What is canon?

[Rob Darvall]

11 hours ago, jajagappa said:

My Imther also presented Orlanth as the Trickster, ... (it's clearly visible in my New Lolon Gospel material). 

Thank you. I've been racking my brain over where that idea was located. The boy came to the same conclusion (that Orlanth is trickster) for sound logical reasons (he broke the world) and I wanted more detail for him.

[Shawn Carpenter]

Canon for authors of official products is useful and beneficial. It helps keep a product on course, maintain its "voice," and preserve consistency.

Canon wielded by consumers is a narrow gate in which one old grognard can hold off hundreds of potential new adapters of a setting.

Combine canon with a deep lore, much of which is no longer in print or was never available for general sale and there's the potential to create an insular sandbox, populated only by old cats and their own cherished products.

Internal canon helps build great games. Canon wielded by consumers is a game killer.

Edited August 19, 2020 by Shawn Carpenter

[Rick Meints]

If you want to know the safest material to get that isn't going to cause you canonical conundrums, consider consuming just Chaosium RQ material and Moon Design gloranthan publications. Once you have all of that material, we can then chat about other material by other publishers. None of the Chaosium or Moon Design material is hard to get, especially as a PDF. I find myself looking at that material on a somewhat regular basis, and certainly far more often than the rest of the cool stuff I have on the shelves.

As always, I never intend to belittle or impugn any other RQ/Gloranthan publications. That's why I am also reluctant to talk about what is canonical. Some people get into heated disagreements about why something isn't, when they think it should be. My reply to that is to use whatever material you feel is best.

Edited August 19, 2020 by Rick Meints
more thoughts

[Lordabdul]

17 hours ago, Jeff said:

I'm perfectly happy informing people about what is canon and what is not, especially when that is tied to specific questions. 

Thanks for the offer! I hope those are reasonable questions:

Is there anything that may/might/will be changed about the Far Place from what was described in Wyrms Footnotes 15? (especially the map, and the history/culture of the local tribes)

There are a few geographical differences in the area around the Woods of the Dead between The Coming Storm and the Pegasus Plateau. They're not very important differences so I'm wondering if they are mostly artistic license and adventure-specific tweaks in terms of cartography and phrasing, or if they were deliberate adjustments to the canon?

Thanks!

Edited August 20, 2020 by lordabdul

[Jeff]

6 hours ago, lordabdul said:

Thanks for the offer! I hope those are reasonable questions:

Is there anything that may/might/will be changed about the Far Place from what was described in Wyrms Footnotes 15? (especially the map, and the history/culture of the local tribes)

There are a few geographical differences in the area around the Woods of the Dead between The Coming Storm and the Pegasus Plateau. They're not very important differences so I'm wondering if they are mostly artistic license and adventure-specific tweaks in terms of cartography and phrasing, or if they were deliberate adjustments to the canon?

Thanks!

Please create a separate thread for this.

[Austin]

23 hours ago, Jeff said:

I'm perfectly happy informing people about what is canon and what is not, especially when that is tied to specific questions. 

I know. And I do appreciate it, sincerely, when you're able to take time and share information with us. I'm aware it's not a trivial task.

My comments are equally emotional responses, as much as they are rational statements. Perhaps heavier on the sentimental side; I experience frustration when I ask a question, and someone just goes "Oh, YGMV. Easy, you don't have questions anymore, right?" That's part of why I, and people like me, want to have things written in stone.

Another complication is this expectation that because Glorantha is detailed, Glorantha is detailed. It's a setting which invokes the anal-retentive detail-hound in me. Which is something I enjoy! But I suspect I often assume more information exists than actually does, simply because of the already-large quantity which is published and unpublished alike.

[Jeff]

1 minute ago, Crel said:

I know. And I do appreciate it, sincerely, when you're able to take time and share information with us. I'm aware it's not a trivial task.

My comments are equally emotional responses, as much as they are rational statements. Perhaps heavier on the sentimental side; I experience frustration when I ask a question, and someone just goes "Oh, YGMV. Easy, you don't have questions anymore, right?" That's part of why I, and people like me, want to have things written in stone.

Another complication is this expectation that because Glorantha is detailed, Glorantha is detailed. It's a setting which invokes the anal-retentive detail-hound in me. Which is something I enjoy! But I suspect I often assume more information exists than actually does, simply because of the already-large quantity which is published and unpublished alike.

There are foundational texts for Glorantha. People don't have to use them, but it is encouraged. However, these foundational documents are just that - foundations. They shouldn't be considered straight-jackets. 

