Austin

Eh, hasn't gone to print yet, so tweaks are still easy!

Be sure to leave a note on DTRPG to that effect, too. 😉

The full release of To Hunt a God is now available on the Jonstown Compendium! This 139-page publication includes: The longform cult of Hrunda, God of Bluepaw Monkeys, including rules for creating new adventurers, new Rune spells, and path to shamanhood. The macabre Temple of the Bones at which humans and animals worship Gods of Nature. A 50+ page adventure which sees the adventurers heroquest into the Old Woods—a forest near Dragon Pass inhabited by elves and talking animals—to perform an act of divine euthanasia. Extra encounters, magic items, and more! If you're a prior purchaser, the new PDF should be available in your DriveThruRPG library. Thank you, everyone, for supporting me and other creators on the Jonstown Compendium. It means the world. May you enjoy many adventures for many years!

I've got a Glorantha short story up on my website this week, "Calling on Ernalda." It's fiction trying to imagine what summoning an elemental feels like. You should check it out!

We are closing in on Part Two's release! Anticipated release date is April 14th. This is NOT a promise, because I'm currently on vacation. Remaining work is me processing proofing notes from my wonderful editors. This clip is from the art piece I've been waiting on, "Into the Underworld" by Laura Galli. I'm astounded at her work, and looking forward to sharing it with y'all on Friday. Part One is available here. As promised, Part Two is a free update to all prior purchasers. I will be uploading the expanded PDF - about 70 new pages - as an additional file to the original product on DriveThruRPG.

Hell yeah!! That's an awesome story. Thanks for sharing it. ❤️ Love these ideas. Sure would be a shame if a Huge Air Elemental went rampaging w/ Ext. 2 for a full day because no one could overcome its POW... 😈

Another update on this one, and one I'm quite happy to share! All content for "To Hunt a God Part 2" is complete!! The final count is 139 pages. I'm waiting on one art piece. In the meantime, I'll be proofreading + tweaking graphic design. Probably two passes over the whole book. Once getting page references, design tweaks, and similar corrections/additions up to date, and then a second pass for error trapping. The last content I'd been muddling away at was some NPCs I'd forgotten to write out in the process of making this damn thing. Because if you've seen any of my Rune Master MOTM issues, you know I like my side characters. 😄 I'm pretty happy with the book, but I make no promises that y'all will get anything anywhere near this elaborate again from me for a while. (Though I do feel that in saying that, I'm tempting my own hubris...) Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting this out there soon—and then some NEW-new stuff won't be far down the line! Expect to see some purty art teasers over the next few weeks.

There's a fun anecdote with this one, for how it showed up in my campaign... My players went to Nochet, and had a big iron bar they'd looted from a ruin in God Forgot en route. The intention was that they could basically trade that in for cool toys, because they'd been wanting to go magic item shopping for a while. In Nochet, I made a 100 L "gacha game," and had a bigass emerald sword hanging from the back of the stall. I knew nothing else about it, I just wanted a cool prize to persuade players to lose all their money trying to win magic items (instead of buying them from merchants, or trading their own for new ones). They each do a few rolls, and their luck is lousy so they win some random trinkets and maybe a POW storing crystal. Then the leader pulls out the big iron bar and just says "Hey, I'll trade you for taht sword." So the trickster/merchant dude is instantly like YES PLEASE trades for it and declares "no backsies!" before scurrying off with his actually-valuable loot. Not sure what to do with the sword - I'd never expected them to get it (I figured a POW×5 roll of 01 or some shit) I declare that it's haunted by an old Orlanthi ghost. No matter what the owner did, it was never "proper" enough (because ha ha, old people). And then it played loud, obnoxious bagpipe music which was distinctly audible from the sword to everyone around, not just the person touching/trying to attune it. His name was Shireg, I think.

The preview of Volume 2 is currently up on my site. No promises of a release target. I'm almost done with the first draft of a new adventure (much, much shorter than To Hunt a God), and will probably intend for Treasures 2 to be my next Jonstown project after that. But I'll probably have non-Glorantha work to get done in the interim.

LEGION on the Jonstown Compendium has several broo shamans statted out. My favorite is White Horn. Also plenty of other nastiness in there for your broo horde.

