Hesitance towards Glorantha as a Setting

[RaconteurX]

Everyone knows that YGMV. Consider that, maybe, that doesn't solve the problem in this case.

Sorry Mike, but your problems with Glorantha have always seemed like a cop-out to me. You fret about not being faithful to the setting, despite the fact that HeroQuest encourages you to do exactly that, and run off to another setting with which you are familiar. All it seems you are saying is that you do not want to run a game set in Glorantha for fear of having your own material contradicted by published sources. Did you feel the same about Shadow World when it was still evolving as a setting?

Glorantha is changing, growing and most of the material which has found its way into print under the Issaries banner is a result of fan influence on Greg's original vision. The esoterica is fanboy material; most people will never read Entekosiad, let alone King of Sartar or Revealed Mythologies, nor should it be necessary. Just because the run-of-the-mill poster on the Glorantha Digest knows lots of fiddly details about the various cultures does not mean you must.

Any material that does not fit the stories you and your players want to tell should not matter, regardless of whether it is official, "generally accepted Glorantha", or what-have-you.

[Scripty]

Personally, I dig Glorantha. I think it's pretty neat. Even the aspects that I've heard others criticize (like the Ducks), I find pretty nifty.

But I haven't run HeroQuest in Glorantha for a number of reasons.

1) I don't feel comfortable enough yet with the details of the setting. I mean I know some of it. But I'd like to be a bit more familiar with it. I don't mind if My Glorantha Varies, but I'm still working my head around the basics ("Introduction to Glorantha" and the info in HeroQuest) so that when My Glorantha Varies it does so for a specific thematic (or dramatic) reason and not because I'm just ignorant.

2) I've found that players (especially in this area) are getting really old in their way of thinking about things. They don't want to learn anything new. Around here, it seems that if it's not Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, Marvel or some other setting already well-known to the group that there's just no interest in it.

But a recent development shed some light on both of these issues.

A guy I used to play with wants to run the Wheel of Time rpg. I've heard the books are pretty good but haven't read them. I simply have no interest. I could not care less. He brought me a handout explaining the setting, somewhat. I read it and it read like a chapter out of a history book with dates, names, places, all stuff I already knew I would not remember. This was nice but I was entirely lukewarm to freezing on the whole idea.

Why?

Am I developing the same rigidity as those of the groups that I just canned because they didn't have the inclination to "try something new"?

Maybe.

But in my defense, I was/am a bit tired of D&D. I've played/run it for far too long of a stretch. The Wheel of Time rpg just looked, to me, like another form of D&D with the serial numbers filed off. I am probably wrong. But I don't have the inclination to follow up on that certainty.

Also in my defense, this was one of the guys that refused to try out HeroQuest because he wasn't interested in "learning something new." The irony (and audacity) of his recent request was not lost on me and did influence my decision (considerably) to not play in his game.

So, now that I've reassured myself that I'm not a curmudgeon, allow me to try to tie all of this together.

If I got to run HeroQuest, I would certainly do it with a whole C.S. Lewis style rip. I would start the PCs out as newcomers to the setting. So that way the players are learning as their characters are learning. As the players learn more, they'll discover more options in the setting that are available to them. But I'd probably start the campaign as an exercise (to a degree) in Simulationism where the characters are, somehow, transplants to the world. Very Dorothy in Oz. But I have a reason, somewhat.

Roleplayers, at least around here, are incredibly lazy. These guys want to be SHOWN a setting, not have to learn about it. Learning about it through play is a good thing to them. 10 or so pages of reading up front = Bad.

But having them start out as characters in Glorantha makes all sorts of assumptions about what they could (or should) know about the setting. At the very least (at the VERY least) they should read the HeroQuest voices write-up for their homeland and any homelands info from the main book. But, if you're giving them pretty much free reign, they'll have to browse all day to even find a homeland that might interest them. If you limit their choices, however, to a small geographic area (such as saying that all PCs must be Heortlings), I think you run the risk of alienating those who may not be interested in playing a Heortling.

