Enter a Podcast of Wonder

[Joerg]

15 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

That's awesome! Similar to the concept of the Biturian Varosh episodes of Wind Words, but with a much more complex material to discuss   I'm surprised you were even able to fit the Composite History of Dragon Pass in one episode. I'm sure @Joerg could discuss the first page across 3 episodes  

Checking that first page (p.83 in the hardcover), only if this would amount to discussing the subsections of CHDP in detail. The first page is the "scientific source analysis" provided by the Fourth Age author Greg Stafford.

But yes, I think that I might  have gone over three episodes detailing the entirety of CHPD, expanding the Grazer and Tarsh sections with additional material from the Sourcebook and the Pavis Book. My page count on discussing King of Sartar in the digest archives might come close to the actual source.

@jrutilaDid you discuss the lack of acknowledgement of Moirades' death/ascension in 1610? Even with the leading statement that the lost fragment detailing Fazzur's side and the period of the military governors being ascribed to the same author, I find it strange that the lost Fazzur section talks about interaction with Moirades rather than Pharandros.

[lordabdul]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

@jrutilaDid you discuss the lack of acknowledgement of Moirades' death/ascension in 1610?

Maybe you should brush up on your Finnish accent, and get yourself invited on the next episode  

Edited November 5, 2020 by lordabdul

[Bill the barbarian]

A Question

If you had Rick Meints in your own private studio and could ask him anything from any part of his lengthy career in Glorantha what would it be? Send it to us and we will select questions to be read by our hosts or better yet you can send us your questions in your own voice in an audio file to the tribe@windwords.fm!

Edited November 6, 2020 by Bill the barbarian

[jrutila]

On 11/5/2020 at 10:52 PM, Joerg said:

@jrutilaDid you discuss the lack of acknowledgement of Moirades' death/ascension in 1610? Even with the leading statement that the lost fragment detailing Fazzur's side and the period of the military governors being ascribed to the same author, I find it strange that the lost Fazzur section talks about interaction with Moirades rather than Pharandros.

Well, we didn't get that deep into the history. Maybe we can address this as a footnote on our next episode as we continue tearing the King of Sartar apart.

[Bill the barbarian]

2 hours ago, jrutila said:

Well, we didn't get that deep into the history. 

...and did you have a bit of Gloranthan history that you wished to hear about from Rick’s delving into the lores of Glorantha in his decades long dive into the rabbithole. If so, post it here, jrutila or send the tribe your dulcet tones in a audio file for possible inclusion in out interview with Chaosium’s President.

Cheers

[Eff]

For Mr. Meints: 

Of the various Gloranthan projects that haven't come to fruition, which one would you most like to have seen completed or released?

[Bill the barbarian]

Thanks Eff, and now it is time to get our Finnish friend @jrutila to ask his question!

[jrutila]

On 11/14/2020 at 9:34 AM, Bill the barbarian said:

Thanks Eff, and now it is time to get our Finnish friend @jrutila to ask his question!

 Ask, and you shall receive. I sent my questions via email.

[Bill the barbarian]

Thank you kindly, Good Sir!

[jholen]

Just wanted to say, this is great stuff! Almost through episode 4, just found out about it last week.

[Bill the barbarian]

thank you kindly sir, glad you like it! Let your friends in on your new secret.

Edited November 20, 2020 by Bill the barbarian

[jrutila]

Keeping the flame up we released our 9th episode of Dayzatarin tähtien alla. It was about Orlanth mythology from King of Sartar. We spoke about the myths and discussed about them. We also went through Jalk's Book briefly. Very interesting stuff. This was also our longest episode so far: 1h 55min. Hopefully this does not become a trend...

By my calculations the next episode of Wind Words should be out already. Everything ok?

[lordabdul]

While you wait for the next Wind Words, may I point you to Neil Gibson's very nice podcast series where he interviews Jonstown Compendium authors?  The very latest one (episode 6) features Jon Hunter.

(to be clear: The RuneQuest Project used to be an actual play podcast, but Neil has made a spin-off that does interviews, which you get from the same feed)

[Pavis BOLG]

Thanks @lordabdul!