Quick update because I don't get here as often as elsewhere on social media— I think I'm done with the primary editing on To Hunt a God, Part 2. Finally managed to stuff my ego in a sock and process the adventure's edits, and now I've got I think all of the text in InDesign. (The editor did a good job, my inner writer was just whining until I got out the butcher knife.) It's 42 pages of raw text, not including sidebars, tables, and most importantly, ART! I have a good chunk of the art already, but I'm expecting to commission one or two more pieces, depending on how the graphic design goes. Mm, and then also the NPC statblocks chapter, forgot I'll need to get the new NPCs into the file too... I won't be committing to a completion date until I've got the file done, and ready to proofread. But I think most of the work ahead of me is mechanical, not creative/emotional.

And Gold! As promised, I'll put together a preview article for Volume 2. The volume's theme is "Relics from the Second Age." I've got a fair amount of bits and bobs done on that, and it'll be fun to go through my notes and start brushing off the dust. Expect that preview article to be out on Friday.

This is an absolutely fantastic deal for any of you on the fence. Four adventures for $5.99 is way better than what I'd consider the best price you can hope for. Phenomenal deal. Plus, these are all (I believe?) authors writing for Glorantha for the first time—let's show them some love. The more the merrier!

I'm super excited, because Treasures is getting damn close to its Gold medal! As it's just nine sales away, I've decided to put together a promo code for nine copies of the Print On Demand edition: http://tiny.cc/treasures-gold Here's to hoping it'll get over the edge soon! As an added incentive when it hits Gold, I'll go ahead and share my current list of items slated to go into Volume Two. 😉

I generally agree that the bigger the benefit sought, the more difficult the quest. Simon's post has plenty of good ideas for handling this situation. The only thing I'd add is that, IMO, the "main" benefit an adventurer gains from a heroquest should be in some way connected with their deeds. So for me defeating a Rune Lord of Thed wouldn't necessarily gain an adventurer Stormspeech 90% (though it might get a hefty bump to the Air Rune, to one's Battle or Broadsword skill, or some other special skill or ability related to that victory). Mastering a magical language like that seems to me like the type of boon won by seducing the queen of the Wind Children, talking a granddaddy storm ram into carrying you to the Gates of Dusk, or some other feat involving communing with the Storm powers.

Some friends of mine just released a Batman fan film, and I really enjoyed it. Send some love (or ten minutes of your time, anyway) their way, eh?

As someone who has bumbled himself into a parallel quagmire with my latest project, I'd recommend against splitting yours into two releases. It doesn't take much to throw yourself off-track, or it can take too long to realize if your scope's more than you intended. Maybe aim for a late December or a January release? I'm not much of a stats guy, but it seems to me that the month or so after Christmas does well for sales because folks have holiday cash (or a gift card) burning a hole in their pocket.

To Hunt a God, Part Two is in beta release! The update is about 30 pages. If you already bought this publication, this file should be available in your DriveThruRPG library. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/382256/To-Hunt-a-God?affiliate_id=546342 I'm still working with the editor on refining, then proofreading, the text. Art production is ongoing, but likely will not be completed until I'm further along in the final book's graphic design, so I know what additional pieces are most needed. Thank you all for your patience. This unbearably slow process hasn't been how I wanted to release this work, but it has been the reality of the past year for me. I'm looking forward to seeing the last puzzle pieces fit together into the completed book.

