Nick Brooke

I plan to reissue some of my old Tales work on the Jonstown Compendium, enhanced and expanded and revised. So I don't want to make the old versions freely available, because I already have enough problems with strange folk who ask: "A Rough Guide to Glamour? I already own the 1997 edition, it's hard to imagine there's anything new in the massively-expanded 2020 hardback edition. A History of Malkionism? I skim-read the 1994 text on your website / in Tales, so why would I want a gorgeously-illustrated artbook of your best Gloranthan article, bulging with Katrin Dirim's mediaeval illuminations?" People are the worst. (Except my customers: they're all lovely!)

MOB and I warmly encourage those people to make community content related posts on the main BRP Central forums, and to post in the existing community content related threads on the main BRP Central forums. If anyone wants to copy interesting files across from the JC or MR CC Facebook groups to this site (in a thread or as file downloads), that’s absolutely fine by us. But we aren’t going to attempt to mirror everything on those groups here: that’s a crazy idea!

She is the Mirror, and She is the Mask. Your instincts betray you: all mirrors are blessed.

But confusion is so much more enjoyable! Wouldn't you rather needlessly multiply entities, for the sheer joy of it, than take a razor to your creations?

Sure, email me.

There is no legitimate source for digital versions of “Tales of the Reaching Moon” magazine, which was never released commercially in PDF format. There are significant hurdles to creating them (because whoever made them would need the agreement of every writer and artist whose work is in an issue, or their estate), and it is unlikely ever to happen. Sorry about that.

I'll leave you to it.

Like it says in my sig: email me with any community content queries. If you’re in group (a), that’ll be the best way to get them answered quickly and accurately. If you start a thread on the RuneQuest or Glorantha forum (I don’t mind which) to talk about community content related stuff, I’ll certainly pay attention, and will probably participate. I’m always happy to facilitate communications between creators, Chaosium folk and DriveThruRPG, but sometimes thrashing out an authoritative answer takes time, and if they’re pure hypotheticals or major stretches it’s unlikely that anyone will have much bandwidth for them (see the JC FAQ for examples). (NB: one FAQ not covered there goes something like this: “Q: I’m considering writing a scenario/campaign/magisterial tome set in PLACE, so please share all of Chaosium’s published and unpublished information about PLACE with me?” The answer, hopefully unsurprisingly, is “No.” As I keep saying, Your Glorantha Will Vary, and that’s fine)

Please feel free to discuss (and encourage discussion of) Jonstown Compendium community content titles in the existing RuneQuest and Glorantha forums. (And of Miskatonic Repository titles, in the Call of Cthulhu forum) Some creators put up their own posts for new releases; if there isn’t a relevant top-level post (or you want to kick off a meta-discussion about themes, products, prices, formats, trends in general), you can always create your own. Be sensible about masking spoilers (the 👁 tool is useful here). If you’re going to post a review, why not also copy it to the product page on DriveThruRPG? Pro tips: if you’ve spotted a small typo or error in a product, send a private message to the creator, rather than crapping on their launch post with what might look like a petty fault-finding quibble. You will be more popular, and it’s probably easily fixed. If you think someone’s getting Glorantha “wrong” and want to tell everyone about it, that’s frankly your problem, because Your Glorantha Will Vary is the founding ethos of the community content programme. And if you think you've spotted dozens of blatantly obvious formatting glitches which nobody else seems to have noticed, take time to make sure your PDF reader works!

I worry we would feel, and perhaps also be, sidelined. The best forum for JC creators is currently the Jonstown Compendium Creators’ Circle on Facebook. The advantage of posting here on the main RQ/Glorantha forums is that our community content titles and any related discussions are visible to casual browsers. I’d hate to lose that.

Updated again on 25 September 2022. I crunched some numbers for friends just now: the average price per page of English-language titles on the Miskatonic Repository (excluding free, Pay What You Want and deterrent prices) is 15-20 cents. The median price (i.e. most common) is $3.99, and the median page-count is 26 pages. I hope this helps community content creators to value their work appropriately. All the information I used for this analysis is available in the Catalogue. Best-seller medals are now regularly updated, but please let me know if I missed one!

