Nick Brooke

I ran The Duel at Dangerford for my playtesters using about five pages of GM notes, two pages of quotes I printed out from the Glorantha Sourcebook and RQG Core Rules for reference, one stat-block, and a page of epic doggerel.

The published scenario is c.32 pages / 12,280 words (c. 1,500 are Chaosium’s text, quoted with permission), including art and maps and front matter and excluding Appendices 2&3 (unrelated playtest notes etc.).

HTH.

For really solid guidance and support, I’ll just plug this course from the Storytelling Collective (disclaimer: I had a hand in customising lesson plans written for Call of Cthulhu for the RuneQuest path): Write Your First RuneQuest Adventure.

There’s a bundle of four adventures written by the most recent graduates of the course, available cheap here: RQ Adventures Bundle.

Chaosium’s submissions guidelines for RuneQuest have some good practical advice.

I think starting with a straightforward adventure is a good idea. If you do write up a sourcebook instead, make it pick-up-and-playable (e.g. with a detailed home clan / town / tribe, personalities, player-facing handouts and plenty of adventure and campaign suggestions to get a group started). But that’s just my advice, and it’s worth what you paid for it. @jajagappa Harald Smith’s Nochet: Adventurer’s Guide or @blackyinkin Simon Bray’s Furthest: Crown Jewel of Lunar Tarsh and Beer With Teeth’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Water are three great examples of highly-playable regional sourcepacks for RQG homelands.

6 hours ago, Ian A. Thomson said:

I agree with this in principle, but (as mentioned to someone else a while back) the problem is that it is already written as anti-Lunar, and this is in-built to the core of the story. So to alter it would (a) remove or undermine that huge and intrinsic frame of classic dramatic tension, and (b) take an enormous amount of time in rewriting to add in new options and balance out the removal of the anti-Lunar, and that time is the one thing I don't have 😞

If anyone seriously wants to adapt Ian's massive multi-volume campaign to include more pro-Lunar options (and I strongly suspect they won't), then their original creative works will always be welcome on the Jonstown Compendium. You are encouraged to reference any Gloranthan sources published by Chaosium in community content, and all Jonstown Compendium books are published by Chaosium, including the original Pavis & Big Rubble books and all of Ian's companion volumes. You can't quote great bleeding chunks of Ian's text, of course, unless he gives you permission: exactly the same deal applies to quoting Chaosium's own books.

And yes, this means you can set scenarios in @jajagappa Harald Smith's Nochet or @blackyinkin Simon Bray's Furthest without a moment's hesitation, you certainly don't have to roll your own version of well-described settings (although you can if you like, because -- all together now -- Your Glorantha Will Vary). Just ask the authors if you'd rather reuse some of their descriptions than write your own: you might be delighted with the answers you get. #WeAreAllUs

Please don't be confused: the second and third editions of Cthulhu Dark Ages, and the fifth edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep, are all products for 7th edition Call of Cthulhu. That's why they're on David's list of products that use the 7th edition rules. (They aren't the core rulebook, they have separate edition counts; I'm slightly startled that you didn't understand this, but maybe it was late when you wrote that.)

9 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Upvoting Moon Cat!

Katrin Dirim wrote:

“Moon Cat is the daughter of the Red Goddess and Yinkin, the Alynx God. She was conceived when Yinkin came upon the Goddess during her Otherworld journey. He found her wounded and bleeding after her defeat at the hands of Wakboth, the Devil. Taking pity on this stranger and smitten by her otherworldly beauty he approached her carefully, and she let him come close and curl up in her lap. He stayed with her for a night, licking shut her wounds and filling her with warmth. Though he himself was too restless to stay long, Yinkin left her with a gift, a child to warm her within and fend off the cold spirits of death. This child is known as the Moon Cat, and accompanied her mother throughout her quest. She kept her warm with her fur while she was cold, hunted spirit mice for her when she was hungry, and played with her to fill her with joy when sorrow threatened to take her over. Now Moon Cat roams the palaces and landscapes of the Red Moon, and is said to guide those lost on its strange and ever-changing surface to safety.

Moon Cat is a minor goddess with no cult of her own, and is usually worshipped in conjunction with other Lunar deities. She has become unexpectedly popular among the rural barbarians of the Lunar Provinces, where she is often worshipped together with her father. Her worshippers act as intermediaries between their villages and the Lunar administration, as Moon Cat is in the rare position of being part of both the Lunar and Storm Pantheons.

... sometimes you get a silly idea and just can't help spending the entire day on it.”

Upvoting Moon Cat!

I don’t think anybody has suggested it wasn’t a legit question, or that there are any non-legit answers.

If you’re asking whether a feral dog is likely to flee or otherwise be unwilling to fight or incapable of fighting immediately after you maim or sever one of its limbs, as a GM I’d most likely say “Yes.” (If it’s been trapped or cornered, though, you could have a hard time finishing it off; alternatively, because I’m not into animal-murdering sims, I might handwave a finale and get on with the interesting part of the adventure.)

But if you’re asking “Could a four-legged animal companion or embodied allied spirit still move and fight after losing a limb?,” the answer is “Yes,” and the proof is Cleo. She is awesomely capable, an inspiration to us all.

I’m not sure anyone has bothered studying what happens to a rider when their mount loses a limb. It doesn’t seem credible to me that they’d be able to do anything other than dismount, more or less ignominiously. But maybe someone who watches more Grand Nationals than I do can post a counter-argument?