Yes the feed is slowly becoming the repository for a number of different RQ themed projects.
Exciting other things coming soon!

[Bill the barbarian]

On 12/7/2020 at 11:16 PM, jrutila said:

By my calculations the next episode of Wind Words should be out already. Everything ok?

Not perfect, thank you for the concern and while it is not unwarranted... we are slowly muddling our way to an early 2021 release of a largely recorded episode (spoilers, it should be great, depends on how badly our new editor Fs it up). We will of course have to record a news and rumours (our stuff is past best before date. But we will get to it). 

Thank you for your patience!

On the positive side, having a break from way too much work means I have had time to run a game, start a module, learn a lot of Reaper, edited a fantastic MotM and... rumour has it module...shh, don’t tell Austin I said that... and began posting here again with regularity for the first time since the podcast began. I am enjoying my leisure. The torturers will return one day and I will once again be chained to my keyboard and mic, but until then...

FREEDOM!!!

Edited December 25, 2020 by Bill the barbarian

[jrutila]

We finished our King of Sartar trilogy in Dayzatarin tähtien alla podcast by discussing about Argrath. There was lot of new stuff for me and I think I now know a little bit more about this hero. In next episodes we will pick something lighter for a change, though.

This was also our 10th episode, yay! Our first episodes have also reached the one hundred plays per episode. That is, in my opinion, quite nice taking into account our language area and the topic.

We also released a six minute bonus episode that is a small story about Argrath written by @af Granskär 20 years ago and now recorded in speech by me.

So, that is what's happening in Finnish Glorantha podcasting scene. How's the English counterpart doing?

[jrutila]

Hello again,

posting here what is happening in our Finnish Glorantha podcast "Dayzatarin tähtien alla". Even though most you don't understand our weird language I thought you like to hear what we do. These are also free ideas to use in other podcasts if you ever decide to do one.

This month we arranged a Juke Box Jury (I think that's what it is called in UK, Levyraati in Finland) of Glorantha music. So every participant brought a song that they think goes somehow with Glorantha. We also briefly discussed about how to use music with Glorantha (in game, to get into mood, as a background).

We also reviewed Red Book of Magic. Given that the podcast participants are Glorantha grognards there wasn't really new spells or information, per se. But there were new images and we applauded that. We also had brief discussion if a person living in Glorantha can name the spell they are doing ("I cast Bladesharp 4!") or is it just rules thing. There is the mention about God Learners indexing and determining the spells. But we all know what happened to God Learners.

Winner of the Juke Box Jury was CMX with their song Vainajala. It was also the only Finnish song on the list. It tells about transitioning into the underworld. Unfortunately, I don't have the forewords for the songs for you but at least the list is here:

Synaulia - Pavor
https://open.spotify.com/track/0t0TT2q7XJ65uDoRiHWcSN?si=ArBInD18Tv-bkQnZMTLNbQ
https://youtu.be/f0IpxYUi2Dk

System of a Down - Toxicity 
https://open.spotify.com/track/0snQkGI5qnAmohLE7jTsTn?si=s4QzKim2RYORA2GIRf5hEA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iywaBOMvYLI

Mercan Dede - Ab-i Lal
https://open.spotify.com/track/4YPb1lAnzH16WrjItMaD4i?si=1upHEZjjTJqLpDTphv2POQ
https://youtu.be/nhssFIoi7mY

CMX - Vainajala
https://open.spotify.com/track/1nNAnDhwkJgQNTVcQa4Aou?si=FnGBxaITS3-vaOLzgHhn6g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsYTHe5DKfY

 

[Runeblogger]

I'm looking forward to listening to another Wind Words podcast. 🙂

[Bill the barbarian]

Thanks RB, we have one ready for editing and we are planning our next but when I can not find two days in a row without pain, It is hard to edit (well harder than that, I must learn how to edit as we lost our last editor, and it fell me to take over) when concentrating causes major pain. 

Covid 19 sucks!

