The God Learners

For this new Glorantha Initiation interview, we have two guests, which explains the unusual length of this episode… we welcome Antoni and Konrad! Konrad studies Bronze Age history, does LARPs, and runs games for teens and children. He has been running RPGs for about 11 years, and RQG for 4 years. You can catch him on Discord as @SpellcastingKisiel Antoni studies geography. You can find him on Facebook as Antek Bartoszko. Konrad and Antoni also give a shout-out to the Polish world-building community Krytyka Światotwórcza . Show Notes Antoni introduces himself: Started RPGs with D&D 3e in high school. Then Warhammer 2e, which is “the most patriotic Polish RPG”. Gothic is the most patriotic Polish computer game. Antoni has opinions about the “drama kids” school of RPG and modern games. He’s a novice GM, and has more fun as a player. Recent games Antoni likes are Fabula Ultima (a TTRPG inspired by JRPG video games) and Vaesen (a Scandinavian 19th-century folk-horror TTRPG). Apparently Antoni broke Vaesen with min-maxing! Konrad introduces himself: He discovered RPGs in a summer camp, watching kids playing Warhammer 2e… but they never let him play! Booo! The following year he started playing and GMing, notably a post-apocalyptic Polish game called “Afterbomb Madness”. Konrad feels more comfortable as a GM, and likes faction play. Warhammer is very very popular in Poland! Poland didn’t have any particular printing of any RPG at first, so people smuggled hastily translated rulebooks. Warhammer was a good fit. It was one of the very first officially released RPGs in Poland. Then, the only Polish RPG magazine at the time broke everyone’s mind about Warhammer because everyone was pretty much taking Warhammer at face value, instead of the comedic game it’s supposed to be. The pun names weren’t translated! Antoni got Konrad into Glorantha. He discovered Glorantha with King of Dragon Pass through a video game streamer playing it. He loved the cultures and vibrant world. He later discovered that there was an RPG, but was turned off by the “realistic combat” that RuneQuest boasted about having. After playing Six Ages, Antoni started ranting to Konrad about Glorantha. We talk a bit about heroquesting as Antoni misunderstands a question about HeroQuest/QuestWorlds as an alternative system with no “realistic combat” in it. Since these books weren’t really available in Poland, it wasn’t on his radar. Konrad realized that he tried playing Six Ages, as he was interested in bronze age gaming, but didn’t get very far. So when Antoni mentioned Glorantha, he was vaguely familiar with it. He had heard about RuneQuest as a “classic RPG”. Konrad started researching the setting and realized he loves it. Glorantha has “hard worldbuilding”. Konrad likes granular mechanics, so RuneQuest’s system looked good. He also appreciates that he can make his own subsystems easily. Konrad still hopes to run a “proper long campaign” soon. Glorantha is “doing good work” about representing the clan, tribal, city state, and god king mindset that might look alien to a modern reader. It’s not a “historic documentary” game, but it’s a “good approximation”. Glorantha might help later understanding real history. Konrad specializes in Levantine late bronze age (15th to 12th century BCE). He’s also interested in European bronze age. He studies social dynamics, people living outside of temple/city-state systems, etc. Joerg on the other hand started looking into European bronze age first, and didn’t look into the fertile crescent until later. Ludo got into Glorantha first, and then looked into Earth history later. Konrad loved the lore and the societies that “feel alive”. There’s a lot to play with when you’re a GM who loves faction play. He notes how Jonstown is described in the Starter Set, and how it contains multiple groups with multiple motivations and agendas, interwoven with their religious beliefs. In RuneQuest, even the monsters are people. Ludo talks about subsystems for political negotiations, as his players are trying to take over the Alone Confederation. Konrad likes the RQG sorcery rules! Joerg says sorcery is like shamanism: you need to min-max a lot to be useful. Konrad doesn’t seem very interested in shamanism, whereas Ludo thinks it’s one of the unique interesting features of the game. “There are now 7 RuneQuest players in Poland!” Konrad tries to run RuneQuest at every convention in Poland, and in the summer-camps he’s working at… basically trying to kick-start a Polish fandom for RuneQuest. The reception of RQG in Polish conventions seems pretty good. Most players are new to RuneQuest as far as Konrad can tell. Chaosium fans in Poland know and play Call of Cthulhu, which Antoni suspect is the biggest TTRPG in the country right now. Or at least one of the “Holy Trio” (CoC, WFRP, D&D 5e) When Ludo asks if Pendragon is known in Poland, Antoni explodes with laughter. He can’t believe anybody would play this game. There is a Polish edition of Pendragon, which Konrad claims is better-looking than the English one. So Polish people know about the game, and the Polish editor released the translation almost at the same time as the original version. Ludo says that Pendragon is probably not played that much in the grand scheme of things, and probably not in the “top 20 games”, but Joerg ask the rhetorical question of what “top 20” means anyway? (I probably meant “top 20” in terms of number of players) Antoni says that, just like Mage: The Ascension, Pendragon, to him, is more meant to be read than to be played. Ludo mentions he played Mage in his youth, having been a big World of Darkness fan back then. Ludo’s first couple TTRPG purchases were Cyberpunk 2020 and Vampire: The Masquerade, which Konrad says are “very Polish tastes”. Ludo asks Antoni what he doesn’t like about Glorantha. Antoni talks about the various “phases” he had with Glorantha. He mentions the “Dukaj-Stafford” effect (from Jacek Dukaj and Greg Stafford… Dukaj is a Polish science-fiction and fantasy writer). This is when a settings is so good that it makes you give up trying to expand it, because you can’t make anything half as good. Antoni’s “second phase” was discovering the Mongoose RuneQuest books, and the cool aspects of gaming in other places and times in Glorantha. Antoni’s Glorantha will definitely vary, and he wants to give a shout-out to Nick Brooke for enabling that. Antoni’s Dara Happans are cool and awesome, and he has hot takes about them. Antoni talks about the different scopes and takes on Glorantha between the editions, or between the TTRPGs and the video games. Konrad agrees, especially since he discovered Glorantha with Six Ages, so “his boys” are the Solar people. Konrad appreciates “well written barbarian cultures” in Glorantha, but he is more interested in the various types of Solar cultures, or about Orlanthi people in Peloria (“solarized Sartarites!”) Konrad has strong opinions about Elmal vs Yelmalio! He doesn’t buy the “wide scale replacement” of one cult by the other, and gives his reasons for it. Antoni doesn’t really like some of the Gloranthan authors’ approach of pretending that they are “translating” some “actual” Gloranthan texts, instead of just writing a game book. Ludo talks about HeroQuest/QuestWorlds as the thing Antoni and Konrad may look into as they mentioned having trouble doing “bigger things” in RuneQuest. Konrad mentions his “biggest issue” with RuneQuest: how the game and the world are presented. Gloranthan and RuneQuest are “absurdly hard to get into”. The best way to get into this game is “finding a GM”. Konrad says that getting into it by yourself is much harder. Konrad mentions the video games (King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages, RuneQuest Warlords ) as good first steps but admits they are niche games and not for everyone. He’s looking forward to the first official Gloranthan novel (A Pyre for Gods and Heroes). We play the game of “what gets released next year?” Joerg is rather optimistic about it. Ludo is pessimistic… and probably right, since this interview was recorded 6 months ago and nothing Joerg has mentioned seems to be happening soon. Antoni mentions that Konrad often compared Glorantha to the Elder Scrolls video game series… and so he argues Gloranthan needs a Skyrim-like game. No biggie. Ludo mentions The One Ring TTRPG (second edition), trying to make a point about games introducing deep lore to players, and once again the guests immediately laugh. Konrad and Antoni apparently have both very strong, and very opposed, opinions about it. Antoni doesn’t like TOR 2e because of its default place and time. But he likes the progression from easy to hard between The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion. “With Glorantha, you start with the Silmarillion”. Konrad agrees about that, and mentions how even the RuneQuest Starter Set floods the reader with too much information. How much information is needed to start? Probably a lot less than what the Starter Set gives. Konrad thinks the Starter Set has a good setting and adventures, but not a good presentation of the setting. Antoni gives praise to the fan community, especially the Glorantha groups on Facebook. He also praises the “Prince of Sartar” webcomic as an entry point into the setting. Antoni ask why there’s not Malkioni-Solar syncretism, when there is Malkioni-Orlanthi syncretism that exists? Joerg explains it with the timelines of when Greg Stafford and Jamie Revell were working on this or that across Glorantha. Jamie’s books are available on the Jonstown Compendium. But these books offer an old vision of Malkioni society that isn’t “canon” anymore, for whatever that’s worth. Antoni asks if the Moon Rune existed before the Red Moon appeared? Joerg says the Moon Rune isn’t needed for being a mystic or achieving some kind of transcendence. Joerg also argues the Moon Rune always existed. Ludo has a different take, about the Moon Rune having mostly disappeared at the Dawn, and the Seven Mothers having brought it back. Antoni asks why the Lunars didn’t share the fate of the God Learners. Konrad has many conspiracy theories. For instance: Orlanth can’t read. Also: Nysalor is basically the ChatGPT of Glorantha. You have to listen but his arguments are pretty sound. Joerg even adds another layer… Going back to Malkioni-Solar syncretism, Ludo and Joerg add more ideas. Antoni asks what’s the deal with reincarnation? Ludo had totally missed that there was reincarnation in Glorantha in the first place… we argue a bit about it, and what that means for talking to ancestors. Then we argue some more about interpreting some of the writings, until we end up on the Ty Kora Tek cult write-up, which Ludo says is bullshit, agreeing with Antoni. Antoni’s favourite conspiracy theory is about the role of Brithos in the rebirth of the world in Time. Joerg says “Brithos might have been the backup”. And it makes Zzabur a bit more right. We start gushing about Zzabur and entertaining he is. Konrad hopes to be able to publish some RuneQuest books in the next couple years. We finish with a round of quick-fire questions! Including Konrad’s surprising take on Newtlings! 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.

Our Guests For this episode we welcome Malin and CJ, which Ludo met in person at ChaosiumCon UK 2025. The book we’re talking about is “Life and Traditions under the Sun Dome” Ludo also took so long to edit this episode that Malin and CJ’s next books are already out: “Three Doors to Your Heart” and “Uleria Loves You” Malin is on Bluesky and has a Patreon CJ is also on Bluesky Show Notes Things we discussed in this episode: Malin and CJ published a book about Life and Traditions of the Sun Dome because they’ve been playing there for a while. Malin got into Glorantha via CJ, and became fascinated by stuff in Cults of Terror. CJ got into Glorantha via some people talking about RuneQuest and its cultures, religions, weird spells, and “walking tapirs”. After playing in Pavis and the Big Rubble, CJ bought RQ3 and some RQ2. The Dragon Pass board game Playing near Sun County in HeroQuest, with the Cradle scenario. CJ bought the RQ3 Sun County book, reading it directly in the post office. It was hard to get a group going. The “Life and Traditions” book is a “more detailed” Sun County, compatible with previous official material (Sun County) and JC material (Black Spear, Sandheart). Many people have written stuff in that area, it’s important to honour that. Back in the day, it felt like Sun County was more “bronze age” and exotic than Sartar, which felt more “celtic” and common. Research for the book included a lot of Bronze Age history. Big spears, shield walls, and hoplites! Back in the day, there wasn’t much material on Sartar. A lot of books were out of print, and in piracy was the only way to access them. Very trusting people who mail their copy of Griffin Mountain to strangers to read and send back! Sun County was a “standalone” book and setting, easier to grasp than other places in Glorantha. To secular Sweden, religious fanaticism is exotic! The reason for the “Life and Traditions” book is that many players have questions… sometimes weird questions… Malin wanted to emulate the “Daily Life in <place>” children books about ancient Egypt or Greece: what is it to live in these places and times? Also, a desire to answer questions to the players who didn’t know Glorantha. Malin loves making house rules and handouts! A character wants to get married? Write a handout about property rights! “It escalates so fast!” Between different regions of Genertela there are different rules and cultures. Sun County should feel different from Sartar. “RuneQuest is a game for over-thinkers” CJ is a sociologist, so how does the class system work!? “Life and Traditions” has a bibliography! It’s serious work! It’s a xenophobic and misogynistic place but they have nice beaches. CJ looks at other countries with the same problems for reference, in addition to historical Bronze Age and Iron Age, and previous Gloranthan material. People are still people, and it’s interesting to see how people would react and behave in a place like Sun County. How to use this book? As an academic description of Sun County, or as a collection of articles to be skimmed and picked from as needed? “It should be read but not memorized”. “It’s a confidence builder”. Instead of adding more history and names and places, the book tries to just add more context to one already established place. Joerg likes the tables to “look around the house”. Ludo likes the random event table. Players can read the book, there is not much “secret information”. The bad stuff in Sun County: patriarchy, xenophobia, etc. How is that fun to play? Depends on the group… it can be treated as background vibe, or as the main theme. The book also shows how to play other types of characters. CJ tried to lean into the set parameters of the place, as established by prior material: Yelmalio is patriarchal, Ernalda is made into a subservient wife, and Zola Fel provides a good part of the fertility magic that Ernalda usually provides elsewhere, etc. Still had to “address the elephant in the room and make everyone feel welcome at the table”. CJ and Malin had several women characters in their campaign. What does that mean for them? How do they live in this society? CJ makes the good point that it’s like playing Call of Cthulhu in the default era of the 1920s, which is a “horribly racist” time in America. “The gamemaster has to address this with the group”, deciding how much to lean into it or address it. Ludo mentions Harlem Unbound as an example of leaning into the racism of the 1920s for Call of Cthulhu. Cool stuff in Sun County: as a foreigner, you interact with a very weird and insular society! An excuse for sending your PCs to Sun County is that the River of Cradles is strategically important! Do your players enjoy being “administratively frustrated”? The absurdity of Glorantha. The cool thing about Yelmalio is that he is NOT cool! “He’s a poser guy wearing shitloads of bling for compensating about all the things he cannot do!” Orlanthi cultists are like Tom Cruise. Yelmalions are played by William H. Macey. Another cool thing is that Sun County is very, very ancient. There are many very old archives and items to be found here. Ludo talks about how he would send his players there. CJ says it’s a good entry point into a new campaign: the place is semi-isolated, with a limited number of cults to choose from, etc. Great for newcomers. “If you want to play a trickster in Sun County, go ahead and try!” No need to go into complex clan/tribe relations here. You can play it like Star Wars/Andor, living in some oppressive society, or like NYPD Blues with Sandheart, or as some Iliad thing with lone people defending their outpost against the nomads. You don’t need to lean into “colonizers vs natives”. Custom rules for faction play: “It’s easier to reward your players when you have numbers on a paper”. Build a shrine to your god so you don’t have to commute! Characters built for intrigue and politics should have as much fun and input into the game as those built for combat. It’s still useful and interesting to track favours and standings even for non-political characters. Tracking even small-scale relationships in some situations like long-term travelling. Switching from RuneQuest to QuestWorlds. RQG starts breaking down the more you play, especially the experience system, which slows down to a crawl. Malin says QuestWorlds is better than HeroQuest. CJ says it used to break down with the bidding system. Malin gives advice for how to convert RQG characters to QW. QW is easier to make little subsystems for since it’s a lot less crunchy. Players had trouble phrasing their keywords, and coming up with flaws. RQG helped establish the “reality” of the fictional world before moving on to QW, which is very valuable. Nick Brooke’s “song book” for conventions and the “HeroWars Gaga” song. Gloranthan cookbooks! Do players behave differently when you change the system? Malin says she had to change her GMing style a lot. QW requires more narrative responsibility from the players, which can overwhelm some of them. Joerg mentions the Swedish RuneQuest Talastar project. Dragonbane mention! Joerg asks about the Teshnans… Malin has plans! Ludo took so long to edit this episode that the Ulerian books that CJ and Malin announce here are already out! Credits The intro music is “ The Warbird ” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “ Cinder and Smoke ” and “ Skyspeak “, along with audio from the FreeSound library.