I ran a playtest of one of my JC adventures one-on-one, with my player running two adventurers. Combat-wise, my experience suggests you should focus on "heroic duels" rather than melee fights. Abstract bigger combats with Battle rolls. Maybe have a crew of "mooks" which tag along with the adventurer, then just assume "my mooks tangle with your mooks" while the Hero throws down with the Baddie. One idea I've had, but never tried, is basically giving the adventurer a Passion or other ability for their NPC buddies. So something like, "Orlanthi Bodyguard 60%." So anything which makes sense that an Orlanth Adventurous bodyguard would do on the Ernaldan adventurer's behalf, he has a 60% at. Something like this could help make one non-fighty character still feel that fights are THEIR win, rather than their NPCs' win. One-on-one play works well with more narrative, rules-lite stuff. Focusing on social conflict, over monster-fighting. Magical conflicts too, spirit stuff, flashy "look at me, I'm a powerful embodiment of my god" things roll well. One of the upsides to a one-on-one game is that you don't have to divide up the cool moments, so a game like that can work well with a single "I'm super amazing" adventurer. There aren't additional players to feel left out. I think a few people who I see over on the Chaosium Discord have one-on-one (or two) games going, but can't recall which community members that is. Modules... From the GM Screen Pack, I'd try re-framing the Apple Lane adventure as a duel between the adventurer and Xiobalg for the fate of the village. "Cattle Raid" should be able to play more-or-less as written (emphasizing the social side of that conflict), but I think handling the boss in the third adventure would be hard solo. I think the following adventures from The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories could be fun one-on-one: The Pegasus Plateau the Grey Crane Crimson Petals The Pairing Stones Each of those adventures has social (or social-ish) elements, or should be relatively easy to tweak for solo play. Reducing a group of baddies to two or three, teaming up with obvious NPC options, stuff like that (without getting into spoiler territory). I wouldn't try running anything from The Smoking Ruins & Other Stories. The investigative adventure in the Starter Set could be fun, but the first and third adventures seem difficult to run for one player. From the JC... I'm not sure I can really recommend any of my own material. Diana Probst's Jallupel Goodwind (which I published, and edited) could be good story-wise, but the "monster" is a bad fit for solo fights unless tweaked. The Throat of Winter should be doable with a small down-tuning, if the adventurer has combat tools. The adventures in Beer With Teeth's Dregs of Clearwine and Cups of Clearwine are flavorful, and not intensely fighty (if memory serves). They should work well, in addition to being plain good books. As I think through things, I would actually consider looking at Company of the Dragon, too. Because the focus is on playing both adventurers and a community, I actually think that campaign has some real potential for one-on-one play. It would probably involve a bit of work tweaking moments, adventures, etc. I'm sure there's other JC stuff which would play well one-on-one, but we're in this beautiful time where I can't actually remember every RQ adventure off the top of my head! So I'll call that a win for the JC, but maybe a loss for this post. 😄 Hope that gives you a few ideas and threads to go start with!

My friends and I are all under 30 (if I'm just barely under, by now). While not "kids," I do think we qualify as being on that younger end, the fresh blood. We discovered RQ through a friend's father before RQG published, but as the main GM I've been primarily playing the new edition. My experience is that the analogy "5E/Pathfinder is to Skyrim, as RQ is to Dark Souls" intrigues pretty much everyone I've asked, who is familiar with D&D. The idea of difficult-but-fair combat is generally exciting for people I know who are familiar with D20 systems. Also elements like everyone has magic. The lore and setting, in my experience, tends to be less engaging for a majority of players. The exception is when it translates to "cool stuff I can do." For example one new player I had picked up a newtling trickster with Become Heron (Become Other Shape) because transformation felt cool to him, and herons eating newts added a fun weird twist. I don't have lots of experience playing in shops, but when I have, I found that the RQG core rules does spark curiosity about the game. It's very colorful, illustrated, yadda yadda, and that grabs attention. I've never seen it on a shop wall myself, but have let players paw through my travel copy. Art budgets attract readers' eyes. This was pre-COVID, haven't played a FLGS game since. The biggest turn-off to new players I've experienced has been that the rules are complicated. Calculating crits versus specials, POWx5 (or other characteristic rolls), resistance table rolls, figuring out which spells or other character options to use when, all tends to overwhelm newer players. Some players also dislike that RQG's focus is on playing humans, coming from D20's plethora of species. However, I've never cared much for insisting on human-centric games, and the variety of species in Glorantha does engage new players. Phrases like man-eating tapirs, what if Achilles was Donald Duck, Food-caste trollkin, and talking plant people definitely prods the curiosity of D20 players.

Always happy to help. 🙂 All I ask is that if you come across any useful tips yourself, you'll share them with the rest of us!