There are also texts we don't consider to be particularly relevant at all and we know are contradicted by foundational texts or will be contradicted in future texts, or that are so off that we fear reading them might cause an immediate -1D6% loss to your relevant Grok Glorantha skill or lose 1d3 points of POW.

[Austin]

21 minutes ago, Jeff said:

-1D6% loss to your relevant Grok Glorantha skill or lose 1d3 points of POW

Well, so long as it's not impacting my SAN...

[Nick Brooke]

"I want to know about the Lunar Empire."

Read the Glorantha Sourcebook: all of the original and best information is in the History of the Lunar Empire, and there's an article on the Gods of the Lunar Way that covers the Lunar pantheon just like the old Gods & Goddesses of Glorantha articles (NB: they're all in the Sourcebook, too). And the art and maps are incredible! It's $20 digital or $40 in hardcover.

"I want to know more about the Lunar Empire."

Then you should probably get the Guide to Glorantha: it details everything we know about the Lunar Empire in a comprehensive gazetteer format, but it'll set you back by $50 in digital or $170 as a two-volume hardcover slipcase set.

"That's a bit steep. But I still want to know more about the Lunar Empire."

Then pick up some older material. You could try to find a copy of the board game Dragon Pass (previously White Bear & Red Moon) on eBay: that was the first published Gloranthan source, it has a good overview of the Lunar Empire's army, magicians and heroes. Apart from that there's good stuff in the RuneQuest Classics range, like the Seven Mothers cult writeup from Cults of Prax, or the Crimson Bat and Nysalor cult writeups from Cults of Terror, and you can find reworked versions of those in some of the later HeroQuest: Glorantha books (but if you're playing RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha the RQ Classics will be more useful to you).

"That's a bit tricky, I'm not into board games, and I think converting between BRP systems is difficult. But I still want to know more about the Lunar Empire."

OK, there's a fan-published book called A Rough Guide to Glamour that's got loads of information about the capital city of the Lunar Empire: it's not official, but it's fun and playable and the authors were very familiar with the Sourcebook, the Guide and the board game, and leveraged those when they created their version. They used to write for Tales of the Reaching Moon, the premier RuneQuest & Glorantha magazine of the 1990s: some of their best stuff from the magazine is collected in the book. It's $15 digital or $30 in hardcover.

"That's not official. But I still want to know more about the Lunar Empire."

You're just going to keep digging until I say something about those old HeroQuest books, aren't you?

"... Yes."

Please don't rely on them. They aren't considered canonical. You would be better off following the Sourcebook, the Guide, the board game, the RuneQuest Classics, and good fan-created stuff. If you use the old ILH books, you'll probably make mistakes. The compilers of the Sourcebook and the Guide didn't rely on them, mostly because they didn't build on the board game, the RuneQuest Classics and the older material that went into the Sourcebook. Also, there's no easy way to convert between HeroQuest and RuneQuest, and those dozens of subcults from HeroQuest were ditched as a confusing dead-end back in the noughties, so they aren't mentioned in the Guide and won't be supported at all in Cults of Glorantha.

"But that's not what I wanted to hear!"

Sorry, man. You can still play games in deprecated versions of Glorantha if you like -- Hero Wars, HeroQuest 1st edition, Super Hero Rune Quest, Mongoose's Second Age, RuneQuest 1st edition "by the book" (with all the guilds and blade venom and other weird stuff) -- knock yourself out! It's just that you won't find them supported by Chaosium, and we don't think you should rely on them if you want to understand Glorantha.

[Nevermet]

Sometimes, I think that my education in sociological theory and my avocational reading of systematic theology is all just prep work for making sense of the corpus of Glorantha texts.

Edited August 20, 2020 by Nevermet

[Nevermet]

I'm getting a lot of laugh reacts, so to be clear: while I wrote the last post with a light tone, the skillsets for discussing Glorantha and doing an academic literature review are extremely similar.

[Eff]

3 minutes ago, Nevermet said:

I'm getting a lot of laugh reacts, so to be clear: while I wrote the last post with a light tone, the skillsets for discussing Glorantha and doing an academic literature review are extremely similar.

I mean, I'm laughing because it's very true. I've pulled out John Day more than a few times when discussing or writing about Glorantha...

[Nick Brooke]

Ancient & mediaeval historian here. I've constructed manuscript stemmas for some Gloranthan publications.

[Nevermet]

And as I've said before, Max Weber's style of ironic social theory is very useful for my ability to grok Glorantha.

(And Durkheim when I wanna be kooky)

[Eff]

4 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

Ancient & mediaeval historian here. I've constructed manuscript stemmas for some Gloranthan publications.

