RQ Settings

[Soccercalle]

Are there any particular reason why there were so few publications for RQ1, 2 or 3 placed in Dragon Pass? Most were in Prax, one large book was about Balazar and one about Dorastor but we only had peripherical settings in Dragon Pass (Apple Lane, Snakepipe Hollow and the Haunted Ruins).

Did Greg want to ”save” Sartar for the future?

[Nick Brooke]

We got glimpses of the late 70s/early 80s Sartar campaign (Chaosium's house campaign) via Greg's accounts in APA zines and Wyrms Footnotes (which are all available from Chaosium today, hurrah!), and he was writing up playable rulesy stuff set in Sartar, bits of which got cannibalised for the never-published Gloranthan Encyclopaedia (late eighties / early nineties), King of Sartar, etc. But just because Chaosium wanted to publish something back in the day didn't ever mean it was likely to happen: a casual familiarity with the Meints Index will cure you of that delusion. And the Sartar that would have been published back then probably didn't look very much like it does today.

You can see the state of early Sartarite gaming in the Chaosium Archives: The Stafford House Campaign and in the Dragons Past columns collected in Wyrms Footnotes.

[PaulB]

To me who played RQ2 and 3, (all with the same set of players, so my view point was quite narrow) the Sartar back then had a much more pseudo Celtic feel, along with a Roman vibe for the Lunar Empire. 

[jajagappa]

4 hours ago, Soccercalle said:

Are there any particular reason why there were so few publications for RQ1, 2 or 3 placed in Dragon Pass?

In the RQ2 era, you had:

• Dragon Pass: Apple Lane, Snakepipe Hollow, Trollpak (mostly northern part of it, but scenarios are in Battle Valley, Skyfall Lake)
• Pavis/River of Cradles: Borderlands, Pavis, Big Rubble, Cults of Prax
• Balazar: Griffin Mountain 
• Dorastor: Cults of Terror

Not too much one way or the other. Greg and Sandy produced much of the Dragon Pass content, Steve Perrin the Pavis/Prax content. Griffin Mountain came from outside.

In the early RQ3 era, you had:

• Dragon Pass: Reprints of Apple Lane, Snakepipe Hollow, various pieces of Trollpak (e.g. Into the Haunted Ruins)
• Griffin Island was moved out of Glorantha (or perhaps you might place it near Teleos or in the Brown Sea)
• Genertela box set covering that whole region

Little new content produced in this period. Greg was not writing RQ material, but the bulk produced was Dragon Pass centered.

In the RQ3 renaissance era, there were:

• Pavis/River of Cradles: Sun County, River of Cradles, Shadows on the Borderlands, Strangers in Prax
• Dragon Pass: King of Sartar
• Dorastor: Dorastor, Lords of Terror

MOB, Ken Rolston, and others set their material in River of Cradles region. Greg was not writing RQ material (but did produce King of Sartar and material on Dara Happa and the Lunar Empire).

Overall, the early period had fairly equal division. As Greg moved away from writing during the AH period, I'm not sure anyone else was particularly willing to "encroach" on that area, or were perhaps waiting to see what Greg might put together there.

As new writers came in, it was easier to write about places that were less central to what Greg was focused on. E.g. MOB and others were able to expand on Steve's earlier Pavis/Prax content, I wrote and submitted content on Imther, etc.

With HQG and RQG, Jeff has been very focused on getting the core story centered on Dragon Pass finally told.

 

[tedium34]

Reading this I had a revelation that in retrospect, on the basis of the published material, RQ2 might have been secretly designed for Troll characters, moving between the Elder Wilds (with adventures in Balazar), the Shadow's Dance (maybe with raids into Snakepipe Hollow) and Pavis - all that humancentric stuff was just a smokescreen. Much easier for trolls to get from one of these to another, than the characters in my Griffin Mountain campaign having to trek through the (then) blank lands of Sartar (or go via Gonn Orta's) to get to Pavis.

[simonh]

I think fantasy roleplaying adventures back in that era tended to be set in frontiers and be largely about exploration. The dominant forms were dungeon crawls and hex crawls. Sartar was where your characters might be from, but not so much where you adventured. A common trope was you were Sartarite rebels on the run. 

That changed over time, but if you were coming into Glorantha as an author it was much easier, and the bar in terms of matching existing canon was a lot lower if you set an adventure in a frontier region. In terms of time and focus my impression is that Greg was spending a lot of time on Pendragon back then too.

[SJB]

On 12/13/2024 at 10:37 PM, jajagappa said:

• Dorastor: Cults of Terror

Not too much one way or the other. Greg and Sandy produced much of the Dragon Pass content, Steve Perrin the Pavis/Prax content. Griffin Mountain came from outside.

Was there ever an original Dorastor campaign upon which the boxed text of Cults of Terror was based? Who ran it?

[jajagappa]

1 minute ago, SJB said:

Was there ever an original Dorastor campaign upon which the boxed text of Cults of Terror was based? Who ran it?

At some point, I believe, there was a planned scenario/campaign called Kree Mountain in this region. (Noted here as being from 1984: Kree Mountain (1984) – The Well of Daliath, which would post-date Cults of Terror, though I think it was a convention scenario.)

There's also a reference to Kree Mountain in an interview with Penelope Love here: Penelope Love, fiction author and game designer | Runeblog "The Widow’s Tale is a little based on our Kree Mountain campaign which we ran at Arcanacon conventions through the eighties. The Kree Mountain scenarios went in different directions and the Lunars were definitely the bad guys, but the campaign planted the idea of a band of resistance fighters carrying a guerrilla warfare against the Lunars in my mind."

I never heard anyone refer to any other campaign in that region before the RQ3 Dorastor and Lords of Terror books which were set in the Risklands region. 

 

[Nick Brooke]

58 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

At some point, I believe, there was a planned scenario/campaign called Kree Mountain in this region. (Noted here as being from 1984: Kree Mountain (1984) – The Well of Daliath, which would post-date Cults of Terror, though I think it was a convention scenario.)

There's also a reference to Kree Mountain in an interview with Penelope Love here: Penelope Love, fiction author and game designer | Runeblog "The Widow’s Tale is a little based on our Kree Mountain campaign which we ran at Arcanacon conventions through the eighties. The Kree Mountain scenarios went in different directions and the Lunars were definitely the bad guys, but the campaign planted the idea of a band of resistance fighters carrying a guerrilla warfare against the Lunars in my mind."

I never heard anyone refer to any other campaign in that region before the RQ3 Dorastor and Lords of Terror books which were set in the Risklands region. 

I understood the Australian “Kree Mountain” convention RQ games were originally set somewhere in or near Sartar; they were subsequently relocated to Aggar when Sartar came into greater focus in the late eighties and early nineties (leaving less wiggle-room for General Roan-ur and his chaos legions). Happy to be corrected if I’ve somehow missed part of the story.