Returning new player questions....

[Spence]

So, I bought RQ after many years, the last time I played RQ was back in the 80’s.  Before the AH version.
The current version has really escaped me though.  The rules are not too bad and the magic will simply need a little time to understand and use.  Nothing too bad really.

It is the setting.  It is meticulously laid out, using undefined terms.  What I mean is the world, its cultures and people are described using terms that really have not be defined.  Read the write up of Sartar on page 24.  Or even the more in-depth description later (pg103?) and you do not end up with a usable visual of the world.  

When I played the game back in the 80’s the GM used real world historical civilizations to give a baseline that was close so we had something to envision.  In the campaign I played in all those years ago, we were loosely based on the ancient Greeks and the campaign was at sea.  We encountered many foes, some were creatures (broos, trollkin and so on), but also other “Greeks”, Etruscans, Assyrians.  The example cultures may not have been spot on for bronze age, but it gave us a basic mental image to work with.

After reading through (skimming really) the RQ core book, I have exactly zero idea of just what characters from Sartar, Esrolia or Prax look like or what their culture resembles.

I know that Glorantha is not the Classic world, but is there a guide out there that connects the dots with historical equivalents?   And is there anything out there on the seafaring side of the house.  It is possible that everything I remember was homebrewed, but I cannot believe that our GM completely redid everything and we did use the rulebooks that were out back then to make our characters.

Any help out there?

[Austin]

I think of Esrolia as being similar to ancient Sumer and Babylon. Big stepped-pyramid temples, monumental "stacking up blocks" structures. Prax is described as all "chapparral," which according to the Google is a type of scrubby desert. I think of the Praxians as basically Great Plains Native Americans but in a desert instead, and describe it that way to my players. I think of the Lunars as basically Roman, though I've taken to calling some of their soldiers hoplites instead because I enjoy it.

I feel like Homeric Greeks still does a good enough job to describe the basic look of any of these blokes dressed up in bronze plate. Or something like the Spartans in 300. But those are both contentious descriptions/claims on this forum, apparently. Likewise some of the Sartarite dress looks to me a bit like Iron Age Saxon and Celt stuff from Britain. It's all a hodgepodge of stolen materials, as most creative works are. There's something of a "but Orlanthi aren't (basically) vikings!" push going on, buuuuttt... yeah I feel like describing them as landlocked vikings is good enough. It gets you an idea what's going on. And then things like the tula, the fyrd, the clan structure, plowing a hide, it all feels rather Iron Age Britain to me, as I understand that culture. (I'm describing that from documentary background-watching, not actually saying I'm a professional archaeologist or historian--but neither was Stafford et al AFAIK.)

I think of Tarsh kind of like Norman-invasion Britain. Not so much in how things visibly look, but in the mishmash of cultures. Roman invasion Britain would also work, and probably better.

The Grazelanders are basically Mongols with different faces in my imagination. Or less barbaric Dothraki from Game of Thrones.

Stuff north of Tarsh is, in my imagination, loosely like ancient Han China with its fixation on ranks and dress and precision. Of course there's bunches of rice paddies there too apparently, and that colors my imagination in a certain light. My mind's Lunar Empire feels kind of like China's aesthetic culture with actual access to stone for Roman-scale engineering. And of course Dara Happa sounds suspiciously like a muddling-together of "Mohenjo-Daro" and "Harappa" from Bronze Age India.

If you want Indo-Aryan but want to avoid the Greeks, I'd take a look at some Hittite art. They're a "Storm King Pantheon" people of Indo-Aryan descent, around the same time as ancient Egypt (late Bronze age stuff) and the carving pictures I've seen look a lot like some of the stuff in the Glorantha Sourcebook to my eye. Plus the Hittites were super fighty and feudy, though I don't think they were in the clan sort of way Sartar's Orlanthi are described. So if you want somewhere else to look for your Orlanthi picture inspirations, maybe that's a place to go.

 

Hittite frieze (I think that's the carving type?) for reference:

[7Tigers]

Parallels have their limit and should really be used for a very broad scope only.

Basic parallel is Bronze Age ancient world, 1000 BC and earlier mainly.

For details, I use previously shared parallels:
. Orlanthi: Greeks of the Iliad, with constant feuds & raiding, with bits of Thracians / Black Sea celts
. Lunars: More ancient Greek (Macedonians) & Persians than Romans, and with massive destruction weapons (Crimson Bat for example)
. Dara Happans: Mesopotamians (Assyrians / Hittites)
. Esrolians: Minoans (Earth matriarchy)
. Praxians: Exotic beast rider nomads, living in an apocalyptic (Mad Max type) desert
. Grazelanders: Old Magyars / Scythians
. Sundomers: Spartans in the Wild West

You can also check Guide extracts on glorantha.com:

. For Orlanthi:
http://www.glorantha.com/docs/quick-summary-gloranthan-cultures-part-one-orlanthi-dragon-pass-and-holy-country/

. For Praxians:
https://www.glorantha.com/docs/praxian-overview/

 

[Joerg]

The historical equivalents are numerous but not that well known unless you spent some time "researching" cultures as ancient as their real world parallels.

