Nick Brooke

More details in this Facebook post from Jeff Richard.

Updated on 16 June with Scott Crowder's Pirates of the East Isles, Vol.1, the first instalment of a three-part campaign set in the exotic East Isles. Character creation supports adventurers from six islands and the race of keets; four pages of Family History set up the status quo in 1625, as the oceans open, the Pirate King rises, and a dread curse is lifted from Mokato. The book contains new rules for martial arts, 14 short-form cults, and a description of the Pirate Island of Pregezora and its leading personalities. The three scenarios are a piratical odyssey stopping at many of the islands and two shorter encounters. The campaign is intended for native East Isles adventurers, familiar with local myths, as all-foreign parties will miss a lot of what's going on. $15.00 for 125 pages. Also released: Dario Corallo's ArtPack 4, a collection of illustrations for use in community content titles. €15.00 for 40 clipart pictures: purchasers can use these in Jonstown Compendium titles in exchange for credit and a free PDF. (And if you want an image altered to meet your needs, he'll be happy to do that for you)

Er, I was talking to @g33k, not you.

You could always pop in to the Uleria Temple in Apple Lane, and ask the priestesses there.

You must be new here, right? 😉

A strange Frenchman once called him "Mr Suitcase" in a ranty missive on the intertubes, and the name amused us so it stuck. I can't be arsed to dig out the moment the label was applied to Rick, but if you dig around this post in the timeline you'll probably find it. https://glorantha.steff.in/digests/GloranthaDigest/vol05/4568.html

Community content "success" vs. professionally published success are totally different creatures: you're not comparing like with like. Seriously, there is no world in which Chaosium would consider a product achieving 500 sales "extremely popular." There are lots of reasons for this -- community content books aren't seen in FLGSs, aren't carried by distributors, and some customers have irrational prejudices against "amateur" work -- but it can't be ignored. What community content has going for it is variety, enthusiasm and productivity. Also, scenario books always sell best to gamemasters (i.e. just one of the members of most gaming groups), while rulebooks, settings and splatbooks (inc. player options like cults and heroquests) can be bought by everyone at the table, because players like their shiny power-ups, yes indeed! So I won't be at all surprised when a core rulebook containing heroquest rules outsells a collection of scenarios: it appeals to more potential customers.

This is not true.

See also Robert Graves' The Greek Myths. Get an edition with footnotes. Revel in them: Greg did. You're trying to work out what the religion-before-the-religion looked like, so the Hydra defeated by Heracles becomes a remnant of the Pelasgian snake-goddess cult, Moon Goddesses are usurped by Sun Gods and Thunder Gods all across the map, and multiple entities end up shoehorned into one cult with surprising antecedents and imagery.

Look, I included a variant of Little Red Riding Hood crossed with Baba Yaga in Black Spear, because I found Greg's patriarchal-POV Verithurusa myth kinda icky (tl/dr: "What did she expect, going out dressed like that?") and wanted to get a Company of Wolves vibe for that encounter. Myths echo. Folklore inspires. Confusing your players is FUN! I would shamelessly raid the Arabian Nights for Lunar heroquests.

No, nothing. We know that, crudely speaking, it brought the Gods’ World closer to the Mortal World, but most examples are now a lost Golden Age. We can’t remember exactly what we lost. These things aren’t meant for us. The most accessible, extant Proximate Holy Realm I can think of is Inner Glamour, where the Moon power surges into the Middle World, gods and goddesses walk the Earth, and Moonson’s idle fancies become flesh and marble.

Five, sir. A magic road, a temple incursion, a static power-up ritual, disrupting an enemy’s creative heroquest, and being lost in the Underworld.

