Virane

Prompted by some of the comments above I think for me, the biggest issue with more recent publications is the discord between concepts/words and visual elements.

To go back to the example I raised earlier -

As far as I can remember, Sartarites were heavily influenced by Iron/Dark Age Germanic-base culture (and Celtic, depending on your take there).

This was - and is - fully demonstrated through specific use of singular terminology (things like Wyter, Wapentake, Thane) and conceptual notions (social structure/activities/processes).

And commensurately, for many years, the visual styles bounced around this basis. Not to mention the incredibly King of Dragon Pass video game!

What I struggle with here is the recent change to shift things Mediterranean in terms of visual style. It really feels like someone sat down and just said 'Well, I think it should look like this' and binned all those connections in favour of what appears to be an entirely arbitrary - and arguably inappropriate - shift in appearance.

If the language and concepts had shifted totally as well, then I could get that. It's someone burning what went before and replacing it with their own vision of a fundamentally different world. And whether or not you agreed with that vision would determine whether you stayed with the property or bid it farewell.

But when, as far as I can tell, most of these same connections of terminology and concept remain in place but all that's changed is visual presentation, it's quite confusing.

14 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

This is an interesting point of disagreement, because Bethesda (the developer of Skyrim and its predecessors, the other Elder Scrolls games, for anyone wondering), actually retconned lore for market purposes. When they were going to develop Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the featured region of Cyrodiil was previously described as a tropical/semitropical jungle or wetland, featuring rice paddies, roman-style legionaries, ancestor worship, and lots of interesting stuff. Much of this was scrapped in favor of a more Western Europe-like style to benefit from the then-current popularity of the Lord of the Rings movies. 

Just an interesting comparative example. 

If you read the rest of my post I think you'll find that's not disagreement at all

Playing to existing tropes is always what marketing people recommend as a go-to. MOST of the time they are right. But not always

8 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

"Functional basis"? How's about this? Skyrim now owns the "Romans vs. Vikings plus Dragons" space. As a poky little tabletop company, Chaosium can't possibly compete with that.

So -- in official publications at least -- the Lunars have been veering away from Rome and into a vaguely Babylonian/Hellenistic/Persian space, while the Sartarites have been veering away from Viking Saxon Celts and towards Mycenaean Greece. And those are both fairly long-term trends, which came into their full flower with the new RQG rulebook (2018).

(It also helps that Chaosium books have proper art budgets these days, so they don't need to use whatever they can get)

NB: my own Lunars still feel pretty goddamn Roman, because I have a degree in those mofos and I'm still going to work it. But they have plenty of aspects derived from other folk as well. I'm a big fan of the new-look Mycenaean Clearwine; it might help to reflect that we mostly used to see clans and tribes in the boondocks, far from the centre of Sartarite "civilisation" (if that's the right word -- oops, sorry, are my prejudices showing?), and only now are we getting a good look at the cities and sinews of Argrath's Kingdom.

The clans I know best are the Greydogs (no city, no major roads, live next to a lowland bog), the Colymar (no city, no major roads, proud of not playing their full part in Sartar's Kingdom) and John Hughes' bluefoot clans of the Far Place gors and gallt (no city, no roads, live in a bleak highland peat bog).

I think Skyrim is in fact a perfect AID to getting people into Glorantha, rather than a barrier! If I have a new player, it's where I go to.

With new players/GMs, there's a really, really high chance they have played and enjoyed Skyrim. It's a great starting point if you're someone who prefers their Sartarites to be more Saxon or Celtic and your Lunars more Roman (as they have been through much of Glorantha's RPG history).

Both Skyrim and Glorantha (originally) pull from similar historical source material. Despite recent shifts, the Lunars always had a strong Roman element. Legions, Centurions, Vexillae - these words were not chosen accidentally. Likewise the use of Saxon and Celtic terms and concepts in the creation of Sartar. Same with Skyrim. These elements were used because the authors and their audiences (with the general cultural background of white western culture) by and large have a stronger familiarity with Rome and its imperial activities than many other ancient cultures.

From a marketing point of view (and this is an area I have considerable experience with), Chaosium would be much better served moving TOWARDS the 'Romans vs Vikings plus Dragons' space, not just based on Skyrim but in a general sense of attracting people from the main base of Western fantasy consumers - as these tropes are ones that people cleave to.

That's if just making money is the goal in the quickest and easiest fashion by relating to existing elements your potential clients are familiar with, however.

At this point I want to make it very clear there is nothing WRONG with doing that. There's no moral or intellectual superiority in treading a less mainstream path, despite what many people tell themselves. There's no innate cultural superiority between the Iliad and 'Married at First Sight', much as that might be a good thing. Selling Glorantha as 'Skyrim with SO MUCH MORE' is a great way to get people to give you their money, and in a business sense that's generally a good thing.

Now obviously more recent owners of the property and their artists have pulled it in a different direction, so using Skyrim as a touchstone is only more viable if you use older materials or if you're waving YGMV rather aggressively at new people.

But this does bring up the question of marketing Glorantha rather than playing it. And while related, these are not the same thing.

What you do with your game once you are playing it is generally a function of how a GM and their players interact. If all my players love Skyrim, I'm going to probably GM Glorantha in that direction, rather than 'force' them to see the world as I feel it should be seen, or as current source materials depict it. Other GMs may do that differently. That's about what your game table wants and will sustain. That's playing Glorantha.