 

Greeks invoke images of Marathon, Salamis, Thermopylae - and that's as little in-period as the armor style in Excalibur for early British dark age Romano-British heroic militia.

The culture of the Orlanthi is that of lactose-tolerant farmer-herders that came into being at the start of the Bronze Age, with agriculture having radiated out from the northern bend of the Fertile Crescent all over the Old World, and dairy-dependent pastoralism added around the same time that Bronze replaced copper tools. Where agriculture or sacred services required communal works, cities and bureaucracies would have come into being - often before the adoption of pastoralism.

The Orlanthi live in a region that has real winters, with snow and frost. That is bound to be reflected in their housing and their winter dress, but need not carry over into their summer and battle dress, as military operations in the winter are not a good idea.

They are a mix of free and tenant farmers, where the tenants are less wealthy but beyond those economic considerations as free as the free farmers. All men are warriors when given the need or opportunity. Equipment will vary.

You will find a similar social structure in Germanic farmer republics, some of which managed to maintain much independence from royal interference into the early modern Age. Most people north of the Alps or the Danube had such social structures in the Bronze Age. In the fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean, often a lot less so, as their continued welfare required coordination and organisation beyond what free farmers organized in extended family groupings (clans) could provide.

Orlanthi usually inhabited hilly country, with uplands that are too inhospitable in winter but good grazing in summer, which leads to the practice of transhumance, leading a significant portion of the lifestock away from the permanent settlements into these uplands. Elsewhere, herds would follow the rains, here the herds avoid the snow.

The Anatolian uplands do offer such conditions, so maybe the Anatolian Bronze Age cultures (think allies of the Trojans in the Trojan War) might be an appropriate parallel. Otherwise, the precursors of the Thracians and Dacians, the Hallstatt Culture people and their Urnfield precursors are my favorite parallel, as I know too little about Bronze Age Afghanistan or Northern India to decide whether those conditions and social structures were similar enough.

The cities in Sartar are mostly the centers of tribal confederations, with the surrounding tribes owning significant parts of the cities. There are also non-tribal city folk, the well-to-do organized in guilds or similar clan-like organisations, the poor as destitute beggars, entertainers, street vendors or day laborers. Most cities were founded less than 150 years ago and were planned cities, copying internal organisation and architecture of the Holy Country or the dwarves (who were very friendly to the dynasty until a century ago). The cities made it through the Lunar conquest and the liberation without signifciant damage. The only walled settlement that was destroyed in the conquest over 20 years ago is Runegate, rebuilt as described in the Adventure Book of the GM Screen package, and that was not a typical Sartarite city but a fortified tribal center.

 

Seafaring: Sartar is completely land-locked, and while it lies on two trade routes leading to the major sea ports for central Genertela, it has no naval experience at all except for some of the closest companions of Argrath and a few far-travelled individuals. Water traffic is limited to the mostly durulz (duck)-operated river boats on the Creek-Stream River to Nochet (which had been severely diminished due to a pogrome a dozen years ago).

 

RQ3 had rules for ships and sailing, but the only Glorantha publication digging deeply into that topic is "Men of the Sea" for HeroQuest 1 (not RuneQuest). Excellent book, cheap as pdf, highly recommended even though some details are no longer supported as canonical.

Seafaring in Glorantha was impossible until two generations ago, due to a great curse that swept the Gloranthan seas free of all ships about 700 years ago. The last 45 years have seen the return to the seas, almost with a vengeance. Naval trade, journeys of discovery, raiding and conquest have blossomed in the last two generations, ancient port sites have returned to prominence lost during the long curse.

A few coastal waters and one notable inland water (Lake Felster) had managed to maintain some naval tradition. If you want Aegaean style seafaring in a rather narrow water, Lake Felster at the heart of Ralios is your friend. Fleet sizes are rather small compared to the Aegaean, but so is the available area of water. The lake is connected to the sea by the Tanier river, a quite broad and fairly navigable waterway, but political divisions prevent an exchange of fleets between the lake and the open seas so far. The major power on the river once controlled all the lands between the sea and the lake, but at that time the seas still had not been opened.

The local naval power used to be the Holy Country, but that entity has largely fallen apart into its constituent portions since its Godking did not return from the Dead nine years ago. Others like the Lunars or King Broyan temporarily unified some of those lands, but currently there is no unified government, the Wolf Pirates are back from their circumnavigation of the inner ocean of Glorantha, and naval trade has become risky once more.

 

[Spence]

Well thank you to those that took the time to reply to my questions.  But I have also been reading other threads in the RQ forum and frankly it has been an eye opener.  And not in a good way.  I will be shelving my copy of RQ and going back to the CoC side of the house.  I find it difficult to believe that the RQ forums and the CoC forums are on the same boards with the same company.  CoC has some differences of opinion comparing purist games to pulp games, but they have never gotten this venomous about hw you are allowed to have fun.  RQ books books are covered with pictures that say Classic Greek or Hoplite and yet to even mention it apparently is heresy or something. 

