Lordabdul

Ok thanks

Oh and in addition to that, you can find some ideas from some old Glorantha grognards who still have some website up. For instance, you can check out David Dunham's website (he's the main developer being the King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages video games set in Glorantha), where he mentions various campaigns he played in. See this page, on the top left -- it includes links to a few campaign summaries. Or Kim Englund's website, with some other ideas.

"What the characters will be doing" is really up to you, no? As I mentioned previously, although you can do the usual fantasy setting stuff (murder hobo, mercenary, trader, etc.), what I find interesting with Glorantha is having characters be part of, and take care of, a clan, and how that clan rides the waves of Dragon Pass history (some things they may get involved in, some things not). As such, the Red Cow books (The Coming Storm and Eleven Lights) (that @Paid a bod yn dwp said they're playing) are of special interest to me. If that's helpful I once read somewhere someone describe Gloranthan regions (and their associated RQ2 sourcebooks) in terms of character activity ("what the characters will be doing"). Those are probably very reductive (so I expect a barrage of long rants trying to add nuance to each item) but keep in mind the whole point is to get a very broad/general idea of what's what in Glorantha so you can see what grabs your attention and have something you can look into for more detail... so if the following list in indeed inexact, please try to keep the descriptions as short as possible. Anyway, if I remember correctly, it went a bit like this: Pavis/Big Rubble (and I suppose the newer Pavis sourcebook also applies): mega dungeon crawling Borderlands and Snakepipe Hollow: wilderness hexcrawl Griffin Mountain: mission-based (mercenary) gameplay (edit: Griffin Mountain is the wilderness crawl, Borderlands is the mission-based one, I got them mixed up) Sartar (Kindom of Heroes, Companion, or the old, slightly outdated Sartar Rising stuff): "heroic" tribal adventures where you manage your clan and make a space for yourself. To be compared with the maybe more "lower level" (as I understand it) Red Cow books where you're part of the Red Cow clan and not "in charge" of it. So as a result, Chaosium (and related publishing houses) has historically supported various types of campaign arcs and character activity, so it's up to you to pick what you think you and your players might enjoy, and pitch that to them.

Do you people pronounce "Orlanthi" in a way that it rhymes with "bee" ("OR-lan-thee") or with "sky" ("OR-lan-theye")?

Awesome thanks everyone!

I'm confused by the fact that looking at illustrations for HQ books is ok, but learning about the designer notes that were given to artists to come up with said illustrations is not. But thanks for the links

Oh and another thing to consider when limiting things to just the RQG books is that many illustrations are hard to interpret. For instance I was just reading the Skills chapter and there’s this awesome drawing on page 183 regarding Spirit Combat and Spirit Dance. The pointy slippers, strapped socks, furry robe and decorated scarf, the helmet with to spiral thingie, that’s all awesome! But I have zero idea what culture this guy is part of, so I can’t even use that as a reference for my players without searching for a bunch of keywords to match it against any of the short homeland descriptions. (since he seems to have Wind powers my guess is that he’s a Sartarite shaman?)

This, thanks. And, given that this is "new to RQG" thread, it might not even be obvious that products for an entirely different game line are actually relevant to RQG. In my case, I do actually own most of those products, but not everyone is as wealthy and/or compulsive that they can spend $600 on books and PDFs for a game that they haven't even started to play (don't tell my wife). Normal people would just buy the RQG rulebook and go with that for a few adventures before investing more into it, and I think it's important for them to have a few references to draw upon in addition to just the illustrations in that book. I know that a couple of my players would definitely do a little bit of research to find a cool-looking weapon or piece of armour, coming back to me with a "Hey is this appropriate for a Bison tribe member? Does your book have stats for it?" (they did that a couple times in other past campaigns in other settings, but luckily we were using GURPS so 99% of the time I could find whatever they were asking for in GURPS Low Tech). But the key here is that the GM still has the final word, so if I want my Glorantha to have Mickey-Mouse hats, then yes, they will Otherwise I would either correct them (maybe they ended up following the wrong cultural branch in their search) or just veto or discuss things (like, for instance, what they found interesting in this particular head piece... if they want fancy hair styles maybe they want to be from Nochet or something, for example).

I agree, but that wasn't my point. I'm not afraid of doing all of that at the table. What I'm afraid of is what happens next: whether Chaosium will, in the next years, release half a dozen books that follow the "official" ("suggested"?) timeline (scenarios where you follow Argrath's rise to power, sourcebooks that describe places and cultures in 1627+). I don't know if there's ever been any official word on whether the RQG line will be "stuck in time", or if it will have some kind of setting advancement? If it's the latter, that means potentially more work to adapt future books to my campaign, or "missing out" on cool stuff that Chaosium publishes. The reason I'm mentioning all this is because I remember seeing some convention panel video where @Jeff and @Jason Durall mention that with RQG they wanted to finally advance the setting past the Lunar occupation, which has now lasted longer in the real world than in the official timeline I'd love to see some short "designer notes" for cultures, places, etc. Something like "for most Sartar tribes we get references for <blah> with a mix of <foobar> and a little bit of <other>", so then when players are creating their characters and clans, they (or their friendly GM) have a few names and keywords to look for pictures, or even bits of history, on the web. Would that be possible? On the old Glorantha website I found some notes written during the production of the GtG where you mentioned what kind of references you gave to artists for the book's illustrations, and that helps a bit but it's just hard to find given the state of that website.

