Nick Brooke

If I were you, unless you’re familiar with HeroQuest 2e rules, I’d just delete them. QuestWorlds titles are among the site’s worst sellers (with one notable exception, now removed from sale), most of our customers are looking for RuneQuest material, and HQ2 works very differently to HW/HQ1 (which aren’t allowed on the Jonstown Compendium).

Updated again on 14 March: now contains 774 titles.

Jacob Webb painted a new cover for the remastered version of Tales of the Sun County Militia (Sandheart Volume One). Mark Smylie created new covers for both Martin’s books (Armies & Enemies and Men of the West) after they’d been out for a while.

They’re one of the best-known examples of the ancient Grazelander sites (spirit totems, burial mounds, hidden shrines and the like) that can be found all over Dragon Pass. Remember that the Pure Horse People had the run of the place between their defeat at Alavan Argay and the coming of Arim the Pauper. Nowadays they’re usually found in the Grazelands proper, but their relics can be found practically anywhere. (And yes, this makes a Grazelander adventurer very useful to have for a game based in Sartar: they know stuff about local landmarks and spirits that the locals don’t)

Hi, Bill - author here, I’m happy to confirm there are no spoilers in what you read. Please buy my excellent book! Black Spear

For any Babylon 5 fans out there, MOB and I used to enjoy calling him “Ambassador Belvani.” Presented with the opportunity to Make Sun County Great Again, he didn’t think twice about the cost.

On the PDF question, I think you’re asking about page background images. Most PDF viewers let you deactivate Layers for printing/viewing, so just make sure you set up your digital edition to use a background Layer for its parchment (or whatever), and anyone who wants to print it out without wasting ink can do exactly that. Or, as Brian suggests, make two versions (ink-lite & full-fat).

Covers sell books.

Belvani will use the Lunars to gain power, for as long as that’s an option. He’ll use the Sun Dragon cult to gain power, for as long as that’s an option. He’ll even use Argrath to gain power, for as long as that’s an option. (I wrote a book about that last bit, tbh). He knows that the best outcome for Sun County is to have him as its Count: that’s the greatest possible good, and anything he does to ensure his personal survival and his rise to power (whether allying with the Lunars before First Moonbroth, championing their plans to marry Yelmalio to the Red Goddess, adroitly pivoting to become a key component of the puritan regime that seizes power under Count Solanthos, or backstabbing the Lunars at Second Moonbroth) is inherently justified. He’s intelligent, perceptive, well-informed and morally flexible. He’s seen the good life in the Empire, and is shocked at how impoverished, parochial and petty his homeland appears in comparison. He knows he’s the only man who can change that… A very dangerous man. I enjoyed working on his motivations a lot.

Interesting. I strip-mined the Entekosiad for my article Holiday Glorantha: The Oronin Valley and found plenty of useful bits. But yes, “deep background” isn’t meant to be “immediately playable reference material.” A fair amount of what I did was giving a spatial and temporal context for all the weird new names: a quick Pelandan primer, much like my History of Malkionism, so you’d know the outline of the most important bits (like: “What’s an Entekos?” “Where’s Wendaria?” “Which Pelandan gods are still worshipped?”). Here’s how I use that deep and weird material myself. It’s secrets, forgotten lore, stuff that most people in 1620s Glorantha would be surprised to learn. You can discover it by going to remote clans with strange traditions, attending worship at variant shrine cults, delving into the meaning of strange statues and ancient symbols, penetrating forbidden temple complexes and taking away their cursed artifacts. These are the stories that empower creative heroquesting, the myths the bad guys use to blindside your players, the facts that irritating Grey Sage feels smug explaining to you, the secret identities the Lunars leverage to prove that, in a very real sense, We are All Us. They’re tricks and traps for the Game Master. Hunt through those unfinished works like a magpie, find something sparkly that talks to you, build it into a scenario. That’s what I did with The Duel at Dangerford (Arkat’s Shadow Warriors are in Arcane Lore, albeit I already knew them via Greg’s oral tradition from 1985). These books aren’t a useful framework for understanding All of Glorantha. They are a nest of wormholes your brain can dive into to help you come up with stories and plots. I mashed up Nestentos/Oslira and Buburstus/Stella Draconis with the more familiar Sun County River Ritual and New Moon Temple Ceremony to write Black Spear, frankly looting the Glorious ReAscent / Gods Wall material to give me a spurious source of depth and complexity. Hector the Librarian knows all this stuff so your players don’t have to.

Ordinarily, yes. Please note that (as stated in MOB’s announcement) this requirement has been waived for the former monographs. If you wrote one, and get it updated to 7th edition rules, and can prepare print-ready files, it’s already eligible for POD. Let me know if you need any advice or support meeting the relevant print specification.

It is not. The Miskatonic Repository is exclusively for Call of Cthulhu 7th edition content. There is as yet no community content store for “BRP-generic” material.

Welcome to the tribe, Megalodonjuan! We’re here to help with any questions: keep them coming. Lots of us played way too much RQ2 (Classic) back in the day, and the new edition is intentionally very backwards-compatible.

People should read more X-Men comics. That is all.