Pick up Trollpak if you want to play as a troll. It's one of the RuneQuest Classics, but the lore won't change much and the rules are very similar to RQG's. I strongly recommend the DuckPac series on the Jonstown Compendium: Book 2 - Duck Adventurers is all about playing as a duck. The old Cult Compendium is a lovely collection of cult writeups for RuneQuest Classic, many of which are being lightly updated (with new art) for RQG. There are some new Cults books in the works (they should be the next major RuneQuest release), and I hear there's a complete ElfPack manuscript, but given the state of the world and the enthusiasm of our supporters Chaosium doesn't like to announce release dates for future books until they're finished, printed and shipped.

It's probably worth mentioning that all Jonstown Compendium works are published by Chaosium, so you can incorporate any of the Gloranthan characters, places, themes, ideas, setting info, etc. you find in them into your own Jonstown Compendium books, in exactly the same way you could if you'd found them in a Chaosium, Issaries or Moon Design Gloranthan book or game. Which is to say: you can't simply cut'n'paste, plagiarise or rewrite chunks of text without permission, but you can certainly use it as raw materials for your own original creative output. And who knows: if you ask nicely, Jonstown Compendium creators might be happy to let you reuse their work in your own community content. (So you want to set a scenario in our version of Glamour? Knock yourself out! We'd love to see what you come up with!)

The Storytelling Collective front page mentions a "Fall Cohort" (gah!) in November 2022. I can't yet say whether there'll be another Chaosium stream (covering CoC & RQ), but I certainly hope so! Also, credit where due: any RuneQuest-specific course content was just my glosses on Paul Fricker's excellent teaching materials. For "investigations into Lovecraftian cosmic horror" read "heroic Bronze Age mythical adventures" throughout, kinda thing.

I disagree. You're working in a shared world that's been published and discussed for almost half a century. It would be bizarre if other people hadn't had the same ideas as you. But your expression of those ideas -- your words, your context, the art and maps and stories and names you use to present them -- are original, and those are what we'd be buying. It'd be really unfortunate for all of us if Martin had decided not to write The Armies & Enemies of Dragon Pass, or Brian The Children of Hykim (to name but two), because "bits of it were thought up by other people, or are ideas shared previously that I liked and wanted to build on." And my own Black Spear is self-consciously a palimpsest, building something new and strange by cobbling together other people's ideas with my own. That leaves terminal laziness. Which is an excuse, 'cos you're not dead yet.

Excuses...

Updated on 10 September with the print edition of The Seven Tailed Wolf by Andrew Logan Montgomery. The third book in his best-selling Six Seasons in Sartar trilogy is available in a range of premium colour hardcover ($43.95), standard colour hardcover ($33.95) and standard colour softcover ($27.95) formats. Also added Somewhere in Glorantha by Mark Prier, a massive collection of tables for generating random locations in Glorantha: if you’ve ever felt the urge to generate a random location in Glorantha, this is the product for you! $13.00 for 196 pages (PDF).

I'm not sure I understand your point. You might find this discussion thread on Twitter illuminating: link.

Behind the spoiler tags is speculative feedback I provided for A Fire in the Darkness, the second scenario in the RQ Starter Set's Adventures Book. Don't read it if you're going to play that scenario: I'm sharing this in the hope a game master out there might find it useful. Note that quoted text and NPC Rune affinity ratings are from the draft manuscript, and may be different in the final version.

