheets, Steve Perrin‘s grasp of mechanics and Greg Stafford‘s desire to build his world.

A first fusion of skill percentages and numeric values for personality traits and passions:

The prototype of the NPC Record Form that made it into publication:

David then gives us an insight into Greg Stafford’s process into bringing these traits and the runes into the game RuneQuest, and Gloranthan gaming in general.

Greg’s concepts of people being hard-wired for mythology and certain types of behavior. One book Greg suggested to David is “Our Kind” by Marvin Harris.

Ultimately, the personality traits became an integral mechanic in Greg’s King Arthur Pendragon. David Larkin shows Greg’s research as annotations in Le Morte D’Arthur in his Pendragon designer’s notes.

The game mechanics for dragonewts (as NPCs) in Wyrm’s Footnote #14 (in 1982) were another step in the process of getting game mechanics out of this.

The quest for HeroQuests as a game mechanic led to Greg working on the Epic System – or Glorantha the Game – even during the years of the Avalon Hill publication of RuneQuest.

“The maddest character sheet anybody has ever seen for Glorantha” from the development process for Glorantha the Game:

The more coherent and elaborate pieces of this process made their way into the “Arcane Lore” volume of the Stafford Library, which still is a collection of almost random notes and concepts.

Robin Laws’ concept for Hero Wars (later HeroQuest, nowadays Questworlds) then was a game where basically all abilities were traits.

Personality traits in gaming praxis

We address the reluctance of players to let personality traits dictate their roleplaying of the characters. David talks about three types of gamers’ reactions to this mechanism – newcomers, curious old hands, and set-in-their-ways grognards.

We touch on conflicting passions (rather than just opposed traits), like “Loyalty (Leader)” and “Hate (Leader)”, and the roleplaying potential in that, and how not to roll this gives the players the freedom to steer their characters.

The example characters of Vasana (the leader who has “Hate Lunar Empire”) and Vostor (an AWOL Lunar soldier disillusioned with the Lunar army looking out to join Vasana’s band) are used in David’s demo games to illustrate how these things play out.

We touch upon how Hate Lunar Empire is different from hating individual Lunars, and how the Storm Bull’s Hate Chaos does not make every Lunar in sight a target for their berserking.

We also talk about the situation of Lunar converts in Sartar after 1625.

Augmenting with traits and passions

“Can I use my Mobility Rune to fly?” and credibility checks.

Use of “Loyalty (Leader)” to get things from a leader, and other uses, and use of automatic success in roleplaying situation.

What to do as a GM when a necessary success doesn’t show up. How to deal with failure.

Opposed rolls with the same degree of successes (plugging this little treatise).

Using the moon rune to augment spirit magic casting.

High scores in passions or traits – GM calls

Allowing players to reduce such high traits

Traits derailing the game.

Traits are not meant to be played as mental illness.

Runes and passions in heroquesting.

Casting massive amounts of rune points manifesting the deities.

Acquiring new passions in-game

Taking loyalty to the leader, or to another patron the character might want something from.

David gives a great example about a Lhankor Mhy initiate from his campaign who took loyalty not to the Colymar tribe, but to the Colymar lawspeaker Hastur, and how he would go about shifting loyalties from one temple to another.

And with that, Joerg reminded Ludovic of bedtime, and we postponed questioning David for a later podcast.

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Returning to our tower for our second episode of the God Learners Podcast, we meet Austin Conrad, the author and publisher of the Myth of the Month on Jonstown Compendium aka Akhelas or Crel.

We digress badly even before we get into the news or our blurb for the Newsletter. (Spoiler: we keep rambling. Surprised?)

The News

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Journal of Runic Studies! Get your Gloranthan news in your inbox, RSS reader, or browser!

We start off with the report that Jonathan Tweet has submitted his text on the project tentatively named The Dragon’s Eye.

We discuss the art previews, especially the 20 heads of Sartarite folk, and digress about skin coloration. The name of the orange-skinned hero Jörg failed to remember is Binstarnif Awe.

Virtual Tabletop integration for the RuneQuest Starter Set with Fantasy Grounds appears to be imminent. Of course, we still need to wait for the Starter Set box to become available in the distribution centers around the world for the pdfs and probably this material to be released.

