Lordabdul

Especially since I assume the GoG books will be like the Bestiary, using only a limited number of artists, or even just a single one, so that there's consistency between all the illustrations of deities and artifacts and whatever... unless they do want to give different pantheons a different flavour, I don't know... but if they go with less artists, that means less parallelization of work and therefore it could easily push the books to late 2020 or further away. But when you know how meticulous Jeff is with every illustration, that's actually good news!

There's a whole bunch of Mesoamerican ball games, including one, still played today, which sounds like some net-less volleyball, and another one that sounds like some proto-basketball where you need to put the ball through a hoop. The talk about the Shovetide Football however reminded me of the history of Lacrosse (Canada's summer sport), and how it dates back to around 1100AD Native American communities. According to the Wikipedia article (and some similar statements I found at some local Lacrosse museum):

Did you have this NPC in the party purely as a plot device to explain things in a diegetic and "biased" way whenever the players had questions? If so, how did that go, and how did you eventually remove him from the party? I really like how short and accessible most of the descriptions are -- especially the short bits about what to expect if someone ever graduates to Rune Lord of each major cult. Any reason why you downplayed the importance of Ernalda, though?

I mentioned the alternative name because that's the name Lunar characters would use. But yeah, if everybody's from Dragon Pass or Prax, there's no need to mention it. If it doesn't explain anything of the everyday life, I don't think it needs to be presented to the players anytime soon. Thanks for all the other info

Nice. Also, it looks like they're getting some interesting exclusive rewards now: Two exclusive scenarios (one in the core rulebook, one in the bestiary). Some cloth maps that are effectively zoomed/cropped version of the big Dragon Pass map we know. A bunch of index card handouts on runes, rune cults, the game system, and the combat system. There seems to be some extra Ernaldori clan material in the GM book (16 pages of material to be exact). A 64 pages spell book. A 64 pages book on the Dundealos tribe. I might get the PDFs just to check all those things out. I'm curious however about what kind of collaboration exists (or not) between Deadcrows and Chaosium? Like, are Chaosium people like Jeff going to review their new/exclusive content and provide a stamp of approval? Even maybe translate it back to English for broader release?

This reminds me of a few things I learned recently that fall in this category. Of course, the following statements might be (partially) mistaken or incomplete, in which case please correct me (although the whole point is to keep it brief so in the case of incompleteness, corrections should not add too much... I'm looking at you, Joerg ) The god Umath, son of Gata and Aether, wanted some realm of his own but the world was pretty crowded with gods already so he made some space in between his parents. That's how the surface (earth) and the sky got separated. Xentha (also called Netta by Pelorians) is the goddess that rules over the night sky -- she effectively is the night, so I assume her name is commonly used in conversations. She shares custody of the surface with Yelm, as they switch places. When Yelm was killed by Orlanth and sent to the Underworld, the light messed up the darkness races down there, like the Uz (the trolls). Kyger Litor led the Uz up to the surface and Xentha helped them out, making sure there was darkness up there while Yelm was dead. Trolls are effectively refugees. Speaking of Orlanth and Yelm, I assume the simple subject of the day/night cycle would be a very common subject of fun roleplay banter between Orlanthi and Yelm characters: Orlanthi people believe Orlanth slew Yelm to woe Ernalda, but then after seeing how it messed everything up, figured he needed to fix it and gathered his buddies to go on the Lightbringers' Quest to get Yelm back from the Underworld. After that, the Great Compromise created Time and because Yelm wasn't quite back to being 100% alive, he kept alternating between "alive", "wounded", and "dead", and that's why we have the day/night cycle. Sun-god worshipers on the other hand believe that the Rebel Gods, led by that fucker Orlanth, tried to kill Yelm and sure they did wound him but Yelm effectively did a, ahem, strategic retreat by going to the Underworld all by himself. There, he brought light, freedom, and the solar way to whoever was down there, and bid his time, regaining his forces. Then, by sheer willpower, he managed to summon and kill the Rebel Gods. They totally didn't go to the Underworld on their own quest to save him, he is the one who got them exactly where he wanted. He got them to apologize, and sent them back with a slap on the wrist. After a while he came back topside and, since then, claims both the surface and the Underworld as his realm, spending half the time upstairs and half the time downstairs, hence the day/night cycle. I'm not quite sure which cults still believes that second version though? Definitely anybody from old-school Dara-Happan descent, along with Pure Horse People? But I don't know about Yelmalio initiates? I assume Elmal initiates believe the Lightbringers Quest version?

