Aiun

See this piece of fan-writing for a possible answer to that question! 🙂

I admit to some curiosity about this comment given that he died of prostate cancer, which is not so easy to prevent even today. Speaking as a panpsychist Quaker chaos mage who prays mainly to Athena, I have a pretty definite position on the question. The cause and effect operates materially, by affecting the consciousness and actions of people involved (and, sure, in more direct material ways with things like dietary restrictions that had health benefits, though that's probably less important than the consciousness-effects to a modern urbanite trying to have a spirituality.) Accordingly I find certain aspects of religion much more effective than others in my life, which does inevitably give me a soft spot towards movements in Gloranthan mythohistory (e.g. the Lunar and Jernotian Ways) that reflect those aspects, as well as a tendency to look for "subversive" ways of interpreting areas of the historimythology that don't match up as well. The beauty of Glorantha (and I also find this in the heavily Glorantha-influenced Elder Scrolls, but in few other places) is that the tools exist to allow me to do this successfully, not just from one angle, but from a variety of them. Glorantha is a strange creature, which is, yes, partly a riff on an aesthetic-magical understanding of broad antiquity as seen through a modern set of shamanic eyes, but also a mishmash of whatever it wants to be. There are religious concepts invented by Christianity such as "heresy" present. There's also a "pedalcopter." It's beautiful. With that said, I do appreciate your bringing up multitheism. Even when I play a hero devoted deeply to a single god (quite nonstandard in antiquity) I'm always tracking my relationships with the others. I vastly prefer this approach to the mystery-cult-ish model of joining up with one god and paying little heed to the others that some (but not all!) frameworks for roleplaying in Glorantha encourage.

Indeed - and to add to that, I personally believe that if a "fantasy race"/species or even culture ever seems so globally unsympathetic that it's impossible to imagine playing as them, then adjusting them to be more sympathetic will produce a better and more satisfying game. YM(&G)WV.

Clearly, people of vingan gender are ineligible for membership in Vinga Adventurous. Wait, no, I've gone wrong somewhere. (In our Glorantha, the overall resolution to this is twofold: that gendered cult restrictions are mere generalities -- the "Orlanthi all" -- and that non-binary identities can fulfill either binary role dependent on context, anyhow. A man who sincerely feels the call to Vinga Adventurous will join, and surely will have an interesting story to tell.)

Thank you for the interest! It's flattering. We'd certainly have to exercise some restraint, as a typical session would have a chance of getting someone in trouble at work because their earphones slipped out, say, in the middle of a little casual heresy about just how Samastina expresses her connection with Ernalda. But, hey, it may happen, and if not... see you at the next Chaosium Con? 😇

Heh, well. Eff and I play an open-ended game where we each often portray several characters a session. There's almost no combat, and so much of the intrigue is derived from different outlooks (political, theological, geographic, etc.) interacting, clashing, and hopefully finding a productive synthesis by the end. We spend a good amount of time thinking up interesting, often magically inflected perspectives to inhabit. But I don't find the kinds of examples you cite interesting. You implicitly acknowledge in your phrasing that they would definitely be proven wrong in a Glorantha like Eff's and mine, and that's part of the problem. An interesting viewpoint character, for us, is one that could have a point, and we'll play and find out how much point they have. Characters like those in our Glorantha would be seen a a rehash of already-decided issues of our parents' generation, and would just need to go to therapy (helpfully provided, in our game, by the local Chalana Arroy in Rhigos, where they might run into a gradually healing Gunda in the waiting room and risk having their perspectives reoriented a little less gently.) So, really, we don't think about those types of people in-game. Basically, they don't exist in our Glorantha because it's more fun to address debates we find more relevant to our own peer group - war vs. peace, how authority justifies itself, and things of that nature.

That was a really fun session! A couple of remarks, though, in light of the rest of the thread. Gunda is an anomaly in our campaign, as the only person we've technically "fought." That really comes from me. I think Eff would be happy to provide combat NPCs, but I'm a pacifist Quaker in real life, and TTRPGs feel very close to life for me. I turned down a few opportunities early on to unsheathe my rapier, and Eff got the point quickly and adjusted the game. So, the extent of my "fighting" was to call upon the Calm Air of Entekos to restrain Gunda's ship so the Trowjang navy could eventually board it. Well, great, we captured her, but it turns out she had tricked us, so a series of delicate negotiations proceeded, the ultimate result of which was alliance. No amount of Multispell or the like would have got me there, which is where I actually wanted to be. So, another way to put it is that we ditched the RQ rules because combat ability became something it wasn't worth rolling for. We did the plot work to establish that my character and her allies are magical enough that fighting them isn't the brightest of ideas for nearly anyone in the canon. For a campaign devoted to changing the course of the Hero Wars through diplomacy, it was rather out of scope to plan out advanced spellcasting strategies, so I, at least, never gave it a serious try.

Hi, I'm "the player" from Eff's game. Personally, I love coming up with complex character personalities and inhabiting them. Thus, I'm not asking an RPG system or setting to constrain what kinds of personalities are playable. (Probably, RQG does not actually do so, although its ability to represent personalities in terms of Runes has limits.) On the other hand, if I invent a personality and the setting is rich enough to have something to say about it - providing likely niches or roles, excluding others, illuminating character history and possible futures - that can be quite fun indeed. I was able to a lot of fun playing Topi, legendary jeweler of Rhigos and geographically unlikely Entekos initiate, in part because I had a great GM who was willing to work with some outlandish ideas I brought in (and match them with some of her own.) The outlandishness includes Entekos using her knowledge of the Jernotian Way to broker a kind of cosmic peace between Sedenya and Orlanth, through Vinga and Etyries. There is much cosmic trickiness here, and it was long before the point when I introduced one of Eff's fanfiction characters from a very different timeline as a potential spoiler of this compromise that we transitioned away from the RQG system and made this question, on a mechanical level, moot for our specific game. With that said, the Harmony Campaign is still an attempt to be a Glorantha, if a unique one (aren't they all?), and we are constantly asking questions like: what does the Air Rune mean, actually? (Mostly, I couldn't stop asking.) And part of that is because this carried on being RQG for quite a long time, and we tried our best to fit a character who was passionate but not hotheaded, this starry-eyed ideal-chaser who loves often and hates less than I do, onto a character sheet. (But it's also partly because of exploring other implementations of Glorantha, notably 13AG, where players "narrate" runes for story purposes.) We ended up with an understanding of Air that may or may not fit in other games, as being multifaceted. Topi represents the Entekos Air/Harmony "facet," and there are more hotheaded, etc. facets that are possible, but they are not in the ascendant post-Windstop. Eff played a very interesting cosmically-minded Kallyr who fit this very well and deepened my understanding of what Air means in our specific campaign. Part of the initial impulse in this refinement (or redefinition?) was admittedly to sidestep the 80% rule for the Air Rune, because it was more fun, for a one-on-one campaign of this nature, if my character WAS in alignment with her rune and her goddess, without having to change the personality I'd come up with. And we have been playing that out as at-the-table mythopoesis, and it's fun, so I consider it a successful choice. I do like a lot of Eff's mechanical suggestions and find them interesting, and maybe we'll try something like that in some future campaign that's more mechanically heavy.

King of Sartar reads: These mysterious, possibly Chaotic creatures? Merely delicious gummi worms. The poor Lunars just wanted a snack.