Austin talks about his newest Monster of the Month project, Petty Spirits part two. (Link to part one), and gives us this preview of the book wyrm by Laura Galli:

More leaks of the upcoming Sartar material or Jeff’s research for that include rather detailed breakdowns of three clans – the Ernaldori, the Varmandi, and the Hiordings, and the Guild of Bronze Workers in Boldhome, covered as well on BRP Central in more convenient format. We struggle to stay on topic, which leads us to researching where a group of dedicated volcano worshipers could erupt one…

Austin’s index of the Red Book rune spells by the runes has made it into the official pdf collection, and we ponder how far one can take recursive indexing.

And then, 24 minutes into the podcast, we digress into our main topic:

Travel in Sartar

So who is traveling across Sartar and Dragon Pass, and for what reasons?

Austin points towards the maps in Nick Brooke’s index to Jonstown Compendium scenarios, originally published on BRP Central.

Reasons to Travel

Digression: How common are metals in Glorantha?

Messages across long distances: people carrying them, or spirits carrying them.

We discuss the roles of Issaries in myth and in the world, as Issaries is a primary travellers’ cult.

Travel preparations should include sacrifices to the gods of the road, or to ask the omens.

Pilgrimages as This World HeroQuests, and rites of purification and ritual preparation while on the way. Austin brings up herms and how disrespect to these could ruin a political career in Athens.

Tourism in the Ancient World, and in Glorantha, and penning travelogues to make your sightseeing a business expenditure. The names of Pausanias and Herodotus get dropped.

Travellers in service of other travellers: work crews clearing roads, or trailblazing new magical paths.

Family reunions as another excuse to take to the roads.

Means of Travel

Austin addresses the tragedy of lack of boat traffic on rivers or bigger interior bodies of water, at least for the core region explored now.

After we recorded this, Jeff Richard leaked a map showing the main roads and navigable rivers in Kethaela and southern Dragon Pass.

Pack animals and mounts

Donkeys, mules, Praxian beasts, or horses? Dinosaurs? Or bugs?

Do you use encumbrance rules?

Human porters as an alternative to pack beasts, and size and composition of travel groups.

Wheeled transport – Ox carts for heavy cargo, odd draft beasts for less heavy stuff.

Road encounters

Bandits and how they might shy away from people in armor and certain tattoos.

Size of bandit groups – organized crime, rival clans attacking traffic on roads controlled by your clan.

Reimbursement for being raided on a clan’s lands?

What are the terms for using the kings’ roads?

Spirits and ghosts, like in Vinga’s Ford.

Wild animals, and Austin calls for a volunteer to write up a scenario on insurance fraud.

Jörg mentions smugglers’ correspondence on clay tablets.

Running out of gas – can a traveller graze a caravan beside the road?

Children and alynx sidekicks as internal source of trouble and tension… “Are we there yet?”

Natural disasters (other than kids)

Frequency of encounters (or more specifically bad stuff): One encounter per hex travelled? Or a narrative approach similar to Robin Laws’ narrative difficulty

Hospitality as a means to slow your travels

Where do you sleep tonight? Hospitality as a boon. Austin explains Xenia, classical Greek guest friendship which creates lasting light bonds between host and guest

We talk about the official or unofficial ambassadors of clans or tribes in some distance, and we natural talk about going to Nochet.

The Cult of Geo as the state-supported fast food or motel chain, and then we can’t help discuss Apple Lane.

Replacing mounts or pack animals, and how that could get thwarted by players having formed attachments to whatever they own.

Are there horse shoes in Glorantha?

Public baths, and how they are an opportunity to get players out of their armor.

Adventure possibilities in visiting private hosts rather than inns.

Gift-giving as guests, and how to twist that into more adventure hooks.

Credits

The intro music is “The Warbird” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “Cinder and Smoke” and “Skyspeak“.

The featured image is by Bernard Gagnon.

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For our first episode of the God Learners Podcast we are visiting Neil Gibson, proprietor of the Black Alynx inn in the seedier parts of Jonstown. Neil’s podcast “Tales of the Black Alynx” had a series of interviews with creators of the Jonstown Compendium, but it is missing one significant contributor – a certain Neil Gibson, author of “LEGION”. We are aiming to amend this omission…

Recent News Items:

The Red Book of Magic is available as a hardcover now (at the point of writing this, not yet in Austrailia).

And if you like the great cover by Mark Smylie and want it as a print or on any number of useful items like mugs or shower curtains, Chaosium’s Red Bubble store will take your money.

