Glorantha Movie Night

[Bill the barbarian]

20 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Let's throw in some heroquest movies. The Bill & Ted movies, and A Chinese Ghost Story, are superb.

All right, HeroQuesting! Big Trouble in Little China! Kurt Russel and John Carpenter!

[Pentallion]

Primal.  Those were Balazaring crocodiles.

[Akhôrahil]

7 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

All right, HeroQuesting! Big Trouble in Little China! Kurt Russel and John Carpenter!

Speaking of, where in Glorantha can Kralorelan exile communities be found?

[metcalph]

18 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Speaking of, where in Glorantha can Kralorelan exile communities be found?

Hanfarador, Ignorance, Teleos, Haragala, Maslo, Kareeshtu and the Holy Country.  

[Joerg]

2 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Speaking of, where in Glorantha can Kralorelan exile communities be found?

Depending on where they resettled that Kralori town, in Seshnela (rather westerly, not too close to the Tanier River, though). Or it was drowned with the rest of God Learner Seshnela.

There are bound to be a few dojos in the former EWF region which may have Kralori-tainted bloodlines.

Kralori naval merchants have contacted Teshnos and Melib, the East Isles, possibly including the Hinter Isles of Vormain, Teleos, and sporadically further ports like Westel in Maslo.

The Lunar Empire had a considerable number of Kralori bureaucrats imported under Sheng Seleris, presumably with some family. A few of these may have survived the Seleric purges, and may be found in Dara Happa, Doblian and Oronin. Not in the Lunar holdouts from that period, though.

I don't think there are many in the Holy Country outside of cosmopolitan Nochet and maybe Karse. The Pelaskites won't have forgiven the loss of dozens of ships when Belintar's expeditionary fleet to Kralorela was annihilated in the Suam Chow after leaving Lur Nop. Unless some were taken as slaves in retaliation, but in that case I wouldn't talk about "exile community".

[buckwheats]

Maybe "The Fountain" would qualify as a Heroquesting movie.

[Ian Absentia]

On 5/30/2020 at 5:05 PM, Mankcam said:

Deadman (another Western, but it feels like a HeroQuest or the Spirit Plane)

Quoted for emphasis.  One of my favorite Jarmusch films -- I don't know how I missed this one.  Despite all superficial appearances, I reckon that none of this film takes place in the mortal plane -- the train ride out west is the departure into the Spirit Plane.  Aspiring Humakti take notice.

!i!

[Beoferret]

What about The Eagle? Reframe it as a Lunar officer going into Sartarite lands to recover a magical unit standard. And it comes complete with a shamanic ritual! Clash of the Titans too? Anything in the swords and sandals genre. Oh, The Beastmaster! 

[Beoferret]

And while this is off-topic, I'd strongly recommend the Prince of Sartar webcomic to your players, especially chapters 1, 5&6 - at least at first (I think they're probably the most accessible for anyone coming to Glorantha and Runequest from D&D.)

[olskool]

Since we're onto hero quests now, I might recommend THE NEVER ENDING STORY about a real-world kid who "hero quests" through a magic book to save the mythical world of Fantasia.    

[Bergguy]

The comic would be a good idea! Thanks for the suggestion Beoferret.

[jajagappa]

7 hours ago, Joerg said:

I don't think there are many in the Holy Country outside of cosmopolitan Nochet and maybe Karse.

There's definitely the Little Kralora neighborhood in Nochet (near other "foreign" enclaves just south of the main market.  I hear black lotus dust is popular now.

As for Karse, I think unlikely beyond a factor or two.  But ships coming from Kralorela are much more likely to go directly to Nochet.

[Joerg]

7 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

There's definitely the Little Kralora neighborhood in Nochet (near other "foreign" enclaves just south of the main market.  I hear black lotus dust is popular now.

As for Karse, I think unlikely beyond a factor or two.  But ships coming from Kralorela are much more likely to go directly to Nochet.

hhile it is true that luxury goods from the Lunar Empire may reach Kralorela via the Red-haired Etyries caravans, Karse has been a Lunar port city for the last six years, which allowed cutting out the middlemen handling transport into Lunar-controlled area. Less so after the Battle of Pennel Ford,, true.

But then, the Windstop of early 1622 must have hit the Gloranthan naval trade worse than the current Corona pandemic, as all the trade winds were dysfunctional. Deplite the bad conditions, the waters of and around the Mirrorsea Bay may have filled up with ships that had no way of returning to wherever they came from against the winds.