Our Guest We welcome once again Austin Conrad to the show! His website is Akhelas Get Treasures of Glorantha: Volume 2 , one of the finest books on the Jonstown Compendium! (which we talked about in episode 31 ) Austin hopes to be “done soon” with his upcoming “Wolves of the Wild Hunt” book… that was a couple months ago and it’s not done yet The book will include slightly remastered previous materials such as The Quacken, and The Queen’s Star, plus new stuff about Gagarthi monsters! Show Notes Things that happened in this episode: Joerg reminds us what the Reminiscences of Paulis Longvale are… Listen to episode 34 if you haven’t already! Cults of Terror is “the gamemaster’s best friend” Also listen to episode 35 with Simon Phipp , specialist of Dorastor! Yes, YOU too can play a Thanatar cultist! Ludo summarizes the previous episode’s story Austin mentions the old Dorastor book , plus gives another shout out to Simon Phipp’s books Ludo goes on a short tangent about the name “Bilini” Austin lays down another argument about the Orlanthi really being Vikings We discuss the various motivations of the characters regarding Chaos, Dorastor, and the Lunar Empire Ludo has made a spreadsheet! He tries to figure out what are the chances of the Bilini king’s army against Razalkark’s army How cute are baby broos? Or baby Scorpion Men? Apparently Diana Probst has one of those in Stone and Bone, go check it out! We talk about battle tactics and “broo walls” How the hell do you recreate this story using RQ rules? Should we play using HeroQuest/QuestWorlds? (again) The phalanx rules suck? Is dual wielding better than using a shield? (We fumble around the convoluted RQG dual wielding rules) Rules terms inside the narrative text… what to make of it? Would you abstract the things we see in this story to “just a few rolls” in RuneQuest? Austin is being an asshole (his words! not mine!) How much plunder do you get from Chaos creatures? Giving a “personal touch” to plunder and gifts… or just add some jewels! Reselling gifts to buy actually useful stuff, like skills and spells! “WHERE IS MY MONEY?” and other things players say Ancient cultures versus transactional cultures Ea-Nasir name drop! Storm Bull cultists as a biker gang Austin mentions “A Short Detour” and the way we tried writing Chaos cultists as nuanced people Are Illuminates crazy assholes? Or are they people with feelings? Uleria is more powerful and bad-ass than we give her credit for Body horror with Uleria! Play Limbo ! Austin has more conspiracy theories about the Celestial Court on his website ! Vampires in Dorastor… do they have enough to eat? World of Darkness vampires vs Dresden Files vampires (also, Ludo mixes up Dresden Files and Laundry Files ) Austin’s Harrek campaign, and the shenanigans the PCs are up to Give player characters cool or embarrassing epithets! The interesting framing of a Chaos-based narrative with a Lunar perspective Telmori vampires! Or vampires feeding on Telmori! Maybe both! The lost power of RQ2 vampires that can steal Rune magic when feeding off someone Rituals to get your magic items to trust you Fear mechanics in RuneQuest? There’s a difference between improvising and off-the-rails-improvising! RQ2 silver magic collars… they’re in every RQ2 story How do you keep prisoners? Suspicious tricksters! (aren’t they always?) Joerg tells us about Jojo The Bobo. Also, Bugs Bunny and the Puppeteer Troupe “We’re in Dorastor, but we’re getting…. human drama???!” Credits The intro music is “ The Warbird ” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “ Cinder and Smoke ” and “ Skyspeak “, along with audio from the FreeSound library.

We are back with a long overdue Glorantha Initiation interview featuring twice the amount of French accents! We talked to Benjamin, aka Dasfynx, who is the webmaster of the (French) RuneQuest Wiki, and co-hosts the (also French) “Runecast” podcast with Gianni Vacca. Le Wiki du JDR RuneQuest Le Runecast (you can of course find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts!) Show Notes Here are the things we talk about in this episode! Ben’s podcast “Runecast” This is one of the three known “talk show” podcasts about Glorantha right now, the other one being the Finnish Dayzatarin tähtien alla (“Under the stars of Dayzatar”) Ben also runs the French RQWiki which started as a translation of Chaosium’s wiki . It started as just figuring out what tech was powering Chaosium’s website Then it was a small translation for Ben’s players And then other fans joined the effort… there are now extra things compared to the Chaosium version Any extra material on the wiki that is from the published material is reproduced with the approval of Studio Deadcrows , the French publisher for RQG Watching old adventure/sci-fi movies on VHS, and being pitched the Warhammer Fantasy RPG (WFRP) as similar to those movies Ben’s first purchased RPG books were from the Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness lines, but we was busy playing sports and listening to rap, so he read the books but didn’t play them! This may be called “lonely fun” Only years after that one WFRP game did Ben finally find another gaming group playing the WEG Star Wars RPG Ben offered to GM Call of Cthulhu after that, which lasted for a handful of years, going through the Spawn of Azathoth campaign You too can learn geography and history by GMing Call of Cthulhu! It’s hard to find English or French RPG books while living in China, so Ben loaded up on many books whenever he would come home As a Roliste TV watcher (YouTube channel here ), Ben learned that one host (Mathieu) is a big fan of RuneQuest, so Ben bought the latest edition… and didn’t like it! This is because the world wasn’t described enough for Ben to picture, so he bought the Glorantha Sourcebook… and didn’t like it either! Too many names and lists of things! It was the Bestiary that made Ben “get it”: each “monster” is actually coming from somewhere and have their place After that, Ben was deep into Glorantha and started reading more and more books about it Glorantha: a steep curve followed by a rabbit hole! Books are expensive so Ben got Gianni Vacca to explain things to him for free! Gianni is Ben’s co-host on the Runecast podcast Gianni is Ben’s Joerg, an old hands of Glorantha… actually even older than Joerg, since Gianni started with RQ2! Ben’s wiki and podcast are geared towards beginners Favourite thing about Glorantha: Dorastor, to make players suffer! See Simon Phipp’s “Secrets of Dorastor” (and other related books), and his interview episode on the show Sartar, because it’s an interesting place Next on Ben’s reading list are the Red Cow campaign books ( book 1 and book 2 ) See also Ian Cooper’s Questworlds interview on the show Things Ben doesn’t like: the gray areas, because he likes to feel like he understands everything Ben asks Joerg what is the nature of the great compromise? Joerg explains how gods can break the compromise and act in Time We talk about avatars of gods also manifesting gods enough to endanger the Compromise, and how Chaos allows gods to get involved in Time Greg’s narrative framework of writing “in world” texts that give contradictory views and accounts The annoyance of “no answers” vs “multiple answers” King of Sartar is… a dense and complicated book GMing the French campaign “Children of the Flame” (Gianni is an author on it) This campaign helped show Ben what is possible in Glorantha It’s about the Dundealos tribe, near Swenville, after they have been replaced by the Lunar Entalos tribe… until the Dragonrise gives an opportunity to retake their lands Faction play, with various tribes, the Lunars, etc. There’s a map of Swenville! A good way to start in Glorantha is a good example: a scenario, a campaign, etc. The Sourcebook isn’t a good idea for beginners The GM pack or a campaign are better! (classic RQ2 campaigns, or newer ones from the Jonstown Compendium) Basically, start small! The French edition of RQG has one scenario in the rulebook, and one in the bestiary… something the English edition is lacking! Ludo briefly talks about his similarly failed encounters with Glorantha Ben reiterates how Glorantha is consistently deep and how he loves that about it Ben started just with the books for a while, but later discovered there are so many things about Glorantha on the internet! Shout-out to 7Tigers, who translates all the news and Well of Daliath content to French Also shout-out to Olivier from “Les Fils du Chaos” for helping correct the French RQWiki And shout-out to everybody else helping in their own way Ben asks Joerg about the Sky World and Joerg obliges! Ludo adds his take about the multi-shaped Sky World Ben still wants one final answer on everything! Joerg mentions the “blind men touching the elephant” tale, and Ben wants to see the elephant, not be one of the blend men We devolve into Jungian archetypes, and other tangents… We end with some quick-fire questions… Ben loves ducks! 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.

Our Guest Our guest this episode is Simon Phipp, author of Secrets of Dorastor , Secrets of Heroquesting , and author or contributor on many, many other books . Joerg sadly isn’t present this time: he was stuck on a highway somewhere in Germany waiting for auto-assistance. Show Notes Here are some various things we talk about in this episode: Getting started playing in Glorantha in 1982… which sounds like 15 years ago but apparently is a lot longer ago RuneQuest 2 (with Cults of Prax ) was Simon’s first game Bud (from Bud’s RPG Review ) recently said that it’s like being born with a silver spoon in your mouth Watching “World of Sports” and reading “The Iliad” as a kid… as one does Simon loves RQ2 for its scale and the visceral feeling you get from playing it Playing in Dorastor because it was nasty and unmapped in the early 80s The only source was the Paulis Longvale narrative from Cults of Terror Other GMs in Simon’s gaming circles were already playing in the “usual places” (Sartar, Prax, Pavis & The Big Rubble) We started our series on Paulis Longvale last episode ! Running a Star Trek-like episodic campaign in and out of Dorastor, starting around 1985 Later, during the RuneQuest 3 era, Dorastor: Land of Doom was released Simon’s players accused him of knowing about the upcoming book’s contents! The pros & cons of playing in the vaguely defined Glorantha of the 80s vs the encyclopedic Glorantha of the 2010s The Dorastor: Land of Doom’s warning on the back cover is factually accurate… if you consider Simon, as a GM, as a big and ugly thing! Come to the Risklands! It’s great! The Chaos Nests of Genertela. They’re great too! Simon’s Dorastor has multiple Chaos Nests In his campaign, Simon’s players killed Razalkark, the king of the Broos, and occupied his fort… and then things got worse Chaotic True Dragons are apparently a bad thing? Simon tells us the story of Dorastor, including his own interpretation of the whole Nysalor/Gbaji/Arkat thing You may remember we discussed some of this with Bud in a previous episode Dorastor is filled with lots and lots of bad monsters! How do you get your players to go there? Simon’s Dorastor is a bit more nuanced than just “a place to kill monsters”: you can create alliances, do trade, and so on Simon gets bored to tears watching the Gloranthan metaplot unfold, with NPCs doing all the cool things HeroWars was very guilty of this Dorastor is so far away from Dragon Pass that we don’t care what Argrath is doing! Simon’s books contain many, many scenarios for Dorastor, plus many adventure seeds There are several layers to Dorastor: Go in, fight Chaos, come out (if you succeed enough times, become a Dorastor guide!) Interact with the big personalities of Dorastor (meet the Spider Queen, she’s great!) Storm Bull initiates must learn to prioritize Humakti broos! Dorastor ducks! Giant vampires! Relationship with the neighbours Don’t forget not all cults hate Chaos Simon likes messing with his players’ heads Chaotic people: they’re not as bad as you think? But watch out, you might quickly end up worshipping Thanatar if you don’t pay attention to Simon’s evil schemes Finding lost or secret things in Dorastor What makes heroes? Super-RuneQuest! and other high-level character stats… The most useless magic item ever… until it breaks your scenario! The problem of long running campaigns Acid! Poison! Ash elementals! Bathing in gorps! Ludo discovers that Cacodemon got Vomit Acid in RuneQuest 3 Fun with Chaos Features! Simon’s best anecdote: basilisks and mirrors! Designing encounter locations It’s not the GM’s job to know the solutions, it’s their job to setup problems Hair and fingernail elementals! Illumination in Dorastor: break the rules, become good, become evil? Come to Dorastor, it’s lovely, and you can become heroes! Credits The intro music is “ The Warbird ” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “ Cinder and Smoke ” and “ Skyspeak “, along with audio from the FreeSound library.