And us community content authors know that we're doing the easy stuff. There are now loads of good scenarios on the Jonstown Compendium, hopefully more than enough to tide you over until the next official release comes out for RuneQuest. (If you haven't yet played through the Six Seasons or Sandheart campaigns, do yourselves a favour, eh?). I hope you've enjoyed everything you've found there : it's all been made possible through the great generosity of Chaosium's principals. And let me briefly plug my JC Catalogue, in case this is all news to you. There are now more than 200 community content titles for RuneQuest and Glorantha, including 45 full-fledged RuneQuest scenarios (plus adventure outlines, scenario seeds, Monsters of the Month, etc.). A couple of dozen of the best-selling titles are available in print. We've honestly never had it so good.

Hi, Nolzur: you probably want to read "The Glorious ReAscent of Yelm," by Greg Stafford. That's the hardcore Lodril+Dayzatar+Yelm stuff, straight from the source. https://www.chaosium.com/the-glorious-reascent-of-yelm-pdf/ For Golden Age Dara Happan architecture, start out thinking Babylonian mud-brick ziggurats but add some magical WTF excesses. For instance, the Gods Wall is the imprint of a giant cylinder-seal; the city walls of Alkor are an unbroken ring of green jade (to get in, the city gates tunnel under the walls); the whole Dara Happan Empire used to be enclosed under a dome, built by mortals at the direction of their gods. For "time not yet existing," see the Cults of Terror Cosmology, the Theogony chapter of the Glorantha Sourcebook, or for real-world exegesis The Myth of the Eternal Return by Mircea Eliade. Primal cosmogonic acts were being performed for the first time: gods were revealing what they could do, would do, would have to do forever after. The gods had free will before Time began; since Time, they've been locked into eternally repeating what they have always done, while history is determined by mortals. And you can find divine acts echoing "previous" divine acts, and things happening "before" they happened, in Godtime myths. (Simple example: Orlanth meets several Lightbringers for the first time on the Westfaring, but they also serve as his counsellors on myths of the Lightbringers' Ring from before the Great Darkness) For rediscovering lost lore through heroquesting: why ever not? That's exactly what the Seven Mothers (praise be upon them) did. Don't play any silly "time travel paradox" games, just accept that everything happened all at once and there's no causality, no way of determining strict relationships between myths except by exploring them in their own terms. The lack of heroquesting rules shouldn't hurt you. Just tell a cool story. Your players, your readers, will forgive you. If you want guidelines, pick up the superb Six Seasons in Sartar from the Jonstown Compendium.

(Insert cabin boy jokes to taste) (or lack of same)

Updated again on 13 June with Ludovic Chabant & Austin Conrad's Bog Struggles, a short and colourful adventure, charmingly illustrated, giving adventurers a chance to interact with a newtling village. A vivid and memorable combat scene is nicely book-ended with suggested introductions and aftermaths. This could be set in any wetlands where newtlings might live. $3.00 for 25 pages. (Note also that Ludovic's first scenario A Short Detour is currently on sale, reduced from $6.95 to $5.00) Also, a quick heads-up. Printing costs will go up next month… [EDIT: the print cost hike has been cancelled, following negotiations between OneBookShelf and Lightning Source]

Updated again on 13 June: now contains 829 listings. Recent best-seller medals refreshed. In case it's useful, here is a list of the English-language titles released in the last 12 months or so that are already Electrum best-sellers (over 250 copies sold): Of Sorrow and Clay* Viral The Dragon of Wantley* Heinrich's Guide to Character Creation* Dockside Dogs* The Hammersmith Haunting* Field of Screams Carnival of Madness* The Grindhouse: Volume 2* The Grindhouse: Volume 1* The Curse of Black Teeth Keetes Carousel of Fears* * available in print.