Bumping this thread into the future! I was wondering about pronunciation of a few things, and it doesn't look like they're on the pronunciation guide. Apologies if they might be for "obvious" words but, for non-native english speakers, pronunciation is never ever obvious! So how do you pronounce "wyter", "tarshite", and "sartarite"?

I had been aware of Glorantha for a decade or so but never did more than glance at it quickly. Ever since late-stage Moon Design and the new Chaosium revival, however, there's something about it -- better artwork, fancy maps, general production values, I don't know -- that made it actually stick. And the "bronze age" aspect is one of the first things that draws me to it. I don't know if there was ever a push to differentiate Orlanthi from Vikings and Lunars from Romans and all that, but I think it's useful to draw parallels to establish baselines. For me, "bronze age" evokes tribal and shamanistic societies as opposed to feudal ones, it evokes distinct aesthetics in art and architecture, wooden palisades and cruder stone walls in some places, primal forces of nature and weird local cults as opposed to territorial and well organized monotheist religions, etc. It's a whole different flavour of "fantasy" and at the point where you're still pitching the game to people, I think it's important to communicate how the world will be like in as few words as possible. The second thing that draws me to Glorantha is the other important thing: "what do you in that world?". I think Glorantha also offers something different here. Most settings give you the usual options like trading, exploring, doing mercenary work, or the good ol' murder-hobo. You can do that in any setting -- the only thing that varies is what illegal goods you carry (on your horse or your ship's cargo), who you have to kill or save, what's the name of the big evil empire/nice oppressed main faction/weird faction with the weird abilities/etc. Glorantha however offers something fairly uncommon, and that's a community to belong to. RQG doesn't do that much yet out of the box (compared to HQ and its sourcebooks) but even with only the main book (compared to other games' main book) you do get this importance of having your family and your clan and your tribe and your cult. You're fighting for something meaningful. Sure that's maybe not necessarily something players might want (I frankly don't know if my players will be interested in that aspect), and min-maxers and such won't care... so it's always possible to fallback to reassuring them that, yes, like with other settings, you can be a wandering for-hire mercenary, but with the bonus that everyone can do magic! That's nice. I think the main downside for me is that Glorantha has so much detail that some things might feel hard to change. I know that I'll get hammered with endless "YGWV", and I have to applaud the way the original authors seem to embrace variation in the fan community, but I'm very hesitant to run a game where Kally Starbrow doesn't get killed and is the one that effectively pushes the Lunars back, or one where Lunars regain their foothold over Dragon Pass by killing Argrath early in his career, or some other big change like that. Glorantha's strength is that PCs can be part of very heroic, high stakes events, but you gotta think twice about giving the players agency over the course of those events... if only because it's unclear how many future sourcebooks will actually rely on a specific timeline or not. So "you can affect the history of entire nations" may or may not be a 3rd selling point -- I'm not sure yet.

This whole post is absolute gold, but this here got me hungry and now I'm thinking someone needs to make a YouTube Glorantha cooking channel.

Nice... I'd love it if you could share some of those A5 cards you made, the political map, etc. (in a format that would let me and others improve on them if needed, too!) Yes! I've been trying to come up with something like that, not only for my players but also for myself!

I realized I also wanted some mass combat rules, and it looks like there will be something! It's probably not going to be very crunchy though, I imagine it will only be a few pages or so of various ways to augment the Battle skill. Right now I'm looking over to my copy of the (as expected) overly complicated GURPS Mass Combat book, and I'm wondering if I'll trim it down and adapt it to RQG... maybe do the same with GURPS Social Engineering too... oh well, we'll see.

Hehe I figured as much -- it's a very good pun and, in retrospect, kind of obvious, so given that we have, you know, talking ducks and such, I wondered if maybe this was coming from some fanzine or something. I might steal it!

Cool, thanks! Also, how big is your brain, that you can hold all that information from so many different sources?

Is that in the Cult of Chaos section of the forums or something? (I can't find anything otherwise) I think it's very very probable that things go the same with my group. Although seasonal adventuring looks interesting, my group has a habit of getting into more and more trouble with no end in sight, in a way that makes it hard to reach any type of "conclusion" after which we can say "....and a few months later...". We'll see how it goes. What materials and references did you both use for all this? Was it mostly home-grown or from some obscure old RQ2 book or fanzine? I can't find much about most of those places and people.

This issue was discussed in this thread: My personal recommendation is to take a deep breath and throw that paper cover away Even if you replace it with something more solid, you will always end up damaging it eventually because a wrapper gets in the way of finding things easily in there.

Almost the same story for me, although I had already been glancing at Glorantha-related product for a while, but never taken the plunge until the Guide To Glorantha was released.

