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Thoror

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Posts posted by Thoror

  1. 12 hours ago, jajagappa said:

    The RQ Classic Cults of Terror has a great running commentary along with the cults.  I don't believe that was brought over to the Cults Compendium, but its a good read and gives some context to the cults in the Dorastor setting.

    Are you talking about The Reminiscences of Paulis Longvale? That's in the Cults Compendium too.

    • Like 2
  2. 2 hours ago, Oracle said:

    I think, there is a misunderstanding. The Sartar Book (Box?) will be a guide to Sartar only. The Sartar Campaign (which is kind of an equivalent to the Boy King/Great Pendragon Campaign for Pendragon) will be a completely different product.

    At least, that's how I understand, what I have read here so far. Could well be, that I'm wrong.

    Oh, that makes sense. Thanks!

  3. 46 minutes ago, Jeff said:

    Get really excited about the Cults Book and the Sartar Book that should be out later this year (at least in PDF)

    Ugh, finally! I've waiting the first one for years; the second one didn't seem so important to me until I learned that it would cover the Later Hero Wars (that's an exciting first) and that it would replace SToK and its companion. Is it really going to be a complete guide to Sartar AND a Boy King/Great Pendragon Campaign style book to boot? How long it's going to be? (because that sounds like a reaally big book).

  4. 5 hours ago, AndreJarosch said:

    d) Get some of the Jonstown Compendium titles from Drivethru (Armies & Enemies of Dragon Pass).

    This one (and its sequel Men of the West), if you are interested in the military side of things. They are not canon, but they respect canon as much as they can and the author used a lot of sources to write them, several of which not so easy to find.

  5. 49 minutes ago, Rick Meints said:

    It was intentional, and we did it to focus on current game editions. If there's a PDF that used to be on chaosium.com that you want to buy, please search for it on DTRPG. As for them being hard to find on DTRPG, please search by title until we finish assigning some HW/HQ titles to the HeroQuest category to increase their visibility.

    Sartar Rising 3-Gathering Thunder is not on DTRPG, please consider uploading it.

    • Like 1
  6. I'm all down for republishing Dorastor as part of Runequest Classic. Also Sun County. They are important milestones in the history of Glorantha, more than interesting, and deserve the chance to be reborn for everyone who missed out.

  7. On 5/22/2021 at 7:24 PM, Thoror said:

    Oh man, I can't wait anymore. I have been waiting for years already! (surely the Gamemaster's Guide and the Sartar Campaign will be awesome too, but this, this is the one I really want. I think of it as the most important Glorantha book ever after the Guide, the Sourcebook and King of Sartar).

    That being said, if there's still some proofreading to do... I think I'm pretty good at it, so you can always send me the text; I'd do it for free (the text would be its own payment).

    (... Hey, there is no harm in trying, is there? 😉)

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  8. 31 minutes ago, Runeblogger said:

    Well perhaps the Unbreakable Sword was unbreakable only because it hadn't yet fullfilled its destiny, which was to kill Gbaji, so that's why it broke down in pieces right afterwards. The Sword was the oath that he would kill Gbaji.

    Sound about right.

    That or, if you believe in the theory that Gbaji was the real winner of the duel, it broke because its legitimate owner had died.

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  9. I'm confused, so I'm going to leave here several quotes for us to consider.

    - Arkat has always had the Unbreakable Sword: Whatever the truth, Arkat possessed a powerful weapon before he left the island [Brithos]: the weapon was called God-Cleaver, reputed to be the Unbreakable Sword. [The Guide to Glorantha, page 128] Arkat’s initiation into the cult of Humakt in 426 was hailed as a victory by the Swords (high priests) of that cult because Arkat’s weapon had always been the Unbreakable Sword, supposedly wrought by Humakt himself. [The Guide to Glorantha, page 129]

    - Arkat won the Unbreakable Sword well after the start of the Gbaji wars: Sometimes Arkat was halted [by the Golden Empire]. Then he would stop to HeroQuest, and return with some new and devastating wonder. On one of these HeroQuests he won Humakt's Unbreakable Sword. [Dorastor: Land of Doom, page 9]

    - Unbreakable, huh? Well, Arkat, I hope you kept the receipts: The Deceiver was dismembered by Arkat's great sword, which broke from the task. [The Guide to Glorantha, page 386] Numerous ancient magical treasures of the lost Feldichi race and the Bright Empire, including pieces of the Unbreakable Sword (...) lie hidden in Dorastor. [Dorastor: Land of Doom, page 4]

    So yeah, when did he win that stupid sword? Why had something so... breakable the name "Unbreakable"? Where is Arkat's Saga when a guy needs it? So many questions! Only in Glorantha, folks.

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  10. 33 minutes ago, David Scott said:

    All of these unpublished works were © Greg Stafford. When an author dies, the rights pass to their estate and heirs. For example, who own the rights to Middle Earth, Dune, etc. It's not the publishers.

    Chaosium has not said anything about not owning the rights. So, even if they don't technically own them, that doesn't seem to be a problem for them.

    That being said, I accept the explanation they've given. It's their business to run, not mine.

    • Like 1
  11. 5 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

    Because I am aware that, as the End of the Third Age approaches, Glorantha will inevitably fracture into multiple overlapping quantum alternate timelines, in which different deeds are achieved by different heroes at different dates, I take this sort of annoyance less seriously than people who have not been illuminated by this simple Cosmic Truth. It's because of Chaos encroaching. It's inevitable. Embrace it. 