One of our cats is a tripod (her foreleg was amputated after a RTA). She gets around at great speed, leaps and bounds with confidence, is very nimble, and can swat at rivals with her remaining front paw by rocking back on her haunches, kangaroo-style.

Here, have a photo of Cleopatra Catra Brooke:

Visions of Myth by Martin Helsdon and Katrin Dirim is now available in premium-quality hardcover and softcover print-on-demand editions from the Jonstown Compendium. Here's a handy link: tiny.cc/jc-visions.

And if you want a look inside, here's me showing you why you need to buy this incredibly beautiful artbook:

It's still around. Here's the Big Gold Book's product page at DriveThruRPG: print-on-demand (softcover) and digital versions are available.

(I got my funniest ever misprinted proof-print while creating the POD, due to some early-noughties legacy tech the Chaosium used back then to prepare its books for print; all cleared up since, of course, but it was hilarious at the time when the book arrived with everything printed out perfectly except for ZERO ARTWORK.)

Chaosium’s BRP family of games has used D100 since the year dot (which, for these purposes, is 1978: RuneQuest First Edition). One BRP-derived game, King Arthur Pendragon, uses a D20 instead. It came out 38 years ago, since when no other Chaosium BRP games have swapped to use D20s. (And now I feel old.)

You should use whichever dice you prefer, of course. If you plan to publish, make sure you aren’t incorporating any text you don’t have the rights to use in your ruleset. The ORC license lets you use text from the new edition of BRP (2023), and there’s an older BRP OGL that covers some bits of the Big Gold Book (2008) - see the SRD for details.

(It’s a Chaosium OGL, so don’t worry about asshole lawyers retrospectively revoking it: we aren’t Hasbro.)

Follow the link, it takes you to the right place.

The Dying Earth RPG is on Bundle of Holding again this month: I checked, and your adventure is included. 

Ransoms are routine transactions, routinely honoured. Screwing around with ransoms is a gross violation of civilised norms, one that invites retribution from your own side as much as it does from your enemies. You just escalated, and fucked up something good that lots of people depend on. Don't be surprised if spirits of reprisal start to plague your community. Take a hit to your Honour, and any Loyalty that seems relevant.

That’s correct. The retailer handles PDF distribution. Chaosium can’t help, we already did our bit by giving them access to the PDFs.

1 hour ago, ChrisWentWhere said:

Just out interest is there some reason under Sor Eels governorship they are more likely to outlawed than under Halcyon var Enkorth’s? Because the latter was too busy lining his own pockets?

I doubt that's what FDW meant, it's more that this is when Prax is still under Lunar rule. The empire's reaction wouldn't be much different under Halcyon's brief governorship, except that he'd be more likely to try to make a personal profit on the deal somehow, even at the prisoner's expense. (What am I saying? Especially at the prisoner's expense!)

2 hours ago, ChrisWentWhere said:

I wonder if they wait at Tourney Altar and the Issaries Merchant acts as an emissary…

Sounds perfect. Base themselves at a Humakti holy place, and collect the ransom there. SOMEONE will be watching the transaction closely and making sure nobody gets any silly ideas…

If your campaign is set in and around Jonstown and the Colymar lands, and you only use the characters, scenarios and setting material published in the RuneQuest Starter Set, Core Rules, Colymar Adventure book and various other "canonical" books from Chaosium, then Your Glorantha Will Still  Vary. It's inevitable! As soon as you start playing with this stuff, doing anything original and creative with it, you varied and broke with canon. So you might as well embrace it, and have fun!

So, realistically: is Chaosium about to publish its own city books describing Nochet, Furthest, Glamour, Boldhome, etc. in gazetteer-level detail?

Magic 8-ball says "Very doubtful."

Is Chaosium about to publish its own identical-only-better, somehow-canonical replacements for all the awesome scenarios from the Jonstown Compendium?

Magic 8-ball says "Don't count on it."

Do you want to have fun playing in Glorantha today, rather than waiting for the mythical "Next Year" when everything magically appears all at once and makes your game experience 100% orthodox and wholly compliant with 2025-era canon?

Magic 8-ball says "Signs point to yes."

Everything on the Jonstown Compendium is original creative non-canonical fan work, which adheres to Greg Stafford’s foundational principle that Your Glorantha Will Vary. Chaosium is in no way obliged to make its own publications conform to non-canonical fan works, and of course it can’t simply copy them. Chaosium does not review or approve JC creations prior to publication, or limit creators’ creativity in any way (other than the obvious: no plagiarism, no ‘extreme adult content,’ etc.).

Now, some JC authors and artists also work with Chaosium in various capacities, and many of them are extremely familiar with their own Gloranthas. Some authors go to great lengths to conform to the latest orthodoxies, whatever they may be, while others enjoy sticking to familiar but superseded versions, or exhuming ancient texts, or blazing entirely new trails. Your Glorantha Will Vary, and it can and should borrow widely from stuff you love. Not all of which will be in official, “canonical” Chaosium publications, unless you take a rather blinkered and un-creative approach to the setting.

Of course!

That’s because Magic World is an accessible compilation of good old stuff that’s no longer on sale. There’s no point in sending people to look at ancient RQ3 or Stormbringer publications nowadays: when the same content is available in another book, that’s what we recommend.

1 hour ago, Jason D said:

I'd love to see that work back in print in some fashion…

Your wish is my command! We brought out print-on-demand editions of BRP Gold, Magic World and Advanced Sorcery around the same time Wizards screwed the pooch by putting a gun to the OGL’s head this time last year: I’m sure it was a coincidence.