Tribes and lands are defined by their Gods, so I'm not sure why it would be "inappropriate". Also, I think that in my Glorantha I would want to show the brutal and unfair aspects of life in a Bronze Age-like society. Someone's "it's not fair! she made her Goddess intervene for her!" is another's "well, tough luck, you're just weak, your so-called God is weak and where is he? Looks like he doesn't even want to talk to you, we might as well take over your lands now, you pathetic piece of Bison excrement". One of the fun aspects of playing Six Ages (the King of Dragon Pass successor, which I didn't play) is how, at first, I was trying to play it diplomatically and friendly but pretty soon you can't show any weakness and you start raiding other people. Life is tough in Glorantha. They are going to use their spells, you better use yours. I suppose the priestess wouldn't do that just because of the economics of Rune Magic points.

Thanks for the recommendation Frankly, my answer is "all of the above": I think it's important to both know where your character's Passions and clan come from, and know what the present situation is. But you're right that the history lesson should probably be kept light (not more than a minute at each step of the character's history... just the bare essentials), and that the focus should be more about the characters' present clan. On that front I'm not sure yet if I'm going with a "create your own clan" campaign with S:KoH, or if I'm going with the 11L campaign where they're part of the Red Cow clan... I still have a lot of reading to do! Yes, some chapters of the GS really read like something someone would tell you around the campfire at night, only you can't interrupt them with "but grandpa, who were those Dara Happans you mentioned?" -- instead you have to just go with the flow.

I could still change my opinion (especially after talking to my players) since my Glorantha technically doesn't exist -- I haven't started playing yet But this is all very interesting because it helps me form a clearer mental picture of what the world should feel like, and also points at any problem that might arise at the table... I can totally see my players arguing at length about this specific topic, so it's nice to be warned in advance so I can establish early what magic is and isn't in my game.

Sure, but that was already addressed previously in this thread... for example with politicians using teleprompters, having a staff of aides talking remotely into their ear or sending them talking points in real-time on their smartphone, etc. These things empower the person with a power that they themselves don't actually have. Interestingly enough, although a lot people know about these things, political debates are still organized in a way that makes it look like the politician is speaking all on their own (for instance you'd never see all the aides standing next to him/her and whispering in their ear! They're always hidden somewhere backstage). So in this sense, I could totally get behind a Charisma skill that doesn't have any obviously noticeable effects but is still somewhat accepted in (some?) Gloranthan societies. At this point, choosing between all those different options is more of a conscious choice for what kind of flavour you want your game to taste like, and what your players might prefer.

It's interesting because, for me (a newcomer to Glorantha), the Glorantha Sourcebook's first chapter also reads a bit like a laundry list of names and events, and I often have to go back and forth a few pages to cross-reference something, or grab some other book to understand where a place is or who some God or personality is (the Dragon Pass maps in GS and RQG are valid for a majority of places but not nearly enough for many other things mentioned in GS, especially when alternate or old names are used for something). The timelines in GtG or even RQ2 are also useful to keep sane when reading GS, in my experience (I wish they added some timelines in GS). That said, I don't plan to just give the character history creation rules to my players and let them figure it out -- I think those rules are indeed meant to be a starting point for the GM to talk about what happened in the last generation or so around your character's homeland, as a way to introduce the setting to the players. As such, I think I will print a couple maps, along with a simplified timeline, and go over it step by step at the table: mention what's going on at a given date, let them roll to see if that affects their family, then move on to the next map and section of the timeline, roll again, etc. We'll see how that goes (I'll gladly read about how other people handled the first game, though).

It is indeed interesting because if it was a Charisma skill, or, say, a Charisma "advantage" (for systems with advantages/disadvantages or other types of traits that don't say "Magic"), we wouldn't be having this conversation, even if the description for such a trait was along the lines of "your character has the favour of the Gods" or something. To add to @Oracle's reply, there's also the very visible (when you know how to look) manipulation techniques that exist on Earth, and that are directly relevant to Charisma. I guess it also relates a bit to what @Bill the barbarian was saying about politicians but, indeed, depending on the situation and the context, someone shaking your hand, holding your shoulder, making eye contact, or asking for small favours first (FITD technique) could be considered acceptable, frowned upon, or unacceptable. How many times have you been to an electronic store and the salesman tells you "oh I've got that same model at home myself, it's a really good choice"? That's definitely visible and (for most people) noticeable, but it still happens. Depending on how your Gloranthans view these things, in different contexts, a spell may or may not have a visible or noticeable component. I'm pretty sure the form of spells have a bit of an evolutionary component, where the specific form of some spell might have changed across the ages to "survive". Other forms of that spell might have "died" a long time ago (nobody used them anymore) because they were not as effective as other forms. In a Glorantha were noticeable Charisma spells are seen as "wow that person is really impressive, they've got the blessing of the Gods, etc. etc.", the spell might get fancy or even tacky. However, in a Glorantha where Charisma is seen as a sleazy manipulation technique, "cheating", "manipulation", whatever... it might have "evolved" into an invisible spell that requires magical detection to figure out if it's been cast. I think it's fine as long as things are consistent, and as long as players know what to expect -- again, I wouldn't like spending points on Charisma only to be told I can't use it at this important clan meeting my character is going to because NPCs will get mad at me.