    I would use internal Gloranthan logic to explain it: it's because, with the Hero Wars, the Greater Darkness comes back, and the only possible way to end such an event on a happy(-ish) note is with I Fought We Won. Of course your heroes won't meet anyone else's heroes in the process. Maybe (if both sets of heroes survive) they will meet after the end, and know that somehow they have fought together all along.

    • Like 1
  12. 2 hours ago, David Scott said:

    And everyone who has copies of any of his unpublished materials is aware of these usual additions:

    1668516752_Screenshot2021-05-27at12_24_46.png.63dabd73aa3e926dcd2146deda20a84a.png

    922096790_Screenshot2021-05-27at12_23_46.png.7aeba688188ba235ff503966095e18f6.png

     

    I get this, but at the same time I find it kind of unfair. Greg isn't around anymore to ask him a copy, no matter how trustworthy you are or how thoughtful your feedback could be. Last year RPG giant (less of a giant than Greg. but still giant) John Tynes sent me something (I'm not going to say what, which will underscore my point), and I haven't shared it with anyone. And I never would, not without his express permission, because he trusted in me, a complete stranger to him, and that kind of trust is absolutely sacred. But John Tynes is alive, and there is no Greg Stafford to trust in me, and there will never be. It's complicated.

    That said, I don't share nor approve Hijabg's comment. These are the people behind the aforementioned Gloranthan Classics, the Guide and the Sourcebook and the upcoming Cults of Glorantha we are talking about; of course they want to share Glorantha with us. But Chaosium is a business which they have to manage as best as they can, no matter how frustrating can it be to people like us without any stake in said business.

    • Like 1
  13. 3 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

    I was shocked at how few PDFs of Wyrm's Footnotes we have sold.

    I'm just speaking for myself: I would buy Arkat's Saga, but I'm not really interested in buying that. I know how important it has been in the history of Glorantha, but precisely for that reason a big part of its content has ended up elsewhere: the Runequest Companion, Wyrm's Footprints, the Guide and the Sourcebook... And personally, I prefer books to magazines.

    Moreso the Runequest Classic edition products; I don't find them very interesting because most of it was reprinted in the (very awesome) Gloranthan Classics books. But hey, those came after a pretty successful Kickstarter, so what would I know about Gloranthan money-making.

    • Like 1
  14. The Hero Wars drink from many sources: the Illiad, the Mahabharata, the Shahnameh... But there is one 16th-Century Chinese novel which, to me and without having read it, seems to be one of the closest things to the Hero Wars that exist in classical literature, and sadly I don't think I'll ever have it in my hands. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you: Investiture/Creation of the Gods (Fengshen Yanyi).

    From the Wikipedia:

    The novel is a romanticised retelling of the overthrow of King Zhòu, the last ruler of the Shang dynasty, by Ji Fa, who would establish the Zhōu dynasty in its place. The story integrates oral and written tales of many Chinese mythological figures who are involved in the struggle as well. These figures include human heroes, immortals, and various spirits (usually represented in avatar form, such as vixens and pheasants, and occasionally as inanimate objects such as a pipa).

    Bewitched by his concubine Daji, who is actually a vixen spirit disguised as a beautiful woman, King Zhou of Shang oppresses his people and persecutes those who oppose him, including those who dare to speak up to him. Ji Fa (King Wu of Zhou), assisted by his strategist Jiang Ziya, rallies an army to overthrow the tyrant and restore peace and order. Throughout the story, battles are waged between the kingdoms of Shang and Zhou, with both sides calling upon various supernatural beings – deities, immortals, demons, spirits, and humans with magical abilities – to aid them in the war. Yuanshi Tianzun ("Primeval Lord of Heaven") bestows upon Jiang Ziya the Fengshen Bang, a list that empowers him to invest the gods of Heaven. The heroes of Zhou and some of their fallen enemies from Shang are eventually endowed with heavenly ranking and essentially elevated as gods, hence the title of the novel.

    Come on, I can't be the only one who thinks of the Red Emperor of the Lunar Empire vs. King Argrath of Sartar while reading about this King Zhou of Shang vs. Ji Fa of Zhou conflict.

    Sadly, this thing is out of print and expensive as hell, but for every Gloranthaphile lucky enough to find and afford it I think it's worth of checking out.

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  15. 2 hours ago, d(sqrt(-1)) said:

    probably Forgotten Realms too (?)

    The Forgotten Realms mythology is a mess, and not in the good, deliberate Gloranthan way. The biggest examples are the Time of Troubles and the Spellplague: two ridiculously big shakeups which only happened because D&D released new editions.

    For that kind of D&D-style, comparatively-mindless fun mythology I very much prefer Pathfinder/Golarion.

  16. 45 minutes ago, g33k said:

    Tolkien really had a unitary (not messy, with multiple cultures' conflicting myth-cycles) mythology (and a very Chrstian-analogue one).  Mordor fundamentally agreed with Gondor (and with the Elves, and the Dwarves) as to the barebones "historical" facts of the events; they only disagreed as to the "meaning" (if any) and the interpretations of said events.

     

    Yeah, precisely why I said "maybe".

    I had thought about Tekumel, but regrettably I don't know it well enough.

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  17. 2 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

    Some day there might be a critical edition showing how the ideas evolved and all scholars can work with all the notes. How great!

    That would be awesome, but it doesn't seem likely. Maybe I'm wrong (I wish to be wrong), but I don't see the intelligentsia coming to consider Greg what he really was: one of the greatest creative minds of his time and the only creator (except maybe Tolkien) of constructed mythologies whose work has come close to capturing the complexity, ambiguity and overall-richness of real-world mythologies.

    But hey, there have been others Vindicated by History. Only time will tell.

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