After too long a hiatus, we are finally back! Well, almost, because Ludo is an idiot and got the time zones wrong while setting up the recording, so Joerg shows up a bit later. Ludo apologizes for messing that up but hey, this is an episode about Chaos, so… Our Guest We welcome once again Austin Conrad to the show! His website is Akhelas Get Treasures of Glorantha: Volume 2 , one of the finest books on the Jonstown Compendium! We actually talked about that book, and magical items in general, for episode 31 Austin’s ghost was summoned during our more recent episode on RuneQuest house rules Show Notes In this episode we chat about things like: Cult of Terror (RQ2, 1981) You can get it as a POD reprint or in PDF from Chaosium Dorastor: Land of Doom (RQ3, 1993) The Cults of Runequest sourcebooks ( available here from Chaosium) Shadows on the Borderlands (RQ3, 1993) The first time the Gloranthan cosmology and history is presented in one text Worshipping Mallia as a non-Chaos deity, in a propitiatory way King of Dragon Pass RuneQuest Warlords Razalkark, the King of the Broos, and a “good boy” Cults of Prax (RQ2, 1979) and the tribulations of Biturian Varosh Our episode series on Biturian Varosh started back when we were the “Wind Words” podcast , and continued with guest Drew Baker early in the God Learners podcast The four philosophies and magic forms of Glorantha… plus a few more! Add you own! The usual suspects: the Guide to Glorantha , the Glorantha Sourcebook , and the Mythology book The entire cosmology and history of Glorantha in 10 pages! Boom! Done! Ludo’s favourite RuneQuest cover, by Jennell Jaquays (see the real wrap-around version!) A Gloranthan pronunciation guide! Can YOU pronounce Gloranthan deities’ names correctly? The Prosopaedia The Curse of Thed: it really sucks! Ludo got confused by his notes (“confusing notes” is a Chaotic feature!) “Reverse Chaos” was renamed “Curse of Thed” in RQG Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay features chaos corruption rules that affect the player characters, sometimes willingly We should be playing in Bilini and Dorastor, there’s a lot of fun stuff happening there! Is it Chaos, or Just Very Bad Thing? Simon Phipp’s Secrets of Dorastor and lines of books Our episode on Arkat , with guest Bud from Bud’s RPG Review The big-ass Genertela map Austin is supposedly being “very polite” in Ludo’s game about NOT becoming an assassin. Spoiler: a month later, Austin did in fact murder a long-standing NPC and initiated into the Eurmal Murderer cult… Wesley Crusher Ragnar Lodbrok and the TV show “Vikings” The Orlanthi as Vikings vs the Orlanthi as ancient Greeks Want to make your players go on a quest? Loan them magical items! The Lightbringers Summons and forcing it on your players Chaos as organized crime Mallia and pandemics… too soon, Joerg! Shenanigans with disease spirits! Dealing with trickster player characters… Scorpion Men: the other iconic Gloranthan bad guys? Beer With Teeth’s Stone and Bone 13th Age Glorantha ‘s Scorpion Men illustrations Gagyx Two-Barb, Scorpion Queen The Footprint, another place of Chaos Food and water are tainted! Roll to find safe things to consume, or pack them! Making your own funky diseases Using the table of troll drink effects from Trollpak (RQ2, 1982) Differences in Chaos curses between RQ2 and RQG Paranoia in players, and nasty Chaotic features Xenohealing, the spell nobody misses, apparently Hashtag Not All Chaos! Adapting a combat scene environment to the baddies’ abilities… For instance: Scorpion Men can climb very well! Austin’s correct answer to Scorpion Men is “don’t” Milking Scorpion Men…. uugggh The players are always the baddies! Credits The intro music is “ The Warbird ” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “ Cinder and Smoke ” and “ Skyspeak “, along with audio from the FreeSound library.

We said we were back from our summer break with episode 32 , but we lied! Joerg’s laptop died and he was busy growing a moustache, and Ludo was ridiculously busy with work. Either way, we are back again, just in time for the end of the year! Our Guest This time we welcome Jon Webb again, who appeared on our show back in episode 6 along with Neil Gibson . Jon is of course the wonderful author of the equally wonderful “Sandheart” series of scenarios: Sandheart Volume 1: Tales of the Sun County Militia Sandheart Volume 2: The Corn Dolls & Fortunate Sun Sandheart Volume 3: Tradition Sandheart Volume 4: The God Skin & Mad Prax Disclaimer: the above links are affiliate links of course (please use them to support the show!) The Making of Sandheart Our first topic is the Sandheart series of scenarios (see links above) which, although they have been written and published a long time ago, we had not covered on the show before… better late than never! We chat with Jon about how Sandheart came to be, the strength of its campaign framework, moral choices, “street-level” adventures, designing problems for which you don’t know the solution, culture clashes between characters, custom heroquesting rules, and more. If you haven’t read or played Sandheart, there shouldn’t be any spoilers for you — only titillating previews of the sort of fun you can expect therein. Note that if you don’t plan on getting all four volumes of the series, we recommend getting volumes 1 and 3. The reason for this is that volume 3 is a scenario that spans multiple years, as the adventurers are tasked with guard duty for a recurring ritual. Getting volume 3 early will let you weave the first couple occurrences of the ritual into the first few adventures. House Rules and Custom Systems In the second and larger half of the episode, we exchange all kinds of ideas about tweaking and extending the RuneQuest rules. Among the things we talk about, in no particular order: Picking rules from different editions of RuneQuest Hit Points formulas Initiative systems and Strike Ranks Sorcery rules Experience checks and experience gain Resolving ties Failing Forward Combat effects and aiming at hit locations Custom hit location tables Shields Granularity of rules per activity Gritty tactical combat vs heroic scenes Average skill scores vs heroic skill scores Fighting styles and converting to other weapons Group rolls Adopting rules from Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Chaotic corruption! Lingering emotions Caravan trading rules Going into a rabbit hole of research and math, and finding what a mechanic should be about Keeping custom mechanics into the “spirit” of the main system Post-coital pillow talk rules We also mention: Ludovic’s own adventure, “A Short Detour” Mythras Troika Dragonbane Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Traveller Alien RPG Credits The intro music is “ The Warbird ” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “ Cinder and Smoke ” and “ Skyspeak “, along with audio from the FreeSound library.

Our Guests In this episode we welcome returning guests Evan Franke and J-M DeFoggi (who had to leave early because of Imperial Administration requirements). You would of course know Evan and J-M from our previous episodes with them: Chaos Rises! (episode 26 about 13th Age Glorantha) and Jackals and Ancient Worldbuilding (episode 19 about J-M’s Bronze Age fantasy adventure game, Jackals !) Our guests are also found in these fine places: The Exploring Glorantha Series on YouTube Lots of Iconic Production endeavours, including YouTube and Patreon . As we release this episode, Evan’s Red Moon and Warring Kingdoms is officially out! Go grab it now, it’s FREE! Show Notes Things we mention during this episode, in vague chronological order, include: TORG Shadows of Esteren The Arms of Nargash-Tor (for Palladium Fantasy ) The Cults of RuneQuest books and, of course, The Lunar Way in particular You can read Ludo’s own reviews of these books here As always, we mention the usual Gloranthan sources: The Glorantha Sourcebook (or in PDF , or on DTRPG ) The Guide to Glorantha (or in PDF , or on DTRPG ) Our episodes on Furthest and Imther , and their corresponding books: Furthest: Crown Jewel of Tarsh Edge of Empire Are you using The Lunar Way mostly for PCs or NPCs? Themes of a Lunar scenario or campaign Citizens of the Lunar Empire Xena: Warrior Princess featuring many Greek gods The Red Goddess as a guest star in your campaign Glorantha, where everybody’s an Illuminated asshole, and nobody’s the good guy The Empire’s trading, culture, politics, etc. Star Wars Glorantha as a Manichean settings vs a nuanced setting The problem of the “simple” settings of our youth becoming more nuanced as we grow older RIFTS and the Coalition States The X-Men, Magneto, and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants Memorable Lunar villains The morality of the Lunar Empire The Lunar Empire as a pretty great place to live in, actually There’s no fairness and civil rights in the Bronze Age The Lunar Empire as the Roman Empire The human flaws and administrative weight of the Lunar Empire The Crimson Bat was self-defence! Struggling to show the Lunar Empire as a nuanced faction Using the USA as a model for the Lunar Empire The editorial history of the Lunars in RuneQuest publications White Bear & Red Moon Harrek the Berserk is “not a great guy!” Beatpot Aelrwin Argrath is up to no good, meddling with stuff he shouldn’t Evan is available for rent as a guest Argrath Black Spear , and Nick Brooke’s take on Argrath Alexander The Great Sartar Griffin Mountain and Strangers in Prax Our favourite cults in the Lunar Way The Seven Mothers as the “ Justice League cult” The awesomeness of the Crimson Bat cult The Nysalor/Gbaji chapter and its fourth-wall breaking aside Crimson Bat feeders publishing city rankings for their “visits” The demonic cult of Yara Aranis, which is pretty much as bad as the Tusk Riders Maran Gor is bad too! Sheng Seleris, the Gloranthan Ghengis Khan The Carmanian Empire roughly explained Lunar Magic, and how to use it in play Getting the Glowline to fail, so you can land your Stormtroopers and AT-ATs Ghost heist at the Lunar Temple! Harry Potter and the Lunar College of Magic Questworlds and 13th Age Glorantha as alternate game systems for certain campaigns The fine points of Lunar phases There are no physics in Glorantha Dragon Pass is a distraction for the Lunar Empire, which is mostly worried about the Pentans Dart Competitions as a Jason Bourne spy-thriller Credits The intro music is “ The Warbird ” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “ Cinder and Smoke ” and “ Skyspeak “, along with audio from the FreeSound library.

Guests Our guests for this new episode of the Glorantha Initiation series are Christian and Amber, from DMs After Dark! We chatted with them back in… (checks notes) November 2023! How time flies… you can find DMs After Dark in many places around the internet , including: YouTube and Twitch Facebook , Twitter , and Bluesky Amber has written a few things, including some short story in the Monstrous Feminine anthology , and can be found at the West Warwick Public Library where she curates the gaming collection. Christian has written and published several scenarios, including “ Zennor & The Sins of St Senara ” and “ The Night Mother’s Moon “, for Call of Cthulhu, published by Stygian Fox. Show Notes In this episode we talk about, more or less: Luring Amber with promises of playing a werewolf (Telmori) Using Chalana Arroy for luring in the cleric-loving player, and shamans for the player who likes weird characters Animism, the Spirit World, and other gameplay elements that are fairly unique to Glorantha Starting with the Starter Set, then going to the Sourcebook Pacing actual play games, making it feel like sitting at an actual table RuneQuest grognards coming to help with the rules Christian has a “book problem”… Ludo can relate Using Six Seasons in Sartar as a way to start small and get all the PCs together Collaborative storytelling and world-building Reconciling player-created lore with “canon” lore Being mindful of players and the audience when preparing storylines, especially cult initiations leading into mythologies like the Unholy Trio, the Sex Pit, etc. Amber acting as a GM assistant, especially in the early stages of preparation Ludo mentions his short story about Chalana Arroy and Mallia Ducks! Broos! Verisimilitude and/or realism to the Bronze Age and other antiquity history Approaching sensitive topics, and doing editorial work with players to match their comfort levels Casino Town! Cwim! The Crimson Bat! What makes sense in your Glorantha, and what seems out of place Early RQ2 dungeon crawling vs later RQ2 dungeons with ecologies and mythologies Understand the vibe of the system over the rules of the system Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and The Bull From The Sea , as good sources for getting a grasp on the antiquity RuneQuest’s crunchy combat system, with its many moving parts and possible combinations A wild mention of Shadows of Esteren makes Ludo happy! Telmori lore! Of course we mention Brian Duguid’s Children of Hykim (see also our interview episode with Brian ) Credits The photo of the red deer used in the title image is by Michael Brace . The intro music is “ Dancing Tiger ” by Damscray. The outro music is “ Islam Dream ” by Serge Quadrado. Other audio is from the FreeSound library.

A new episode is out but Joerg still doesn’t have his replacement laptop so there are no detailed show notes again! Our Guest We welcome the ever prolific Austin Conrad back on the show to talk about his new book which is all about magic items. Links to Austin’s stuff: Treasures of Glorantha Volume 2: Relics of the Second Age Treasures of Glorantha Volume 1: Dragon Pass Note that the above are affiliate links — please use them, thank you! You can also get the old Plunder book for RuneQuest 2nd edition in PDF and in POD from Chaosium. Credits The intro music is “ The Warbird ” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “ Cinder and Smoke ” and “ Skyspeak “, along with audio from the FreeSound library.

Show Notes Joerg is still without a computer, so not only are there no detailed show notes again, but he’s not here to stop me from giving a clickbaity title to this episode! Because, indeed, we have zero news about a Questworld Glorantha book… if anything, it’s the contrary. But what we do have for you is Ian Cooper as our guest! Ian comes on the podcast to talk to us about the imminently coming Questworlds. We talk about what it is, what it isn’t, how its mechanics work, and what it’s good for. You can find Questworlds’ free SRD here . You can find Ian on Mastodon here , on Bluesky here , and on Twitter here . We also chat about the game’s history as Hero Wars and then HeroQuest ( 1st and 2nd editions). Ian tells us about his Red Cow campaign books, The Coming Storm and The Eleven Lights , and what happens in the unreleased sequels that he’s played through. We talk about Greg Stafford’s design philosophy and involvement in the early days of the product line, the differences between the other product lines, and more! Of course, it’s not a zero-sum game, so Ian also makes a point that you can play some games with RuneQuest, and some other games with Questworlds… it’s all about the sort of experience you want for a given story. Credits The intro music is “ The Warbird ” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “ Cinder and Smoke ” and “ Skyspeak “, along with audio from the FreeSound library.