So, for me, the decision is that, when I run a Glorantha game, the PCs are definitely going to be just as new to the setting as the players. This gives the players no investment up front in preparation for the setting (which, IME, players will often not follow up on anyway). Later, after a while familiarizing themselves with the setting, we'll send Dorothy back to Kansas and they can build their PCs with a working knowledge of the setting and some experience in it. Those who are happy with their PCs, however, can always choose not to click their heels three times.

That's how I'd vary my Glorantha. I don't think you're running into any sort of problem with the setting. It just sounds to me like you have a player who's more interested in learning about Glorantha through play, rather than having to study up on it. I can respect that. New settings can be confusing and the larger they are (or more unfamiliar), the more daunting they seem.

Just my 2-1/2 cents going on a dime.

Scott

[buserian]

So, for me, the decision is that, when I run a Glorantha game, the PCs are definitely going to be just as new to the setting as the players. This gives the players no investment up front in preparation for the setting (which, IME, players will often not follow up on anyway). Later, after a while familiarizing themselves with the setting, we'll send Dorothy back to Kansas and they can build their PCs with a working knowledge of the setting and some experience in it. Those who are happy with their PCs, however, can always choose not to click their heels three times.

As a matter of fact, this is a tactic that Greg Stafford himself used in his house campaign back in the late 70s or early 80s. The famous scholar Redbird was actually a D&D character who was transplanted into Glorantha and the RuneQuest rules. As played (by Rudy Kraft?), he was not happy about having lost all of his cool magic, and his efforts in the campaign were at least in part motivated by trying to get those nifty powers back, one way or the other.

One of the early issues of the Tales of the Reaching Moon fanzine reported that he came to an unhappy end -- I think trolls are snacking on him?

But, back to the point -- bringing heroes into a strange fantasy world (or some variant of that theme) is a common (perhaps even overdone) theme of many fantasy and science fiction stories -- all the Well World novels (+others of Chalker's works), the Thomas Covenant series (+others by Donaldson), many of Barbara Hambly's books, the Incomplete Enchanter, the Amber series, the Sliders TV show, various time travel movies, Last Starfighter, and Army of Darkness, to name just a few of the books I can see on my bookshelf from my desk or shows I have seen over the years. And as a common theme of the genre, such a tactic is more than appropriate for HeroQuest. It's a great idea.

Are you going to have each of the players write a 100-word narrative describing their favorite DnD character? :)


buserian

[Scripty]

But, back to the point -- bringing heroes into a strange fantasy world (or some variant of that theme) is a common (perhaps even overdone) theme of many fantasy and science fiction stories -- all the Well World novels (+others of Chalker's works), the Thomas Covenant series (+others by Donaldson), many of Barbara Hambly's books, the Incomplete Enchanter, the Amber series, the Sliders TV show, various time travel movies, Last Starfighter, and Army of Darkness, to name just a few of the books I can see on my bookshelf from my desk or shows I have seen over the years. And as a common theme of the genre, such a tactic is more than appropriate for HeroQuest. It's a great idea.

Are you going to have each of the players write a 100-word narrative describing their favorite DnD character? :)


buserian

Thanks. It was really the only approach that I could think of that would be FIFO with Glorantha. Honestly, there are still some questions I have about the setting. For example, one of the first things established in the Introduction to Glorantha book is that Glorantha has 4 major types of magic: Animism, Wizardry, Theism and Mysticism. It took me a bit of digging to realize that Mysticism just didn't make it into the new HeroQuest book.

I knew that this Dorothy in Glorantha idea was entirely unoriginal but it did seem to be the most direct path to getting a group unfamiliar with Glorantha to play in it, IMO. Rather than give the players a packet to study up on, I'd just tell them: don't worry, you're not supposed to know anything about the setting.

Some of the approaches I've considered:

1) Having people stat themselves as PCs and doing the whole lost at sea (we live on the coast) thing to have them wind up in Glorantha. There are some serious pitfalls to this approach. But I think it would be fairly easy to get the game going.

2) Have people choose a D&D character (as you mentioned) and have a spell mishap or something teleport them to Glorantha.