More than once I've contemplated extending the brief Documentary Source Hypothesis invoked in the discussion of the four Argrath's Sagas in King of Sartar to cover the entire book...

[Nevermet]

I would adore that

[Lordabdul]

8 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

we don't think you should rely on them if you want to understand Glorantha

You mean that Sedenya doesn't look like a medieval shōjo manga character?

[Nick Brooke]

1 minute ago, lordabdul said:

You mean that Sedenya doesn't look like a medieval shōjo manga character?

The art is frankly the least of those books' problems. I love Glorantha Phantasma's output, and some of the artwork reprinted in ILH-2 is exquisite.

[Virane]

Prompted by some of the comments above I think for me, the biggest issue with more recent publications is the discord between concepts/words and visual elements.

To go back to the example I raised earlier -

As far as I can remember, Sartarites were heavily influenced by Iron/Dark Age Germanic-base culture (and Celtic, depending on your take there).

This was - and is - fully demonstrated through specific use of singular terminology (things like Wyter, Wapentake, Thane) and conceptual notions (social structure/activities/processes).

And commensurately, for many years, the visual styles bounced around this basis. Not to mention the incredibly King of Dragon Pass video game!

What I struggle with here is the recent change to shift things Mediterranean in terms of visual style. It really feels like someone sat down and just said 'Well, I think it should look like this' and binned all those connections in favour of what appears to be an entirely arbitrary - and arguably inappropriate - shift in appearance.

If the language and concepts had shifted totally as well, then I could get that. It's someone burning what went before and replacing it with their own vision of a fundamentally different world. And whether or not you agreed with that vision would determine whether you stayed with the property or bid it farewell.

But when, as far as I can tell, most of these same connections of terminology and concept remain in place but all that's changed is visual presentation, it's quite confusing.

 

[Jeff]

5 hours ago, Virane said:

Prompted by some of the comments above I think for me, the biggest issue with more recent publications is the discord between concepts/words and visual elements.

To go back to the example I raised earlier -

As far as I can remember, Sartarites were heavily influenced by Iron/Dark Age Germanic-base culture (and Celtic, depending on your take there).

This was - and is - fully demonstrated through specific use of singular terminology (things like Wyter, Wapentake, Thane) and conceptual notions (social structure/activities/processes).

And commensurately, for many years, the visual styles bounced around this basis. Not to mention the incredibly King of Dragon Pass video game!

What I struggle with here is the recent change to shift things Mediterranean in terms of visual style. It really feels like someone sat down and just said 'Well, I think it should look like this' and binned all those connections in favour of what appears to be an entirely arbitrary - and arguably inappropriate - shift in appearance.

If the language and concepts had shifted totally as well, then I could get that. It's someone burning what went before and replacing it with their own vision of a fundamentally different world. And whether or not you agreed with that vision would determine whether you stayed with the property or bid it farewell.

But when, as far as I can tell, most of these same connections of terminology and concept remain in place but all that's changed is visual presentation, it's quite confusing.

 

The Orlanthi were originally presented as being very "Ancient World". 

[Jeff]

And who can forget this depiction of Prince Argrath from the RuneQuest Companion. Looks very German-Celt to me.
 

 

Edited August 21, 2020 by Jeff

[soltakss]

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

The Orlanthi were originally presented as being very "Ancient World". 

Yes, Orlanthi were depicted as like Vikings/Anglo-Saxons/Celts in Hero Wars and onwards. Before that they were definitely more classical.

[Jeff]

4 minutes ago, soltakss said:

Yes, Orlanthi were depicted as like Vikings/Anglo-Saxons/Celts in Hero Wars and onwards. Before that they were definitely more classical.

And for that I blame my good friend and gaming partner David Dunham.

[metcalph]

7 minutes ago, soltakss said:

Yes, Orlanthi were depicted as like Vikings/Anglo-Saxons/Celts in Hero Wars and onwards. Before that they were definitely more classical.

Cults of Terror did introduce the Thanes but I think at that time Greg cared about cultural verisimilitude as much as Orson Wells did.

 

[Jeff]

Just now, metcalph said:

Cults of Terror did introduce the Thanes but I think at that time Greg cared about cultural verisimilitude as much as Orson Wells did.

 

Yes. A lot of terminology creeped in from source material Greg was using to work out Orlanthi society. Greg had a huge amount of material about the economics of early Medieval Britain - land production, legal codes, etc. This stuff creeped into texts (although fortunately the worst of it never made it into publication). A lot of this went on to become the foundation of Pendragon, which also resulted in the settings bleeding a little bit into each other. But the Orlanthi are supposed to be the Orlanthi, not the Celts, not the ancient Germans, not someone else.