Photo by David Dunham 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 . Show Notes Here are things we talk about in this interview! JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Parasite Eve , but also other video games like Metal Gear Solid which ingrained a love of deep lore and complicated narratives in Joel’s mind. Games where mechanics are intertwined with the setting. Finding D&D at a board game cafe in New York and starting playing roleplaying games… this was followed by Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: Requiem . Creating a character one way and roleplaying them another way. Playing Don’t Rest Your Head and Unknown Armies . We digress a bit about Unknown Armies’ “ One Shots ” scenario collection, where Jailbreak and, especially, Fly to Heaven are featured. Life-path character creation systems, especially Traveller’s . King of Dragon Pass , back when it was a game in a box with manuals. We digress again about old school video games that had actual good stuff in the box, not just a DVD, especially one Ludo’s favourite video games ever, the Ultima series (you can get them on GOG ). Playing KoDP again later on mobile/tablet to finish it properly. Using the Glorantha wiki to learn more about the lore, mostly by looking at the references mentioned at the bottom of the pages. This led Joel to getting some old RuneQuest and HeroQuest products in PDF before buying the new RuneQuest: Glorantha books. The idea of time and god in theology/philosophy classes. Roughly speaking, gods need to be outside of time to not be subject to change. Joel was interested in the metaphysics of the setting, but the RuneQuest mechanics were intimidating. Joel’s ideal game: KoDP but with an “adventure mode” like in Dwarf Fortress to play members of the tribe. Joerg mentions that he did play games like this with HeroQuest: Glorantha (now Questworlds), which had some rules for handling the clan. We mention the overlap between KoDP and HeroQuest in the person of Robin Laws. Talking about Six Ages and its sequel , we answer questions about heroquesting. Joerg explains it as a “passion play”, and goes into a bit more detail. Joel draws some analogy with his own religious experiences and theological education. Answering more questions about the mythology and cultures of Glorantha (the Red Goddess, Chaos, etc) sends Joel on another philosophical discussion about Platonic ideals, “true evil” as non-existence, and other erudite things. Joerg explains his take on Chaos. Joel and Joerg discuss the different world views and creation myths on Glorantha. Ludo compares the “default” theistic Gloranthan creation myth with Greek mythology, but notes that there are other views. Joerg launches us into the draconic view, and Joel notes the parallels with Hinduism. While we’re at it, Ludo even mentions the Malkioni humanists. Joerg adds more information, and Joel sees it as an interesting mix of many real-world inspirations from all over the map, across many different eras. Of course, Plato’s Republic gets a mention. We talk some more about the Hyalorings that you play in Six Ages. Joel asks about their pedigree, so Joerg is happy to provide him with their story from the God Time to the Second Age. This leads us somehow to talk about Argrath and the Red Moon & White Bear board game. Joel says he would like to get an RPG group going but he hasn’t been able to so far. We talk about the different types of gameplay possible in Glorantha. Asking Joel about what he doesn’t like about Glorantha, he mentions how there’s a lot of material that’s hard to shuffle through. He mentions how Harnworld (another favourite of Ludo’s) also has a lot of material, but is well organized. With Glorantha, you’re “feeling around in the dark”, dealing with many competing systems and titles. Joel says that starting with the video games was good but was just the tip of the iceberg. Joerg recommends the RuneQuest Starter Set, and the usual other books. Joel mentions that he listens to podcasts to get into history and lore — for Earth he regularly follows the History of Rome podcast, the Revolution podcast, and two History of China podcasts. Ludo mentions that he got interested in Earth ancient history after getting into Glorantha. The actual interview actually ran much longer than this episode’s duration, and a lot of it was cut in the editing room. So if you think we’re digressing a lot, believe us, it was even worse. 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.

Our Guests For this episode, we have Nick Brooke and Simon Bray as our guests to talk about Simon’s book Furthest, Crown Jewel of Lunar Tarsh, and about what goes on in Lunar Tarsh in general. Show Notes There are no fancy show notes for this episode yet: Joerg’s laptop seems to have been blown up by Orlanthi rebels who don’t want the truth to be told… we will edit this post with the final show notes when Joerg has acquired a new laptop. In the meantime, you can go buy Simon’s stuff: Furthest, Crown Jewel of Tarsh (PDF & hardcover) Simon’s Redbubble shop , including the Map of Furthest and the Map of Tarsh . Bonus stuff: Hydra! (PDF) Adventurers from the Lunar Provinces (PDF) Credits The intro music is “ The Warbird ” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “ Cinder and Smoke ” and “ Skyspeak “, along with audio from the FreeSound library.

This episode comes much later than anticipated, but this is Ludo’s fault! Apologies to all. Our Guests In this episode we welcome Kevin Jacklin and David Hall: Kevin has been writing freeform games for a very long time, and table-top role-playing games a little before that, becoming a huge fan of RuneQuest. Kevin names a fateful meeting with our other guest David Hall at a board-gaming convention in the West of England that had a big bearing on what happened afterwards. David Hall started producing a RuneQuest and Glorantha magazine by the name Tales of the Reaching Moon back in 1989. The magazine lasted until 2002 across 20 issues. David was also behind the Reaching Moon Megacorp which produced a number of supporting Gloranthan publications over the same period. Of course the Megacorp was not as massive as the name suggests, it was basically David working part-time out of a very small flat in Slough. Lastly, David was the organizer of the Convulsion game convention from 1992 to 2002, which continues to this day by the name Continuum. And it was at the first Convulsion in 1992 that David and Kevin ran their first freeform, Home of the Bold. Main Topic Ludo admits that he has no experience at all with freeforms but then asks Jörg when he first got into this form of roleplaying. Jörg’s first exposure to freeforms was in the same year he met David for the first time, in 1993 when David visited our annual German RuneQuest convention. While it was not a Gloranthan freeform, it was a Call of Cthulhu freeform which saw Jörg wearing his lab coat chasing after a bird mummy and other stuff. Ludo asked whether there was someone actually dressed as a mummy, but that mummy actually was a prop – a desiccated bird carcass originally wrapped into linen bandages. David sadly did not play in that freeform, as it was German language only, but we (the German RuneQuest society that had been organizing these conventions since 1990) remedied that language problem two years later at our convention near Berlin. The next year Jörg attended the second Convulsion convention in Leicester and had a role to play in How the West Was One, the second of the Reaching Moon Megacorp Gloranthan freeforms. What is a Freeform? David describes a freeform as a microcosm of fantasy roleplaying. Home of the Bold is a fifty player game where each of the fifty players gets a pre-generated character. They get objectives they are trying to meet, they get a list of characters in the game who they are supposed to know, and they get a few abilities and spells to help them get along. Effectively, the cast covers the Lunar administration, the Lunar military, tax collectors, spies, merchants, and on the Sartarite side it includes the city councillors, guilds people, merchants, the local underworld, city constables who look after the local underworld, heralds, and various members of the tribes who are in the city of Boldhome. Altogether a microcosm of the whole of Sartar and the whole of the city, and effectively what happens is that everybody talks to each other. As the directors of the freeform “all we do” is to write the characters, set up the scene, sort of coil the spring, and then just let it go. By the end of the game, the directors will know a lot less about the game than the players will know because they will be living the game and they will work out what’s happening. Kevin adds that it is very much a living thing. To be ultra-precise about it, this is not people sitting around a large table rolling dice, this is a large playing area. People will very often costume for this. It runs over several hours – Home of the Bold in particular is an eight or nine hour game, with a break in there – so it lasts pretty much for the whole of one day of the convention, and people can be caught up in it. That is something that regular table-top roleplaying usually doesn’t do, you can actually become lost in the whole thing. This direct experience is one of the huge benefits of the whole freeform game. Something like that is very taxing to write and organize, which is why you need a convention to support a freeform game. You cannot really run a massive freeform anywhere else. The very first Convulsion had a big freeform game, and David brought Kevin on board because he knew a little bit about them. Kevin’s experience with freeforms originated from a conversation with Sandy Petersen because he had written a Call of Cthulhu scenario. In the late eighties and early nineties Kevin got a chance to visit the Chaosium headquarters because the head offices of his company were situated in the Bay area, too, giving Kevin a really good excuse to go and visit Chaosium and see the folk at work there. A year or two later, Sandy had moved to Microprose on the east coast of the US, and he told Kevin about a group of folks there who had started to write freeform games. This was something that had been going on mainly on the east coast and west coast of the US, something called Interactive Literature., which is in fact live action theatrical roleplaying or freeforms. Sandy had got into a group that included e.g. Lawrence Shick who had written for D&D. The group was called Cruel Hoax, and they were putting on a big freeform in a convention on the east coast, and because Kevin had accumulated lots of air miles, Kevin decided it would be a good idea if he and Dan Steel, a friend of his, flew over to take part in this. The game was called Café Casablanca, effectively a mash-up of all the film noir of the late 1930ies and 40ies including Casablanca of course. Having taken part in this, Kevin thought this was a really cool idea (Details can be found on the Convivium convention website run by Kevin) David knew Kevin, and when Kevin told him about Cafe Casablanca it sounded amazing. David showed off his costumes and everything, and David wanted to have one of those freeforms for the Convulsion convention he was setting up in Leicester for 1992, so they sat down to write one. David says that had they known how much work it was to write a freeform, they might not have started that. Kevin remembers that it was not quite that straightforward – they had to convince the rest of the Convulsion committee that this was a cool thing to do. Because nobody had ever played a freeform, and because they needed how cool they really are, Kevin wrote one which he ran at his house for the committee. That was Adventures of Robin Hood , Kevin asks David whether there exist any pictures of him in tights, which David (quite vehemently) negates. Anyway, the committee seemed to like the concept, and the following year they introduced Home of the Bold to an unsuspecting public at Convulsion. Freeform Plots Ludo falls into his role as the newcomer to this kind of activity, and he asks about what to expect from a freeform. He has some idea about murder mystery games which have a inciting incident – the murder – and then people trying to get behind who did it, and that’s the big resolution. David replies that there are always a number of plots in the freeforms. There are about ten or twenty plots in Home of the Bold, some bigger than others. There are probably murders that need to be solved, heists the underworld is trying to pull, but the main backdrop is the occupation by the Lunar Empire, so there is a big aspect of that. The directors set this thing up, then it all depends on what the players do. There is no such thing as a right ending, but there is a likely ending. Kevin adds that one of the things the directors do put in place is scaffolding which gives players something bigger than themselves to do. So for example there is an election, and it is in the objectives of some of the players to try and get elected, so you have to go around and persuade people, or blackmail them or whatever you want to do to vote for you. There is a chariot race, and there are prizes for people who win the chariot race. You have all of these things that people hang on to that are part of something that is really big, and that’s a cool thing about freeforms. Everybody does have their own objectives, but the trick with writing a character sheet is that if you need to go and find X, there is going to be someone who has got X or who has information how to find X. Every player is the star of their own movie, things are happening to them. If you talk to the lowliest street beggar about what is going on in Home of the Bold, it is going to be the glorious rise of the street beggar, he probably doesn’t care about the Lunar occupation as long as he is getting a bowl of soup at the end of the day. The writers basically provide half a novel for each of the players and give them a bunch of objectives. The really good players are ones that make up more objectives for themselves, which is when things become self-generative. David adds that the writers have another technique. Some player characters get an envelope which is to be opened when there is a life-changing event happening to them. When a certain triggering event happens, their whole objectives may change. There are romance plots as well, you may end up sharing objectives with people who you may not accidentally fall for. There are all sorts of things that can send people off into a different direction. There is one rule though that unless it is into the last hour of the game, you never make it a player’s objective to kill another player character. That is a big no-go in freeforms. Ludo asks whether “except in the last hour” means that there is going to be a big blood-bath. Kevin explains that some people spend weeks and months to prepare their characters for the game. There usually is a good mix of genders attending such a freeform. A lot of players like to do the costuming bits, some might have a different costume for every hour of the game. It is fantastic to see what the players bring to a freeform, it can be one of the satisfactions in preparing such an event. So what you cannot do is tell a character to go and kill character Y, because if you kill that player’s character thirty minutes into the game, that player is going to be terribly annoyed as all their preparation will have been for naught from that point onward. However, a good public death scene is fantastic in a freeform, especially for a baddie, so the general rule is that yes, in the last hour of the game you can actually kill another player’s character. Jörg interjects that there is one way you can kill a player character when there is a villain or victim who needs killing if you tell that to the player of that character beforehand and you provide them with the replacement character from the start. David elaborates that yes, you can play a villain in the game, and often players will sign up for playing a villain in the game because they are fun and have a lot of agency. The thing about villains is that for 95% of the time they are a formidable foe of the heroes who are quite likely a bit incompetent, but in the last five percent of the time they need to fail. All this may entail imprisoning the hero, torturing them, telling them all of their plans, where they are going to be next week, and then the hero escapes, strangely. The game is about creating a maximum game fun environment where the players know who the villains are. The writers use very broad strokes that people know from movies or comics etc. Especially when people aren’t that familiar with the background you need to employ some well-known tropes that people can connect with. Glorantha as a background is a little specialized, and people playing Glorantha games usually know a reasonable amount about it, but the authors try not necessarily to assume that familiarity. You don’t have to be a gloranthaphile to enjoy any of the Gloranthan games Kevin and his friends have written. The character sheet will contain some necessary basic information about the background relevant to the character, and there are also booklets presenting the background of the game to the players that are handed out before the game. With conflicts up to and including killing other player characters, Ludo asks about the actual rules mechanics that are used to resolve conflicts in the game. Kevin observes the more he has written freeforms, the fewer rules he has actually put into the games. There are freeforms where the players actually carry around a little shaker with a die that will be used to resolve conflicts, but that doesn’t work all that well. Kevin’s best advice to players is to actually talk to other players to find a mutual way to resolve the conflict that is actually dramatically satisfying, even (or especially) if one of you loses. If there is no mutual solution, the players get to use stone paper scissors just to get a decision. David adds that a lot of the abilities and spells given to the players are built around that resolution mechanism, which especially in the last hour of the game should be used to get a resolution to their own objectives, too. Taking the example of the chariot race featured in Home of the Bold, there are obviously going to be some rules around that chariot race, allowing people to feel that their skill or their special ability is going to help them to win that event. So there are some specific rules as well as some general rules. Freeform Metagame Ludo asks whether that is also where as the game masters you go around the rooms and help people with that, to which David replies hopefully as little as possible. The directors are always there to help, but they really try not to get involved unless they really have to be. Jörg mentions that the directors tend to cheat a bit about that involvement, assigning some players a role that requires them to go around at certain times and announce a new event or similar. So the player how has the town herald gets the job to make the players aware of things happening. David explains that there are some events in the game that are pre-set. To some extent, all the freeforms set in Glorantha are based on a historical (or prophesied) event in the setting, that tells how the Malani tribe was created and all sorts of things. But being things actually played out by players, the events don’t usually end up like canonical history has them ending. Ludo then asks whether there is a post-game presentation of what everybody in the game was up to. Often there will be a big event at the end, in-game. Actually it is very important to have a debriefing or decompressing session after the game. Sometimes people get really caught up in their game and their character, which can be a very emotional thing, so you need that time to allow people to understand that it wasn’t personal, that it wasn’t the other player doing bad things to you as a person, that it was their character doing stuff to a character whose role you took on. Ludo observes that this can be a general problems at conventions where you play with people you don’t know, so you cannot be sure whether that other player is acting like an asshole because that’s how his character is set up or whether that person actually is an asshole in real life. Kevin stresses the importance of having the opportunity after a freeform to get things off your chest, even if it is only to boast about things you achieved in the game, and talk about some of the plots you were involved in. Often someone will stand up and talk about a plot, and other people will chime in to clarify what actually went on (from their perspective), possibly across the other side of town in their experience of the game. Learning about events that you weren’t directly involved in actually is a nice thing as it gives you the feeling that you were involved in something bigger than your character. Jörg mentions the two after-action write-up collections submitted by a large number of players in the game which were published as fund-raisers at the follow-up conventions and distributed to the contributors. Kevin remembers that to have been a quite hefty bit of work, and they stopped producing those quite quickly. A Few Famous Gloranthan Freeforms Ludo then asks about the freeforms that have been mentioned to him, like Home of the Bold or How the West Was One. David explains that Home of the Bold was set in Boldhome during the Lunar occupation. That is about as much he wants to say at this point in order not to give the plot away. How The West Was One is set in the west of Glorantha, it is about an attempt to bring all the various Malkioni sects together at an ecumenical council with attending people wearing funny hats and working at not having too many crises of faith. These crises of faith had a nice mechanism (involving sealed letters being opened) where people would go off chewing scenery (pretending to whip themselves or other expressions of religious drama) and changing the direction of their characters and their goals. Life of Moonson was set in Glamour. It was about choosing the new mask of the Red Emperor, featuring all the people you would expect in the empire like Jar-eel, Beat-pot Aelwrin, the Batman. Ludo points out that that is the freeform that is available on the Jonstown Compendium . People get all the material possibly to run it on their birthday parties (or other events where there may be fifty people willing to spend a day on a freeform). Fall of the House of Malan by Jeff Richard and Neil Robinson, produced around the way the Malani tribe was basically broken and the Lismelder tribe splitting off. Another one by the same team was Orkarl’s Bull, with an epic cattle raid at the center of things. There was People of Pavis (run at German RuneQuest Convention in 1997) during the Lunar occupation, there was Rise of Ralios (with The World’s Greatest Tournament the accompanying background booklet, run at German RuneQuest Convention in 1996) about the return of Arkat – five times, there was the Broken Council (at the San Francisco RuneQuest Con) about the birth of Nysalor, and there was Home of the Bold, the first bilingual freeform at the German RuneQuest convention 1995 outside of Berlin which was about the Lhankor Mhy temple of Jonstown having to pay a tribute to the imperial library in terms of valuable books. Jörg adds a few other offerings the conventions had later on, like e.g. Harem Nights set in Fonrit, Griffin Mountain or Bust set in Balazar, and David adds even one set in the Grey Dog Inn, The Murder at the Grey Dog Inn. (A more extensive list is found in this blog post of Jörg’s.) The very large freeforms sort of petered out about 2002-ish, becoming much much smaller since then. The reasons for that change in format were mostly practical ones as it is quite hard to find and then keep fifty people engaged for a whole day. There were smaller ones like for instance Tarsh War (which got published by the Reaching Moon Megacorp). David rightly mentions the original Gloranthan freeform which was Sartar High Council by Greg Stafford, published in Wyrm’s Footnotes #7 (and reprinted in Reaching Moon Megacorp’s Wyrm’s Footprints , a bit of a precursor to the Glorantha Sourcebook catching up all the good stuff from Wyrm’s Footnotes at a time when they were out of print). David thinks that Chris Gidlow’s smaller freeform games come a bit more out of the table-top game. They are normally played around a table but have very strong freeform elements to them. Jörg describes how the big freeforms usually prepare the gaming site indicating various in-game locations by associating features of the gaming site. These may include the temple of Boldhome, the royal palace, the thieves’ den, the market place where you can meet everybody, and some of these places have access restrictions, often enforced by some of the players. There is a bit of faction building simply by where your character can go in the game. David describes the locations in Home of the Bold and their roles: The market place, where all people may gather and where the herald makes his ann