3) Have people choose their favorite dead D&D character and have it "summoned" to Glorantha from beyond the land of the dead.

4) Pull a Nobilis on them. Have them all be business people doing lunch. They return to their office to find the elevator doors open to... Glorantha.

Even better I considered a variant where some of the players were cops and some were fugitives. The pursuit leads them straight to... Glorantha (where their pistols, etc., slowly begin to disintegrate).

It makes me chuckle to think of "From Dusk til Dawn" opening up into Glorantha rather than a Vampire Bar. We could drop them in Durulz country and call it "From Duck Til Dawn." :D

5) Or we could do a total C.S. Lewis and have the PCs be children. I think Glorantha would work fairly well for the whole Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe treatment. It would be low-powered Sim, but it could really add to the fantasy element quite a bit.

It's flattering to know that Greg has already done this. I reassures me that I'm not completely off my rocker.

Scott

[contracycle]

IMO, something of a problem this presents is that Glorantha does not seem like a real, developed setting as you would find in another RPG.  IT's "work in progress" status, the conflicting fan material, make developing a glorantha setting almost as much work as writing a setting of your own.  The work investment required for glorantha GM's is substantially higher than for most games, it seems to me.

[Bankuei]

Hi guys,

I wouldn't say that HeroQuest has "more" work involved than most other games out there, but rather, a different focus of work.   While its definitely true that work has to be put out by the group as a whole initially, in terms of defining the culture and situation for themselves, prep between sessions and the amount of effort in play is a lot less than other systems.

I found myself searching and searching for more information, until it occurred to me that Glorantha IS the "interpret as you will" setting that many games mention but fail to support.  The setting forces you, as a Narrator, as a player to put some input into the world.  For some folks, that's exactly what they've always looked for, and for others, its not their cup of tea.

In this case, HQ departs from most games, and leaves a lot of folks running on habitual assumptions stranded.  I think a section on the sort of group preparation necessary before play would have been an excellent section to put in before the character creation.  

Chris

[Emmerson]

As a Gm new to glorantha, with players who are also new to glorantha I can sympathise with some of the problems posters are finding with starting up with heroquest. While I agree heartily with the YGMV statement from the book, I would also like to be able to get a good grip on what the established world has to offer, sure I can make up what I like about glorantha, but the world has been in print for a long time and has a stalwart band of followers and they can`t all be wrong in liking this strange magical world. The problem with the books I have at the moment (players guide, guide to dragon pass, Tarsh in flames, Thieves arm, and cult compendium) is that it is difficult to tie the information together in a coherent fashion, whatever you seem to read about the world ends up in just piles of loose ends, gods, famous persons, places that are mentioned in text with no explanation of who they are or how they fit. If you try and tie up these loose ends on the net you usually end with just more loose ends. While I`m sure this makes a rich and vibrant land, but it is frustrating if you are trying to pick up the basics about the world.

There seems to be the suggestion in some of these posts that if  you dont already know about glorantha then you should make up your own version using the information you have, which is fair enough as far as it goes but doesnt really address the problem of  players and Gms who would like to run games in the official setting getting acquainted with Glorantha as a setting.

I am currently 4 sessions into a Heortling Gloranthan campaign, I chose Heortland as the setting for the game cos it was the only part of Glorantha I was familiar with from demo games run by the RHQN, and because it was the area I could find most coherent information on. My players are enjoying it depite reservations (they thought ducks , and most of the creatures were laughable and the fact that they couldnt really see how it was going  to be different from any other fantasy setting). In my group players very rarely do any work on developing the setting other than their character creation, so every setting we run is a case of developing and explaining the world as we go.

[Deacon Blues]

Here's one:

I don't like the Bronze Age setting.  I don't like the hierarchies and societal structures dictated by it.  I also don't like the tech level - I just feel more comfortable with heroes in chainmail and longswords, rather than bone axes and leather jerkins.

Any suggestions?

[Brand_Robins]

I just feel more comfortable with heroes in chainmail and longswords, rather than bone axes and leather jerkins.

Esvular and/or Seshnela?

