Nick Brooke

All of the RuneQuest Classics are available in print on demand from Chaosium's web store. I'm sorry they weren't what you were looking for, and hope you find your Forever Game soon.

The overview takes up the first thirty pages or so, and applies to any kind of Hsunchen. There are three pages on the Basmoli (lion hsunchen, found in Prax) and three pages on the Telmori (wolf hsunchen, originating in Ralios with some migrants as far away as Sartar). So that's about 36 directly relevant pages, not counting generic advice on character creation, adventure/ campaign/ heroquest suggestions and the technical appendices. Every tribe in the book gets a half-page myth, included in the above.

Where we have fallen down, IMO, is pointing towards stuff that's not available yet, while not doing enough to market: a) the RuneQuest / Glorantha Classics (pick up the Cult Compendium or the two Cults Books and you have full cult writeups for loads of stuff that's summarised in RQG Core; pick up Borderlands / Pavis / Big Rubble and you can happily adventure in Glorantha for many years), and b) our frankly brilliant community content. If you haven't read Six Seasons, or Sandheart, you are really missing out. Those authors get Glorantha, and they're showing you how you can weave heroquests and mythology into stories of everyday Bronze Age life.

You're insane. Chaosium in the late 70s/early 80s was notorious for announcing vapourware and never following through. Rick Meints devotes space to "What Never Was" throughout his Meints Index to Glorantha.

Well, I'd stick an advert for the Jonstown Compendium in the back of a future RuneQuest hardback, if it was up to me. That way people won't be unaware of more than a hundred scenarios and sourcebooks for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. But the Powers that Be think otherwise, and who am I to doubt their wisdom?

Briefly dilating: because of the pervasive influence of the World's Favourite Role-Playing Game (TM), some people earnestly believe that every game needs its holy trilogy of Player's Handbook, Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide to be considered complete. RuneQuest players know that this is a really bad take: until the Mongoose era, no edition of RuneQuest had ever had anything called a Game Master's Guide, and frankly the less said about the Mongoose era, the better. But the perception is there, and is reinforced by the RQG Core book's (doubtless well-meant) indication that some secondary stuff is "coming soon." So the slipcase set (comprising: RQG Core, RQG Bestiary, Colymar Campaign Pack) is seen as "incomplete" by folk who literally don't know what they're missing, but are sure it's really important (somehow). Personal bit: RuneQuest in Glorantha was my favourite setting for a decade before I first went on a heroquest, when the Greydog Clan playtested Jon Quaife's scenario Grey Hare's Riddle Quest before its publication in Tales of the Reaching Moon's HeroQuest Special, back in 1992. Jon didn't have any super-sekret lore or insights or frameworks, he just wrote a cool folklore story set on the Other Side, and we all loved playing it. I've tried to provide a similar experience in my own Black Spear and, arguably, The Duel at Dangerford. If you don't enjoy them because they haven't been shoehorned into some unpublished meta-framework, honestly, that's on you. And that's why I think it was a mistake to mention a GM's Guide.

My takeaway from this is that it was a mistake to mention a hypothetical future GM's Guide in the core rulebook. But that's just me.

As someone said in a different franchise, "chaos isn't a pit: chaos is a ladder." (Note the small C, bully-boys. Oh, sorry, you're illiterate) As the Lunar Provinces, and indeed the Heartland Sultanates, fragment and descend into warlordism over the coming decades, I perceive great opportunities... for those who are willing to reach out and grasp them.

I add a big dose of wide-eyed gormless enthusiasm for the Next Big Thing to my Etyries cultists. They know in their heart that they’re building a new economic paradigm which has a Special Relationship with Time (TM), so they sound something like dotcom evangelists, Ponzi salesmen, bitcoin enthusiasts or enn eff tee boosters, especially compared to the more sedate Issaries merchants.