Edited March 8 by Bill the barbarian

[jrutila]

News from Finnish Glorantha podcasting scene. Two new episodes out since my last post. First, in episode 12, we looked into south, to Pamaltela. Quite soon we realised Pamaltela is quite big and deep in lore and we only scratched the surface.  We took a small dive into Fonrit, tough. Maybe we have to revisit some parts of Pamaltela later. One thing I personally learned from the episode was the idea, that chaos monsters in Pamaltela are individual creatures and there really isn't chaos races like broos and scorpion mens etc. Never thought of that before.

Our latest episode was about art and illustrations of Glorantha. We had special guest, illustrator Ossi Hiekkala (https://www.archipictor.com/) who is doing illustrations for Glorantha products (for example, the cover of the new RuneQuest Starter Set). Our episode base structure was an e-mail interview with @Jeff. We read the answers and then discussed about the topic. You can find our questions and Jeff's answers from below. Thank you Jeff for taking time to answer our questions. We collected a Pinterest board containing couple of pictures from artists and topics we discussed about.

We also reviewed the RuneQuest Coloring Book in the episode.

E-mail interview with Jeff Richard

Art direction has taken a huge leap under your guidance. It has not always been the number 1 priority in Gloranthan publications. Has this been a resource thing, or did you have an “awakening” about the importance of art? What have your main influences been?

Art is absolutely necessary in order to "see" the setting. IMO being able to imagine what a Sartarite warrior or a dark troll or the plains of Prax look like is as important asthe text. Unfortunately, until we Kickstarted the Guide, we really didn't have the resources to do things right. During the Issaries period (HeroQuest, Sartar, etc.) we were working on such a shoestring budget that we pretty much had to use whatever we could get. But with the Guide, and now with RuneQuest, we can really put the resources into art that the setting deserves.

In terms of influences on the use of arts in our books, I am strongly (perhaps overly) influenced by things like the Osprey books with Angus McBride, John Warry's Warfare in the Classical World, and the DK Eyewitness series. I want to see what people wear, how they live, how they die, and how they imagine the world through  their own art. Having a bunch of people stand around in heroic action poses bores me silly. In terms of classic game art, give me Lisa Free, Gene Day, Miles Teves, or Jeff Laubenstein any day of the week. I've also got a tremendous fondness for the work of Erol Otus, David Trampier, and Russ Nicolson.

I love it when fantasy artists take elements from the classics - Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, Viktor Vasnetsov, John William Waterhouse, Franz Stuck, etc. Mark Smylie recently did a cover for us (Red Book of Magic) which was inspired in part by Carl Jung's illustrations in the Liber Novus.

 

Any hints for other cultural influences for Glorantha? Any museums etc that have made a deep impression, and every Glorantha fan should see?

I'm an inveterate museum goer. The Louvre, the British Museum, Museumsinsel - I've made repeated pilgrimages to them for ideas and references. Some other fantastically Gloranthan museums are the National Museum of Archaeology in Valetta, the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete, and the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

But also be willing to run with over the top sword and sorcery ideas - loincloths, bare chests, magical crystals, glowing swords, swirling spirits, and armor that is as much about showing off as it is for being practical. This is a magical and fantastic world as well as a material one. Burning Man i as good a source of ideas as the Altesmuseum. 

 

Any pop culture references you care to share?

Musically, I associate Glorantha with Bowie's flights of wild fancy that get grounded by Lou Reed's focus on the losers and failures and Johnny Cash singing about murder and love. Add a bit of Zeppelin and Iggy Pop's rock shamanism, Kate Bush's magical imagination, the drug use of the Stones and the Doors, and the occasional cavalry charge of Beethoven, and you got what runs through my head. 

Moviewise, I don't really associate Glorantha with things like Game of Thrones or Vikings or whatever. I associate it with Westerns. Unforgiven, Deadwood, Deadman, Tombstone - go wild with it. A dangerous frontier where we can explore the consequences of violence and vengeance, we can try to impose civilization, or try to communicate with the powerful spirits of the place.

 

How much canon you get to (or have to) create when guiding the, more and more detailed, graphics? There must be questions like, for example, should they be serving wine from a barrel or an amphora. Do you find answers from existing sourcebooks?