Both have heroes who tend to have chainmail and longswords, have societies based on something other than a bronze age model, and are (generally) losely enough touched by canon that you can have your will with them. Seshnela works well for your average feudal adventures, and is well fitting to Pendragon or Lionheart type games. Esvular is more urban and urbane, trade based and cosmopolitan, less heirarchical and gives lots of room for wandering adventurers and free-wheeling politics.

Or you could always go with Scripty's Conan conversion, but that would be a non-Gloranthan suggestion....

[simon_hibbs]

I don't like the Bronze Age setting.  I don't like the hierarchies and societal structures dictated by it.  I also don't like the tech level - I just feel more comfortable with heroes in chainmail and longswords, rather than bone axes and leather jerkins.

Glorantha isn't a bronze age setting, it just happens to be that bronze is the most commonly used metal.

To clarify that, there are many cultures in Glorantha that are far in advance, both technologicaly and culturaly, than any bronze age culture was on earth. Just look at the Lunar Empire which is similar in it's achievements to the Roman empire, or the advanced feudal cultures of the West that rival Europe in the middle ages in many respects.

The fact that the most comonly used metal is Bronze has caused some confusion on this issue. Another factor is that one of the earliest campaign sourcebooks was Griffin Mountain, which detailed the essentialy stone age culture of the Votanki.


Simon Hibbs

[simon_hibbs]

Everyone knows that YGMV. Consider that, maybe, that doesn't solve the problem in this case.

Sorry Mike, but your problems with Glorantha have always seemed like a cop-out to me. ...

No, I can sympathise. Some people just prefer to roll their own setting, and I think that's fine. HQ is well suited to that.


Simon Hibbs

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Chris,

You wrote:

Hi guys,

While its definitely true that work has to be put out by the group as a whole initially, in terms of defining the culture and situation for themselves, prep between sessions and the amount of effort in play is a lot less than other systems.

...

I think a section on the sort of group preparation necessary before play would have been an excellent section to put in before the character creation.  

Chris

Since you're so good at breaking stuff like this down, could you make up maybe a "topic heading list" that would have been used for such a chapter in HQ.  (If you wanted to go nutty and break down your whole process, I'd love that, too.)

Thanks,
Christopher

(and this might be a new thread)

[Mike Holmes]

Sorry Mike, but your problems with Glorantha have always seemed like a cop-out to me. You fret about not being faithful to the setting, despite the fact that HeroQuest encourages you to do exactly that, and run off to another setting with which you are familiar. All it seems you are saying is that you do not want to run a game set in Glorantha for fear of having your own material contradicted by published sources.

That's exactly one of my problems. How is it a cop out?

Did you feel the same about Shadow World when it was still evolving as a setting?

More than you can know. The published metaplot of SW is horrifically problematic. I think that I alienatied the author Terry Amthor with my opinions about that, and related problems.

Fortunately I can take the metaplot as just resource material - back engineering it into potential plot again. What I don't have to worry about in SW is there being a detail of how a culture works, or rituals, or anything like that. Given the intent to play in RM, none of that was worked out. Which makes it eminently sutable for my purposes. (Note that there are probably even better settings, I just happen to know this one, and like certain things about it - it could as easily have been something like Forgotten Realms if I knew anything about it).

Just because the run-of-the-mill poster on the Glorantha Digest knows lots of fiddly details about the various cultures does not mean you must.

Of course not. But, again, why play in a campaign that could be taken objectively if only to fail to do so? If you aren't going to play the game by the canon, then why play the setting at all? See, in Shadow World, I don't ignore any of the canon lightly (with the exception of what I do to the metaplot above). Everything that's there is taken as the basis for play by default. Sure I'll change things as need be (I've had to make some adjustments just to support the HQ system, for instance). But the idea is to not ever have to change something if I don't have to do so.

See, I'm a canon guy. I like for the setting to be "Hard", for it to have some objective "reality" that's unalterable for the most part. Because that gives me a feel that you can only get in RPGs. Now, the problem with Glorantha is that, in order to play the canon, you have to be an expert - even the non-fan stuff, even just the stuff that Greg has produced (it's uniqueness actually works against it here). Further, since that's the case, you are constrained in your creativity to the extent that the setting is "complete".

