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Meanwhile I have finished the "technical" part of the setting with the available skills and professions, the beginning status, income and living expenses and all that, much of it based upon material from the unpublished RuneQuest 4, which has a very useful chapter on economics. I have also added a lot to the description of the Keru's culture, including some notes on their history and more material on their philosophy, and the first three adventure options (exploration of the island, first trade voyage to Corflu, fight against the sea monster) are also more or less ready, with a fourth one (a first voyage along the Zola Fel to Pavis) in the works. I am not yet sure how to continue from there, because I have no idea what the characters will be interested in. I think I will prepare a couple of encounters of different types both for Kerumar and for the Zola Fel valley and also add some internal conflicts among the Keru, but right now I do not have many good ideas - it seems I will have to put the setting aside for a while, hoping that I will be hit by inspiration later on.

Thank you very much for the information, I am looking forward to this one.

What I would need most for my games would be ideas for interesting situations, combinations of locations, the people there, and their motivations, whether an inn with owner, staff and some unusual guests, a shop with owner, goods and customers, or a temple with priests and members of the community - I think you get the idea.

One day too late, just yesterday I plundered my bank account for a copy of River of Cradles and some other RQ3 stuff ...

Looking at my plans for the setting, I have one exploration adventure with some environmental challenges, a few riddles and an encounter with the angry spirit of a tribal shaman unwilling to let the characters take the iron meteorite from his gra- ve, and a sightseeing and trading adventure in Corflu with the description of the regional culture, the introduction of two species - baboons and newtlings - and perhaps encounters with the usual thieves and other troublemakers of a market. My campaigns are traditionally low on combat, but after these two adventures it would seem nice to continue the campaign with a little more action. When the characters return from Corflu to Kerumar they will learn that in their ab- sence the fishing boats in the Bay of Dolphins have been attacked by what looked like a giant sea snake. It seems that the beast did hide while the Keru's big ships lay at anchor in the bay, but came out to defend its hunting grounds when these ships left for Corflu. A sea monster and fishing boats in the same bay do not go to- gether well, so Lord Kerum will ask the characters whether they could deal with the problem - which they will probably do (it is still a sandbox, and they can also decide otherwise, in which case a few nonplayer characters will be killed before the beast is defeated). If the characters manage to kill the monster, the bay will also be open again for the Ludoch merpeople of the region, who will then try to establish a friendly contact with their new Keru neighbours - the introduction of the third Gloranthan species into the campaign.

And a first idea for the introduction of a potentially important nonplayer character, a scene that will of course only happen in this way if the cha- racters react friendly to the begging baboon: Goreek the Baboon The characters accompany Lord Kerum and his retinue to the market of Corflu, and while Lord Kerum and his best merchant Rona Norelen try to buy and sell various goods with the help of Malas Ferigim's language spells, the characters wander around to take a look at what the local merchants have to offer. There is also a small troop of nine baboons at the market. The characters have never seen baboons before, but these ones are obviously in a very bad shape, hungry and begging, and treated rather rudely by the merchants. When the troop's lea- der realizes that the characters are watching him, he walks up to them and begs for food, and then follows them at a distance. A while later, when the characters return to Lord Kerum's group, they learn that he was unable to hire someone willing to travel to Kerumar with them to serve as a teacher of Tradetalk and regional lore, and that his attempt to buy a slave with the necessary knowledge failed because the local merchants demanded an outra- geous price of 2,000 silver pieces for such an educated slave. While the Keru are still discussing this, the baboon suddenly begins to tug at the clothes of one of the characters and obviously attempts to speak to him. Provided the character can convince Malas Ferigim to cast another language spell („I am already exhausted, and I see no real need for a chat with a begging animal.“), the baboon will tell the characters that his name is Goreek, that he heard what the merchants were talking about, that he speaks Tradetalk fluently and knows the ri- ver valley well, and that he and his troop would be willing to go with the characters and teach them in return for enough food for all members of the troop, a knife for each member of the troop, a safe and friendly place to stay and a promise to return the troop to the Zola Fel valley whenever the baboons so desire. If the things develop as I expect, the baboons will become permanent inhabitants of Kerumar, with the foothills of the Merapar Mountains in the north of the island as their new home. I think this would add an interesting faction to the population of Ke- rumar.