There's been some Chinese Whispers about this, which I do my best to unpack in my first Gloranthan Manifesto, p.49. At the Games Day convention in London in 1986, Sandy Petersen told a British audience that American gamers who were new to RuneQuest & Glorantha in the mid-eighties thought that the Lunars were the good guys and the Orlanthi were a terrible band of wreckers, based on their self-presentation in the Red Box's Voices. We smiled and nodded politely, because we'd all been playing since RQ2 times and knew that the Lunars are the baddies. The Reaching Moon Megacorp's house campaign was based around the Greydog Clan: all Orlanthi, no Lunars. We knew that the Lunars were baddies, but we didn't like them being one-dimensional baddies. Which is why we wrote so much interesting stuff about them, to give them depth and complexity and motivation. Some folk don't like that, which is fine, I just wish they were less boring about it.

Loads of community content scenarios on the Miskatonic Repository are set in and around Arkham in the 1920s. You can easily find them using my Miskatonic Repository Catalogue, which lets you filter by location and era. Still going cheap for a few hours more in DriveThruRPG's "Christmas in July" sale (currently 75 cents, usually $1.00).

You can leave a five-star rating now, and write the accompanying review later, you know? This book is obviously top quality, and believe me: creators live for feedback!

I've been sharing some pricing observations on the Storytelling Collective's Discord. Here's the gist of it: Call of Cthulhu scenarios in English on the Miskatonic Repository average around 20 cents per page. If you price yours much above that, I'd expect to see some quality original artwork, fancy maps & handouts, and the like. Always value what you create; we don't recommend "Pay What You Want" (as most people want to pay nothing). Customers like to pay prices denominated as $xx.99 or $xx.95 rather than $xx.00, that's just human nature. If you aren't selling to humans, other rules apply. And yes, I'm braced for the incoming wave. There's a reason I tidied up the Catalogue before the end of July...

Updated again on 29 July. Expect a flurry of new scenarios in the next week or so, as the participants in this summer's Storytelling Collective's Write Your First Adventure course are about to graduate... Alex Guillotte has been having a good month: as well as Viral (co-authored with Bud), his scenarios The Pipeline and The Grindhouse: Volume One (co-authored with Ian Christiansen) got their Gold best-seller medals in July. All three titles are available in print. (So is Field of Screams, by Al "Diesel" Smith, whose new scenario Cursed has just been released)

I think you're confusing two things. The Call of Cthulhu Starter Set isn't the same thing as Call of Cthulhu Classic (recently kickstarted), which comes in 1" and 2" boxed versions (the 1" box is just the rules, the 2" box includes a bunch of supplements). If you want to pick up the 2" Classic box, you'll need to be at GenCon booth 411 or check Chaosium's store when they go on sale, on August 4.

Simon Bray found it easy to repurpose existing RQG adventures for a Lunar party based in Tarsh.

Both gorgeous volumes of Life of Moonson are available in print and digital format at 25% off, to celebrate the game's 25th anniversary. They're around 240 pages each. Life of Moonson, Book One: The Characters contains fifty illustrated character sheets: everything that at least one of the players knew before the game started. Life of Moonson, Book Two: The Freeform contains the game rules, timetable, events and secrets: everything none of the players knew before the game started!

Both volumes of Life of Moonson are currently 25% off in both printed and digital formats to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our freeform’s first outing. Book One: The Characters Book Two: The Freeform

Coulda gone with the “Orlanthi All.” 😉

Darius: “Storm Bull cultists are the epitome of rational behaviour.” Cults of Prax: “Normal people consider all worshippers of this cult to be mindless brutes, barely human, certainly deranged, and absolutely dangerous. These opinions are correct.”

Weird take, given that we know Illumination frees you from the irrational, unthinking fear of Chaos. YGWV, I guess.

It’s the annual Christmas in July sale on DriveThruRPG, and lots of Jonstown Compendium titles are available at up to 25% off in digital format. If you’re not sure what to pick up, I’ve refreshed my free lists of the best-selling RuneQuest scenarios and Gloranthan sourcebooks for Summer 2022; if you want more detail than that, my JC Index 2022 and JC Catalogue are both in the sale. But wait: there’s more! Our fifty-player freeform live-action role-playing game Life of Moonson came out twenty-five years ago, so as a 25th anniversary celebration we’re offering print copies at 25% off! It comes in two fat hardbacks: Book One - The Characters and Book Two - The Freeform.

Here's what my old writeup said: Which is why I didn't worry about geas wording.

That doesn’t help. “Use no straight blades.”

The weather is better in Tarsh.