How to start playing in Glorantha

[hkokko]

 

Glorantha has so much background material that it sometimes can feel intimidating to enter. In fact it is not. Glorantha is what you make of it. 

 

One of the true old timers among Glorantha gamers is Joerg Baumgartner. He answered a question in the Google+ Glorantha community so well that I asked him for a permission to repost it as a guest post here in Notes From Pavis. At the end of the post I will provide directions to three other earlier posts how to start with Glorantha. 

 

Here is his post. 

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/guest-post-how-to-start-playing-in-glorantha/

[jholen]

It's a great post!

I'd agree -- jumping into a game is largely the most fun. I'm having success introducing the wife, after our second session (first was just generating our clan/characters) she expressed interest in learning more. I gave her the HQ:G book, and suggested the Intro to Glorantha section as well as The Complete Griselda, for some fun short stories.

[Joerg]

True old timer - not quite. While I read about RQ when I started roleplaying around 1984, it wasn't before the Games Workshop edition of RQ3 that I got my hands on the system (around 1989), which led me to translate it to German. Then I met Lutz Reimers who had already finished his translation at STARD convention in Hamburg, which led to me attending part of the first German RuneQuest convention 1990 in Cologne, and after my return from a year working in Norway (1991-1992) joining the Deutsche RuneQuest-Gesellschaft and taking over their magazine Free INT for 6 issues.

In 1993 I was still a newcomer to Glorantha, with about three years of reading and a bit of Gloranthan gaming (mostly Dragon Pass and very few Gloranthan convention games) and the tentative beginnings of my Glorantha index (started in the solitude of northern Norway to reconcile the RQ3 Genertela Box data with the Pavis info, then including data from King of Sartar) under my belt when I joined the RQ Daily. That means I missed 15 years of RuneQuest/Glorantha activity... I do admit to having been one of the most prolific writers in the early years of daily mailing lists, but RQ2 and all its supplements were mythic tomes back then, unavailable in provincial Germany.

In a way, this late entry (compared to the RQ2 clan who are the real old timers) into the Glorantha tribe may have sharpened my awareness about how difficult it can be to start with Glorantha. Back in the early 1990ies, things looked rosy for Glorantha, with the RQ3 Renaissance, King of Sartar and an active community on the internet, a number of Glorantha-themed conventions all around the world (Leicester, Baltimore, Melbourne, Germany). In fact, 2016 may be the first year since the mid nineties which offers more specialized convention activity than those years.

Some things have changed. In those early days of the Digest, we felt that we could still shape the official Glorantha with our ideas, and I guess that we managed to influence some of those bits. Now we have this huge body of canonical Glorantha in the shape of the Guide to Glorantha, which I personally think of as "a good start". We also have a huge backlog of not so canonical any more Gloranthan publications with great ideas still worth using in your campaigns. Now we no longer try to fit material into a temporarily static 1618-1621 setting (or harkening back into historical periods) but we can take the info from the Guide, warp it with events vaguely described in the prophecies, and produce heavily altered settings for gaming in the era that we first visited with the battles in the Dragon Pass (or even White Bear and Red Moon) boardgame.

 

In my advice I forgot one component for getting familiar with Glorantha which helped me a lot - exchanging GM info with other GMs in adjacent areas. I was involved in several such cooperations, such as the Wilmskirk Tribal Federation info exchange which had campaigns for all four tribes putting together their data, or the Whitewall Wiki. As a narrator I felt a lot more secure about presenting a living world by getting feedback from the other campaigns in the neighborhood, discussing scenario ideas and outcomes.

So if you want to have a review board of other Gloranthan GMs, go networking. One of the most recent technologies are private G+ groups where GMs invite interested people to have a look at their campaign and current scenarios. Even if you should get no new input to improve your campaign (an unlikely case), presenting your plans before actually playing them out will make you focus, formulate and fine-tune your ideas. You don't have to be a GM with 20 years of Glorantha experience. Some of the people who comment or listen in are bound to be, make use of their experience.

[hkokko]

@Joerg I consider close to 27 years of experience as an old timer :-) There are few of us who started earlier, I started in Feb 1981 - will have our campaigns 35 year anniversary game next month. Will be celebrating that on island called Loral. Maybe the players will finally reach the rumoured City of Gold - heh, heh, heh...

I have seen you online at the RQ/Glorantha mailing lists, web sites and forums since the interwebs started and if I do not recall wrongly some time/s at Convulsion/Continuum. So true old timer fits pretty well as far as I can see... 

Would be good to meet again at some point. 

Your updated advice duly added to the guest blog post. 

[Questbird]

As a somewhat heretical contribution, I acquired the River of Cradles RQ3 campaign. I liked most of the stuff I saw so I plunked it (it being the Prax region) into my homebrew (ie. non-Gloranthan) campaign, without too many ill effects. The early Gloranthan stuff set in Prax, Big Rubble and Griffin Mountain is well-written, hangs together well and in my opinion is quite re-usable outside of Glorantha. So my answer to the question is just get started with one of those early campaigns. The cults and cultures work nicely and give you a good introduction to the world. You may become addicted and want more. I enjoyed running River of Cradles but I didn't feel inclined to change worlds afterwards.

[GianniVacca]

I can't see why there's all this talk about "how to start playing in Glorantha". After all, we all did start at some point.

I successfully introduced both my kids to Glorantha, and it wasn't particularly difficult. I think the key is focusing on a given starting area, introducing the cool runes, and really insisting on all the required information to play the character.

[Noita]

1 hour ago, GianniVacca said:

I can't see why there's all this talk about "how to start playing in Glorantha". After all, we all did start at some point.

I successfully introduced both my kids to Glorantha, and it wasn't particularly difficult. I think the key is focusing on a given starting area, introducing the cool runes, and really insisting on all the required information to play the character.

I'm so with you on this. If anything it's easier now with all the info to back you up. 

[Mankcam]

Yep I'm not sure why it seems overwhelming. Yes the G2G may be viewed as overwhelming, but its not a typical gaming product. 

Glorantha can be presented like any setting, a piece at a time, without a care for what may lay beyond that localised region. I ran Glorantha in the mid to late 80s with just RQ2 and the The Big Rubble box. My cousin had the Pavis and The Borderlands box, as well as the two Cults books. Between us it all worked a charm, and to this day the richness of those books still give me inspiration

I think getting back to sandbox settings is the trick, then widening scope later on, if desired. The Gloranthan Classics are a great place to start, regardless of which edition of RQ is being used..

Edited February 26, 2016 by Mankcam

[Steve]

Just to add to this, a great resource if you're starting in Sartar is the free-to-download Player's Primer, which you can download from the Glorantha website.

 

[skoll]

What some might find overwhelming, is the amont of material available, with no definite ruleset to use them with. Back in the day it was different - you basically had one (or two) version of the rules, and you used what supplements your FLGS happened to carry. Nowadays there's HQ and several versions of RQ (and soon 13th age). With the success of the RQ2 KS campaign, all the old supplements are back in print, plus there are all the HQ supplements (plus GtG, which contrary to what the name suggests, is not the best starting point). I can easily understand, that somebody completely new to Glorantha might feel overwhelmed when trying to decide how to get started.