g33k

<shrug> It's Glorantha, man! Whachagonnado? Sometimes the sirens just get ya.

If you have RQ-mechanical questions, the RQ forum will get lots of attention. If it's really a Glorantha-setting question -- independent of game-mechanics -- you might get a slightly-broader audience in the forum for Glorantha specifically.

One caution I'd offer: it's very possible to have your clan TOO hidden, TOO cut-off. Just as new PC's -- going through character-generation -- are embedded in their cultures, make sure your new Clan is embedded in the world, with allies and rivals (and yes, even enemies!) in the larger world of Glorantha, and the region where you live. It's far too easy (sometimes even automatic/default) to fall into the clannish version of the "lone wolf PC" trope.

Yeah, totally this!!! Most Orlanthi will never have even MET a Troll. Seen one at a distance, maybe, but not met them, in a talk-face-to-face manner. Delving deeper... There are exceptions... the Torkani tribe, "Dark Orlanthi," live adjacent to Troll lands, and pay tribute to the Trolls (in return for protection from nearby werewolves); many Torkani have the Darkness Rune as part of their personalities (normally rare for humans). There's another tribe of Dark Orlanthi -- the Bachad -- who are noted Troll-Fighters. Back at the newbie-player level... Show the players pictures of trolls, & trollkin. "You've seen these guys, occasionally. Never talked to them. Dark Men, they're called. Uz, they call themselves... except for the little ones, the trollkin. Enlo. They're all dangerous folk... even the pathetic little trollkin, because those ones tend to run in packs. Trolls'd just as soon eat you up -- bones an' clothes an' all -- as shake your hand. But... you can deal with them, if you deal careful-like." Then, the PC's DO have to deal with some Uz, and/or Enlo... and at your table, the Glorantha as-played / as-experienced (the REAL Glorantha -- Your Glorantha Will Vary) enlarges!

Congratumisserations; enjoy your new RPG & I feel your pain.

One kind of has to point to the "Dream Dragon" phenomenon, and the "Dragonewts Dream" event. It's possible (not afaik "canonical" ... but don't let that stop you!) that any "god of dreams" in the vicinity of Dragon Pass may be unable to reach the Middle World because of some Draconic Wierdness... Or just getting eaten...

Nah. All I meant was that there are so many "surprises" that none of our "spilling the beans" will really substantially reduce the amount of "surprise" you encounter organically, as you read and play... The world is just different. DIFFERENT. It will keep surprising you. For years and years and years, it will keep surprising you. That's OK... the real world keeps surprising us, after all! New species get discovered; new materials-science; the "Lucky 10000" effect ... etc etc etc. Remember: developed since the 1960's. Glorantha is just so deep and so broad that if you want to become "encyclopedic" ... yeah, that takes decades (or a lot of reading and a phenomenal memory). But you don't need to be encyclopedic! The classic advice to new gamers is: start small. But it's... different. Take "Chaos:" this isn't D&D's "lawful vs chaotic." Glorantha is the world, all of Creation; the underworld, the spirit-world, God-Time, it's all Glorantha, creation. Chaos comes from outside; it's a void, it's destruction, it's bubbling madness. Chaotic things keep creeping in; there are vile races of Chaotic creatures resident in Glorantha, Scorpionmen and Broos and Gorp and more; Chaos-taint is something most-often feared and hated. It's the Big Bad of the setting, for sure. But then... there's the Lunar Empire, led by the Red Moon Goddess Sedenya. They are about the most civilized and cosmopolitan empire going, VERY open and accepting of different people, different styles of being and of expressing oneself... very very modern, in many ways the most enlightened and "modern-friendly" place in Glorantha. Including that they are accepting of Chaos... Sedenya preaches "Illumination," and that Chaos also has a place within Creation... that the difference between Chaos and not-Chaos is illusory, just like the differences between "us" and "them" are illusory: We are All Us! One of the Lunars' most-fearsome weapons is the Crimson Bat, a dragon-scale Chaos beast that eats not just enemy soldiers but enemy souls. The Lunars kind of can't be the Good Guys with that in their repertoire (the bat, BTW, has in fact been killed; but it comes back from Hell...) . Jump right in! Glorantha is every bit as daunting as you allow it to be. If you lean-in on "Glorantha is daunting," you will find it a Fountain of Endless Daunt +5. If you go with "holy crap this is wild, what a blast!" you will find Glorantha just as apt to support that approach... aim for "MGF" -- More Gaming/oranthan Fun. Start small. One clan in Sartar, or one Tribe in Prax, or a cultic/religious alliance (crossing clan/tribal & even kingdom boundaries) provides a nice focus for new players. The Broken Tower (RQG freebie intro scenario) is great, and very-easy to integrate into the GM Screen Pack adventures & setting-material; the new adventure book The Smoking Ruins is also very easy to integrate. That's like... a dozen or so adventures and a small sandbox for further play/exploration.

