Nick Brooke

We play these games to have fun finding out, not to close down possibilities beforehand. Yes, Storm Bullies who fumble Sense Chaos rolls can cause chaos (small-c! small-c!), and I suggest GMs shouldn't spend any time working out sensible protocols, precautions and failsafes beforehand. They're anti-social drunken bully-boys, not seasoned quality assurance professionals.

I've updated the Jonstown Compendium Index to include the various products (maps, tokens, cardboard counters and shorter titles) released since the first version this year; there still haven't been any major releases. Recent titles of note are: Maps of Talastar & Dorastor by Mikael Mansen VTT Bronze Age Ducks by Josh "Skull" Dixon Vilinar Cave cardboard tokens and maps by Dario Corallo. I greatly look forward to meeting some of you at Chaosium Con in Ann Arbor next month. There's a Community Content panel on Friday morning (Try This At Home), and a "Happy Hour" breakfast event on Saturday morning (Meet & Greet Fellow Community Content Creators), and I'll always be happy to chat if you catch me at a loose end.

I understand how some knuckle-dragging slaves of the patriarchy might mistake a socially, sexually and intellectually liberated woman for a "chaos horror." Clearly, there is much work yet to be done...

My Arabian Nights analogy for the Lunars surely means the "happy ending" of many folk tales will be when the protagonist realises she can marry all three of the handsome princes / warriors / chieftains (or whoever) she's been adventuring with: the marvellous revelation of the Lunar Way means that she doesn't have to choose between them. Everyone wins!

Have you asked Dario Corallo? He's brilliant, not expensive, and knows exactly what Pavis looks like.

If you want to propose the Rune affinities, Passions and/or Sorcery techniques the Coders might have in RQG, that’s cool. We don’t want to see products containing “revised and updated” statblocks for NPCs, but suggestions like that would be fine. What you do for use in your own games is entirely up to you; it’s only when you want to sell something via our community content programme that we take an interest.

From the Jonstown Compendium FAQ: We don’t want the Jonstown Compendium to become a marketplace for “updated” versions of older Chaosium material. Please take care, we’d hate you to invest a lot of time and effort in an unsuitable conversion project.

The major published source is the Fifth Wane History, collected in the Glorantha Sourcebook. The Pure Horse People of Pent originated in Peloria, of course. And it does matter, because in Glorantha the outcomes of myth and heroquesting are real, not subjective - the Most Reverend Mother of Horses (in Pent, not Dragon Pass) who was defeated by Hon-eel knows she was defeated. Jeff is explaining here how Hon-eel won (using a heroquest identity challenge); you won’t find it in so few words in any of the sources, but it all adds up.

Although it's about suppressing Orlanth-worship in Sartar (rather than Pavis County), you might find the short article on pages 40f. of my first Gloranthan Manifesto relevant or interesting: Orlanth Worship & Lunar Occupation. The Lunars never intentionally suppressed Ernalda worship; when that goddess died after what went down in Whitewall, it was completely unexpected. The Lunars love the Earth Goddess; she's how Hon-eel got into Tarsh, after all.

Speaking personally, I belong to the "shit happens" school of thought. Old Chaosium's track record with Kickstarter delivery was none too great either (including outright lies to backers about printing, IIRC), and even New Chaosium hit a few bumpy patches back in the day. That said, things seem to have worked out all right in the end... unless you had your heart set on one of those weird non-core add-ons that almost sank the company, I suppose. But Stygian Fox are still clearly capable of producing beautiful new products in digital and print, so I'd be inclined to give them a chance. Your mileage may vary, and you know what? That's OK. It's your money. But as we all know, the last few years have been a hellscape (Brexit, Trump, Covid...), and expecting every amateur business to sail serenely through the carnage is kinda delusional. Be kind.

Before you get carried away…

As you said in your root post, all errata up to June 2021 is included in the 40th anniversary edition.

For RQ Classics, see the advice at the back of the core rulebook (pages 432-437). But the books themselves aren't converted, those are guidelines for RQG GMs using them with the new system. My advice is to wing it - add things you actually need on the fly, rather than investing many hours in unnecessary conversion work. Remember, the players don't ever get to audit your NPCs! If a strike rank or hit point breakdown is "slightly wrong," who cares?

I’ll check them. My email’s in my sig. Cheers, Nick

Storm Bulls are rightly seen as more disruptive in many places than quiet, well-behaved Ogres who just want to blend in socially and might occasionally eat someone who probably won’t be missed.

I think my esteemed colleague @David Scott is mistaken when he dismisses the Coders as having “no interest for RQG.” You could say the same about the RuneQuest Classics Pavis, Big Rubble and Borderlands. Plenty of people still have fun with that older material, either playing it “as-is” (in the Before Times) or else sensibly adapting it for post-Dragonrise play. More of an issue (but not that much of one, IMO) is the deliberately gross, RQ3-exploiting statblocks of many of the Strangers. But that would be a bad reason to dismiss the core RQ3 Renaissance publications (Sun County, Troubled Waters, Shadows & Strangers). Modest proposal: bundle Troubled Waters plus The Lunar Coders plus Barran the Monster-Slayer into one book. (Skip Arlaten the Magus if the Guide to Glorantha retcon of the West and changes to Sorcery rules between RQ3 and RQG make him unsalvageable; I don’t have a dog in that fight). Reissue Sun County and Shadows on the Borderlands as-is. Put no effort into converting RQ3 to either RQ Classic or RQG (or indeed writing conversion notes): our readers are intelligent, they can do what’s necessary to use these titles in their games. Job done.