The thing is, @kerr_avon, Greg was working in that space because the exclusionary gender-essentialist bollocks that attached itself to traditional mythological gender roles had started to bother him. If the only permitted miffic roles for women were queen/ lover/ mother/ witch/ virgin/ castratrix, if Orlanth was so bound up in Heortling concepts of masculinity that women couldn’t ever be allowed to worship him, what message would that send to players who wanted to explore other gender possibilities (heroic Orlanthi warrior-women; men worshipping the Earth Goddesses)? Many of the pioneering scholars whose work Greg had relied on when he first conceived Glorantha were frankly a bit fashy, rather more Kinder, Küche, Kirche inclined than most of us would enjoy. (Look into Mircea Eliade’s links with the Iron Guard, if you like). As with female knights in Pendragon, Greg’s instincts were to empower and enable non-traditional, diverse choices, not to close them down by fiat. (Knee-jerkers don’t like that, either; but we don’t particularly care what they think. They’re welcome to publish their own community content, of course: there’s enough room for Varied Gloranthas to suit every prejudice, even weird fantasy worlds with a rigid gender binary that doesn’t exist in our real world. Clearly that wasn’t what Greg Stafford wanted in his world of Glorantha)

And one of the RQ books. So it goes.

Vinga was introduced in King of Sartar (1992) and is mentioned in Avalon Hill's Dorastor: Land of Doom (1993). Nandan wasn't mentioned in print until Hero Wars.

The Six Paths is a community content title on the Jonstown Compendium, and is therefore not canonical. Nothing on the Jonstown Compendium is canonical. However, it's based on the description of Heortling genders from the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha core rulebook (Sex and Marriage, p.81), which is as canonical as it gets. Greg Stafford thought and wrote extensively about Vinga and Nandan (as the role-models for Orlanthi folk who don't fit traditional gender roles) in the 90s and 00s, and you'll find them in Thunder Rebels for the old Hero Wars RPG. Edan's work in The Six Paths builds on that and IMO transcends it, by explicitly and overtly splitting the six paths from cult affiliations.

People who insist that "Jar-eel should roll fumbles just as often as my players" will, of course, welcome that prospect. Me? Like Harrek, I consider Jar-eel an essentially unstoppable force of nature, a deus ex machina. If I were putting her into a RuneQuest scenario,* I would decide beforehand what I was doing with her, and give the adventurers clear and achievable goals (inc. "not dying," "distracting her," "escaping heroically," etc.). She isn't a player character,** she doesn't have to be specified as one. Think of encounters with her as scripted boss fights in a MMO. You'll probably have more fun running them that way than you will by diving into attritional melee combat against an overwhelmingly superior opponent while praying for an absurd NPC dice fuckup to save your players. And if I wanted to derail the "future history" of Glorantha, I'd just man up and do it, not keep asking for permission. You're the Game Master, right? You've read the warnings, you know your rights. Go for it! If it goes well, you'll be as famous as Derek the Troll; and if it goes badly, you'll know why all those people were warning you. --- * She does feature in my next scenario, and I seriously considered adding her to Black Spear Act 7, until I noticed I'd hit page-count. ** Usually.

I disagree. The best outcome was shown in Prince of Sartar, chapter 2.

Updated again on 7 June with Michael Paul O'Sullivan's Velhara's Mirror, a sandbox campaign exploring tumultuous events in Beast Valley after the Dragonrise. Presented as a sequel to The Ruins of Bonn Kanach, this outlines the many factions contending for power in the south of Dragon Pass. Six two-page adventure outlines present events in 1627 where the adventurers can get involved, making friends or enemies with any of the factions, while the title scenario is a ten-page adventure that takes place during the Great Hunt at the end of Storm Season. The separate 46-page NPC Roster is an excellent collection of RuneQuest stat blocks for Sun Domers, Kitori, Trolls, Lunars, Sartarites, Beast Men, Grazelanders, Esrolians and Wolf Pirates, as well as NPC adventurers and some scenario-specific creatures. $6.99 for 86 pages.

Updated again on 5 June with Diana Probst & Kristi Herbert's The Lifethief, a sequel to Beer With Teeth's earlier releases Stone and Bone and The Gifts of Prax (aka Stonier and Bonier). This gorgeously-illustrated adventure sends a party into one of the worst places in the world, where something terrible is happening. An appendix of Praxian encounters rounds things off nicely. $10.00 for 47 pages.