Who's the current master of the Greydog Inn?

[Jex]

Hey, so, uh, I haven't posted here in a while, but some time back I was posting quite a few questions about an adventure I was working on, set in the main village of the Marshedge clan.  This turned out to be a much bigger job than I initially expected: When I first decided to write a RuneQuest adventure, I decided to set it among the Lismelder Tribe because at the time I thought it was an area close to the main locations detailed in the core rules but that itself had not received much previous development, so there wouldn't be much I would have to research.  That turned out very much not to be the case; I discovered later that the Lismelder Tribe had been the subject of a long-running campaign by some future RuneQuest developers (centered on the Greydog clan), and had in fact received quite a lot of development in fanzines.  (I know the fanzines may not be technically canon, but given that some of the material in those fanzines was later adapted into canon and that the writers of those articles later went on to develop official RuneQuest material, I figured it would probably be best to treat them as canon unless explicitly contradicted.)  So I had to scrounge for a bunch of old fanzines and scour them for relevant material, and... well, like I said, it ended up being a lot more involved than I expected.

(So why didn't I just pick a different location?  Well, because by the time I realized how much had been developed about the Lismelder Tribe, I was far enough along with my project that I didn't want to relocate it, and besides if I did pick a different location, it was always possible that when I went to research that location I'd find it had a lot of previous development I'd have to read up on too.)

Anyway, though, I'd kind of... reluctantly set that project aside for a while; I had a lot to deal with last year (I work in the entertainment industry, so I was hit by the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes).  But I'm finally picking it back up again and hoping I can maybe finish the damn thing in the last two months—it's been about two years now since I started it; I need to finally get it done.

(Of course, now I'm a bit worried that something I write about the Lismelder or the Marshedge Tribe may be contradicted by the upcoming book on Sartar, but... eh, I guess we'll see.)

All of which is preamble to the question this post was meant to be about, namely, as it says in the title: Who's the current master of the Greydog Inn?

It's not at all important to the adventure itself, which, again, takes place in the main village of the Marshedge clan, and in which the Greydog Inn plays no part whatsoever.  But along with the adventure I was planning to release a sourcebook on the Marshedge clan that also included a broader overview of the Lismelder Tribe as a whole.  (As a matter of fact, the adventure itself has been done for a while (well, the text has; I haven't done the layout or illustrations); it's mostly this sourcebook I'm still working on.)  And in that overview of the Lismelder Tribe, the Greydog Inn is listed among significant sites in the Lismelder lands, and gets a brief three-paragraph description, and in that three-paragraph description I want to mention the name of the master of the inn.  It's a trivial detail as far as my project goes, but I want to try to get all the details right.

The Greydog Inn gets a detailed description in Tales of the Reaching Moon #20, where it says that the inn's master is Bestaf Longbrewer.  But it also says that he's "ready to retire, but has had a very difficult time choosing which of his two sons to endorse to the chief [as his replacement]"—and given that the material in TotRM is set in the year 1610, a decade and a half before the temporal setting of the current RuneQuest editions, I figured that he's probably retired by now.

So, I was wondering... does anyone know if it was ever established in the old Greydog campaign or anywhere else just which of his sons he finally chose?  If not, of course I can just make a decision myself (and if so I'm leaning toward his having settled on his second son, Hardy)... but if there was a canonical (or quasicanonical) answer I'd like to follow it.  Like I said, as much as possible I want to get all the details right.

[David Scott]

Hardy is the innkeeper. Skalfi Blackbrow is the chief as of 1624, when the former chief, Branduan Greatblade was killed at the Battle of the Barrels by Orlmarthi raiders seeking to plunder the alleged overly-full cellars of the Greydog Inn.

[Jex]

Ah, thanks very much!  That's very helpful.

And thanks also for the information about the chief, although... now I'm a bit confused; this seems to contradict a post by @Nick Brooke from a few years ago:

On 2/5/2021 at 8:11 AM, Nick Brooke said:

Canonically, I understand Branduan Greatblade becomes king of the Lismelder tribe after the Dragonrise.

We Greydogs are allowed to call him an arsehole, but nobody else gets to do that.

It seems... challenging for Branduan Greatblade to become king of the Lismelder tribe in 1625 if he was killed in 1624.  Was Nick Brooke mistaken?  Or was Branduan Greatblade brought back to life?  Or were there two Branduan Greatblades?  Or is there something I'm misunderstanding?

And if Branduan Greatblade didn't succeed Harvald the Hairy as king of the Lismelder tribe, who did?

[David Scott]

The timeline was revisited for 1625.

• Thanos was seventeenth (1602 – 1616)
• Harvald was eighteenth (1616 – 1625)
• Skalfi is nineteenth (1625 - )
   

Edited Tuesday at 08:33 AM by David Scott

[Jex]

Huh.  So Skalfi Blackblade is not only the chief of the Greydogs, but the Lismelder king after Harvald, then?  OK, thanks, that's definitely good to know; based on that earlier post, I'd had Branduan Greatblade as the current Lismelder king in my writeup, but I'll change that.  Is there any information about Skalfi Blackblade anywhere?

Also, do you happen to know if there's any canon information for the current chieftains of the other Lismelder clans?  I know who the chiefs of each clan were in 1610 according to TotRM 18, but given the time that's passed I'd suppose many of them had died or retired.  I'd kind of assumed it probably hadn't been canonically specified who the current chiefs were of each clan in 1625 and I'd made my own determinations about the current clan chiefs, but if there are canonical answers I'll alter my descriptions accordingly.

[Brian Duguid]

Perhaps worth mentioning here that Jonathan Quaife is working on a Greydog clan book for the Jonstown Compendium. He hasn't said much about it, but some of the art has been previewed on Facebook.

[Jex]

Hrm.  I did not know that.  That's something else I want to try to avoid contradicting, then... obviously as he was a gamemaster of the original Greydog campaign, I'd consider anything he wrote about the matter to be canon for all practical purposes.

Of course, again, what I'm working on is focusing on the Marshedge clan, and the Greydogs play no part in the adventure, so really the only part that might end up in conflict is the overview of the Lismelder Tribe I'm including in the Marshedge sourcebook, which is a relatively small part of the work as a whole.  I don't know; maybe I should stop worrying quite so much about potential contradictions right now, focus on getting things done, and then make any necessary changes after the fact if I discover I've gotten something wrong...