Heh, that's one good way to go about it I actually have the Glorantha Sourcebook and the Guide to Glorantha, although I still haven't gone through the majority of their contents. For now, due to lack of time, I treat them less as books to read cover to cover, and more as reference books where, if I run into something mentioning, say, the Gbaji Wars, I go "WTF is a Gbaji?" and look it up in either book. Nice! Thanks for that. To be honest, the example of the water flowing uphill is actually not very good -- it would not ever come to my mind to mention that to my players unless I actually knew about it... so if I ever brought it up, it means I already have an explanation for it somehow. My concern is more for stuff that's in plain sight like, say, Kero Fin or the Red Moon. I don't want to play 3 scenarios before learning about it and mentioning it at the table: "oh right, by the way, there's this big red sphere hanging in the sky in the north west, it's creepy as hell" and the players go "wait a second, we could have used that as a landmark 2 sessions ago when we were lost??!!". Of course I could hand-wave it back as "oh but back then, it was the phase that meant it was facing away from you", assuming I also learned about the phases and all that, but I hope people see my point. Actually, it might be similar, as far as I understand (I'm not 100% sure about how the story goes), as that time when Greg came out and said that oh yeah of course Orlanthi people have olive skin and red hair and everybody went "oh shit, what, really?". It's one thing for it to happen because it's a new revelation from one of the authors, but another for it to happen because I didn't read that one page from one of the sourcebooks. I know I know, I'm probably putting on too much pressure on myself to prepare this thing -- I mean, I GM'ed stuff like Masks of Nyarlathotep and didn't feel nearly as much pressure to "do it right". I mean, worst case, my Glorantha varies, right? But that still bothers me That's fair for the cultural side of things, which is also daunting, but I won't sweat it too much because, sure, the PCs won't know much about other people's cultures and I'm OK telling them "I know what I said last month but hey, turns out I was wr.... errr.... turns out your characters had the wrong idea about ducks! That was to be expected, though, you only ever saw 2 in your entire life" (<grumbling> "...and I only read their background info last night..."). But it's not true for things like the Red Moon or the darkness of Sartarite skin: it's either there or it ain't.

KoS, page 107, although both S:KoH and SC have very similar maps (different framing, portrait orientation, and in colour). This to me is exactly why it feels so intimidating to start any kind of Gloranthan campaign. It's fine for a few standalone scenarios, but I'm very concerned about, effectively, Gregging myself and my players... like for instance I just learned in this thread about the whole reason Magasta's Pool exists, and why rivers flow to the oceans. It happens so often: I read some little factoid and I go "oh shit really?" and then I have to grab GtG or GS and read up several pages of material -- it's like a Wikipedia rabbithole but with cool and obscure mythology. And sure, in the case of rivers flowing to oceans, the players might start by assuming it's because of gravity and other physics, and later I can either "well actually..." or have them meet an NPC that shares that knowledge with them, and it doesn't matter too much, but I'm effectively afraid of painting myself in a corner with another fact that does matter and would be hard to retcon. I don't know what I don't know. I don't know if there are such important facts that I should make sure I know before I venture forth into my first games. Maybe there aren't and I'm just worried for nothing! Who knows?