There have been three community content releases since the 2022 Index went on sale, but nothing yet feels big enough to be worth an update: Creatures of Glorantha, by Davide Quatrini: $1.49 for 5.5 pages / 7 new bestiary entries, illustrated with public domain or creative commons licensed art. Erigia, by Mikael Mansen: $13.50 for two high-resolution maps of Eol and Erigia, the homelands of two Lunar allies: the Thunder Delta Slingers and the brutal Char-un. Men of the West, by Martin Helsdon: now available in a hardcover B&W print-on-demand edition, $27.00 for 182 pages on the Malkioni West (Fronela, Seshnela, Ralios and Slontos).

Feeling precious today, are we? Speaking for myself, I write fanwank for silly elf games. Maybe you are working on an altogether higher level, I wouldn’t know. But I eagerly await your own community content contributions, and will provide all the support you need to get them out in digital and print formats.

Please check the licenses for any fonts you're using in community content. Publishing via the Jonstown Compendium is a commercial activity; most font licenses allow this (e.g. a license for the Atlantis font - mentioned above - lets you use it in unlimited commercial and personal digital and print products). You'll find that a lot of font licensing language is actually designed to stop you distributing or reselling the font itself, rather than restricting what you can do with it in output. Sometimes free / demo font licenses are more restrictive (e.g. a free version of the Atlantis font is licensed for personal use only, and clearly you shouldn't use that on the Jonstown Compendium). But the whole suite costs just $12, so if you really want to emulate Chaosium's header style, it's not expensive. If you aren't on Facebook, you're missing out on some of our best community content resources. Which is fine: that's your choice, and I respect it.

Hear, hear! That wasn't a retcon. Also, "Your Gloranthas Will Vary." You are under absolutely no obligation to conform to either Chaosium canon or indeed your own previously published work in community content titles. It would be frankly absurd for Chaosium to attempt to hold fanwank to a higher standard than it has ever been able to maintain itself. If people don't like what you're doing with your body of work, they're under no obligation to: buy it, rate it, review it positively, etc.

Quite correct: our propaganda, like our magic, is clearly superior.

The best RPG index ever (IMO) is in 13th Age, where a Glossary is folded into the Index. So if you're looking up a key game term, you find a succinct definition of what you're looking up, as well as all the page references (with key ones bolded as per your RQG example). That's probably more work than you wanted, but I'll mention it just in case.

Not from that exhibition, but anyway: here's a Peruvian llama effigy in silver and copper, with a rather nice fox head-dress ornament behind. They were on display at the Sainsbury Centre, on the University of East Anglia campus, five or so years back.

We lie to them. "Forward, brave men of the Third Furthest Foot! We march forth on a fact-finding diplomatic mission to escort these emissaries to the Ivory Plinth!"

I'm sorry Storm Khan has been having a bad day, and suggest stepping away from the lightning rod. If his question had been, "Could a mob of Esrolians pick on someone from the Lunar Empire for looking different?," the answer would be "Sure, if you want." The more obviously "Lunar" they are (e.g. wearing red, black and silver clothes and armour of imperial design, festooning themselves with Moon rune decorations, henna, tattoos and scarifications, wearing sophisticated hair and beard styles or shaved heads, carrying curved scimitars or sickles, preferring civilised food [maize flatbreads, potatoes, lark's tongues in aspic], praying to the Moon on Wilddays, speaking in a cultured New Pelorian accent, etc.), the more likely they are to become victims. Whether you choose to include violent racist mobs in your fantasy role-playing games is of course up to you (and YGWV), but you'll note that this isn't about racism: it's about identifying someone as Lunar. But it wasn't. His question was, "Could a mob in Esrolia identify Lunar Tarshites because they look ethnically/racially different?" So that's the question a lot of us answered, and the answer is "No." Now, if by "Lunar Tarshite" he meant "colonist from the Lunar Heartlands now living in Lunar Tarsh," then yes, those immigrants (who probably insist on being called "expats") probably do look rather different to the majority native Tarshite population: see my earlier post about "Pelorian" vs. "Orlanthi" appearances. Paler skin, more likely to be blond and blue-eyed, all that jazz. But native Lunar Tarshites look pretty much the same as Tarsh Exiles and folk from North Sartar, which is why mobs don't target people for "looking like Lunar Tarshites": there are much better cues you can pick up on. Some of them are obvious ("Dressing like a Lunar"), while others are things where even someone carefully disguised could slip up (e.g. wearing a pomade from the Heartlands; accent and word choice; religious behaviour in private). "A hint of Lunar allegiance" is very different to "an easily-identified ethnicity"; Pelorian ancestry isn't Tarshite. And this thread started out by being about race and ethnicity before the OP's pivot. Which is probably why it was such a car-crash: we're talking past each other.

That's not all of it, though. The bit showing how Greg as a player uses Tostig's trove of Gloranthan lore to entertain his players while not derailing anything is <chef's kiss> perfect, and I'd urge @Jason D to find space for it in any RQG Gamemaster Guide. Below is a short excerpt from the Dwarf Lore article by Greg Stafford, published in issue #24 of Different Worlds magazine (September 1982). I have said elsewhere that the Glorantha Sourcebook reprints almost all of my favourite articles about Glorantha. I say “Almost all,” because this one is missing. What I love about it is that it shows how to use (and abuse) trivial Gloranthan knowledge in play.

Drop me an email, I’ll prompt him.