I've played a fair amount of non-RQ adventures using RuneQuest, and I've GM'd some RQG using non-RQ adventures. Our old campaign ran through a number of classic D&D dungeons in RQ, and Glorantha. We nowadays call that system "RQ Bastard" because it's RQ3, but with ~20 years of oral houserules. The original campaign we got the rules from is still going, though our own campaign ended awhile ago. Some fun adventures we ran which stick out include Lost Shrine of Tamoachan, the Caves of Chaos (I believe?), and The Lost Island of Castanamir. I'm told the other game completed Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain. We didn't worry about trying to bend setting stuff much. Just pop and go. If something doesn't fit, well, that's weird magic stuff beyond mortal ken, ain't it? Personally, I've run some Pathfinder and D&D stuff, and also some stuff from Forbidden Lands (by Free League) within my RQG campaigns. The Spire of Quetzel for FL was a lot of fun; it has the right sort of over-the-top crazy to feel like an uncontrolled jaunt on the Hero World. Also the Mellifluous Mage, or something like that, is interesting. A bees-themed dungeon with interesting secrets and weirdness. FL has a lot of good sword and sorcery vibes, which reskins pretty OK into Glorantha. Plus, its treasure values don't require much fiddling to fit Gloranthan economy. Another adventure I enjoyed running was I believe The Spire of Iron and Crystal for Pathfinder. Not certain the name, but I think it was by Frog God Games. I reskinned the adventure as a God Learner ruin on the coasts of God Forgot. One of my rules of thumb for mechanical conversions is to take an attack bonus, and multiply it by 5 to get an RQ skill percentage. Damage values can remain similar at low D20 levels, but require more tweaking at high levels. This x5 trick works pretty OK with D&D 5E, though I've used it mostly with Pathfinder 1E. Another useful trick for playing adventures out of the book is to take any difficulty class (DC) effect, and make it either a resistance roll (POW against the DC), or an opposed roll using the DCx5 against like, Dodge or Scan or whatever. These tricks don't get you all the way, but they'll cover like 50% of "winging it" when playing an adventure written for D20 within RQ. Magic is a bit trickier. It depends on how comfortable you are with the system, if you want to ad hoc stuff. I'm pretty OK with going "Eh, 3 to 5 points of spirit magic, made up as I go along" because I know that's usually a few points of Bladesharp, Heal, or Protection. Those are your staples, IMO. Other spells might wind up on the list, but are they actually gonna get cast in a combat situation? Hard to say. Bigger magic is tough, because it's hard to have fluency with the whole RBM to sort of sideways guess at similar magic. Remember that everyone has common magic, though. And sometimes, it's more dramatic to keep an antagonist with the D&D-style magic. A fireball spell is VERY FUCKING SCARY if you're an Orlanthi fighting a weird enemy sorcerer. Area effect attacks? the horror! A rule of thumb which comes up less often is assume a Big Magic Dude has 18 MP (or maybe an additional 10-20 MP from enchantments), and that a D&D spell costs MP equal to its level. Disruption replaces basically all cantrips or magic missile or other basic damaging things. To be frank, with the speed of many RQ combats, casters with bigger magic shouldn't bother with Disruption - just bring out the big guns first. I like to take notes first, but that's because I like having a good written skeleton before GMing. Not everyone's going to need as much support as myself, and not everyone's going to have fluency with the material for this prep process to be relatively quick. Lore translations are hard, but honestly, a lot of the time we got away with just not worrying about it. Looking back, I think it's sort of a Gordian Knot. Shit's weird and strange and your problem is survival. This works well coming from adapting adventures out of the D20 publications because of the heavy use of combat, conflict, and dungeons. A lot of the time, you can place a dungeon within a broader Gloranthan story context. Feuds and rivalries are common setups, and you can adapt those to Orlanthi-style blood oaths and High Drama without too much labor. So what if dungeons don't always make "ecological sense" or some garbage - they're fun, yeah? Like, there's a reason people have been dungeon-crawling for over 40 years. The best dungeons do make sense, but don't let that deter you from using adventures which have fun ideas with middling execution. I know this is kind of long and definitely rambling, but I hope it has a few useful insights. We've had a lot of fun using RQ's system to play non-RQ adventures, and I definitely encourage other people to do the same. There's tons of cool stuff out there, and in my experience the dangerousness of RQ's combat makes playing through combat-junky D20 adventures more exciting, not less. Oh, one last note - make sure to trim down the numbers in pretty much every D20 adventure you run. Equal number of antagonists to the adventurers is a good rule of thumb. Up to x1.5 for weak mooks like trollkin. And remember that a big baddie which can soak damage in D20 games is at a pretty serious disadvantage during RQ games, because of action economy. If you have 30 hit points instead of 150, you go down quick.

There's not much media outside books or pen-and-paper, though the amount of stuff on YouTube is slowly growing. For the general aesthetic and "vibe," my go-to film is Bahubali. It's a Bollywood epic in the vein of Lord of the Rings, although it's about Love and Hate rather than Good and Evil. Great film, but long. I think one odd, but flavorful, "elevator pitch" would be "The Iliad featuring Donald Duck," especially with the recently published community content books about the noble durulz (anthropomorphic Death-worshiping ducks). (Not that you have to play ducks, but it's a good example of some of the cool weirdness available for games in Glorantha. 🙂 )

Oh, and I'm pleased to share that To Hunt a God has earned its Silver bestseller medal! 🥰 Thanks once more to everyone who has purchased it so far.