Nick Brooke

No, it was not. Valley of Plenty was pulled from sale when the authors decided they wouldn’t be bringing out any of the sequels they’d mentioned. They republished it when they decided that they might do that after all. They then pulled the print edition when people had weird expectations about getting updated pages mailed to them for free. This was entirely a Troupe Games initiative.

Risible misinformation: we fling poo in your general direction. Daka Fal is, of course, a mask worn by Grandfather Baboon: ask any baboon! All human religion was learned from baboons in the Dark.

OK, I’ll see if we can delete all mention of the SRD from both the Guidelines and the FAQ. Thanks for your input.

If you’re writing an Umathelan campaign setting sourcebook for the rule system previously known as HeroQuest Glorantha that includes lots of playable material, scenarios, episodes, campaign outlines, bestiary, characters, a starter village (or whatever), etc., and you want to include some short new rules for Umathelan magic keywords that are compatible with HeroQuest Glorantha, knock yourself out: they support playable material, and we’re happy for you to do that. I’ll warn you that two categories of material that sell particularly poorly on the Jonstown Compendium are exotic settings and QuestWorlds releases. But hopefully you knew that already. The naming confusion is partly because Chaosium has sold the HeroQuest trade mark. That probably makes the guidance more confusing than it needs to be, but since hardly anybody is writing for that system, it doesn’t matter much. And as you can see, some people like to be confused.

Don’t use the QuestWorlds SRD: use the rules previously published as HeroQuest Glorantha instead. If you use the QuestWorlds SRD and write something that doesn’t work with the rules formerly known as “HeroQuest Glorantha,” we will remove it from sale and advise you to use the rule system we told you to. Do you need me to use shorter words?

Please read the end of the FAQ.

Jonstown Compendium FAQ. The last page or so is highly relevant to this thread. There have been about half a dozen QuestWorlds releases (all using HeroQuest: Glorantha) in the 4+years the programme has operated.

I think that would be wise. Otherwise you could waste a lot of time e.g. retrocloning Hero Wars from the SRD and then find your JC submission rejected because we explicitly told you not to do that.

If you want to set a game in Glorantha, you can use the gamist D20-rolling 13th Age Glorantha class+level system, the narrativist, largely-statless QuestWorlds system (specifically what used to be sold as HeroQuest: Glorantha) or the simulationist D% BRP-defining RuneQuest system (in either of the editions currently available from Chaosium). Knock yourself out!

For completeness’ sake: you can also publish adventures and sourcebooks for the 13th Age Glorantha rules system on the Jonstown Compendium. This is by generous permission of our friends at Fire Opal Media. (And other than some 13AG conversion notes for Six Seasons in Sartar, I’m unaware of any publications using this rule set.) That’s your lot. Anything else isn’t allowed under the community content agreement, and you’ll have to negotiate a licence with Chaosium directly. Finally, we generally discourage people from writing variant rules for our games (a new combat system, a variant sorcery system, etc.). We want you to write for the games we publish, not for the “better” versions you’ve house-ruled into existence. If you’ve written a scenario that needs spot rules for an encounter or a new system for tracking campaign resources (i.e. your new stuff is thematically linked to playable content), that’s probably fine. But don’t replace our rules, especially not with somebody else’s. We can’t allow that: we don’t own anybody else’s rules.

The only Basic Role-Playing (BRP) rules you can use on the Jonstown Compendium are RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (2018) and RuneQuest Classic (which is a reprint of second edition RuneQuest, RQ2). You can’t publish for Avalon Hill’s third edition of RuneQuest (RQ3), as although Chaosium owns those rules we don’t currently support them. You can’t publish for the first edition of RuneQuest (RQ1) because RuneQuest Classic is Chaosium’s only supported retro edition. (I know this will disappoint at least one person, and probably no more than that.) You can’t publish anything for any Mongoose or Design Mechanism edition of RuneQuest (including those now called Legend and Mythras), as Chaosium doesn’t own those rules and we can’t let you use them. You can’t publish generic BRP material on the Jonstown Compendium, it has to be set in Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha and use one of the two supported BRP rule-sets (RQG or RQ2). To date, nothing has yet been published using the RuneQuest Classic rules, but we can live in hope.

To be clear, the only QuestWorlds rule set Chaosium allows creators to use on the Jonstown Compendium is the game that was previously called HeroQuest: Glorantha (published in 2015). Hero Wars (trade paperbacks, published in 2000), HeroQuest (first edition, big red book, published in 2003) and HeroQuest (second edition, generic / non-Gloranthan, published in 2009) rules are deprecated, and you can’t publish anything for them through the community content programme. “Rolling your own” Gloranthan rules using the QuestWorlds SRD (e.g. so as to reimplement deprecated features of those earlier rulesets) is explicitly not permitted. Some people have funny notions about what the marketplace is for. We are trying to make sure people know what they’re buying when they pick up a “QuestWorlds” product from our community content programme.