Actually it is only turned 90° to the right to better fit on the page of my setting description, and this is also the reason why I have shortened the floating docks a little. I have not yet marked the marsh on the map, main- ly because I have not yet found a nice way to do it - my attempts until now look rather ugly, but I keep working on it.

Thank you very much for an excellent idea. The iron meteorite fits in very well, especially because it is not too difficult to create the cave paintings showing something falling from the sky, picked up by someone who "looks like a shaman", and later buried with him. Yes, there will be the usual bone and stone tools at the cave, bronze tools and thelike at the ruined village and temple, and all over the island many previously domesticated plants and animals returned to the wild - this is also a nice way to let the characters find or capture some useful things or animals the refugees we- re unable to bring with them.

With the Corfu map out of the way for the moment, the next thing to work on will be the first introductory adventure, which will explain the culture of the Keru and cover the arrival on the island and the explora- tion of the island. Apart from the ruined village and small temple already mentioned in an earlier post, there will also be even older traces of previous inhabitants of the island, a cave with cave paintings in the Merapar Mountains in the north of the island. My current idea is to use the cave paintings as a kind of ancient trea- sure map leading to some item(s) which is/are valuable enough to barter or trade it/them at Corflu for something useful, but at the moment I do not yet have a convincing idea what the ancient item(s) could be or do. Since the characters will be the ones who (hopefully ...) find the item(s), it will be their task to accompany the first trade voyage to Corflu to sell the item(s) there, which will lead to the second adventure, the first en- counter with the culture of Genertela. The things I want to highlight in that second adventure are the Lunar Em- pire's control of the region and the role of the religions and their cults in the society of Genertela, and the two nonhuman races I intend to use for encounters in this adventure are the Baboons and the Newtlings.

One of the "missing links" of the Kerumar setting was a map of Corflu, which will probably become the port most often visited by the Keru, both for trade in Corflu itself and as a first stop on the voyage along the Zola Fel to Pavis. There was a very basic little map of Corflu in the Pavis supplement, which I used as the inspiration for a more detailed one with a few minor changes to adapt the town to my ideas for the Kerumar setting. Here is the first draft of this map of Corflu:

I did use a limited system of Pendragon traits and passions to give the players an idea of the cultural background of their characters and of the expectations of the characters' society, but this system was in no way binding for the cha- racters, they could always act differently, although acting against the cultural expectations often led to unfriendly reactions from other members of the cultu- re and to an increasingly tarnished reputation. It worked quite well, but we cea- sed to use the system once the players had developed a good understanding of their characters' culture.

The BRP rules, page 189, have this: The way I handle it, I inform the players only about those actions of the non-player characters which their characters can know about or reasonably expect.

The work on the Kerumar setting is progressing rather slowly, there is such a lot of source material to read and digest, and unfortunately this material is not free of confusing contradictions. Slavery is one of those confusing subjects. It seems that slavery is rather common in Genertela, the very interesting PDF on Trade in Glorantha by Ge- rald Bosch I found on the Internet also gives some details concerning slave- ry and the slave trade in Glorantha - but no source mentions the price of a slave. A character can buy dozens and dozens of types of weapons and armour in different versions with different prices, but he cannot buy a sla- ve ... ah, well, another thing to handwave. Looking at the neighbourhood of Kerumar Island, I think the borders of the region likely to be explored by the Keru will be the valley of the Zola Fel in the northwest and the island of Melib in the east. Once the Keru have lear- ned that the Threestep Islands are the home of pirates, they will probably decide not to sail west of Corflu, and Teshnos and Melib Island are far en- ough in the east to become the border of the Keru's voyages in that direc- tion. Most of the coastline north of Kerumar Island belongs to the so called Bleak Shore of the Wastes, and from the sources I could find it seems that there is not much to see or do there (unless I design it myself). The east, Teshnos and Melib, will probably not be visited by the Keru during the early parts of the campaign, so I have a little more time to read up on the situa- tion there. Apart from that I have made some more notes on the culture of the Keru, for example what their buildings are made of (adobe and wood, only rarely stone), what their clothes are like (usually cotton, in winter wool, prefer- red colours white and blue), what they eat (fish, of course, and lamb, plus vegetables and a little grain), which musical instruments they play (flute and drum, mostly), when they are considered adults (at sixteen) and marry (usually before their twentieth birthday), and how long they live (women rarely get older than 75 years, men rarely get older than 70 years) - and so on, from government to gender roles. And now it is back to the available sources, to see whether this is compa- tible with the existing material on Glorantha, and where I may have to ma- ke adaptations (or can borrow additional ideas).