[GMKen]

Old school GM here who is putting together a campaign in Balazar & the Elder Wilds which will culminate in participation in a hero quest to destroy the Festering Island.  So I’ve also been looking for movies that could help new players get a feel for the stone/Bronze Age world of Glorantha.

A few that I’ve found:

Quest for Fire/Alpha double-feature.  Both are nice examples of a hero quest returning gifts to the tribe.  The addition of Windwalker would make for a great triple-feature.

10,000 B.C./Red Sonja.  Equal servings of cheese, just in different flavors.  Mmm... Warrior women...

Vikingdom/Viking Quest.  Speaking of cheese, the first has a certain Kung Fury vibe to it that makes it fun.  In the second a water wyrm can only be appeased by the blood of kings’ daughters and a young man who plays with lightning undertakes a quest to shape the future.

Pagan King/Last Warrior.  Mmm... pagan fertility rites...  and some good examples of fighting strategies like a shield wall.  The latter has more spiritual elements, and the gods make known their presence.  Both of these are very, very loosely based on historical events.

The Last King - the Lunars are after the head of the bastard infant of the dead tribal king.  Two warriors must protect the infant in its flight through the frozen lands of the icy north.

Roar - a very young Heath Ledger undertakes a heroquest to unite the tribes of Ireland against the pernicious advances of the Empire.  A fun and under-appreciated TV show.

Musa (the Warrior)/Dragon Inn.  The first will make you want to learn how to fight with a one-handed spear and features some excellent battle sequences.  Dragon Inn helped serve as inspiration for the recent RQG adventure Highwall Inn.  Make sure you bring your own chopsticks.  There have been follow-ons, like Blades of the Dragon Inn that are also fun.

Vikings/13th Warrior.  The first I’m kind of meh about, but I get why people include it.  13th Warrior is brilliant and a perfect example of a game in action.  (Okay, you need to make an athletics roll to swing across the falls.  Make a move silently to sneak through the runnel) 
 

There are more that I’m looking for, but kind of focused now on putting my campaign structure together.  The overall arc is 12 Rune Lords/Priests/Lord-Priests from mostly minor cults are collectively tasked with eliminating the wound in our world that is the Festering Island. They mostly don’t know who the others are, and the adventure will require bitter enemies to work together against what they think are their best interests to collectively fight a larger foe that threatens everyone.  Adventurers will be in the entourage supporting their efforts, a la the Cradle Run in Pavis.  They’ll start out adventuring north into the Elder Wilds around the Elf Sea, so Sea Cave, and then some Duck adventures (Pond, Tower and maybe Raven in the Roost) in the swamps and woodlands to the north.  Eventually they’ll hook up with the main story line and shift to things like thinning out the chaos presence in the surrounding regions.  So Scorpion Hall, Devil’s Gulch and my own little nasties.  Maybe some vampire hunting in the Hellpits of Nightfang near the Gork Hills.  Act 3 will of course be an epic experience of massive coruscating magics and last minute despair as a chaos monstrosity tries to force its way through the reft into reality.  Oh, and the 13th warrior is a dragonewt.  For some reason.  No one really gets that one, but it is what it is.
 

Happy gaming!

[soltakss]

5 minutes ago, GMKen said:

Roar - a very young Heath Ledger undertakes a heroquest to unite the tribes of Ireland against the pernicious advances of the Empire.  A fun and under-appreciated TV show.

I think I watched that when I worked in Ireland. It was released in 1997, so fits me being there in 1998. I remember it as being fun and had some basis in fact, due to the archaeological discoveries of the time.

[Ian Absentia]

1 hour ago, GMKen said:

10,000 B.C./Red Sonja.  Equal servings of cheese, just in different flavors.  Mmm... Warrior women...

And, you know, Red Sonja would not be out of place in the highly anachronistic 10,000 BC.