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.

We finally worked up the courage to get Jeff Richard on our show! Jeff is the Creative Director and Chair of Chaosium, the lead writer on most of the RuneQuest books, the lead art director on RuneQuest, and the editor for Pendragon. Jeff is also generally responsible for the look and feel of the Chaosium books. Jeff’s Gaming History Jeff’s roleplaying career started in the late seventies with not being able to make much sense of the original D&D rules but getting the system from playing Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha . It was in Middle or High School when one of his friends brought a copy of RuneQuest and advertised it as a game where you could play anything in the setting, even a were-pig. Even better, they realized it was in the same setting as that board game White Bear and Red Moon which they had played before. Jeff had been gaming for quite some time before he and Greg Stafford started writing together in the late 1990s. In the 2000s Jeff and Rick Meints ended up pretty much taking over the leaderless Issaries Inc. with its Hero Wars/HeroQuest line, putting out the second (generic) edition of the HeroQuest rules and campaign books for Sartar and Pavis. A few years later Greg Stafford regained control over Chaosium and brought the Moon Design crew (expanded to include Michael O’Brian aka MOB and Neil Robinson) in to take over the company. Ludo mentions that Jörg told him just before the recording about the werepig. Jeff confirms that Pinky Petunia was his first character (who didn’t last very long), a kamikaze werepig which was the coolest experience to a 14 or 15 year old who had been playing just AD&D and related games with their very limited set of character classes and races. Jeff also was part of the Seattle Farmers Collective, a group of Seattle roleplayers including Jeff, David Dunham, Neil Robinson, Pam Carlson, Dana Shack (?), Dave Pearton and others which engaged in a number of ways of exploratory gaming in the nineties. David Dunham had managed to marry the Pendragon rules with RuneQuest, which on retrospect is pretty easy, and the Collective played a couple of generational games in various places in Glorantha. What was interesting was that the characters were the local community, and they were involved in these Bronze Age feuds, and the more the characters succeeded the worse the things would turn out. At the time, Jeff was reading a lot of Icelandic Sagas and researching theories of feuds, of how feud systems would end up to create an equilibrium. A lot of those experiences worked their way into David Dunham’s computer game King of Dragon Pass , and then, twenty years later, a lot of that worked its way into the current edition of RuneQuest. Ludo mentions that a lot of people who play RuneQuest might recognize its setting as that of the King of Dragon Pass or Six Ages games, much like Jeff had the experience with the White Bear and Red Moon boardgame. Jeff talks about the demography of the players of RuneQuest and the fans of Glorantha. It is very clear that a lot of old-time fans are getting back into it, but sales numbers indicate that it is largely a new audience. There are people coming in from David Dunham’s computer games, others come in from the Morrowind/Skyrim connections ( mentioned in this interview with the designers ). Jeff often jokes that old RuneQuest is The Velvet Underground of gaming, selling 20,000 copies but everybody who ended up owning a copy leaving a big impression. Ludo inserts the saying “You might not know RuneQuest, but RuneQuest is your favourite game designer’s favourite game.” Jeff argues that this changed in the last decade or so as RuneQuest had largely been dead as a rules system since the early nineties. Now it has a new edition, it has a very active fan-base, it is showing up at conventions, its audience is growing – Jeff will probably have to retire that Velvet Underground joke. What would have happened if that band had ever actually caught on? Ludo points out the good influence of new people coming in to the setting, and mentions our Gloranthan Initiation series of interviews where we talk to people comparatively new to the setting (which we upload in between the main episodes of this podcast). Asked for roleplaying games outside of the BRP family, after rattling off a number of games published by Chaosium (Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, Nephilim ) Jeff mentions Vampire: The Masquerade as a game he enjoyed a lot, and Ars Magica , which he did a couple of campaigns with. Both these games offered something else than going underground knocking down doors and taking people’s shit. Other games include the old West End Games Star Wars , FGU’s Bushido (which shared one of the authors with RQ3’s Land of Ninja). Ludo points out Bushido’s battle rules, while Jeff emphasizes its implementation of the samurai code of honour. Jeff names Chris Klug’s James Bond 007 as one of his favourite games of all time, too, comparing it to Pendragon for brilliantly designed games. Ludo points out Jeff’s role in the first ever Gloranthan podcast, Tales of Mythic Adventures which he co-hosted with Michael O’Brian (aka MOB). Jeff explains that setting up a regular podcast or just any kind of regular show is a gigantic time commitment (you can nearly hear Ludo and Jörg nodding sagely at that), and for some reason people thought that it was more important that Jeff and MOB write and create books for there to be podcasts about. Jörg points towards Jeff’s work on the Prince of Sartar webcomic which went into indeterminate hiatus for the same reason. Again, some people out there put more value in new books being produced rather than Jeff and Kalin Kadiev producing an experimental webcomic. Ludo recalls people crediting the webcomic for drawing them back into the Glorantha hobby. Again, Jeff blames the time commitment, but calls it a platform to play around with the look and feel of things, and you can see a lot of impact from that in the later art direction and the look and feel of the RuneQuest books. The Cults of RuneQuest Series With this, we have completed the introduction of our guest, and we can drop into the Cults of RuneQuest series. Ludo quotes Jeff having said that this was the biggest project he had worked on in his career so far, and asks whether Jeff can take a break now or whether he is already diving into his next big project. Jeff replies that there are no breaks. One of the differences between fan publications and his current position is that he does that for a living, so he can’t sit back and take a nice pause now a project gets fulfilled. At the end of the day, what Chaosium is all about is to create new books and new adventures. Jeff is in the process of looking at the first pass of the layout for the Lunar book, looking into the refining, and hoping that it will be off to the printer in the next couple of weeks. After that there will be the Guide to Dragon Pass, and after that either the Sartar campaign book or the Solar volume of Cults of RuneQuest. Jeff describes the situation of his layout people as working on a conveyor belt. Jeff enjoys that RuneQuest now is in a situation where Chaosium could realistically schedule six to eight RuneQuest books in any twelve months period. Other than RuneQuest, the Pendragon line is getting up to a similarly lively publication schedule. Ludo allows himself to be distracted from Glorantha giving his appreciation for the layout style of Pendragon with all those little medieval illuminations in the margins. Jeff compares the word count of the Cults books with that of the Guide, both being in roughly the same magnitude. Asked what was the most complicated aspect of the project, Jeff confirms it was the inter-connectedness which made the project so much harder, making sure that all of these rules systems tie into each other. Jeff describes the Guide as a fictional encyclopedia, a purely narrative description of the setting which doesn’t need to be mechanically linked. For example, when you go through the associated cults you need to make sure they all line up with each other. Ludo claims that you can’t make a big table cross-indexing all cults with one another, and while Jeff did actually create such a table with a hundred by a hundred entries when developing the books, including spreadsheets documenting which cults allow sorcery, which cults allow shamanism, which cults are associated with other cults, which cults are enemies… That was a whole other level of complexity compared to writing the Guide to Glorantha. When asked about the Mythology book, Jeff confirms that it is already printed, and going to be released in October. Go and buy, buy, buy! He goes on to show us the printed proof, which doesn’t do that much to our audience, as no-one can see this (yet), but boy it looks pretty. In an absolute ideal world where Chaosium did not have to worry about marketing and building their audience, Jeff would have liked to start the Cults of RuneQuest series with the Mythology as the leading book. In Jeff’s view the Mythology book is the most important book in the series because it explains how Greg Stafford and Jeff view mythology and how to interact with the rest of the books. It provides the framework for the rest of the Cults books. On the other hand, in itself it has no cults in it. Jeff supports Chaosium’s marketing decision to go with the Prosopaedia first, presenting a huge number of deities, and then the volumes Lightbringers and Earth Goddesses which include the most popular player character cults. Now that the books are broken up into eleven volumes, Ludo asks about who would be the customers for which books of the series. While a player mainly interested in playing earth cults will be well served with the Earth Goddesses volume, would the Mythology book be catering to the GMs instead? Jeff views all of the Cults books as player-facing. While a player may say “I never play a Darkness cult, I won’t need that book”, and that’s totally fine. With the exception of the Lords of Terror book all the Cults Books contain stuff that you might play. As a player, Jeff would probably buy the book with the cult of the character, and then the companion book about all the other cults in the party, and then the Mythology book which connects all the stories of the deities. Jeff tried to provide the most detailed presentation of the Monomyth to date. Jeff tells us how Greg had tried to write the Mythology book based entirely on individual stories. You would then be able to assemble the Monomyth by realizing that all these stories fit together. There are two problems with this approach. One is that the entire project is getting really long. The other is that at some point you start writing stories to fill in gaps, resulting in some stories just not being as good. Greg always worked better when he had this great inspiration and came up with an amazing story, and in that story he would see how it would fit into the overall framework of the Monomyth. On the other hand, when he had to write all that stuff between the lines, he ended up with a lot of stuff that lacked that brilliance and probably should have been rejected a long time ago. The approach taken by the Mythology book is to provide the overview of the Monomyth supplemented by small stories that give you examples how that would work. As a result it reads better and can actually be done in a reasonable deadline rather than try to finish the Belintar’s Book project which would collect all the stories that are known. Ludo reports his experience how the Monomyth shines through the various stories told in the two Cults Books published so far, and he has been wondering whether the Monomyth is a convenient construct for a gaming world or whether Greg just was a great fan of Joseph Campbell and wanted to implement his theory. Greg Stafford started writing his fictional mythology back in the Sixties, and there has been a framework to the mythology since 1966 or 1967 and has always been there since. It got the title of the Monomyth in recognition of Joseph Campbell, but it has a structure similar to how Tolkien’s Legendaria has structure to it. This is where Glorantha is a work of fantasy and experimental mythology. We can do things in the world that make it feel more real and that can take us a step further than we can imagine with real world mythologies. Ludo brings up interconnected stories like e.g. the Marvel Cinematic Universe but points out that mythology doesn’t need as much consistency as that. Myths may very well contradict each other. Ludo asks how the Cults series avoids creating just a Gloranthan cinematic universe where all the stories line up perfectly consistent with one another, creating a One True Monomyth. Jeff replies that there is an essay in the Mythology book addressing that. One of the things that was important to Greg (and Jeff) is that the very worst approaches to understand mythology is to grab a book and argue about the details as you largely miss the point of the stories. The best way to understand mythology is for it to show up in your games, for your GM and the player characters to participate in it and to experience it. It would even better to be that person and directly interact with spirits and gods, but given the limitations of our experiences that is difficult to arrange. The next best way to experience the mythology is to play it, and after that the next best is to listen to someone telling you the stories (in a minimally interactive way). Treating the events in a myth as cold facts from a book is the worst way to interact with the myth. Still, nerds being nerds, these details usually end up being what is discussed on internet forums. Most Glorantha fans fall into the group experiencing the myths through play or narration, appreciating that there is a structure where it all fits together, ideally leading them onward to think about other things. One of the ironies Jeff experiences is that people brand new to the setting get this point a lot better than people who have been arguing about it for years. Sensitive Topics in Glorantha Ludo lists a number of grand themes that myths deal with: why people do what they do, why society has to work this way etc., touching on death and gender roles and other sensitive topics. Ludo brings up a couple of cases where people have complained about depictions of nudity or of animal sacrifice in the art. Jeff (who had a foot in both the European and the American side of things) points out that contrary to Ludo’s expectations Chaosium never had any complaints like that from the US. The complaints came from the UK or in case of the animal sacrifices from Spain. Jeff views RuneQuest as game material for mature individuals of whatever age able to deal with topics like life, death, sex, gender, social organization. A lot of the stuff is “Where does the world come from?” or “Why do things function the way they do?” In order for that to feel real and to be artistically honest it is gonna hit a lot of stuff that we don’t like to talk about as much, especially in this social media-driven world that we find ourselves in today. Asked whether Chaosium actually had to wave away certain vocal minority problems, Jeff tells that they started out being very careful about how they presented things, there being some ground rules. Jeff tries to be as open and aware of inclusion as possible. There are some things that don’t exist in Glorantha like a race-based slavery with large scale deportation in the setting. Writing takes a combination of care and artistic integrity. When problematic topics arise, it is because they are part of the world, and not out of a sense of mischief or trying to be shocking. A fantasy setting cannot just be about things we like and aspire to, but also need things we fear and hate. People’s reaction is different when such elements enter the story with artistic integrity rather than when they are smuggled in only for shock value. Ludo describes the Monomyth as the way each cult and deity fits into the grand scheme of the cosmos. Presented in the core rules book with three seemingly redundant hunter cults (Foundchild, Odayla and Yinkin) Ludo was confused why there were three such gods, but with the Lightbringers book their respective roles and context has been clarified. Jeff reminisces that at the time of putting together the core rules book Jeff knew that it would be quite a long time before Chaosium could deliver the detailed cult write-ups, so the designers had to find a compromise between providing a set of archetypes that exist in the world but also throwing in a few existing cults that were fan favourites from earlier editions. While these may not be as mythologically important, people might whine if these were missing. If the designers had decided to have only Yinkin as the example hunter cult, that would have been pointless for people wishing to game in Prax. The one cult that almost did not make the cut was Odayla who isn’t really that important in the core area covered by the rules, but as Jason Durall pointed out, that cult allows its members to become a bear, and how awesome is that? Any time the designers create a book, they establish the setting and provide its content, and try make sure that the setting and fantasy fiction fit together, but also it has to function as a game, to keep people engaged in it is also terribly important because that is what RuneQuest is for. Asked whether it would be hard to make these cults playable, Jeff answers that e.g. that followers of the water cults might have a tough time making those cults relevant if the entire campaign takes place up in the highlands of Dragon Pass, away from the sea. Jeff tells how one of the players in his current game is an initiate of the local river god, who is great when the party is right near the river, which they almost never are in the adventures. But to Jeff it is important that not every character decision is equally good in all situations, that there are consequences. A situation without consequences might be hard ot get into, and may ultimately end up in a dead end for game play for most people. Ludo asks how Jeff presents people coming from D&D with the roleplaying opportunities when they pick a less important minority cult (without attempting to introduce some artificial game balance). In Jeff’s opinion a lot of the minor cults have tremendous roleplaying opportunities, but that initiating to the Great Storm King with all his friends and being devoted to basically the cat god have different scope in affecting the game world. While playing a follower of Yinkin may not be as cosmologically significant as playing a hero of the Storm King, it can be as much fun, and most new players get that. There is an unfortunate tendency to conflate paths to potential power with roleplaying opportunities. While it is completely valid that some players seek a character on the path to power, it is just as fine to have players who want their characters just to chew scenery and have a great time without ever achieving some great power. Ludo talks about his experiences with players designing a character they wanted to play, totally unwilling to give that character any growth in terms of proficiency as that character already hit that sweet spot. In Jeff’s experience, it is a fallacy to assume that all players playing the game want a certain thing X, and then to design the game so that all players achieve this thing, when the players demanding this thing X are just a vocal minority of the target audience. What Jeff likes about the Cults books as splatbooks is that each cult provides a different mix of possibilities. If players choose Humakt as their cult, they know that combat is a very important part of their character, and same for a Storm Bull cultist, but playing a follower of Donandar is going to be a very different perspective, with combat still going to be an impor