That's a typical thing I do whenever I introduce a new game world to my players, even if it's using a system they know because it's likely used differently than they're used to. It can be a scene where they're training/sparring with other kids in the village but, usually, I do the equivalent of the cliche "kill the rats in this basement", but re-skinned differently... for instance, they're on herding duty but some low-powered pests or wild beasts (still figuring out which, suggestions welcome!) try grabbing one of the cows... basically something where it doesn't matter much if they win or lose, and something that will be followed by some narrative ellipse so that if they didn't fare too well, they can heal before going out to the real adventure (and, also, reflect on what went bad, even potentially re-adjusting their characters if they realize the party isn't well balanced). And you can still somehow integrate it to the broader narrative, like "since you kids did so well protecting the herd, you get to go on a cattle raid!". Of course that's only possible when you start a campaign -- for one-shots and convention scenarios, there are completely different tricks to use.

Really nice picture! I wonder how the helmet fits on her head with the haircut she has? Would the helmet have a hole on the top, or would it just crush her braid? Also, that's totally not how I pictured the type of armor Orlanthi warriors would wear -- this is more like what I figured Lunars would wear (especially that helmet style... is she a Lunar collaborator or something? ). Is there any good weapon/armor visual reference for the major Gloranthan factions so I can fix my mental images?

I think Jeff's point was that it should scale to what the players can realistically play, and in RQG that means it doesn't need to scale much higher than a Rune Lord king of some kind (Argrath et al). Now I've got no idea if it does scale well to that level, but at least it doesn't need to scale higher. If it was a generic system (like FATE/GURPS/etc) where you can play anything, then yes it should definitely be able to scale higher and lower but to be honest, even such generic systems don't scale that well to Godzilla/Cthulhu sizes anyway.

You can probably already augment Battle skill rolls with passions and runes and such. But yes, I started working on some house rules to make this all crunchier.

It might be not publishable but it might be shareable in case you want feedback? I'd love to take a peek at what you have! I started taking a few notes for the kind of house rules I might want there (since I'm planning an 11L campaign, which features big battles). My initial idea was to make up rules where the Battle skill gets combined with other skills (including weapon or defense skills) so that a battle is resolved in a couple to a handful rolls where players can choose what their characters did (followed orders, rushed forward, stayed back, etc.) which in turn lets them take risks (or not) and figure out how that went (which could drive reputation gains and other in-game consequences). I generally find my players are more engaged with a scene if they can at least choose between a couple options, and even better if there's more than 1 step so they can push their luck or back down. Determining how a character did in a battle with just a single fixed roll (Battle skill) or maybe 2 rolls (if you augment it) is probably going to frustrate my players... "I'll try to be part of the flanking party" "OK, roll Battle" "...but I'll stick close to Jarstak Bristle-Beard to protect him" "OK, roll Battle", "...and I'll..." "just roll Battle!".

Oh yeah good point! I wonder if, say, Lunar maps might even be turned around (90 or 180 degrees from the usual North up) because they want to align it with whatever facing the Red Moon has at the beginning of its cycle or something.

I don't think it would necessarily -- in the real world, my understanding is that perspective wasn't widely used in paintings and art until the end of the 15th century. Before that, any painting had the characteristically "flat" or, at least, "weird fucked up isometric-ish", aspect of medieval art. So it's very possible Gloranthan artists and cartographers similarly "see" naturally in perspective, but don't know (yet) how to translate that into their work. Or maybe they do -- at this point it's just world art direction, and how you want your Glorantha to feel like. Judging on the art direction of the official books, though, it looks like perspective hasn't been "invented" yet in Genertelan cultures.

You could also consider the Quickstart Rules & Adventure?

Oh yeah, good point. Yeah the style is obviously totally wrong for Glorantha, so I imagine the same kind of semi-broken perspective but with a different art direction. I'm wondering though -- checking back on a lot of Gloranthan material, I don't find many references to paper (papyrus/parchment/whatever) documents -- a lot of references are to sculptures and bas-reliefs and things carved or painted on vases and such. I suppose a lot of it is because it gives a definitive historical feel (especially for material that's "in character" and looks back at long gone eras of Glorantha), but I'm now wondering how common would be paper documents and maps compared to tablets?