When I get a draft text to review, I'm checking for several things in parallel. Is this a typo? These are the easy bits. Markup the fix, and explain why if it looks dubious. Is this sensible? What's the point of presenting "conversions to miles / yards" with decimal-place accuracy, when all the initial numbers are estimates? Aren't these three paragraphs in the wrong order? Why mention Sorcery at all? And so on. Is this RuneQuest? Have you inadvertently used your own house rules e.g. for how shields work, without cross-checking vs. the core rulebook? Isn't this bit a good opportunity to show how Rune affinities work in play? Have you considered assigning an Honour hit for bushwhacking an opponent? Is this Glorantha? Does it present things in a way that feels weird to someone who knows the setting as well as I do? Are we making things hard to approach for readers who are new to the setting? Is the text needlessly multiplying entities, or referencing obsolete terminology, or abbreviating things in a way that is actively misleading, or making mountains out of mole-hills? My honesty also makes me highlight cases where terminology I prefer, but that's officially deprecated nowadays (e.g. "Sheriff of Apple Lane"), has somehow crept into the manuscript. Is this wise? Wouldn't everyone's lives be easier if you left out that one weird bit about Elmal that we know will spark idiotic flame wars somewhere? Does the text (inadvertently or otherwise) present all Lunars as Chaos-tainted, or turn a blind eye to ethnic cleansing, or encourage psychopaths and bigots? If the draft manuscript encourages players' worst instincts, I'll write a small personal screed explaining why this is a Bad Thing, and propose alternative text. Whoever's editing (Jason, in this case) receives all of my feedback (about twenty pages for the RQ Starter Set, not counting SoloQuest markup), plus what anybody else sends back. They have to process all of that, and don't necessarily agree with everything I say,* and might put tricky things on the back burner (or cross-check with other reviewers and team members). If I've suggested a change that'd be tedious to implement, it's totally OK by me for them to shrug and say, "I can't be arsed to fix that bit, it'll have to do." At the end of the day, we are publishing a silly elf game, not an operator's manual for a medical device or nuclear reactor. Adding more expensive proof-reading overhead will increase the cost of all our books; missing an occasional error is entirely acceptable, and we can always fix it on the forums / in errata once it surfaces. I have better things to do with my life than review all of my proposed markup vs. the finished product. I do check whether any stuff I thought was unwise or un-Gloranthan has crept in, because I know there will be flame wars about that nonsense, and I need to keep my powder dry. If a lot of stuff I wrote is passed over in the final product, I might find another way to share it (c.f. the Smoking Ruin playtest notes in The Duel at Dangerford). But then again, I might not. I am a whimsical and mercurial creature. ___ * I know this will come as a shock to some of you, but I am not always right.

There's a male Vingan in RQ3's Dorastor: Land of Doom. I thought that was pretty silly at the time, but YGWofcV. (Berra Thengan, chief houscarl: uses male pronouns, see pic on p.90). Yes, "Berra" can be a boy's name too.

Generic answer, apologies. Q: "What's to stop me abusing [spell]?" A: "Your GM is there to stop you abusing [spell]." They can do it by telling you not to be silly, by house-ruling, by explaining that the spell doesn't work that way, by siccing a cult spirit of retribution on you, by invoking social pressure from NPCs who know what your character is attempting (inc. clan leaders, cult superiors and the like). It's what they're there for. In extremis, of course, they do it by showing you the door. See the first pages of my first Gloranthan Manifesto. If you're ignoring the bit of the writeup that says "in a time of mortal or existential peril," then I'll cheerfully ignore all the other bits describing how the spell works, because it doesn't.

That happened at the First Battle of Chaos, which was a while earlier than Castle Blue. Both those battles were before the first Moon rose inside of Time. And we don't have any myths about Orlanth or other Storm gods contesting with prehistoric Moon Goddesses (Annilla, Lesilla, etc.) over control of the Middle Air, so I think the Red Moon is doing something new. (But then again, we don't have many myths about the prehistoric Moon Goddesses, full stop). The most notable myth involving Orlanth and the Blue Moon is where she teams up with him to assassinate Emperor Yelm, just saying.

Thanks for the tag, Brian! Here's a handy guide to setting up new titles on the Jonstown Compendium. Setting Up a JC Title.pdf

Sure. If that’s your group’s idea of fun, have fun with it. And if that’s your player’s idea of no fun at all, ignore it and do something that’s fun, instead. That’s all I’m saying.