There have been plenty of postings by Chaosium with previews of the art that is going into the Gods of Glorantha books.

Loic Muzy has contributed 170 pieces of art, among these a portrait of each of the 100 cult deities. There is a huge piece by Agatha Pithié depicting the monomyth, or at least an impressive number of important scenes from it, and the Prosopaedia will be illustrated by Kathrin Dirim.

There is a thread with many preview pieces on BRP Central.

In recent time, Jeff Richard has also shared numerous previews on his current Glorantha developments on Facebook, and because of the fleeting nature of Facebook streams, these posts have been documented in other places, among others in our newsletter.

Jeff shared a list of foundational documents of Glorantha lore, and a list of some other publications which are strong but not infallible influences on the current Glorantha canon, among other places on the Well of Daliath. While we’re at it, we talk about our own research and inspirational sources.

We are talking about the imminent price raise of high quality Print-on-Demand books from DriveThruRpg, including those of the Jonstown Compendium, and a sale on such books before these new prices hit the platform.

We talk briefly about the change in the portrayal of Sartar from a land of rural clans with heroic but rather hidebound hill dwellers to that of a cosmopolitan crossroads of trade and magics with vibrant cities full of architecture that you expect from ancient civilizations.

We talk about real world information on the Bronze Age and related periods.

Interview with Neil Gibson

We ask Neil about his beginnings in roleplaying, and Neil tells how the switch from D&D to RuneQuest changed the way of playing.

We learn about his experiences exploring the Big Rubble and the Elder Wilds with RuneQuest Second Edition, his path through other systems like Call of Cthulhu, Bushido, and Car Wars, how his roleplaying career took a hiatus when Gloranthan RuneQuest disappeared, and how his enthusiasm was re-kindled with the publication of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

Neil relates his efforts roping in his children, and his online experience on early Sunday mornings, a RuneQuest third edition game set in mythical Wales, and plans to run a local RQG game from the Starter set.

We talk about Legion Games and “LEGION“, Neil’s first offering on the Jonstown Compendium.

Ludo meant to cite Jason Durall, not Steve (Perrin?)

Neil talks about the fun he had creating these broos, and gleefully presents the fun that can be had with diseases carried by broos, including a few new ones he published there.

We talk a bit about NPC collections as roleplaying supplements, and how they evolved from mere repetitive stat blocks into collections that give us motivations, interaction with other NPCs, and scenario hooks.

Neil reveals how LEGION was created as a practical application of creating a script to produce stat blocks for another project he has in the works.

LEGION is in fact the first of quite a few publications in the Jonstown Compendium by Legion Games, a company that Neil created with Drew Baker, the author of the Rubble Redux series and a number of other Legion games supplements. Neil and Drew have some projects in the pipeline, too, including a board game.

Legion Games has a bundle of all their products to date out in pdf.

Other than broos, Neil is in the process of preparing a collection about an even more vile foe: Ducks. (But then that remark may have been quackist.) The ducks are to avoid the Disney tropes and the pure comic relief approach, and will detail two quite different populations of ducks – downtrodden ones in Dragon Pass, and fairly successful and proud in Esrolia. Neil has roped in a new artist for this project, Thomas Connell, who offers a preview of the Duck style on his ArtStation page.

Neil continues working on his campaign putatively titled Into the Wastes, planned as a series of three books, the first named Flower Girl set around Bullflood in western Pavis County, the second in Indagos a little further to the east, and finally an exploration of ruins of Genert’s Garden in the Wastes. The books are planned to provide some gazetteer of the places, scenarios and plot hooks.

We talk a little about publishing on the Jonstown Compendium, how the earnings from sales mostly bolster the war chest from which illustrators are hired to increase the quality and appeal of the products, often after the initial release.

Neil has his own podcast, The RuneQuest Project, available on all the major podcasting platforms. Starting out with actual play episodes, about a year ago Neil switched to a series of interviews with publishers on the Jonstown Compendium, starting a series titled “Tales from the Black Alynx”. Neil is planning to pick up some interviews, and plans to go after the artists now.

Neil talks about his most anticipated releases from Chaosium for Runequest, the Sartar box and the Starter box in particular.

Finally, we ask Neil for his personal runes. With Neil’s choices the only cult we could think of is a revelation of the God Learners…

Credits

Images in this post are courtesy of Legion Games. The intro music is “The Warbird” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “Cinder and Smoke” and “Skyspeak“.

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