Hey all

I'm playing my first HQ game in a couple weeks. I'ts a 'short story arc' thing, we're trying a few games & HQ is next up (I'm GMing).

So, all very exciting :) SOmething that totally rocks me about Glorantha is the bronze age thing. To that end I want to make the setting archaic bronze-age-faithful: basically, canon Glorantha with the anachronistic elements removed. Ie:

* horses are only used for chariots. Chariot-riding aristocracy or royal troops. THis can be from civilized palace-states, or nomadic cattle-herders, or tribal kindoms. The only cavalry would be the savage tribes of the Praxian Wastes who ride exotic beasts. No horse cavalry at all.
* no bronze chain mail or "full plate"
* no Churches. The third branch of magic would be called "Gnosticism" which would keep with the existing HQ use of "Essence" magic, only instead of saints, liturgists, churches, orders & so on, it would have "Great Sages" who teach Gnostic Paths followed/taught by philosophers and bards (still use wizards & sorcerers just like canon HQ).

I'm cool with canonical elves & even dwarves, provided the highest-tech dwarf stuff is ironworking.

I'm thinking that something like this has to have been done before, but I haven't been able to find anything so far.

Does anyone else know of any?

many thanks!

Hi

Folk in Glorantha do ride horses. I am curious as to why would you want to remove that? Horses were a big part of celtic bronze age society.

Also, as you will be using Heroquest I am puzzled by your comments on armour, as armour type, if in keeping with the culture, is so minor a point as to often be overlooked by most folks.

I am also interested on your Gnosticism. When you say canon HQ do you mean canon Glorantha? HQ is starting to be considered a generic game engine, one that can be used easily to create other genre's.

So, are you basing your ideas in Glorantha, in some other fantasy world or are you creating one yourself?

If in Glorantha, when (2nd age, early 3rd age, Herowars period, etc.) and where (Dragon Pass, Lunar Empire, Ralios, Umathela?).

Regards
Rob

Lamorak33 wrote:

Also, as you will be using Heroquest I am puzzled by your comments on armour, as armour type, if in keeping with the culture, is so minor a point as to often be overlooked by most folks.

charles wrote:
archaic bronze-age-faithful: basically, canon Glorantha with the anachronistic elements removed.

Jane wrote:

charles wrote:
archaic bronze-age-faithful: basically, canon Glorantha with the anachronistic elements removed.

You did realise that they're not anachronistic at all? "Canon" Glorantha isn't Bronze Age with some wrong bits, it's more like Iron Age/Dark Age with "bronze" (a metal you can mine) taking the place of iron. Not that that invalidates your preference for altering it to resemble Homer, I'd just point out that you may have a lot of work on your hands.

Hi all
thanks for your comments & suggestions!

Just to give some context, I own the HQ corebook but have only this last week begun to discover the Gloranthan resources that exist outside of it. I had no idea just how vast GLorantha is, & how thin a slice of that is presented (it seems to me at this point) in the HQ corebook. This is not a criticism, in fact the opposite: it's an awe-felt tribute to the act of creation that Glorantha's become, and a great admiration for the writers of the corebook whose task was to decide what to leave out. They've done that with enormous skill.

Also, re: my use of "canon HQ" / "canon Glorantha", I kind of used them both interchangeably up there. Rob, I take your point about 'generic HQ', and while I'm not sure if I entirely agree with it, I'm going to defer to your much greater experience on this one in this thread. So consider my use of 'canon' here to be 'canon Glorantha'. My exposure to Glorantha at this point has been almost entirely the HQ corebook, so please excuse it where I've conflated the two.

Jane wrote:

charles wrote:
archaic bronze-age-faithful: basically, canon Glorantha with the anachronistic elements removed.

You did realise that they're not anachronistic at all? "Canon" Glorantha isn't Bronze Age with some wrong bits, it's more like Iron Age/Dark Age with "bronze" (a metal you can mine) taking the place of iron.