Hmm. This is interesting (and has some merit, I think). Seems related to the Skill Tree of Ringworld RPG, but ... a bit simpler? How do you handle skill-checks and/or training? When/how does someone get to improve their "melee 35%" vs. "1H Axe 15% " for example; or improve "Communication 25%" vs "Orate 10%"?

Trolls are, by and large, big and scary and dangerous. It's easy to "not like" them! Ernalda is the chief "Earth Queen" goddess; a key motto of her people is "There is always another way." Orlanth is the "Storm" god, King of the Gods; one of HIS key mottoes is, "Violence is always an option." They're a married couple. The relationship is... tumultuous.

<looks at Glorantha> Yeah... I think "some surprises for people to discover on their own" is pretty much covered...

Yes. Heroquesting/Runequesting is a longtime feature of Glorantha. It is the main way you surpass human norms. There was a period where Chaosium had separated "Runequest" as a (tm) from "Glorantha" (I guess a (c)? but IP-law ain't my wheelhouse). Greg Stafford, in a separate company called Issaries, Inc (Issaries being the god of Trade and Communication in Glorantha) teamed up with noted game-designer Robin Laws to create a new RPG for Glorantha. It was titled Hero Wars. Later, the company (Milton Bradley) who owned the (tm) (or (c), I dunno...) to the "HeroQuest" title let the rights lapse, so Greg registered HeroQuest and brought out the new edition of HW retitled as HeroQuest. There's now HW, HQ1e, HQ2e, HQG (HeroQuest Glorantha), and "QuestWorlds" -- an SRD & OGL-ish 3e of the HQ engine).

More ancient lore: Glorantha -- as a real-world creation -- is older than RPGs! Greg Stafford's oldest notes on the setting -- that he could firmly date -- were from the mid-1960s. By the mid-1970s, he was producing a game set in Glorantha: White Bear, Red Moon (1975). This was Chaosium's 1st publication, AFAIK; it was a wargame/boardgame, NOT a RPG... it's just that "wargames" were the most "storytelling" game Greg had met thus far in his life (RPG's were only a year or two old, at this point, and most still viewed them as an interesting variation on a sort of wargame; Greg simply hadn't crossed paths with them). CUTSCENE: One of Greg's friends was at the printers to pick up an order... at the same time that a TSR guy (allegedly Gygax himself) was picking up the very-first commercial print-run of the original D&D game (so I guess this must have been in Wisconsin?). The friend, knowing Greg was into "storytelling" and "fantasy" games, bought a copy of this funky "Dungeons&Dragons" fantasy game right there in the print-shop; as far as is known, this means that Greg Stafford got the very first "sale" of D&D, ever. When he got a look at D&D, Greg began pursuing a RPG version of Glorantha post-haste. Early efforts were, unfortunately, not working out the way he wanted... let's jump now to Steve Perrin: FADE TO STEVE PERRIN: Steve was an early (founding?) member of the SCA, the Society for Creative Anachronism (medieval fight-geeks & historical re-enactors, if you haven't heard of them before), AND an early player of D&D. Informed by his SCA field-combat experience, he and other D&D players had a suite of "house rules" for D&D, which in 1976 he typed up as "The Perrin Conventions" and brought along to hand out at an early RPG-convention (DunDraCon 1). When Greg got hold of the Perrin Conventions, he asked Steve to "have a look at" the RPG rules for Glorantha, and see if he could bring it into better shape for Greg's vision of the world. Those rules -- the Perrin-led development -- went on to become Runequest. RQ2e followed hard on the heels of the original RQ rules; in some regards, it's almost like 1e was the "0.9" or "beta-test" version of the RQ2 rules; it was the 2e version of the game that saw the storied early days when RQ rivaled D&D... Borderlands, Pavis, TrollPak, BIg Rubble, Griffin Mountain... And it was RQ2 that was pared-down to a 16page "BRP", re-tooled for Call of Cthulhu and many other games, etc etc etc. (POST-CREDIT TRAILER: Amusingly, the Perrin Conventions also went back to Wisconsin, and were more or less entirely-absorbed into a later edition of D&D, making Perrin's group "House Rules" official D&D for the whole world.)

Fixed it for ya! Or... hrm... How's that?

How could you leave off Gark the Calm? Gark, who promises calmness for all eternity! All you have to do is become a zombie...