Full Disclosure:  I own a copy of this movie.  I sort of love it, sort of hate it.  Thanks to this thread, I watched it again last night (as well as my copy of Whale Rider a day earlier).  I didn't realise that it was a Roland Emerick film.  Last night I hated it.  Visually, it does some great things (hooray for axe-beaks!), and it capitalises well on some non-mainstream archaeological theories suggesting higher degrees of technological development occurring thousands of years earlier than generally supposed.  But the writing's awful, and the producers clearly felt, "Well, as long as we're allowing theoretical anachronisms, let's just throw in some schlock to make it more exciting."  Stumbling blocks to my enjoyment last night:

• Racially diverse focal tribe, but racially homogeneous peripheral tribes.
• Galloping mammoths.
• Domesticated horses capable of supporting a rider.
• Weird geography (the heroes apparently start in the tundra of ice age Central Asia, go "over the mountains," through a jungle into the veldt of southern/eastern Africa, then north into Egypt).

I'm giving it a pass on limited metallurgy.

Don't get me wrong -- I love it and I hate it.  It does have a lot of potential inspiration for a Balazaring campaign.  But, please, don't describe your mammoths as "galloping".

!i!

[Brootse]

3 hours ago, GMKen said:

Roar - a very young Heath Ledger undertakes a heroquest to unite the tribes of Ireland against the pernicious advances of the Empire.  A fun and under-appreciated TV show.

Hah, I had previously only heard about the 1981 Roar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roar_(film)

[Garwalf]

On 5/30/2020 at 7:05 PM, Mankcam said:

The Man With No Name Trilogy (ok, yep these are Westerns, but the vibe can be thrown into Glorantha in a major way)

Deadman (another Western, but it feels like a HeroQuest or the Spirit Plane)

Of these films, I think I've only seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but I like the idea of Glorantha feeling a lot like Westerns. I know that Robin Laws has discussed this on Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff. To paraphrase: RPG adventurers are like the "heroes" of a Western: They are violent and outside the norms of society, but society needs them around to protect against even *worse* threats.

Along these lines, can anybody think of good classic Westerns set at a White fort or settlement, and the concern is the conflict with threatening forces outside? Any films like that could have a good Pavis vibe.

Forgive me if I've missed it, but has anybody mentioned The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven?

[Garwalf]

On 5/29/2020 at 4:54 PM, Bergguy said:

The Moana suggestion might resonate strongly with my group because half of them are obsessed with Disney princesses. But hey! If that what it takes to steer my group into the realm of myth, so be it!

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it here (or anywhere else) before: The day I saw it, I thought Disney's Brave was a great Orlanthi myth:

You have a red-headed, high-spirited female protagonist (clearly Vinga) who makes a terrible mistake and then has to try to set things right. And what's more Orlanthi/Vingan than that?

Edited June 2, 2020 by Garwalf

[Bill the barbarian]

And when Netflix runs dry might I recommend a good Gloranthan podcast? I know of a couple.

[Manimati]

Mohenjo Daro,  an Indian movie from 2016, shows a bronze age society, one of the songs is even showing a fertility ritual/heroquest. A little cheesy but not bad at all.

[Ultor]

Monkey has already been mentioned, but Stephen Chow's Journey to the West is a nice film-length take of the beginning of that story.

Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is a reworking of Macbeth, but there's nothing wrong with that - as an examination of the consequences of kin-slaying and breaches of hospitality.

 

[Eff]

The Guy Ritchie film King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a terrible, terrible movie by most respects, but it has frequent journeys into the Otherworld and a downright hallucinogenic sequence towards the end, alongside a kind of goofy earnestness that's certainly very Gloranthan. 

Films that are aesthetically very distinct but which help carry some of the tone or thematic aspects of Heroquesting and interacting with the Otherside:

Phase IV 

Last Year at Marienbad

Beyond the Black Rainbow

Millennium Actress (This film depicts a kind of Heroquest as the characters cast themselves into the roles of characters in a variety of movies and the film shifts visually to depict their entrance into these roles.)

Paprika 

Edited June 4, 2020 by Eff
Accidentally submitted before finishing.

[Bergguy]

Once again, thanks for all of the suggestions everybody! I feel like I have an endless amount of movies to watch now. 

[Darius West]

On 5/31/2020 at 3:14 AM, AndreJarosch said:

It´s a very good ctholoid movie too!

Yeah, but you only lose 1d3 SAN, and never get any spells or mythos (other than Marvel Mythos) from it.  Don't get me wrong, I definitely felt that Howard the Duck was destroying my mind while I was watching it, but not in a King in Yellow kinda way,even though I did regret watching it. I admit I was filled with self destructive thoughts afterwards too, but that mainly amounted to wanting to bash my head against a wall to erase the memory because I couldn't unwatch it. 

Edited June 8, 2020 by Darius West