I agree with @Jeff in that, from my limited experience with practicing martial arts, it's not like you train attack or defense separately -- you always do both, whether it's while doing a kata, or while sparring with someone. The difference in people being better/worse at attacking/defending probably has more to do with them choosing a more offensive or defensive stance, or otherwise choosing how to use their skill from one round to the other. If you want to get crazy (and I sometimes do want to get crazy! I own GURPS Martial Arts and I'm not afraid to use it! ) you could apply different penalties/bonuses for different situations, so that you get more strategic choice to the players, and get, indeed, different percentages for attack/defense more often than not. For instance, here are a couple of completely-made-up-on-the-spot house rules (which are, unsurprisingly, inspired by GURPS): Offensive stance: an offensive stance lets you get bonuses to attack or damage, but gives you penalties to defense because you're spending all your energy and focus on attack (useful when you're desperate, or when the enemy is temporarily incapacitated). Defensive stance: don't do anything this turn except move and defend, get hefty bonuses to defense. Might be useful for moving to a more strategic position on the battlemat or something, I don't know (this kind of rule is more useful in GURPS where you have "shock penalty" when you get hit). Feints: take a penalty to attack, and give a proportional penalty to the enemy's defense (useful when you're skilled, super useful when you're clearly better than your opponent.. it would probably decrease the "RQ combat is deadly even when fighting some random bandits" factor because it makes the "hero fights random thugs" combats shorter). Another option is to also make different skills based off the main skill, like, say, you can train more specifically for defense, or for some specific technique like disarming or beheading or leg sweep, and that's cheaper to increase (although now you need to come up with rules for improving sub-skills), but it's still based off of the "main skill" which will increase all its specialty skills when you raise it. Either way, one thing to remember is that, ideally, most characters should have a roughly equivalent number of skills to manage (as in: spend points in). If you double the number of skills that fighter-types need to spend points in at character creation, that might not be fair compared to other character types. So whatever separate attack/defense skill house rule you come up with needs to take that into account.

Yeah I also was surprised, at first, about how small distances in Glorantha are. It wasn't so much about tribes and nations being small since, as previously pointed out, a lot of Bronze Age factions were pretty small too (it bothered me a bit but not so much)... for me, the problem was more about the fact that you could have such varied ecosystems so close to each other -- like the (at best) Mediterranean environment of Sartar right across the mountains from an African desert like Prax [1]. I guess it can all be waved away (again!) with some Gloranthan magic/god/whatever explanation. And it's not totally implausible anyway (we have some desert region in the middle of British Columbia after all!). I think when it comes down to it, a game world should be gameable first anyway, so I agree with @Sir_Godspeed that it's a good tradeoff. These small distances is what prompted me to look at the curvature of Glorantha in the OP, actually. Since Glorantha turns out to be pretty small, I proved that you can get away with quite a lot of curve while still staying in the "bulgy cube" zone (i.e. "flat world" or not doesn't matter much with small distances). It would have to be much bigger before it would even look like a chunk of a sphere. [1] I think that old-school RQ gamers, especially RQ3 people, have a more "native americans" view of Praxian tribes? But it seems to me like Prax was more designed as African-like. I'm curious about what official word there is on this.

Haha I guess I'm late to the party then It would probably work OK with my campaign because I'm pretty sure none of my players know anything about Glorantha. There might be a couple new players that join the party that might know it but that's up for debate. Thanks for the links @Ali the Helering and @albinoboo! I frankly didn't think too much of doing research on various ancient forms of maps, but they kind of look cool! But I think @g33k really hits the nail on the head for me: I think "perspective" maps like this one from one of the previous links might be more common than not, as a result of using Flight (to gain elevation, but maybe not enough to get a real top-down view) or Farsee from some high place (which would indeed "flatten" the natural perspective of human vision), or animal (bird) vision. Also, nobody has weighed in much about the availability and price of such maps though. Besides Lhankor Mhy temples and the occasional random wandering scribe/cartographer for hire, I'm thinking that some information might be publicly visible on the walls of some rich noble person (who might have paid to have something cool and impressive to show their hosts), and at important locations like Sartar's Palace, next to the bas-reliefs describing important historical events like the Battle of Grizzly Peak.