Basically: Greg Stafford had some friends in the early years, who he allowed to name bits of the setting. The iconic maps of the RQ2 era, drawn by William Church: Yeah, he got "Wilmskirk." This other friend, he loved the Carl Barks style Disney Ducks, and he wanted Duckburg. Someone pointed out that it was -just-possible- that Disney would take umbrage, so it became Duck Point... But Glorantha still needed Ducks to live there. The rest is history (or infamy, depending on who you ask).

Welcome to Chaosium. They claim to make simple RPG products, but they lie! I think they use crack cocaine in the manufacture. Their products are addictive.

But, lest I forget -- check the "BDBoM" in the Dowload sections... the Big Damn Book of Monsters. It should handle some of the conversion load, if you decide you need some D&D flavors...

Glorantha is very very different from the Tolkien-esque vibe of D&D... a few snippets: The Elves aren't like "humans, but cooler, and they love plants..." they ARE plants! Their dearest wish is to spread the primal Green Age forest over all the world. The very few, very rare, very weird ones who might be "adventurers" alongside humans are called "rootless" elves, regarded by other elves with pity, with horror, and with extreme distrust... but in the end, they are still plants, with utterly inhuman perspectives and priorities. The next-most-playable PC race (after humans) is Trolls. Trolls -- sometimes called "Dark Men" -- are actually native to the Underworld, an otherplanar almost-Hell, dark and secret. They were forced out in a cataclysm wherein the murdered Sun arrived in Hell, burning and bright beyond tolerance. Leaving behind the place they called Wonderhome, they found themselves exiled to the Hurtplace, the surface-world. Later in the mythology, they were cursed with a strange reproductive weakness: whereas the original Troll (now called the "Mistress Race") was a mighty figure on par with the great Human heroes, the Curse of Kin means they now bear Dark Trolls (near Human abilities, and good PC-candidates) and even the stunted little Trollkin. And ducks. Anthropomorphic ducks, also PC'able. Howard, Donald, Daffy, Scrooge McDuck levels of absurdity, blended a tragic Death-potent vibe, and obscure origins. Etc Etc Etc...

Hello (again) and welcome (this time, to the Tribe of Gloranthans!) I think the piece you're missing is to combine the 1st paragraph I quoted with the 2nd I quoted. Your "monsters" will, as often as not, be regular humans... just, humans from enemy tribes, enemy cults, enemy kingdoms, etc. Dungeoneering and monster-slaying isn't usually the focus of the "average" RQ game. The same variability of character-creation, motivation, & role-play applies to foes, rivals, etc. Plus some "evil" and "chaos" cults, that probably aren't the focus of most (or any) PC's. Chaosium is up-front in that they have zero intention to provide player-support for PC's of some of the nastier elements of Glorantha.

<sighs deeply> <looks at yet-unpurchased parts of the Chaosium's RQG catalog> <looks at Jonstown Compendium> <looks at Lyonesse, with Mythic Mesopotamia/Babylon/whatever, and Mythic Polynesia yet to come> It's all a vast conspiracy, isn't it? TDM... Chaosium... Y'all HATE me having a bank account, don't you?

The spirit closes in and attacks... essentially at melee range (magic and iron weapons can be used against the spirit)! Spirits can attack ANYONE this way -- not just a shaman -- and the victim don't have to discorporate to fight the spirit.

Don't forget bone as a potential building material for rigid frameworks... Possibly magic-worked bone, to make for extra flexibility at need. Draft-beasts for skiers? Oh, yes! One muskox could probably pull quite a few "assault skiers" to an awesome charge -- they each have a tether to a harness/hardpoint on the muskox, +5' length of tether for each skier. They pole for a few strokes as the charge begins (to reduce strain on that toughest part of the pull), then the slick skis just glide as the charge picks up speed... The skiers all inline behind the muskox, or fanning out on either/both sides. They could either enter a muskox-sized hole in a shield-wall, or spread out in a broad skirmish-line, as needed... and MUCH more rapidly than most such forces could redeploy, faster than the defenders could adjust/adapt... Bigger than RW muskoxen? I say go for it! Certainly the Praxian Alticamelus aka "High Llama" is bigger than anything llama-ish RW/today, and IIRC so is the Praxian Bison. I think the sentient "Baboon" is also bigger than any variety of mandrill (upon which it's based), and "gigantism" in general seems a recurrent Gloranthan theme (Men-and-a-half, anyone?) A quick Google-search found no oversize prehistoric muskox, but MGF honestly more-or-less demands this!

Cthulhu X Barsoom What could be a more uncomplicated IP ... ? (but frankly, that sounds pretty F'ing awesome!)

No, I think @Savant1974 is brandishing. The person "shaking down" the system, HE'S Sabre-rattling -- @Lloyd Dupont.

<paranoid player, who has been tricked by one too many GM traps> At least, that's what @Scotty has to say... We'll have to see if @David Scott agrees! 🤔 </paranoia>