Thanks to the Guide a lot of that is set down, and books like the forthcoming Sartar boxed set provide more information. Where I don't know, I try to refer to several different cultures that are more or less similar to that Gloranthan culture. So for the Sartarites we reference a lot of Southern European, Near Eastern, or South Asian material artefacts from the Bronze and Iron Ages. Material culture tends to be more widely spread than we like to pretend, and Sartar is a mixing point of lots of different cultures, so look for appropriate reference points and mix it up.

 

There are quite many “Where in Glorantha” posts around showing a real-world landscape that could fit in Glorantha. There have also been prominent Glorantha landscape visualizations published by artists. What aspects make the Gloranthan landscape unique when picturing it? What differs it from our world or generic fantasy?

To me, the landscape of Glorantha is inspired by the Western United States - the landscapes of the American Rockies and the Southwest, or the Sierra Nevada. That's Dragon Pass and Prax. I imagine Glorantha as people from the ancient world inhabiting Pleistocene North America, with herds of bison and antelopes, saber-toothed cats and other megafauna. Plus dinosaurs. The Mahabharata performed in Jackson Hole. With dinosaurs of course. You have fantastic high mountains, grasslands mixed with forests of pine and oak, and scrublands. Places like Devil's Tower, Mount Rainier, Yosemite Valley, the Black Hills and the Badlands, US Route 50 in Nevada - all of that inspires Glorantha. 

 

Do you have a personal favorite image you keep getting back to? What aspects of a Glorantha imaginary do you, personally, pay special attention to?

I've got bunches of favorite published pieces and even more favorite unpublished pieces! Among my absolute favorite published pieces are the Vasana pic done by Loïc Muzy, Andrey Fetisov's pic showing Vasana and Yanioth offering sacrifices to Ernalda, and Jakub Rebelka's Red Goddess. But I got SO many favorite unpublished pieces. Especially by Ossi - I think his Sartarite social classes piece might be one of my absolute favorites. There's a piece by Hazem Ameen's in the forthcoming Starter set that I often refer to - it captures the Sartarites perfectly. And the stuff Agathe Pité and Loïc are doing for the Cults book just blows my mind.

I'm sure Ossi can say that I pay special attention to skin color (the Orlanthi are olive-brown, not white), tattoos (I am coming up with a tattoo guide) and material objects.  

 

Any other remarks or pointers you want to make about Gloranthan graphics?

Let the Gloranthans be their own thing. Borrow from many different points of reference - mixing things up. Don't let any Glorathan be a one to one correspondence to a real world culture. Experiment with body shapes, skin and hair color, and wild hairstyles. And be willing to show ordinary scenes that tell stories - one of my favorite images from Ossi is a Sartarite farmer tenderly holding his child in his arms. That's Glorantha to me!

[Bill the barbarian]

Hmm, to start thank you all for subscribing and downloading and listening to Wind Words. You gals and guys rock! A big thanks to all who sent us their thoughts and feedback and of course, thanks to the beta testers. Our guests and contestants, well, you are all fantastic! All of you! And of course, thanks to Chaosium for making great games and inspiring even more things all set in the wonderful world created by Greg Stafford for us to podcast about. 

Sadly and with heavy hearts, we will be saying goodby to Wind Words. 

Again, thanks to all mentioned above and all who I have missed.

Cheers!

PS @Trifletraxor, could you leave this thread open for a week or two so folk can say anything on their minds and then put on the padlocks and call this done like dinner?

Edited June 10 by Bill the barbarian

[soltakss]

That is a shame. Are you going to keep the audio files available to download or are you going to delete them?

 

[Bill the barbarian]

I will have the podcasts if anyone wants a copy (no mylar protection and not immanently collectable, sorry) and I think the site is being repurposed and may have the files as well. Sorry, I do not have that info.

Edited June 10 by Bill the barbarian

[soltakss]

So, time to download them then

[Bill the barbarian]

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

So, time to download them then

No need to panic.

Again, I have infinite copies, and I am sure the others have them as well. I have no way of keeping them in an easily distributable format, but I can not speak for the others. Still PM me, and I will be happy to shoot you a copy. Can’t imagine this could cause any problems. 

Edited June 10 by Bill the barbarian