But hey, if you want to discuss what other types of maps might be available, where, how, for how much, and what they would look like, I'm all for it

Sure but I specifically framed it as "hand outs for players during a HQ/RQ/whatever adventure", so by "map" I really mean the type of bird's eye view (top down or perspective) that you would typically just print directly from one of the books, like maps of Dragon Pass/Sartar/etc. And even if the "in game" map took a different form, I guess its "real world" version would still take the form of an equivalent familiar cartographic map because that's what modern humans are used to. I exclude from this discussion maps of very small areas (like, say, Apple Lane) since they're obviously not "maps" that exist in the game world (i.e. equipment the characters carry), but OOC game aids that help everybody have the same mental picture of an area.

Hey there, A few months ago I heard on the KARTAS podcast that Ken Hite's own custom hellenistic 13th Age campaign featured only "in character" maps, i.e. either the players draw their own maps based on the GM's description of their travels (or what NPCs tell them), or, if they want to see some cool hand-outs, they need to go find some cartographer who has maps to sell (or steal). I thought that this is pretty cool -- it's kind of a shame to hold off on maps, because frankly everybody loves maps, especially Gloranthan maps which are often super cool, but on the other hand, this also makes maps even more special since players have to do some work before the GM lets them see any. So of course I figured "what if did that for my upcoming RQG campaign?". But first I have some questions: 1. Did anybody do that? (even if it's for other games) Any feedback? 2. What is, even, the general availability of maps in Glorantha? I assume that you probably find maps for sale at any good Lhankor Mhy temple, but where else? How expensive would they be? How common would they be? (for instance, there are probably maps in Boldhome's palace, but what about, say, Queen Leika's residence? Or Apple Lane's thane's house?) 3. How detailed would Gloranthan maps be? How far would they cover? For instance, would Queen Leika's maps feature landmarks in other tribes' territories? Would they have a lot of information on, say, Lunar Tarsh or Esrolia? Is Prax even accurately mapped out, or would it be mostly vague maps that convey the general knowledge that "it's a couple days' ride South from Pimper's Block to the Devil's Marsh"? Etc... Thanks!

Chaosium also writes Call of Cthulhu, the game which, by my count, has one of the highest amount of scenario/campaign books in the industry. So I'm not worried about whether they understand the value of lots of adventure modules... the question is more about whether they think that's what the RQG audience wants, vs. other types of books like cults and regions and tribes, which is what I see a lot of people asking for. I myself would be happy with the 60/40 approach that most of the previous HeroQuest material had, which was that each location came with both descriptions for sandbox/custom play, and a couple or more pre-made adventures.

Yeah I do appreciate that it's merely suggested, but it's still worth checking what it means if you don't follow that suggestion, especially since playtesting might have focused on seasonal adventuring and might have therefore missed some little problems when you don't follow the suggestion -- which is why I made this thread. I also like that it does indeed encourage to look at (and play) the broad "heroic saga" of the characters as opposed to the day to day grind of the murderhobo, but, ironically enough, if you read through Vasana's Saga in RQG, it reads a lot more like what some of us in this thread are doing or planning on doing. For instance, the first several chapters of 1926 Fire Season contain, as far as I can tell, at least 3 different scenarios (or what I would myself call "scenarios") chained together with some ellipses in between for travel/resting/waiting for tribal leaders to decide something in Boldhome/etc. Not quite the "one adventure per season", but that's fine, I really enjoyed these boxed texts, they really do an excellent job setting the tone of Gloranthan gameplay.