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Hey y'all first post here! And first post on a forum in more than a decade 🫠

With RQG's range of books available and the breadth they cover I'm really curious how the GMs among us use them, I am only just dipping my toes in with the starter kit atm and have been recommended multiple initial books to buy.

Usually some combination of GM Screen + RQG Rules or GM Screen + Glorantha Sourcebook or simply the slipcase

But for books like the RBM, Prosopaedia, the Guide to Glorantha and the Cults books; how have you integrated them into your game running?
Or if you're a player and also have them, how do you integrate them into character creation and roleplay? :))

Really curious to see how this community, which clearly has a love for such a unique setting, uses the books!

 

Edited by harmaa.alue
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4 hours ago, harmaa.alue said:

Hey y'all first post here! And first post on a forum in more than a decade 🫠

Welcome!

 

4 hours ago, harmaa.alue said:

[...] for books like the RBM, Prosopaedia, the Guide to Glorantha and the Cults books; how have you integrated them into your game running?
Or if you're a player and also have them, how do you integrate them into character creation and roleplay? :))

Really curious to see how this community, which clearly has a love for such a unique setting, uses the books!

Good question. Sticking strictly to direct use (i.e., what's been or will be used for the gaming table):

I've used the RBM to provide inspiration for a magical item (part of a tribe's regalia), by basing it's powers on a listed spell. Haven't actually ran the adventure it's used in yet. CoRQ: The Lightbringers has provided a player of mine with a more in-depth understanding of his character's god and me with ideas for another player whose character is a shaman of Kolat. 

Personally, I got the most use out of those books in drafting an adventure I ran at Chaosium Con '24. The session was set in the Fonritian/Banamban city of Goan (on the southern continent of Pamaltela.) I made extensive use of the Guide to Glorantha to help build the setting, including background, an understanding of Goan's politics and social tensions, a sense of how the city was physically organized, what was in the markets, etc. The Prosopaedia gave me some more info on Fonritian and Doraddi gods too. I then used the Guide, the Prosopaedia, as well as CoRQ: The Lightbringers and CoRQ: The Earth Goddesses to help draft the pre-gens for the session (two Doraddi travelers, a Fonritian slave soldier, a Wolf Pirate, and a devotee of Babeester Gor.) And actually, I use the RBoM too, to help in crafting a new rune spell for one of the pre-gens.

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5 hours ago, harmaa.alue said:

Hey y'all first post here! And first post on a forum in more than a decade 🫠

With RQG's range of books available and the breadth they cover I'm really curious how the GMs among us use them, I am only just dipping my toes in with the starter kit atm and have been recommended multiple initial books to buy.

Welcome back!

As a GM, I mostly need: RQ Core book, occasionally RQ Bestiary, Weapons & Equipment, Glorantha Sourcebook, Red Book of Magic. And since I run campaigns in Imther, I need my own Edge of Empire book. 🙂 

(If I was currently running in Dragon Pass, as I have in the past, then I'd want to use: GM Screen pack, Starter Set, Glorantha Sourcebook, forthcoming Dragon Pass book, and Lightbringer and Earth Goddesses cults books. I've run Smoking Ruins, so have used that as well.)

As a Player, I mostly need: RQ Core book, Weapons & Equipment as needed, relevant Cults books.

As a JC Author, I need it all! 

Edited by jajagappa
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At the table:

  • Core rules 
  • Weapons and Equipment
  • Bestiary
  • Red Book of Magic
  • Prosopaedia

Hard copies on the table for player reference. PDFs with copious bookmarks, comments, cross-references, and hyperlinks, on the laptop for me (it gets a bit laggy though).

I also keep the Gamemaster References booklet to hand.

In Planning:

EVERTHING I own including the 1996 MIG which lets me find obscure lore in OOP sources.

  • Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass both for story elements and illos
  • Six Paths for session 0 / chargen and some plotting
  • The Book of Doom when I want stuff my players can't meta
  • The Six Seasons series for fast mechanics when combat is less important and for easy-to-use NPCs.
  • An ancient copy of Bushido and some homebrew to make the Battle roll shorten mass combat
  • Plunder, Trinkets, etc for loot bags (and sometimes scenario ideas/maguffins/plot hooks)
  • Relevant cults books
  • And obviously any source material for the scenario setting including The Guide, The Soucebook, and The AA Atlas (free IIRC).

BUT I really enjoy both having and using stuff I've been collecting since the early 80s. I am by proffession a storyteller (live theatre) and enjoy creating them as much as using them. 

Realisticly, I know folk who are running games perfectly well with the Core Rules and either the Starter Set, The Gm Screen (a very good investment as it's really another starter set with a screen thrown in), or Pegasus Plateau. And I've heard of people just playing the starter set with its pregens. 

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On 10/4/2024 at 12:44 PM, harmaa.alue said:

Really curious to see how this community, which clearly has a love for such a unique setting, uses the books!

I use a lot of the books as background material.

The Cults Books are useful when generating NPCs, as are the Homelands, although I tend to use the Quick Homelands from Holiday Dorastor: Risklands as they summarise H9omelands in a better way than in core books.

The Guide to Glorantha is very useful when describing areas that don't have any supplements, or when writing new supplements.

Argan Argar Atlas is excellent when Adventurers want to travel.

I drop things from various supplements into scenarios.

So, generally I use them as resources, to dip into now and again.

If I ran another Gloranthan Campaign it would be set in Dorastor and would run through the scenarios in the Holiday Dorastor range, with maybe some other scenarios slotted in if they fit.

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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What books? For a face-to-face situation, I'd have the core rules, the Bestiary, Weapons and Equipment, the calendar, and the Red Book of Magic available on the side, the Starter Set rules on the table for the players and GM during the game. Players are welcome to look up rules details. The GM screen available, too, although not necessarily set up like a barrier, and a digital library for more obscure information or quick lookup using the search function. I would prepare maps and suitable illustrations to set the mood, possibly in digital format rather than printouts.

I am German, and GMing for a German audience might involve the German translation of the Core Rules, but that brings a load of extra work as I need to check whether the translation of the English terms is what I expect them to be. I find it easier to stick to the English language rules so that I have only one term for each rules item to remember.

I rarely run published adventures, although I mine them for ideas and encounters. And NPC/creature stats, illustrations, maps, and possibly handouts.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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Personally, I ban the core rulebook from the table. The actual game rule are in the quickstart, which I have a printed copy of. Core reference materials are GM's screen and RBoM.  W&E, Bestiary and the cults books are helpful to have available.

The core book is best treated as something to be read offline by the GM to prime their intuition as how to smoothly handle a variety of sitations. Trying to use it as an in-game reference will do nothing but stall the game session.  I don't want to spend everyone's time searching for the 3 sentences across 2 sections that require careful parsing and creative interpretation to come up with a ruling no better than I coudl make on the fly.

Not having it available removes the temptation to do that, which I wouldn't always be able to resist...

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For my last few games, I had at the table the gm screen, the RQ dice, the Strike Rank tracker. I also had the starter set on the side which I referenced for a spell or two and to show npc pictures in Jonstown. No Core book, no Red book, no Bestiary, no anything else.

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I own them all.

The Chaosium books I use the most during sessions are the Red Book of Magic and the Bestiary. The book I use the most between sessions is the Lightbringer as three out of four PCs belong to Lightbringer Cults.

The Chaosium book I uses the least are the Argan Argar Maps, the Guide to Glorantha and the two scenario books.

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On 10/4/2024 at 4:44 AM, harmaa.alue said:

Hey y'all first post here! And first post on a forum in more than a decade 🫠

With RQG's range of books available and the breadth they cover I'm really curious how the GMs among us use them, I am only just dipping my toes in with the starter kit atm and have been recommended multiple initial books to buy.