RuneQuest is copyright 2023 Chaosium Inc., Old-School Essentials is copyright 2023 Necrotic Gnome 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. Show Notes Things we mention in this episode include: Starting with D&D (of course). Getting “sucked” into Vampire: The Masquerade and the World of Darkness setting, particularly Mage: The Ascension . We don’t need to get into the weeds of the WoD metaplot. Discovering the OSR movement, and especially OSE . Going from Troika to Seth Skorkowski to Call of Cthulhu to RuneQuest 2nd edition (classic reprint) Reading RQ2 cover to cover. It has layers of complexity but somehow in a simple way. It’s less crunchy than, say, Lancer . Rurik’s saga in the RQ2 rulebook gives a fascinating glimpse of the setting. The idea of ransom is very interesting, especially to prevent PCs from always killing everyone. Cults of Prax also has a very interesting narrative, and expands nicely upon the cults glimpsed at in the RQ2 rulebook. The new RQG books are like RQ2 but with a lot (a lot!) more pages, and great art (some of the best ever found in an RPG product). Matt had a false-ish start as an RQG gamemaster, but has now found a player spot in someone else’s game. RQG character creation is way too long and complicated. Too many choices to make. Lots of information that that needs to be looked up about the setting. Somehow RQ2 did a better job teasing the setting but implying that “nobody knows more that this”. Comparatively, RQG teases the setting in a way that sends the reader to the Glorantha Sourcebook and other lore books. This might be because reading RQ2 puts the reader back at the origin of the game. Matt ran the Broken Tower but the first character took three evenings to create. He therefore used a more “we’ll figure it out as we go” approach, coupled with pre-gens, for the other characters and the lore. Not looking up all the lore you don’t need for an adventure is important. The Glorantha Sourcebook might be required reading to explain a lot of stuff from the rulebook (like the many places, events, and NPCs mentioned in the Family History). Dreaming of a simpler character creation system, like Call of Cthulhu’s faster creation options from the Investigator Handbook. There’s actually a simpler RQG character creation system available on the RQ Wiki . Matt experienced the Broken Tower a second time as a duck, and is now on to more adventures in Dragon Pass… including going to the Shaker Temple and descending into Hell! Matt wouldn’t necessarily recommend RQ2 as a first dive into Glorantha, but he recommends it as a good rules system read. Matt recommends the RuneQuest Starter Set and its world-book as a first contact with Glorantha. But Sartar is Matt’s least interesting place to game in. Matt changes his mind and recommends Khan of Khan instead to get started… but we discuss how the game is now out of print. Ducks are real cool, and the Spirit World is cool too. Matt isn’t really interested in metaplots in general, and Glorantha’s Hero Wars isn’t any different. We talk a bit about various ways of playing around a metaplot, or ignoring it. Joerg argues about taking on the role of the main heroes of a metaplot. Matt wishes there was more information outside of Sartar and the River of Cradles, and outside of the Orlanthi pantheon. Again, the Sourcebook is recommended reading, but (at the time of recording) the release of the first few cult books was imminent. Matt asks his question for Joerg, about how the Mindlink spells aren’t in RQG. Ludo talks about the dark-elf walkie-talkie hack, and Joerg mentions the Waertagi sort of did that already. As we go through the wildcard questions, we also go on a tangent about Yelmalio (who else?) that leads us through the God Time, the Dawn, and up to the Sandheart campaign. 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.