Which is why I like SW better. It's very incomplete. Now, you say, but then don't you lose that feeling of objective reality? No, I don't. Because it's not making things up that makes it seem less objective. You have to make things up in every RPG. Even if I were an expert in Glorantha, even that world isn't so complete that I wouldn't have to make stuff up. The stuff created from scratch is just as immersive as canon, as long as it makes sense with the existing canon.

No, the problem is changing things that already exist. When I have to do that, that's when the objective reality feature dissolves before my eyes. That's when it feels that we're just using Glorantha as inspirational, rather than playing in Glorantha. Yes, I realize that's what they encourage. It's what I can't stand.

BTW, I have the same problem with any liscenced material, and am on record there as finding that problematic, too. I can't play in Middle Earth, despite knowing it well, because I don't want to alter it in my own mind. It's fine the way it is. Glorantha, too is rather "complete" (though, I'd admit that the Heroquest/relative universe idea goes a long way to ameliorating that). I don't want to add on to Greg or anyone else's vision, or play off of it, I want to make my own. SW is incomplete enough, "skelletal" enough, that that's what I feel when I play.

I could start from complete scratch I suppose. But what I really want is a compromise between complete and non-existent. A solid starting place, from which to create.

Now, again, this is my own personal problem, and I don't expect that others will feel the same way. If you know the canon of Glorantha, and like it, and play it, then good for you. If you don't mind altering things in play to suit your needs, that's great. It just doesn't work for me. And I think I'm not alone (though I may be in a tiny minority).

Mike

[Mike Holmes]

At the risk of following up on the post above...

I just feel more comfortable with heroes in chainmail and longswords, rather than bone axes and leather jerkins.

Esvular and/or Seshnela?

I have to agree with the complaint, sorta. Glorantha, aesthetically, is a cultural mishmash. You have all manner of cultures side by side (as they are in the real world, often) because all that diversity is interesting and deep.

But compare it with Conan's Hyboria. Sure Hyboria is composed of all manner of cultures. But, interestingly, there's a single overarching aesthetic that covers the entire region - everywhere Conan goes. I think that what Deacon may be stating is that Glorantha in having bronze age cultures next to others delivers a unique aesthetic. Which means that you have to get it to enjoy it. As opposed to the "standard fantasy" aesthetic that we already know, or other, simpler aesthetics that seem to drive RPG play well.

I think that Glorantha is, in some ways, too good for RPG play. I admire Greg's work tremendously - I just don't always "get" it. Elves are plants? For RPG play, I want to just "get it". (Now someone will say that I can just inject my own aesthetic, and we're back to the post above).

Mike

[Deacon Blues]

Esvular and/or Seshnela?
Esvular is more urban and urbane, trade based and cosmopolitan, less heirarchical and gives lots of room for wandering adventurers and free-wheeling politics.

See, this is cool - but it sort of underscores my difference of taste.  There are a handful of cultures that play at or near the tech level I like (Esvular, Dara Happa, Tarsh to a limited extent); the majority, however, seem to be on the primitive side (Bison People, Grazers, Heortlings, etc).

To be honest, though, the HeroQuest main book uses "primitive" PCs for all of its sidebar examples - Bison people, Heortlings, Puma men, etc.  So while the image of Glorantha as the Dark Ages may be unfair, it's not completely unfounded - I'm just reading what's printed.

Also, though I can't quite put my finger on any particular source, I get the idea that the Lunars are the "bad guys" of the Hero Wars - or at least the "misguided souls" who bring about all the badness.  Hell, one of the later campaign supplements is called Orlanth is Dead!, which I take it is not meant to be a triumphant celebration.  So I wouldn't want to run a campaign full of villains or haughty imperialists, and this limits my choices further.

Again, this is largely a matter of personal taste - I prefer my barbarians to be on the "outskirts" of the game world (geographically or metaphysically).  If I'm misinformed, or unaware of the rich possibilities of civilized adventure, then please let me know.  I'd love to be wrong about this.