A player or GM trying to enter RQ based on the current core rule book really has no idea and cannot find anything in the core book to actually describe what the various tribe/nations are like.  I can understand that they apparently disliked real world history enough to try and make everything completely different.  Which is fine, except now the game has no entry portal unless you wish to turn a game into a full on research project.  But the venom displayed on some of the threads I read is very revealing.  Especially since it is apparently accepted as OK.

 

Now I thank the three people that took the time to answer me directly, Crel, 7Tigers and Joerg, and their well thought out responses.  You are great representatives of the RQ community. 

But I'll be moving on.  I have very little free time to RPG at all and I simply cannot waste it in this environment. 

Good luck all and I hope you can get back to the FUN that is what RPG's are all about.

[Shiningbrow]

1 hour ago, Spence said:

Well thank you to those that took the time to reply to my questions.  But I have also been reading other threads in the RQ forum and frankly it has been an eye opener.  And not in a good way.  I will be shelving my copy of RQ and going back to the CoC side of the house.  I find it difficult to believe that the RQ forums and the CoC forums are on the same boards with the same company.  CoC has some differences of opinion comparing purist games to pulp games, but they have never gotten this venomous about hw you are allowed to have fun.  RQ books books are covered with pictures that say Classic Greek or Hoplite and yet to even mention it apparently is heresy or something. 

A player or GM trying to enter RQ based on the current core rule book really has no idea and cannot find anything in the core book to actually describe what the various tribe/nations are like.  I can understand that they apparently disliked real world history enough to try and make everything completely different.  Which is fine, except now the game has no entry portal unless you wish to turn a game into a full on research project.  But the venom displayed on some of the threads I read is very revealing.  Especially since it is apparently accepted as OK.

 

Now I thank the three people that took the time to answer me directly, Crel, 7Tigers and Joerg, and their well thought out responses.  You are great representatives of the RQ community. 

But I'll be moving on.  I have very little free time to RPG at all and I simply cannot waste it in this environment. 

Good luck all and I hope you can get back to the FUN that is what RPG's are all about.

It's a shame you've been turned off from a game largely in part by the (often heated) discussions and arguments on here. I personally haven't seen those for this topic, but it wouldn't surprise me...

 

FTR, there is the 2 Volume Guide to Glorantha which does exactly what you're asking for , an explanation of all the peoples and cultures. The first volume is focussed on the area also focussed on in the RQG book - Genertela, and thus the Dragon Pass area. That first volume is 400 pages (but, certainly no need to go through all of that!!!) It's a fairly easy read..

But, yeah, that's another expense for a game you're still not sure of. Perhaps you could look over a copy at your FLGS?? 

[Ian Absentia]

3 hours ago, Spence said:

But I'll be moving on.  I have very little free time to RPG at all and I simply cannot waste it in this environment. 

Good luck all and I hope you can get back to the FUN that is what RPG's are all about.

Are you sure this isn't the message you intended to write from the outset?

The real-world-parallels chestnut is bait that brings out the worst in the grognards, and recent developments in Glorantha have purposely steered away from more concrete comparisons that bog down in argument instead of play.  A skim through the art in the book gives a strong flavor of the cultures in and around Dragon Pass in dress, weaponry, and mythology.  And the sections on homelands provide succinct summaries of the cultures.  I find it hard to miss, especially going into it already knowing what to look for.

It's too bad that you assumed that grousing over minutia on a message board typified the new edition of the game.  It's also too bad that you decided to engage in it yourself.  Message boards are too often distractions from actual play.  Best of luck playing the games you enjoy.

!i!

Edited May 21, 2019 by Ian Absentia

[Joerg]

4 hours ago, Spence said:

But the venom displayed on some of the threads I read is very revealing.  Especially since it is apparently accepted as OK.

Not ok. I've been called out for that, correctly, but I still despair about Orlanthi hoplites. Orlanthi in conquered or imitation hoplite armor are acceptable, although their magic and heavy armor don't gel that well.

 

4 hours ago, Spence said:

Now I thank the three people that took the time to answer me directly, Crel, 7Tigers and Joerg, and their well thought out responses.  You are great representatives of the RQ community. 

I am a representative of the grumbling grognards, really.

I am mightily irked at "don't use land-locked Vikings any more" when we get "use land-locked Achaeans" instead which makes about as much or as little sense, and it doesn't make sense for a culture that has been described as non-Greek (aka Barbarian) until the most recent re-phrasing as "bronze-working tribal chiefdoms" in the Guide.
Greek parallels are fine for western Peloria, which even has two large lakes and navigable rivers to play around with penteconters. Glorantha doesn't have any parallel for the Mediterranean (any more). The Homeward Ocean is aptly named for the sailing conditions it offers. Its real world parallel could be the Indic Ocean, but not the Mediterranean where triremes could opeate in fair weather. Don't get me started on ram-armed bird-headed penteconters for Wolf Pirates originating from Ygg's Isles when the ancestrally neighboring Loskalmi have long ships and knarrs for their sea transport and warfare...