Usually some combination of GM Screen + RQG Rules or GM Screen + Glorantha Sourcebook or simply the slipcase

But for books like the RBM, Prosopaedia, the Guide to Glorantha and the Cults books; how have you integrated them into your game running?
Or if you're a player and also have them, how do you integrate them into character creation and roleplay? :))

Really curious to see how this community, which clearly has a love for such a unique setting, uses the books!

 

Welcome to Grognardia!

Answering your questions in order...

1. RuneQuest In Glorantha core rules is absolutely vital. There are things in it that were not in the Starter Set.

2. The GM Pack is very very helpful. It gives you an established tribe to base your characters in and gives you a solid idea of clan politics in the wake of the Dragonrise.

3. Of the remaining books, my suggestions are [in order]:

a] Red Book of Magic

b] The Glorantha Bestiary

c] The Glorantha Sourcebook [the single volume one]

d] Either 'The Smoking Ruin' or 'The Pegasus Plateau'

e] Weapons and Equipment

Now you can get away with not having any of the lower books for some time. All adventures in the GM Pack and Starter Set come with full stats on encounters.

 

As for how I personally use the books:

When I'm running a game, I like to keep the reference stack to a fair minimum. I keep a copy of the RQG book, the Red Book, the Bestiary, and Weapons and Equipment on the table and my adventure and notes.  I learned long ago that too many references leads to the GM spending too much time leafing through books and not enough time on the players and adventures.

Three bits of advice...

a] When you get the RQG book, read the introduction chapter very carefully. It gives you Glorantha in synopsis and helps you establish the setting in your mind so you can transmit that to the players.

b] The combat system in d100 [RQ, Call of Cthulhu, Basic Roleplay] is deadly. The hit points your characters have are the only ones their ever going to get, and there's not a whole lot of them. Combat should not be casually entered into. Players need to power up with their spells, prepare tactics beforehand, and be willing to run if things turn sour. The weakest humanoid opponent in RQ, the 'goblin' equivalent, is a trollkin with a spear. That trollkin has a straight up 5% chance of killing a PC outright every single round. Of course the players have the same odds against him too. But there is no such thing as a 'warm up fight' in RuneQuest.

c] There are two magical resource pools in RQ: Magic Points [based on the character's POW stat] and Rune Points [the number of points of POW the character has sacrificed to learn their god's secret spells]. Magic Points are recovered with rest. USE THEM! Power up your character before a fight, use them to heal yourself, etc. In the morning they'll all be back.  Rune Points are harder to replace [you need to attend a worship ceremony to get them back], but they ARE replaceable. If using a Rune spell will safe the day, USE IT. One last thing about magic... Look at the Common Rune Spells. These are spells that all deities have in common and every character who has sacrificed for a Rune Point can use them. These spells can save your character's life [especially Cure Wounds], so familiarize yourself with them.

I hope this Wall of Text has been of some use to you. If you have any more questions, feel free to post them. Good luck and happy questing!

Edited by svensson
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Strictly speaking, RQG core rules (or the starter set rules) is all you need.

If I'm stuck at something that is going to take more than a few minutes to figure out, I will house rule it and promise my players that I will look it up after the game and report back. That goes for lore and mechanics. We are all learning RQG as we go so we find it to be a happy balance between keeping the game moving and learning rules. Though we tend to get stuck/deep dive on ONE new mechanic each session to learn too.

Now, since I own all the books released so far, I have on my table in PDF (I mostly run VTT due to scheduling):

  • Whatever scenario I'm running
  • RQG Core Rules
  • GM Screen (physical on my desk)
  • Cults of RQ: Lightbringers, Earth Deities (for referencing cult lore and rules for my player's cult. Just need that Solar book now!)
  • Red Book of Magic
  • Lands of RQ: Dragon Pass (so so so helpful for lore and brining the world alive as my player's characters move through Dragon Pass)
  • Weapons & Equipment (shopping session or whatever random things my player wants to buy. Like today, one of them wanted to buy a chicken to eat raw ...)

Again I stress that you don't need all the splat books on your desk. Its just that since I own them all, it'd be a shame not to use them =D

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@ROOTless

Two other things occur to me when teaching people about Glorantha.