Marketing Glorantha is getting people to play it. And that's where the conversation moves towards managing people's preconceptions and attachments. And this is about new players, not existing ones.

From a branding point of view, YGMV is not a good thing necessarily. Brand cohesiveness is very much a thing, and YGMV gives that a nasty kicking. It's the default expectation across almost all human cultures that I am aware of, because most people consume and engage with cultural items in a progressive fashion.

If you're selling Glorantha with YGMV up front, then you're selling it to a very small minority audience. You're basically saying 'Here's a new brand for you to interact with, it's got some solid cornerstones but you can stick whatever you like in between those'. Some people will like this concept but that is most certainly a minority. That's not necessarily a bad thing - while in general terms you may sell fewer units/encourage fewer new players than a more 'traditional' brand approach, if that market is over saturated (either in the true sense of a financial market or the marketplace of your players' minds) and you feel your product may not compete sufficiently, then aiming outside the box is a valid approach as long as you can break even or profit from that market share (either by selling books or getting people to enjoy playing with you). And more importantly, YOU (as either a GM or a person making money from selling books) have your own personal stake in things and you get to choose what level of risk/reward you want to satisfy your own desires.

If you're not upfronting YGMV but selling Glorantha in its current 'form', then that's something else. You're selling a unique setting with visual and cultural themes that diverge quite widely from the Western European norms that dominate fantasy tropes and again, that's selling to a minority audience. And again, not necessarily a bad thing in a saturated market.

That's why this is an interesting question every time it comes up, because from a marketing/branding point of view it's certainly not the 'traditional' path to success.

It's hard to measure the 'overall' success of this choice because that's something that takes a long time to observe and requires data that no one will have at this point in time, if ever.

I don't know the sales figures for Glorantha products in recent years but even if I did, I'd not use that as an accurate measure as there's no way to cleanly tell how many of those sales are growth (entirely new players and GMs) and how many are from existing Glorantha players, with a good few decades worth of exposure there. And in brand terms, it's very difficult to draw a line in the sand and delineate a product success path (which is sustainable longevity over a given period) for Glorantha, given the various and not inconsiderable shifts in system and visual styles, which are major defining elements of RPG products.

The success of marketing Glorantha to new players, and the role of YGMV in that, is something that will take years, or decades to examine and even then, you're highly unlikely to ever pull hard data. The closest you'd come is when you feel the majority of the 'old school' players have shuffled off (mortal coil or otherwise and don't worry, I'm included in this grouping!) and you examine whether the game is selling and playing sustainably to a 'new' generation. And since it's a continuum, that's basically just an exercise in arbitrarily kicking some numbers in relation to the relative financial framework of whoever owns the property at a given point in time, which may be of intense interest to them but isn't necessarily connected to an 'overall' examination of the 'success' or 'longevity' of a property.

I always find this conversation interesting, and I do have a bit of an issue with the assumptions a lot of folks project with YGMV/YGWV.

I think it's important to not just handwave that statement happily all the time. For some people, that's awesome. They LOVE the idea! It's freeing! It's amazing!

And good for them!

But for other folks, their brains may not work that way. They would prefer to have a concrete world provided to them - and no judgment should ever be applied for any reason to that desire.

It's neither better nor worse, just different.

Some people might say there is no singular 'concrete' world with Glorantha but that's not true - there's plenty of elements that remain relatively untouched through the years.

The issue a lot of people move around is that in most cases, the 'canon' issues aren't to do with THINGS so much as STYLES.

To be blunt, it's because various owners of the property have approached given elements of the setting with their own personal bias (bias that may even change during their stewardship!) and shaded parts of the setting the way they want it to look.

The archetypical example is your Orlanthi warrior chappie. Is he a Saxon-type fellow? Is he more an Iron-age Celt? Bronze Age Celt? More Greek now? Shades of Etruscan? Does he wear woolen trews because it's cold in that hilltop stead or is he made of sterner stuff and just has a linen wrap around his dangly bits? What does that sword of his look like? Leaf blade? More viking-style? Oh and his helmet!

And the issue is people get attached to these attachments. If I think of 'my' Orlanthi as Saxon folks, a sourcebook where they are visually depicted as flouncing about near naked in comparison is going to shock me! And if 'my' Orlanthi like the air on their parts of an evening, a picture of them as some beardy brutes sweating away in stinky fleece is going to repulse me!

I think this is the issue most folks run up against, and in most cases this is simply reflective of how and when they were introduced to the property.

I would suggest that part of (possibly a large part of) the reason YGMV is a 'thing' is because of this kind of obvious lack of visual continuity above everything else, and that is entirely sensible and logical.

I feel that this needs to be front-loaded a bit more. Rather than throwing THE WONDER OF YGMV!!!!!!!!!!!! in peoples' faces, it's probably good to just be upfront about the fact that the visual styles (and some historical/thematic elements) have changed over the years as various people have participated in the growth of Glorantha. And that's their prerogative, the same way as anyone who finds a given change discordant is 100% justified in feeling so.

tl;dr I feel like more upfront commentary on the functional basis for YGMV rather than simply saying 'IT'S PART OF THE GAME' *WINK* can be beneficial both for those people who struggle with thematic changes during their experience of the game over time and new people who find it confusing. As someone who is somewhat neurodifferentiated for example, I find that a lot easier to get to grips with.