In this episode which we finally get around to talking about 13 th Age Glorantha. Ludo and Jörg are joined by Becca of “Dames & Dice” fame on the Iconic Podcast, and by Evan Franke, of “Exploring Glorantha” fame. Becca is part of the Iconic Production Podcast, a bunch of podcasts and channels dedicated to talking about 13 th Age, which includes 13 th Age Glorantha. Becca has Glorantha experience not just from a multi-session game of 13 th Age Glorantha, but also from two RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha games (one of which she talks about in episode 5 of Dames & Dice ). Evan has already been on this podcast together with J-M in episode 19 of our podcast , talking about Jackals and Ancient World-Building. He may be more familiar to you as the source of deep Glorantha lore on the Exploring Glorantha YouTube series . He jokingly describes himself as a “hanger-on” of Iconic Production podcasts and actual plays. As Ludo expounds on the history of Glorantha as a setting for games, Becca drops that she has the board game: a copy of the original White Bear and Red Moon, gifted to her at Christmas last year by her dad who did a lot of roleplaying in college along a couple of AD&D 1 st edition books. 13 th Age Ludo admonishes people to not just buy the 13 th Age Glorantha book thinking of it as a full game as you need the 13 th Age rules along with this book. (Ludo claims it has to be the full rules book, but it is possible to work out the rules from the SRD which is free from Pelgrane Press ) Becca outlines 13 th Age: a fantasy D20 roleplaying game which feels somewhat similar to D&D 5 th edition with a few exceptions (no skills, backgrounds, the idea of failing forward) and being a lot more heroic in scope than your usual start into a D20 game. Ludo quotes descriptions of 13 th Age as a mix of D&D 3.5 and D&D 4 th edition, usually in reflection of its authors’ involvement in those two iterations of D&D. Ludo comments on the tone of the writing in the 13 th Age rules book, and on the emphasis on the player characters being the heroes (and movers and shakers) in the world rather than just another bunch of schmucks. Becca agrees that beginning characters are a lot more powerful than in D100 games or like roughly a 5 th level character in D&D 5 th edition. Icons One thing to put your character on the hero’s path is your Iconic Relationship, a connection to one of the 13 Icons in 13 th Age. (The number 13 comes up a lot…) There are 13 Icons to the world, great beings who can influence your character and how that character is made. Jörg asks what an Icon is: a god, a demigod? Becca gives a few examples, like the Emperor (of the Dragon Empire) who has a lot of resources and followers behind him, the Great Druid who lives in the woods with an agenda to let nature take down civilization, the Diabolist, the Crusader, the Orc Lord, etc. In Gloranthan terms, these would be people like the Red Emperor (a reincarnating demigod) or Zzabur (immortal sorcerer supreme). Ludo points out that while these Icons may have agendas antagonistic to one’s own personal or cultural agendas, there are no outright good or evil individuals among these Icons. Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet went into the rulebook saying “It is your world, nothing has to work in it like it does in our world.” That means that the Emperor might really care about running the Dragon Empire down to the details, or he might just use his position as highest authority in the Empire to acquire some certain personal goal or object of power. Likewise the Orc Lord may seem like a terrible person leaving a trail raiding and pillaging behind him, or he could be a liberator for all the monsters in the Empire suppressed by human (elf, dwarf, …) supremacy. Which sounds a lot like Prince Argrath to Jörg. Ludo points out the conversational style of the rulebook, with little jokes, designers’ notes (at times contradicting one another), One Unique Thing In 13 th Age, each character has one distinctive feature that sets them apart from all the rest of the people in the world. It may be something big and major from the onset, or it might start as something simple and small but possibly growing as your character acquires levels and more powers. Becca tells us about her and Evan’s characters in the Iconic Production playtest actual play game. Becca’s character was the last heir to the Ringsome Dukedom, a formerly lovely place now swallowed by a Hellhole. Evan has something that can either destroy the Lich King (one of the 13 icons) or restore the Lich King to its former glory, the wizard king. Evan describes this as his gift to the GM to shape the campaign, not as an in-game benefit to the character but as a campaign hook for the unfolding story of the characters. Jörg concludes that this concept might be translated to Glorantha as something like “I am Arkat Reborn” (although Evan points out that that claim is actually not that unique as there will be five Arkats in the foreseeable course of the Hero Wars at the same time). Ludo asks how that collection of Unique Things for each player character works out in practice for the GM who has to balance these rather different personal spotlights in the course of the campaign, but Becca points out that these reduce the number of Icons the GM has to keep track of for that campaign, with Becca’s heiress having a negative relation to the Diabolist (as source of that Hell Hole), and Evan’s character having (to build) a relation to the Lich King and his activities. Becca describes Evan’s One Unique Thing as more of an end of campaign (arc) item when the decision which way to go is made while her own theme of dealing with the Hell Hole might be more mid-campaign, Jörg asks how these rather specific directions of such a campaign align with pre-written adventures for 13 th Age. Becca describes how 13 th Age adventures too are written in a conversational tone, asking the prospective GM about the main Icons and giving some ideas how each of the Icons might influence this specific adventure, giving 3 or four ideas for each Icon. Becca quotes some of her own writing for Pelgrane Press for the to be released in a near future, “Behemoths: Path of the Koru”. In her contribution, Becca outlines how the impending death of the Behemoths will affect the Dragon Empire and the future of the setting, providing advice for each Icon how they are involved and what their interest in this event may be. Ludo points out a narrative mechanism where the players roll on their Icon relations and giving the GM a roll for the Icon which is going to be involved in the next leg of the game, providing another narrative clue to the GM about the direction this play-through of the scenario/campaign is going to take. Becca gives a practical example how to spend a relationship point to the Icon in a situation where the player characters are stuck, invoking a narrative reason to apply said relationship. And also how a creative GM can take this approach to insert another complication to the lives of the characters. Ludo rambles about how a gritty D20 game has such narrative mechanics, and Jörg feels reminded of how Fate Points are used in Fate. Montage Technique While Ludo is in the spirit of raiding 13 th Age for other games, he points out a mechanic that might not even be in the core rules, the Montage technique, allowing you to go through “half the dungeon” in just about 15 minutes. The GM challenges the players asking one of them to come up with a problem they encounter on their way into the story, and the person next to you will solve it, going through all the players to create a shared idea about the story so fat. Unless it is a big ask, you don’t typically spend spell slots or similarly limited resources on these but just solve these narratively. Failing Forward When designing their rules, Jonathan and Rob observed that in many games there was a danger of getting stuck in a station of a scenario if nobody rolled well enough. In order to keep the narrative going, the player attempting e.g. to pick a lock still fails their roll, but the GM still allows the door to open, but introduces a complication. The door opens, and behind it there have gathered a bunch of armed and angry orcs… Ludo talks about how old-school investigative games (or scenarios) may get stuck by the players (and/or their characters) failing to find or to get the clues, where some more recent games like Robin Laws’ Gumshoe (also published by Pelgrane Press) have the philosophy that the players automatically get the relevant clues but modifying the narrative (and possibly the sense of personal achievement). Escalating Combats The Escalation Die in 13 th Age is meant to reflect how the momentum in a fight builds up as it progresses. In the first round of the combat, the Escalation die is not used, but in the following round it is turned to show a 1, resulting in the player characters’ attacks gaining plus 1 on their D20 roll (where rolling high is good), giving +2 the next round, maxing out at +6. This helps speed up combat by reducing the chance of the big heroes missing all their rolls in combat. Normally this applies only to attack rolls, unless a character has a special ability allowing the use of the Escalation Die. Equally, normal monsters don’t benefit from the Escalation Die unless they are special monsters like dragons, who do. There might also be special circumstances where the GM may deny the Escalation Die to the player characters, like subjecting them to a fear power, making monsters scarier or forcing players to approach a fight more tactically than just dicing out attack rolls. The Escalation Die may also be used as a timing device for the GM to trigger an additional event, helping to build more dynamism into a scene. Porting this over into other game systems as a cumulative attack bonus could easily be done, e.g. a cumulative 10% bonus. Whether this makes a good timer when ported to say RQG is another question. Monsters Have Fixed Damage Which makes player “death” rather predictable once you have suffered a few hits, especially since you don’t get to do anything actively to block damage, as Jörg observed in a game he sat in. Evan points out that the player characters have always the option to run away from an opponent (unlike RQG which penalizes such retreats), and also that player characters have a go at a heroic return, a game mechanic familiar to players of the WBRM/Dragon Pass board game and repurposed to simulate the “backdoor from Hell” heroquesting reward that seems to have been one common heroquesting bonus in the Stafford house campaign. Other Features of 13 th Age Missed rolls by player characters still deal some minimum damage. There is a whole chapter of advice on building battles and staging opposition. When Jörg asks about how non-combat specialists fare in battle, we learn that with very few exceptions all classes will have combat or at least combat-supporting abilities. There is no idea how to model a pacifist Chalana Arroy healer as a 13 th Age Glorantha class yet, though. 13 th Age Glorantha Next, we move on to 13th Age Glorantha specifically. The “Chaos Rises!” Campaign When translating Glorantha into a sandboxy framework for fighting monsters, the designers opted to go with Chaos as the existential threat that needs to be dealt with rather than politicking or intrigue. Chaos Rises! is the framework for 13 th Age Glorantha. While the Kickstarter for 13 th Age Glorantha also financed the publication of the (system-less) Glorantha Sourcebook which provides the background for the upcoming Hero Wars, the main premise of 13G is that the world is breaking as Chaos rises. You need to pull together desperate player characters to prevent the world from falling apart as a separate thread from the geopolitical conflict between the resurging Kingdom of Sartar and the Lunar Empire. While that conflict spawns some of this, there are other places where Chaos rears its ugly head, like the scorpionfolk queen Gagix Twobarb down south in Larnste’s Footprint or chaos monsters boiling out of Snake Pipe Hollow and other notorious dens of Chaos. In keeping with the general design philosophy of 13 th Age this is not an absolute requirement, the basic idea is that heroes set out to patch the world together so that there is a stage for the Hero Wars to happen at all. Given Evan’s credits as a big Glorantha expert (Ludo said nerd, but…), Ludo asks whether Evan’s games feature elements and protagonists of the official Hero Wars prophecies, or whether he just lets loose fighting Chaos. Evan tells of two different paths he has taken, one GMing published introductory scenarios for newcomers to both Glorantha and 13th Age, such as The Next Valley Over where something chaotic destroyed your neighbouring community and you have to figure out what it is, or The Horn of Snake Pipe Hollow which is from the 13 th Age Glorantha rulebook itself. Evan then mentions his “little side project” Red Moon and Warring Kingdoms which is set in Fronela, far away from Dragon Pass and exploring playing 13 th Age Glorantha with Lunar characters (although not from the Lunar Empire). Parallel to Chaos Rising, there is the problem of the Kingdom of War in Fronela, distracting from the (Sartar and Lunar Empire focus on the) Hero Wars. For Evan, this is also a return to the spirit of adventuring in RQ2 in distant areas like Balazar where the local adventures and dangers make up your experience of Glorantha, a sandbox of dungeons as Ludo puts it. Runes as Icons Ludo points out that even the description of the setting in 13 th Age Glorantha is not by region, but by rune, providing Chaos places like Snake Pipe Hollow or Larnste’s Print, Disorder places like the Big Rubble and the Rockwood Mountains, Dragonewt places, Earth strongholds etc. Not so much a cohesive whole but locations to pick and insert into your campaign regardless of geography. Ludo refers to a map pointed out to him by our listener Uzz, a map of Dragon Pass and Prax without any labels at all, leaving this up to the GM and the campaign to develop or to randomly re-interpret. Evan elaborates that in standard 13 th Age the Icons are important movers and shakers in the world, and that the authors could have ported that into the world of 13 th Age Glorantha framing Jar-eel, the Red Emperor, Argrath etc. as Icons. Rather than these transitory characters, you have a relationship with several runes that dominate your life and personality. We see something like that in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, but in 13 th Age Glorantha this is limited to a set of three runes, one of which (at least) should be connected to your deity and cult. This extends to framing the scenes by rolling which rune will be influencing the upcoming scene. Ludo admits that he had to re-read the “Narrating the Runes” chapter a number of times to get an idea how to make that work. Similar to the Icon relationships in 13 th Age, a character’s relationship to three of the runes can be positive, neutral or negative/conflicting. Rather than the augmenting role you get from Runic inspiration in RuneQuest Glorantha, in 13 th Age Glorantha the runes allow the player to frame the scene from a story-telling or atmospheric approach. Ludo describes how RQG might force a player to spend a rune point for such atmospheric enhancement of a scene when all they wanted was to look cool when taking the narrative spotlight, something more easily achieved in HeroQuest Glorantha/Questworlds, and in 13 th Age Glorantha. Character Classes 13 th Age character classes start with a short blurb about what the role of members of this character class is in the world. We start with the Trickster class, which is a unique approach and definitely not for everyone. The core idea is a role for a heroic Trickster. Evan describes his experience playing such a trickster as the rest of the party playing in Beowulf or the Iliad while the Trickster was playing in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Everything the Trickster does serves to make the other characters look and act more heroic while causing pain and danger to the Trickster. These powers include to “take possession” of a fumble rolled by another player, applying that to the next roll done by the Trickster, or to cause critical success for another player by taking on a ridiculous disadvantage for the Trickster. Evan describes a scene where his actions as a Trickster enable the party Humakti to make use of an ability that the initial miss on his attack would otherwise have wasted, resulting in the comic relief granting the Humakti their great moment. Speaking of comic relief, Jörg asks whether you can play a duck in 13th Age Glorantha. This brings us to cultural backgrounds and races, of which there are several human cultures with different advantages and disadvantages in the book, plus Dark Trolls and Ducks. Ducks get one of two powers – the grim death-wielding power or the wacky comic-relief power. Evan mentions that his upcoming opus will contain not just human followers of the Lunar Way and other Fronelan cultures, but also Mostali, Aldryami and Waertagi as ancestral backgrounds. Ludo suggests that all the class-based powers in 13 th Age Glorantha are good ideas to be used as Heroquesting boons or abilities. There is also a chapter on heroquest gifts by runes in 13 th Age Glorantha. Ludo describes how especially the Earth Priestess and the Hellmother have entire hosts of spirits they can summon repeatedly in different combats, unlike the very restricted rune power economy in a game of RQG. This leads to a more heroic style of Glorantha, perhaps the anime version of Glorantha (rather the Saturday morning cartoon version, to allow some adult content). While RuneQuest does offer a toolkit with which you can ultimately construct such effects, with the 13 th Age Glorantha powers you simply get to use these in play without fine-tuning and developing your character in that direction. Jörg points towards the RQ2 Runemasters supplement where each of the sample rune masters had zoos of spirits enabling them to overcome some of these limitations, but Ludo feels that with new limitations like the RQG Charisma cap for spirits controlled by a character the RuneQuest resource economy remains more stingy. Glorantha Through Different Systems After all this talk about how 13 th Age compares to RuneQuest, Jörg asks about how the experience compares to playing HeroQuest Glorantha/Questworlds. Evan refers to his experience of playing with Ian Cooper at Chaosium Con. 13 th Age Glorantha is a lot crunchier than Questworlds, with classes, powers etc. providing rather strict definition what can be done. Where 13 th Age Glorantha is about fighting monsters in Glorantha in the course of the narrative, Questworlds with its single roll resolution mechanic is a game of telling a story, having a rich narrative experience in engaging with the world followed through with a very simple resolution mechanic. Ludo chimes in that both 13th Age Glorantha and Questworlds have in common a more magical Glorantha as opposed to the more mundane Glorantha that can be modelled by RuneQuest. (Ludo actually suggested “boring” rather than mundane, and claims it would be nice to get some angry emails for a change.) Heroquesting Putting his finger again into the continued absence of official rules for Heroquesting in RuneQuest, Ludo asks about the 13 th Age implementation of Heroquesting. Where an F20 game can be described as Dungeon Crawling, Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo described heroquesting as Myth Crawling, visiting various stations of the quest like stations in a dungeon. Evan describes the Lightbringers Quest where the Westfaring (to the Gates of Dusk) is a Wilderness adventure that gets you to the Dungeon, the descent into Hell, with various stations like the underworld palace of the Only Old One, getting thrown into the dungeons there, gett