Here’s Rick explaining why:

If you want Chaos cults early, pick up “Cults of Terror.”

Updated again: Draconic Enlightenment, by Leon Kirshtein and Simon Phipp. A grab-bag of suggestions for running Draconic Enlightenment as an alternative version of Nysalor Illumination, plus new plunder items (dragonewt eggs, jade dreamstones) and bestiary entries (cursed serpents, pseudo dragons), followed by a lengthy recap of dragonewt personalities and magic, and three scenario outlines (Serpent’s Schemes, Shipwrecked, Rituals of Cleansing). (32 pages for $4.00) Lost & Found, by Paul Davies. A collection of Plunder! items in the classic format, several charmingly quirky, and most including adventure seeds suggesting how a game master could use them in their campaign. There are seven small illustrations plus a scrappy map (unlabelled) and some misc. scribbles. (28 pages for $11.37 - unusually, this product is priced in UK pounds (£9.00), and the stated price may wobble as the exchange rate changes) Best-seller charts have been updated to show the best-selling products in both Q4 2023 and Q1 2024, as well as details for the last three months.

Speak for yourself. As She sings in the final act of Sedenya! The Musical: “And as for the Empire And as for fame I never invited them in Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired. They are Illusion, they’re not the solutions they promised to be The answer was here all the time I love you, and hope you love me...” 🎶

“There is a crack, a crack, in everything: That’s how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen

I understand Darius was impressed by something he read in The Book of Drastic Resolutions: Volume Chaos. It's nice that somebody was. Let's leave it at that.

I don’t think it’s my original idea. The Pol-Joni are Sartar’s allies, and form a buffer against raiders from the Plains: it would seem weird if the Kingdom of Sartar or the Pol-Joni Tribe were happy for its merchants to arm their enemies. That breaks down after 1602, when the Kingdom stops functioning and the Lunars play divide-and-rule, and is pretty much in the trash-can after 1610, when the Lunars start shipping Provincial Army surplus kit to their Sable Nation auxiliaries and the Pol-Joni are driven out of the Good Place. There are related complications when the Lunars crack down on Sartarites posessing any military-grade weapons and armour (cf. Starbrow’s Rebellion), and of course a ban on “sales” wouldn’t prevent an enterprising merchant or tribal leader from gift exchanges (e.g. giving a Praxian Khan some fancy bronze or iron armour in exchange for favours or services), even if it probably should. With no Prince (or a weak puppet) on the throne, the Kingdom is hardly functioning properly. Come the RQG timeline, this is all moot. Argrath has loads of Praxian allies, arms them to the teeth, and doesn’t care about any treaties his predecessors might have entered into with the Pol-Joni tribe or anyone else.

See my Manifesto, pages 113-114.

It’s something that happened after the fall of Sartar. The first Lunar invasion of Prax was (in part) to head off a pan-tribal confederation forming under Waha leadership and driving the Pol-Joni from those great grazing lands. From King of Sartar: Before Sartar fell, the Kingdom propped up the Pol-Joni (remember, they were the only Praxian tribe it’s legal for Sartarite merchants to sell metal weapons and armour to). Afterwards, they were kinda cut loose, and the threat from the Plaines tribes loomed large.

The Pol Joni don't want to "ease relations with Praxian tribes." They want to ride horses and herd cattle.

I hope it doesn't, because Chaosium hasn't approved that.

Index updated: The unproduced script of a 1989 adaptation by hack author Preston Shrader of the rediscovered Greek tragedy Boldhome (which bears a remarkable similarity to a RuneQuest scenario: go figure!). Name-dropping asides throughout the supporting material give new insights into the history of 20th century dramas (theatrical, filmed and televisual) inspired by Gloranthan sources found in the Vatican Apostolic Archive and elsewhere. The original stage play concerns a reunion and doomed romance between two members of the Orlanthi resistance; this adaptation is a police procedural focusing instead on the bungling Boldhome City Guard. The critics say: "Makes Six Seasons in Sartar look like an epic." (70 pages for $5.95) And I’ll hide this bit behind a spoiler warning, so please don’t read it unless you’re already thinking of buying the scenario as it’ll take away some of the joy of discovery through play: Cheers, Nick

Here in the UK, retail prices have increased by about 160% since Sun County came out back in 1992. It was $18.95 back then, so it'd probably set you back $50 or so nowadays, and that's before any premium for scarcity value. Just putting things in context. There is no need for anyone to "helm a project" or "organise people to do layout." The Chaosium moves at its own ineluctable speed.