Yes, and I think this will be a possible task for the player characters. They are very likely to become something like "local heroes" quite early in the campaign, and therefore get into a position where they can either support or challenge the existing social order. The nobility of the Keru's homeland in Pamaltela was hereditary, but since they decided to make a new start in a new land this may well change. I suspect that the players will prefer to keep a nobility, mainly because this is also the social or- der of their neighbours and therefore likely to be accepted by them, but I could well imagine that a future nobility of the Keru could be based on merit instead of birth. The main obstacle to this would be the Keru's philosophy, a belief in the cycle of rebirth, where what one does for one's people in this life also determines the sta- tus in the next life, which should result in the idea that the nobles are born noble because they did great deeds for their people in the last life.

The most important nonplayer character of the early part of the campaign will doubtless be Lord Avar Kerum, and so I tried to find out what his inten- tions could be like. He will certainly want to be accepted as the sovereign ruler of Kerumar Is- land, but at the same time will also want to keep the location of the island and the low number of his subjects secret as long as possible in order to avoid a subjugation by the Lunar Empire, the strongest power of the region. The other power he will be afraid of are the Wolf Pirates. They know where the island is, although probably not yet that the Keru have settled there, and Lord Kerum can only hope that the planned settlement and its defences are ready when the Wolf Pirates learn about the Keru's presence on the is- land. He will also want friendly relations with potential allies, and once he has ga- thered a few more informations about the situation in the north he will pro- bably see the Corflu Trade Alliance in Corflu and the Ingilli Family and the In- gilli Riverside Association in Pavis as suitable trading partners and potential allies. Another little thing I have worked on is Lord Kerum's plan for the settlement. On this first draft of the map 1 is House Kerum, 2 is the House of the Coun- cil, 3 is the Market Place, 4 is the Craftsmen's Court:

Well, thank you very much. While I originally intended to use Mongoose Runequest II / Legend for this setting, I have now had second thoughts and will use my usual houseruled version of BRP instead, I think it captures the feeling I want for this cam- paign better. The first trade voyage of the Keru to the northern coast and Corflu suffers from the problem that the refugees have little silver and no trade goods to offer. However, they came to Kerumar Island with five merchant ships, and Lord Avar Kerum decided that he will keep only the best one of these ships, and only until a smaller and faster replacement can be built. The wood of three of the other ships will be used to build a couple of fishing boats and for the construction of the refugee's first settlement, and the refugees will attempt to sell the last ship at Corflu. The normal price of such a ship would be ca. 20,000 Silver Pieces, and Lord Kerum hopes to sell the ship for half of it, and to buy some oxen and pigs and some equipment and supplies at Cor- flu with this silver. He will probably also have to hire someone to teach the Keru the Tradetalk language and to give them some informations on their new neighbourhood.

Thank you all very much for the informations. This fits in perfectly with my ideas for the setting. I have decided to give the refugees a little evidence of the reason for the disappearance of the previous inhabitants of the island. The ruined village on the mouth of the eastern river, now named Ture- la River, and the cemetery near the village give the impression that this village once had between 100 and 200 inhabitants. They probably left in great haste, because their everyday goods like pots and knives are still to be found in the ruins, only any obvious valuables seem to be missing. The adobe and wood buildings of the village have not been damaged by fire, and there are no signs of a fight – no skeletons in the buildings or on the streets. I wonder what conclusions the characters will draw from this, the real sto- ry is that the villagers became the victims of a surprise attack by pirates, who rounded up the villagers to sell them as slaves, took what few valuab- les the villagers had, and sailed off. The remnants of the village are meant as a warning to the characters that the seas around their island and the is- land itself are not safe, and that they should think of preparations to de- fend their new settlement. So I will move the refugees' island a little to the southeast, and Three-Step Island becomes the base of those pirates, and a permanent source of dan- ger for the refugees. Edit.: This would put Kerumar Island approximately here, ca. 550 kilometers south- east of the mouth of the Zola Fel:

Well, not really ... Meanwhile I have made a few more notes about the refugees. With a new homeland they will also want a new name, and I think they will call them- selves the Keru, it seems to be a fitting name for the followers of the noble family of Kerum and inhabitants of Kerumar island. I have also decided that they will not worship any deities, in their view all the deities are temporary creations of their believers and exists only as long as they are worshipped, and creatures who depend on humans may be po- werful, but they are not worthy of worship. This means that I will have to design some kind of philosophy to take a reli- gion's place in Keru culture, and I think I will take a look at the real world's Far East for this. The Keru use magic sparingly, and prefer nonmagical methods wherever pos- sible. They use some Common Magic spells, and they have a few sorcerers who know useful spells related to the sea, like Call Wind, Calm Sea or Strong Boat (which I still have to design). The cultural weapon of the Keru is the spear, used without a shield much li- ke a quarterstaff with a blade at one end. The dagger and the bow are also common weapons. To give the culture a consistent feeling I have also worked a little on the Ke- ru language. The family names of nobles have two syllables, all other family names have three syllables, the family names of males end with an "m", the family names of women with an "n". Hela Kerun would be a female member of the noble Kerum family, Nurad Yavenim a male commoner. And the Keru have also got a symbol or coat of arms, a simple one since I see them as a somewhat simple culture:

Thank you all very much for your informations and ideas. Men of the Sea was within reach, I will be able to use the material. River of Cradles, however, seems very difficult to get, so I will have to come up with my own detailed description of Corflu, based upon the informations from Pa- vis and Borderlands. What I have at the moment are 280 refugees from an island off the northern coast of Pamaltela. Led by their hereditary leader Lord Avar Kerum, the sorce- rer Malas Ferigim and the scholar Tornu Parelem they sail north to an uninha- bited island discovered some years ago by the explorer Pardin Yaretim, who serves as the captain of Lord Kerum's ship during this voyage into exile. On their five ships the refugees bring plants and seeds, animals like chicken and sheep, tools and various other equipment to their new homeland. Once they have established their settlement on the island, which they intend to name Kerumar in honour of their leader, they will send a first ship to the coast in the north to search for a place to trade, because they urgently need some things the crowded ships could not carry, for example oxen to plough their new fields. However, the first adventure will probably be the discovery of some ruins on Kerumar Island, ruins of a settlement on the coast and a kind of temple near the mountains, and this discovery may lead to an explanation why such a ni- ce and fertile island is uninhabited ...

Thank you very much indeed. The main reason for the island is that I would like to use the rules from Runequest Empires' "Building a Kingdom" chapter to give the characters' new homeland a dyna- mic history as a developing realm, with local politics and conflicts and potential lea- dership positions for the characters, and that I prefer to design the landscape of that realm myself, because this helps me to better understand what the most plau- sible direction of the development should be. For example, with a newly settled island I can assume that the craftsmen will be- gin to search for good sources of stone and metal in the mountains, the fishermen will want a port and a boatyard, the farmers will begin to clear some land, and Lord Kerum will think of a manor, if not a small castle - and since I designed the island, I know who is likely to do what at which location, and to which conflicts it is likely to lead. I seem to have missed that information, could you please tell me where I can find it ?

A short while ago I took a look at some of Moon Design's Gloranthan Classics, and I am somewhat tempted to move one of my campaigns to (a version of) Glorantha, preferably in a way which enables the characters to explore the re- gion along the River of Cradles from Corflu to Pavis as foreigners who do not need to have much "Glorantha Lore" skills to begin with. The basic idea is that of a group of people, perhaps refugees, "from the South" (not yet defined) who settle an island several days off the coast east of the River of Cradles, and then try to establish friendly relations and especially tra- de with the people of the river valley, up to and including Pavis. Unfortunately I have left Glorantha a long while ago, and have forgotten most of what I knew about the setting, so I am not sure how to handle that idea in true "Gloranthan Style", especially since the players would prefer low magic (no cults for their characters) and would also prefer to delete some of the mo- re weird races (ducks, morokanth, etc.) from the setting. So please let me know your ideas and opinions on this campaign idea, for exam- ple which of the region's people and factions the foreigners from the sea would most probably have to deal with, who would be their likely friends and enemies, and whatever else might prove helpful for such a campaign - every advice is most welcome. By the way, this is the island in question, Kerumar:

With the Asor and their society and culture mostly finished, the next things to look at are the Asors' enemies, the Shadow Creatures. During the First Age of Middle Earth, when Morgoth ruled the North, what is to- day the peninsula of Asornok was a part of the wide plain of Lothlann, north of the Iron Mountains, in Morgoth's realm. All of the lands once ruled by Morgoth are still under his curse of cold and desolation, and will remain under the curse as long as there are places which have been touched by Morgoth during the First Age. As mentioned previously, the Asor have cleansed the lands on the southern and western coast of their peninsula and on many of the isles off the coast, but the- re are still lands under the control of Shadow Creatures in the north and east of the peninsula, lands the Asor intend to cleanse now that the Shadow of Mordor has fallen in order to remove the anchors of Morgoth's curse and heal the land. The most important of these places is Kala Udar, the "Heart of Cold". It is a deep volcanic rift in the northeast of Asornok, guarded by the nearby grey ice fortress of an Ice Demon. According to the legends of the Asor, Morgoth himself created the rift as the home of a Fire Demon who ruled Lothlann in his name. This Balrog, if it ever existed, probably no longer lives under Kala Udar, because any Helegrog would hardly have built his fortress next to the home of a Balrog. Another important Shadow Hold is An Gurim, the "Place of the Worm", a large sub- terranean network of caves in the north of Asornok. For centuries it has been the lair of an ancient Cold Drake, but it is unknown whether Morgoth placed him there to guard the caves and whatever they may contain, or whether he wandered the- re after Morgoth's fall at the end of the First Age. In order to cleanse their lands and to lift Morgoth's curse the Asor will have to de- feat both the Helegrog and his Snow Troll followers at Kala Udar and the Cold Dra- ke at An Gurim, two extremely difficult tasks, and then to use Yavanna's Blessing to heal the lands. While the Asor characters have the means to destroy the Hele- grog of Kala Udar, at least after they have eliminated his small army of Snow Trolls with an all out attack or a campaign of attrition, the Cold Drake of An Gurim is a far more serious problem, because the Asor have no weapon which could hurt it at all. They will most probably need some knowledge and help of the powerful Southerners, and someone has to travel South to search for the means to fight the Worm ...

Here is a review, it seems there are not many differences: Review – Arms of Legend (Legend RPG) « Reviews « Rpg – Role Playing Games

As I see it, your characters need only two Status values, those for the Savinac Order and for their Gaelic Clan, everything else can be handled with default modifiers, unless the characters actually join another one of the factions. The various branches of the church (Cistercian Order, Augustinian Order and the Arch- bishops) will use the character's modified Status with the Savinac Order, the Kingdom of Scotland and the Lordship of the Isles will use the characters' modified Status with their Gaelic Clan (unless the characters act in the name of the Savinac Order), and in the Norman Kingdom the characters' status will depend on whether they act as mem- bers of the Savinac Order or as members of their Gaelic Clan. In my view Status is the characters' standing within a specific group they belong to, beyond that group foreigners will judge them based upon their individual preferences and prejudices (""People with red hair are not trustworthy", etc.) or based upon their membership in a faction (default value), but unless a character has some high office in his faction they will rarely have an idea of the character's actual standing in the faction - this would be "insider knowledge".

Not really, in my view it is not unusual to have regions with different styles in the same setting. For example, in Pendragon you have a high fantasy setting at Arthur's court at Camelot, but a sword and sorcery setting in the lands of the savage Picts, and a style somewhere in between in the halls of the barbarian Saxons. In a Crusades setting you have the Emperor's court in Byzantium, the highly cultured Muslim cities, and the com- paratively barbarian Frankish crusader states. I see it as an advantage of such "mixed" settings that the characters have to deal with societies which are very different from their own home culture, which gives them a nice opportunity to discover new cultures and to use their social skills.