Our guest for this episode is Austin Conrad, who last graced our podcast in episode 2, On the Road . Austin is the author of many things on the Jonstown Compendium , generally publishing under the “Akhelas” brand , while he is known as “Crel” on BRP Central, Discord, and social media. Introductions Austin is a contender for the most productive publisher on the Jonstown Compendium with his 24 issue Myth of the Month series that ran for the first two years of the Jonstown Compendium, culminating in the sizeable scenario booklet To Hunt A God . Akhelas is the name of the setting Austin started writing in 2016 before the Jonstown Compendium even existed, and before he was even involved in Glorantha. The setting is inspired by Homeric epics and the tales of Herodotus, and especially Thucydides and the conflicts of city states. The cosmology of Akhelas derives heavily from Platon’s Timeas, and the setting is kind of on the edge between Bronze Age and Classic Age. Little wonder Austin “took to Glorantha like a duck to water”. When Austin is going to start publishing this animist city-state Bronze Age warfare stuff, he expects people to point to Glorantha as a parallel. Great minds… Austin expects to self-publish his first novel maybe later this year, more likely next year. Ludo mentions that Shawn and Peggy Carpenter have returned their publication Valley of Plenty , with new material added: extra detail, new cults, extra adventures. Like Austin, Shawn has announced a novel for next year . To Hunt A God According to Austin, To Hunt A God is a heroquest where your adventurers do the thing it says in the title. Before we conclude this episode with this definitive statement, Austin expresses his sense of accomplishment after getting this book into print on demand. He urges everybody to sit down and publish their stuff in the community content program. More stuff is great, and sitting down with your own book is a spectacular experience. Getting it print-ready took Austin about a week of work and then six weeks of waiting. To Hunt A God contains a new cult for players, Hrunda. Austin had the goal to provide a player cult that people would want to belong to. Another major section of the book is a temple site dedicated to Hrunda and a number of associate beast totem cults with their human and animal worshippers. The second half of the book contains the adventure. It sets off with a religious festival attended by the player characters. We discuss the location of the temple and the Old Woods in relation to Esrolia (west of the Skyreach range, north of Longsiland, the easternmost outreach of the Arstola forest). Austin calls out both similarities and differences with the Wild Temple in Beast Valley. The temple in the Old Woods is more modest in extent, concentrating all its important holy places in a small area. Austin explains that the adventure originated from his RuneQuest Glorantha campaign situated in the city of Sylthi in Esrolia. We talk a bit about how this piece of Arstola is different from the rest of the forest, and where to find information. Austin admits that he still needs to catch up listening to our podcast. Ludo is not sure he has his priorities straight. Making Up Cults Ludo elaborates on how cults are the defining difference between RuneQuest Glorantha and other fantasy games and settings, and how sooner or later every group or GM will leave the canonical selection of cults behind for their own special thing. Even with the upcoming publication of the Cults of RuneQuest books (“more cults than you need”) you will sooner or later find your own niche cult. Jörg points out that already the third adventure in the Colymar Adventure book gives the player characters a choice about how the deity of the backstory will turn out, showing the official endorsement of this practice. Ludo counters with the Quickstart adventure which will lead to some new cult activity if the players go for mostly non-violent solutions. Austin confesses that he is a great fan of making up cults. GMs as well as player tend to buy in to their game by adding a personal touch. In mainstream D20 games people make their own character class. In RuneQuest set in Glorantha these are the cults. Austin talks about numerous cults and deities that he wrote up for his Esrolia game. Ludo teases that people might understand this as a backlog of upcoming books, but Austin quickly denies anything within calling distance. There was a reason he needed 18 months to finish To Hunt A God after having hit a hard start into 2022, and re-entering a project with a thousand pages of notes after such a break won’t produce results quickly. Austin compares his creative process to that guy who has a disassembled car project in the garage he religiously visits, only to drink a beer or two rather than put in some effort. Austin also explains how him turning to a full time writing job means that people need to buy his books if they want the Esrolia project to proceed, as there will be fewer commissions outside of his Glorantha writing. Inspired by the Red Book of Magic The Red Book of Magic is the collection of all the Rune Spells and special Spirit Spells from the Cults Books (at least at the time of its publication back in 2020, when we naively thought that the Cults Books would be just around the corner). Because of the delay of the less typical cult write-ups, Austin states that a spell without a known cult has no obvious way to use it in your game: a collection of toys without giving you the instructions how to use them. One spell that caught Austin’s attention (and affection) was Proteus, a spell that allows the caster to change their shape into a shape that they have devoured earlier. While owners of RQ3 Gods of Glorantha would be able to find that this is a Triolina spell, people without this long out-of-print supplement have no way to associate that spell with a cult or to make use of it. Austin saw the Movement Rune, originally owned by Larnste, the god of Change. Austin complains that the river cults are “boring as hell”, which is why he gives the river cults in his area access to shape-shifting. Austin had a player whose thief character could shape-shift, and it was a disaster, and they had a great time. In Austin’s version, the river cults would give their worshippers three shapes that they could acquire with Meld Form (an Enchantment which doesn’t cost POW). These forms were bull, ram, and crocodile (actually baby crocodile). Austin suggests that use of this spell combo could make Hsunchen shape-shifting magic less overpriced, with a beast partner sensing their approaching death potentially volunteering to give their shape to a human partner. In summary, if you want to give access to an orphaned spell, how do you fit it into the setting in a way that is kind of unusual and unexpected. Ludo describes how playing the scenario that he later published as Bog Struggles the players got access to the spirit of the River Horse, It seems to be very common to encounter spirits or forgotten godlings whose magic may get accessible as a spirit cult. It is a question “What do I get in return for joining this cult”, and Austin points out that this mind-set was typical for the ancient (and earlier) periods. Cult practices were of a transactional nature – I give you this cow and you stop messing up my harvest by sending (pr withholding) rain. Deities were powerful forces, but not role models, unlike in modern monotheism. Ludo calls the deities selfish assholes who mess with people and stuff, make children with whatever and demand worship and adoration. Jörg compares the deities to service providers who need to be propitiated in order to get the necessary service. We go on talking about Orlanth as Comcast deep in Balazar… We talk about how you only get the right kind of lightning when within reach of at least one of the holy mountains. Types of Cults The RuneQuest rules recognize several layers of cults by importance as well as by the target entity. Spirit Cults Spirit cults are a place to start if you want to screw with cults. They found very naturally upon exposure of the adventurers to the cult entity. Austin wonders whether spirit cults are regularly established via adventurer types or whether they may be started by ordinary folk in the setting of Glorantha. Ludo posits that usually there will be a shaman nearby whose job it is to monitor spirits and to know how to deal with them, both to avoid arousing them and when player adventurers or unlucky NPCs have aroused them (creating scenario hooks). Jörg has a different approach, with spirits of and in the household or on a ship etc. being interacted with by ordinary people – often propitiated, but also asked for boons or magic. Austin talks about household spirits falling into Ernalda’s domain, and Ludo brings up ancestor worship as another form of personal relation to spirits. Austin expects non-adventurer people not founding spirit cults but initiating into existing ones (providing the necessary number of worshipers for shrines to work). E.g. a minor healing spirit able to provide Cure Disease who may temporarily attract a great following. Mechanically, spirit cults are a way to give player adventurers that one spell they cannot get from their main cult but can’t live without. Austin compares them to prestige classes in certain D20 games. In RuneQuest, this ties into the Power economy: how much you put into Rune spells, how much into personal enchantments, or other uses. Austin re-invents the existing Praxian spirit cult Lightning Boy (the local form of Orlanth Adventurous). Austin talks about giving a spirit cult a special rune spell and maybe one or two common rune spells. In hindsight, his treatment of Hrunda in To Hunt A God may have been over-complicated by giving some but not all common rune spells. For another example, a Naiad who grants Breath Air/Water might make that POW investment more attractive if her cult also gave Heal Wound as an alternative use for that rune point. Cult entities of spirit cults tend to be fairly minor deities or big spirits. Ludo thinks of them as not big enough to have played a role in the Gods War. With major cults, Ludo sees a lot more strings attached. Jörg proposes spirit cults as shards of greater deities unavailable in the local pantheon, e.g. in Prax (Lightning Boy) or the Lunar Heartlands. Austin and Jörg riff about farmer magics. Austin asks whether most spirit cults would be formed after accidental encounters with a spirit, or whether people went out of their way to find a spirit to worship for a certain purpose. Ludo and Jörg agree that encounters play a role, whether in a game or in stories. (There are cases of heroes bringing in spirit cults to serve their communities, like e.g. Balazar with Mralota). Ludo argues that spirit cults are just the first phase of a regular cult, with most remaining at this size (or disappearing again) while others grow and grow until they qualify for temples and regular cult structures. Ludo can see how (a local form of) Yelmalio could start out as a spirit cult before attracting more than a few dozen worshippers. Other people go on exploratory heroquests to bring back an entity filling their needs that may turn out to be just an aspect of a greater deity (or grow into one). Jörg uses the simile of people describing the elephant by touching one of its parts to describe how such explorers may not grasp the full extent and associations of a deity they have contacted. Even major cults cannot really embrace the entirety of their deity. Propitiation is a major point in spirit cults, too – giving sacrifice just to an aspect to be left in peace. People constructing cults and shaping cult entities are known, too. Most notorious were the God Learners, but they were hardly alone. Austin points out that there is no reliable systematic approach, things need to be messy. Jörg suggests another term of these partial worship, splinter cults. Austin makes a difference between contacting a tree spirit that exists within Time from contacting a God Time entity or partial entity like Aldrya. Austin also warns us not to delve too deep into the differences between God Time and Time… Hero Cults Austin starts with the observation that a hero cult is like a spirit cult, using the same mechanic. Ludo and Jörg point out that the difference lies mainly in the cult entity, as a worshipped cult hero may still be alive. Ludo even suggests that the entity can be one of the player characters. Austin observes that it can be very fun to be worshipped, because then you get special powers. Jörg sees also a ball-and-chain aspect of being worshipped, as the cult entity gets pulled into the same role again and again, will he or nil he. Ludo asks whether that is more your echo in the God Plane, but Jörg claims that your echo and ego align over time. Ludo asks to expand this, so he can throw more shenanigans at his players (possibly referring to Austin here). Ludo lays out the rules side of the deal. Your hero goes on a heroquest and obtains a heroquest ability and some hero points to activate it. Your hero then regains the hero points by being worshipped, and the worshipper in turn gain access to (a toned down variant of) the heroquest ability as a rune spell. Jörg names Hofstaring Treeleaper as his go-to character for a hero with a cult. Hofstaring is worshipped among the Culbrea tribe, with some getting the tree-leaping rune spell. If Hofstaring was still alive, he would easily be challenged to jump the next impossible tree. Austin prefers Jar-eel as his example (she has that effect on people who encounter her). If you were facing Jar-eel and you had a feat that allows your axe to do double damage against Lunes (Red Moon elementals), that feat would carry over into a vulnerability for the woman who is essentially the Red Goddess walking on (Gloranthan) Earth. She also has to fulfill commitments beyond what other initiates or rune masters have to. Jeff Richard wrote a while ago that a capital H Hero will have transgressed against their cult, too. Ludo argues that that is the way to bring progress to the cult, with ultimately the hero cult feat/Rune spell becoming a mainstream cult spell. Ludo asks how to play out this integration into the wider cult in a game without doing something like a three year break with some charisma rolls to convince 1D6 temples to adopt your method. Jörg suggests that this may happen in the face of cataclysm when the hero’s feat becomes crucial in averting a bad fate. With the Hero Wars basically consisting of a whole series of upcoming cataclysms, no shortage there (and no big deal if the GM adds another one). Or, as Ludo puts it, there are no Hero Wars, just min-maxing players with delusion of greatness. Austin feels called out by this. Subcults Subcults are a way to add a new aspect to a cult entity. One thing Ludo likes about Greek mythology is that there were many places where a special role was attached to an otherwise well known deity. There was a temple of Zeus Flyswatter ( Zeus Apomyios ) in a great collection of temples where all manner of animal sacrifice went on, which naturally attracted flies to the slaughter. Jörg posits a different approach: whenever you write a new myth about a deity (or otherwise cult entity), you create a new subcult. Ludo thinks that’s the business of hero cults, but Austin points out that many hero cults are basically subcults of the existing cult of their hero. There are hero cults outside of existing cult structures, with Harrek the Berserk as a case study. Austin paraphrases Jeff Richard that Harrek gets worship for the same reason Malia does: “Oh please, Harrek, don’t come this way!” Ludo makes Jar-eel the poster girl for the opposite way, a hero fully integrated into her deity’s cult. We discuss poster girls in the sense of Carry Fisher’s Princess Leia bondage image being worshipped by young boys in (or rather from) the seventies and eighties. Austin really likes these distinctions to be messy and ambiguous. While some of the introductory material could be more straightforward, the ambiguity is what makes Glorantha (or mythology in general) fun to play around with. “Maybe that elephant has wings.” Austin has the revelation that the entirety of the Gods War was just a dog toy. Ludo is sure that there was a God Learner theory supporting that, and Jörg locates that in the library of the sunk Trickster library in Slontos. Jörg offers another distinction between hero cult and subcult – when did the myth (or introduction of the feat) happen, in God Time, or as a heroic effort within History? Ludo fleshes this out – you can come back from the discovery of how to leap trees saying “look at me, I am awesome because now I can leap over trees, so worship me!”, or you can come back saying “I went to the God Time and met this kinsman of Orlanth called Bob who taught me to leap trees, so everybody worship Bob!” Hero cults are for egomaniacs, while subcults are founded by true devotees. Or the difference between Rune Lords and Rune Priests, as Jörg puts it. Syncretism rears its ugly head: You encounter a deity which shares certain angles with your own, like e.g. being the cruel god at the Hill of Gold, chaining Orlanth to Shargash (or the Fronelan form Vorthan) and ultimately Zorak Zoran, possibly bringing in shared magic. Austin gives an example of how the Death Wielder feat can do such heroic mis-identification that nonetheless can give access to powers. Ludo takes Heler as the example – this could be the personification of the rain as a bona fide deity, or it could be just the name for Orlanth’s power to make it rain without any intrinsic contradiction. Vinga can be a daughter of Orlanth or just a female aspect of Orlanth. It compares to dedicating yourself only to part of the cult, like a Star Trek fan only ever watching the original series, and not the entirety of the franchise. We conclude that you should not ever involve yourself with a fandom. And no, we aren’t fans, we are devoting ourselves to serious study of Glorantha. Ahem. Jörg reminisces about dipping his own feet in Gloranthan fan-subcreation tackling the weird henotheism of Malkioni worshipping regular deities, like that Aeolian sect in Heortland. This triggers Austin to bring up his deranged scribble journal. Austin (too) spent three days rambling about Aeolian sorcery in his notes. The Aeolians sit in southern Heortland, between Orlanthi Heortland (Hendrikiland) and God Forgot, a land of atheist sorcerers who either are Brithini or think they are, imitating their ways. Austin’s deranged ramblings for Aeolian sorcery (which may never see the light of day any more than the picture above) have new relationships between runes, or assign elements to deities which aren’t apparent anywhere else. The premise is that the Monomyth could be very wrong and the magic still works, which is made possible by having the sorcery element which doesn’t rely on the warranty of your rune magic. Sorcery gives you the tools to jailbreak your phone, it is really good at it. Sorcery also allows you to infer and use the antithesis of a rune you mastered. Regardless whether he will use it in publication or not, what Austin found out from this exercise is that if you don’t play with the cults but with the runes you are getting different results in your sub-creation. Austin feels that the Monomyth as presented over-emphasizes the role of the elements, He plays through an experiment where all the Lightbringer deities are purely made up of power runes, including Orlanth. Things get too messy to transcribe, or to count potential Nysalorean riddles. Austin rambles about Entekos the still Air Goddess being the wife of Orlanth, challenging many magical preconceptions. Jörg rambles about Orlanth possibly not being born a storm god but becoming the Storm King through his teenage hero journey through the Gods

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. You can find Bryon here: Bryon1187 on Twitter Bryon’s YouTube channel with his game reports, RPG-a-day entries, and, more importantly, RuneQuest Glorantha book reviews . Bryon on MeWe Show Notes Among the many things we’re ranting about in this episode, you’ll find: Running convention games for Chaosium’s Cult of Chaos when the RuneQuest Glorantha Quickstart came out (Origins and GenCon first year, Pax Unplugged a few times, etc) Discovering RuneQuest 2nd edition by looking at Apple Lane and/or Snakepipe Hollow on the game store’s shelves The wonders of the RuneQuest hit location chart Collecting a lot of books from the old Gloranthan product lines, and (gasp!) highlighting passages in them Trying to answer the question “what is a Glorantha?” Northern European vision of Bronze Age slowly transitioning to other, more Mediterranean and Mesopotamian mental pictures The Mythology and the Runes are real in Glorantha Explaining Glorantha in a very excited way to new people at conventions The integration between the setting and the mechanics, also featured in other games such as: Behind Enemy Lines Harn (system agnostic setting) and Harnmaster (a crunchy rules system developed to play in Harn) Land of the Rising Sun (Bryon actually told me later that the Lands of Adventure supplement has “ a great non-magical miracles section that [he has] been dying to try out “) Bushido 40 years of catching up is daunting, but RuneQuest Glorantha nicely focuses at first on the Colymar clan to keep it simple: no need to worry about Ralios, the Eastern Isles, or whatever RuneQuest 2n edition didn’t even have many areas covered anyway Converting D&D modules (Bryon later told me it was Judges Guild’s “Caverns of Thrasia”), placed near Larnste’s Footprint because there’s some Chaos stuff there Tying Runes to personalities can be confusing, because you have to learn what Runes actually mean, and what they can augment (compare to Pendragon’s clearer and more obvious Traits) Some cults can be fairly niche and, again, you have to learn what they are… what is a Babeester Gor? So you want to play a hunter… do you want to worship Yinkin, Foundchild, or Odayla? What are these anyway, and why are there three of them? The integration of world and setting means that there is a lot of lore exposition needed to explain the mechanics, and vice versa Building spreadsheets to keep track of all the temples across Dragon Pass! Bryon’s video series on the Red Book of Magic, and what he learned meticulously reading through it The many editing issues in RuneQuest Glorantha books: POW vs POW rolls, sentence construction, Spirit Combat, etc. Opposed roll ties article on the God Learners It’s tricky to change or tweak Glorantha when you don’t feel like you’re comfortable with the lore yet Sorcery is hard: Bryon’s Lhankor Mhy player has a spreadsheet! Shamanism is hard too: lots of “realizations” about spirits and the Spirit World during play, after the first interpretations proved to be too game-breaking Using Cyberpunk’s netrunning as an analogy for the Spirit World Spirits can’t always sort through all the auras and spirits they see, so they are unreliable spies Bryon’s game is mixing homebrew adventures with published ones like The Fainting Spirit (Cult of Chaos only), the Rattling Wind, etc. Bryon’s game was railroady at first, but came to a crawl when it became more player driven Dungeon Master’s Block technique: use Magic: The Gathering cards to generate ideas for the who/what/where of the campaign’s story threads Grabbing existing adventures from many other games and systems to fill the blanks Mutant Year Zero’s procedural scenario generation card deck Roleplay Cafe ‘s and DungeonCraft ‘s (aka Professor Dungeon Master) YouTube channels for more game prep tips Bryon’s recommendation for newbies is to play the Quickstart, and he wished he had gotten the White Bear & Red Moom board game earlier! 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.