1. In the RQG core rules, there are sidebars detailing 'Vasana's Story', the tale of the iconic characters in the book as it relates to the various rules in the game. Do a cut-and-paste of those sections and assemble them into a document for your players to read. It will give them a great sense of the setting.

2. Movies. There are three or four movies that will really get your players thinking 'Bronze Age with very active cults and gods'. Your mileage will vary, of course, but these are the ones I recommend:

a] Troy [2004]. This gives a great view of 'lo-tech' warfare and the Cult of the Hero.

b] Clash of the Titans [2010]. Yeah, this is an RQ adventure master class.

c] Jason and the Argonauts [1963]. OK, maybe this is a nostalgia hit, but the Ray Harryhausen Claymation movies are incredible. JatA is the best of them in my opinion.

d] The Ten Commandments. Any list that has the Greek myths should include at least a couple featuring the Egyptian myths as well. There are several movies centered on Pharaonic Egypt. The Ten Commandments is the most familiar, but The Egyptian is also good.

Something to remember about all these films is that they were written and produced by Christian outsiders... they do not depict the Greek or Egyptian civilizations as the native saw them. That said, they do fit the tropes you're trying to teach for Glorantha.

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I'm currently running two long term RQ campaigns (and planning a third even though I'll never have time to start it) and here's roughly what books I use and how (all physical copies):

Rulebook, Bestiary, Gamemaster Screen Pack: The basics. Could not run games without these and all three are always open and ready to use behind the GM screen.

Starter Set: Absolutely amazing set but my campaigns have moved so much beyond the scope of the set that I use it mostly just as a rough guide to Jonstown. But in the beginning this was an amazing set to get back to RQ after many years of break.

RBoM, Weapons & Equipment: As a GM I rarely find use for these, but my players use both actively to look up spell descriptions or stuff to buy for their character etc. W&E is also a good read for GM at least once.

Cults books, Sourcebook: I mostly just keep these home as reference material when cooking up new stuff for the players, but all are amazing reads and really help you get ino the setting. Really looking forward to the new Dragon Pass book also which I will be buying hopefully later today.

 

Beyond the official material I use the Six Seasons In Sartar trilogy and the Nochet, Queen of Cities a lot also since i'm running both, the six seasons and a nochet based campaign right now. Edge of Empire has also been very valuable just because of all the inspiration and the immaculate vibes. Recently i also dug up my old Trollpack after my nochet campaign ended up taking a small detour to Shadow Plateau.

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10 hours ago, Topi.242 said:

Beyond the official material I use the Six Seasons In Sartar trilogy and the Nochet, Queen of Cities a lot also since i'm running both, the six seasons and a nochet based campaign right now. Edge of Empire has also been very valuable just because of all the inspiration and the immaculate vibes.

Great to hear that you're enjoying/using both the Nochet and Edge of Empire works! 🙂 

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I'm gearing up for a non-Runequest Gloranthan game, and the cult books have been invaluable in selling players on the vibes and character possibilities of the setting. I knew that I was going to have to run Glorantha when the GM of our current game paused in flipping through Earth Goddesses to stare at the full-pager of Babeester Gor herself, and then turned to me and asked me to tell her more about the bloody-handed goddess of vengeance.

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10 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Great to hear that you're enjoying/using both the Nochet and Edge of Empire works! 🙂 

The Nochet book has given me so many ideas! Seriously, can we move some focus from that boring piece of badlands that's called the Dragon Pass, and get some more information on Esrolia, please?!

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Hopefully there will be Kethaela book similar to the new Dragon Pass book soon (or at least before I finish my City of queens campaign). And yes, the Nochet book is absolutely brilliant, not only as a gaming aid but also as a good read. 

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5 hours ago, ROOTless said:

Seriously, can we move some focus from that boring piece of badlands that's called the Dragon Pass, and get some more information on Esrolia, please?!