Please don’t do this: we would hate you to waste your time and ours. See also the JC FAQ: If you submit something deliberately unsuitable but “technically legitimate, I suppose” to the community content store, Chaosium will remove it from sale and may take any other actions to defend the integrity of the community content programme. If you want to check whether your proposed creation is acceptable or crosses any lines, my contact details are below. If you’re writing Gloranthan QuestWorlds content, please follow the HeroQuest 2e rules as implemented in HeroQuest Glorantha and its product line (Sartar: KoH, Sartar Companion, Pavis: GTA, etc.), rather than retro-emulating now deprecated features from Hero Wars or HeroQuest 1e. QuestWorlds titles are among the worst-selling community content titles already, please don’t do anything that might poison the well. (Puddle? I dunno)

One critical point to make: Oakfed is the god of uncontrollable wildfires. You can easily use his powers to start stuff burning, but good luck trying to stop it, or controlling where those fires go and how fast they spread once you've started them. Play with wildfire, get burned.

This is exactly right! And some weird complaints ("My Lhankor Mhy Sword Sages aren't canonical any more!") are absurdly easy to retrofit: they're important to you, so they can feature in your games, but the owners of canon don't think it important enough to insist they exist in everyone else's games. Likewise the Lanbril Kitchen Sink Thieves' Guild writeup from RQ Classic Pavis: it's fairly daft, but if that's your kind of daftness, please feel free to keep using it. And the same again with (checks notes) weird insane Jakaleeli variant approaches to magic, devised by small numbers of practitioners in one of the most effervescently creative and freethinking Lunar traditions.

Book One has sold nearly 200 copies, and Book Two is on nearly 150. You can see sales charts for all major Jonstown Compendium releases here: link. My takeaway from the charts: the worst-selling titles on the JC are written in foreign languages, written for QuestWorlds, or set in exotic locations (outside Dragon Pass & Prax & the Lunar Empire). I didn’t bother charting the short/expensive stuff, because sales are way lower than for other, sensibly-priced releases.

The best advice I can give is: don’t price any book at more than $19.95 in PDF, or sales will likely fall off a cliff. This is based on internal research by DriveThruRPG, you can probably find the blog posts with a little digging (update: here). We’ve made 180-page books for around $20 (Citizens, Black Spear), and that’s as long as I’d go nowadays. Pretty sure Drew concurs. (Our pricier titles were Life of Moonson for me and Company of the Dragon for him; in both cases, sales have disappointed compared to our shorter, earlier works, and we’ve decided not to release any more longer works). The four Sandheart books and Glamour are around 100 pages. Six Seasons is 144. Look up the rest in the Catalogue if you’re interested, it comes bundled with a spreadsheet inc. page count and price data you can manipulate to your heart’s content. Print pricing works differently: my usual advice is to maintain your digital margin on the average print sale, so you’d usually aim for the print price to be around 2x digital price (more for premium colour, less for standard colour, and much less for black & white). Use the print cost calculator on DriveThruRPG to fine-tune strategies. My generic advice on pricing: if your digital edition costs more than 15 cents per page of content (excluding covers, front matter, adverts, blank space, etc.), you’d better have plenty of good original artwork to justify it, or else your book will stick out like an expensive thumb in my Catalogue.

Yes, she features in the RuneQuest Classic Borderlands scenario "Muriah's Revenge," and is a handy reusable antagonist for campaigns set in Prax.

The city god isn’t necessarily the city founder; the Westerners recognise all kinds of ways by which powerful spiritual entities can be created. Yes, there are city gods in Malkioni lands. They’re worshipped by the citizens of their cities (duh!), other than members of the Zzaburi wizard-caste, who are of course forbidden to worship any god other than the Invisible God. (Terms and conditions apply)

IMG, we ignore "minor holy days" (e.g. "every Windsday," "every Clayday") as below the significance threshold - you only get one meaningful shot at worshipping (and recovering Rune points) per season. If the only way you can worship is by casting Sanctify wherever you happen to be, you don't get to renew that Sanctify spell (because it's still up and running while you worship: same logic for Extensions and the related spells). So every sane and reasonable person will head to the biggest accessible temple they can find on every seasonal holy day. As a sane and reasonable GM, I don't give my players a hard time about this, or require rolls to see how many Rune points are recovered, unless that's a feature of my seasonal adventure (or I otherwise want to jerk them around).

In the unlikely event you’re writing for the-game-formerly-known-as-HeroQuest, just call it QuestWorlds. You can reference pages in the HeroQuest: Glorantha rulebook, and that’s the version of the game supported on the Jonstown Compendium (plus the QuestWorlds SRD, 🤷‍♂️). It’s not ideal, but it seems to be workable, and it’s not as if many people are writing for it. The “legal BS” I leave to our lawyers. Don’t call your book a “HeroQuest” book, and we should all get along just fine without pissing off the boardgame folk. If you cock up, we’ll advise you of what needs to be changed, and may remove your title from sale until necessary edits (e.g. “for HeroQuest read QuestWorlds throughout”) can be made to the title and its listing. If you cock up egregiously, we may have to remove you from the programme. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any specific concerns, examples, etc. My email address is below. I strongly recommend reading the Jonstown Compendium FAQ before wasting my time with niggling hypotheticals.