I'm sure that is a goal, but suspect it falls in the queue after Pavis/Big Rubble and Prax. 

In the meantime, I've got a couple Nochet-based projects in the works. 🙂 

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1 hour ago, ROOTless said:

I was being fairly serious. I find the Holy Country (and the Lunar Empire, as well as their predecessor) so much more interesting than Sartar ever was.

And the Nochet book is very interesting, full of ideas.

I'm fairly certain looking at the list of future projects in the pipeline or discussed, that the Holy Country is eventually in plan and that there is definitely interest in it from the community. But it's not as far along in the pipeline as other projects.

There's a lot of interesting details for Esrolia though. Martin Helsdon's Ships and Shores work has a lot of useful background, in-world stories, and encounters around the Holy Country, and he's got another work in progress for the city of Rhigos. As I noted, I've got more coming for Nochet, and maybe we'll see others contributing there to help flesh it out more.

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As a GM, the core rules, though I actually use the booklets from the GMs screen set for most rules questions. I use the Red Book of Magic a lot, but it's mostly a convenience if you know which cult/book has the spell (and I don't find having the spells for cults that have not been published yet is useful (though I have a bunch of old RQ3 material, so sometimes those spells are useful to me)). The Bestiary, of course, is needed a lot when GMing. 

The Cults books are the books that will most enhance your game IMO. They have a wealth of extra spells and details about the cults, background that enriches characterisation and suggests scenarios, cultural detail, etc. And they do double duty as  both character facing and GM facing books. Lightbringers first, the Earth, then Lunars probably the right order. But as more books come out, all of them are going to be valuable. 

Weapons and Equipment is much more useful than you might think. It answers a whole lot of useful campaign questions, and it adds a whole lot of minor magic items and other useful things (magical pets, new weapons like whips and nets, new things to make weapons and armour out of, etc) that it will enhance any campaign more you'd expect. 

There are geography books that tell you about the setting - the new Dragon Pass book is the first new one, and if you want to play in Dragon Pass it is worth getting. I'd get whatever you can get, including the various great JC books, if you can find ones specific to where you are playing. From the JC I love Harald's Nochet stuff, I love the Sandheart books and other Sun County material, and I love the Beer with Teeth Prax material,  I don't particularly find Ian Thompsons Pavis stuff works for me (too much variance from the base setting, and positively baroque elaboration of sub-cults and other minor details), I find the Dorastor books are too over the top for my style - but your tastes will differ from mine. 

There are a lot of books that are basically lore books - they are mostly for GMs and players to read between games for deep background. They will deepen your understanding of the setting, and inspire you with ideas. But you'll rarely reach for them during a game. The first one of these to get is the Glorantha Sourcebook. The Mythology book is one for general myth stuff, and damn good. The Guide is the big one, most important for high level geographical information about the entire setting, for when you feel you want to get out of the starting areas. The Prosopaedia has lots of little mythological details, including lots of mythic detail about mythology outside the core pantheons. But the Gloranthan lore rabbit holes runs very long and deep - once you have those there is the Stafford Library, and so much other stuff, including things like the many useful Lore books Nick Brooke has put out on the Lunars, the West, etc. The Mythology book and the Guide both have the core Big Picture mythology which I find very valuable, the Guide and the Sourcebook have the Big Picture history. But deep diving into what is relevant to your campaign is always rewarding IMO. 

Edited by davecake
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I’ve basically printed off a copy of the starter box rule set (I own two sets but still like a print out). I then have printed out the pertinent rules from the core rule book that I use . I then take the RBOM, the Bestiary, the Lunar Book and my own Furthest book (I’m running a furthest campaign after all!). However, the Dragon Pass book may be visiting too. I’ve printed off my city map and the scenario for the week. I really want to take my beautiful Redbubble maps that you can buy from my store, but jeez my players are super messy! 

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1 hour ago, Simon_Bray said:

I really want to take my beautiful Redbubble maps that you can buy from my store, but jeez my players are super messy! 

Sounds like Redbubble needs a waxed linen option?

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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