James wrote:
Basically, armor is either good, bad, or extra-special ... In mechanical terms, changing it is child's play -- just assume that the heavy armor is big old bronze stuff like the Dendra panoply, that the light armor is leather or textile (or "just a shield and a helmet"), and that the really good armor is super-awesome magic stuff like dinosaur hide or whatever. Easy-peasy. I plan on doing this for my own game, actually.

Different areas of the setting are going to require different amounts of work. Up the mystery and ritual in the Lunar Empire and you're good to go; Dragon Pass and Prax are going to require hardly any alteration at all. But the west, which is obviously medieval, is going to be a bitch and a half to bronze-age-ify. Even if you go around removing all references to iron and so on, you're still going to have a very feudal feel to it. If it were me, I would just stay out of it.

Lamorak33 wrote:
Folk in Glorantha do ride horses. I am curious as to why would you want to remove that? Horses were a big part of celtic bronze age society.

Lamorak33 wrote:

So, are you basing your ideas in Glorantha, in some other fantasy world or are you creating one yourself?

If in Glorantha, when (2nd age, early 3rd age, Herowars period, etc.) and where (Dragon Pass, Lunar Empire, Ralios, Umathela?).

Regards
Rob

rstites wrote:

...you could well write out the stirrup.  You could just give it to certain cultures too: only those with a myth to the stirrup could use it, for example.  This shouldn't have any ingame affect in HQ, though in RQ it would remove the ability to use heavy one-handed weapons from horseback and remove the massive horse strength aided damage on charges.

Since HQ doesn't really deal in detail with any of this, it'd be pretty easy to deal with it on the fly if you have a good understanding of where you want to take it.  As previously mentioned, armor is either good, better, or best.  Just change the names and it still works the same.  The same goes for any other mechanical issues.

Errata:

the following:

charles wrote:
Maybe 'horses are too sacred to be ridden' or 'a mark of Chaos' (maybe too close to being a beast-man???)

Charles,

charles wrote:
Just to give some context, I own the HQ corebook but have only this last week begun to discover the Gloranthan resources that exist outside of it. I had no idea just how vast GLorantha is, & how thin a slice of that is presented (it seems to me at this point) in the HQ corebook. This is not a criticism, in fact the opposite: it's an awe-felt tribute to the act of creation that Glorantha's become, and a great admiration for the writers of the corebook whose task was to decide what to leave out. They've done that with enormous skill.

Of course you're right, Jane. I meant "anachronistic in a bronze-age faithful setting", not "anachronistic in Glorantha".

Thanks (sorry, I don't know your name). I'd hoped this would be the case. I was figuring the whole 'no riding horses' to be a myth-thing, too. Maybe 'horses are too sacred to be ridden' or 'a mark of Chaos' (maybe too close to being a beast-man???), with the Praxians as stirup-less riders who can only do so because of their mystical union with their mounts (involving rites no civilized person would even want to know about), and even though they don't ride horses, it's still way too close to blasphemy for most non-Praxians to accept.

I'm sure that Jane, like myself, has just seen lots of people talk about Glorantha being Bronze Age for years, when it's really not.

I wanted to walk a world that resonated with Graves 'The White Goddess', Campbell's 'Hero With A Thousand Faces', Mary Renault's 'The King Must Die' & ' Bull From The Sea'

Hi

Remember that 'Your Glorantha Will Vary'.

Thus if you want to do away with Horses and declare that Dragon Pass is no more hilly or rugged than, say, England the I say indulge yourself. Absolutely do not get hung up on details that you might think conflicts with the 'canon'.

And to illustrtate that point I will tell a little story. My campaign took the Player Characters to Whitewall. It turns out that my suppositions about the culture and politics was just plain wrong. Jeff, who is working on a Heroquest book about this exact locale told me so. Oh, a book will be coming out in a couple of months or a couple of years that will contradict what I used in my game. But guess what? It doesn't matter! We had a blast and the stuff I made up worked very well, we had fun and that campaign has now ended, still with no sign of that book!

So as Jane says, you go for it!

Regards
Rob

One possibly interesting way of doing what you want is to steal the idea from Questworld that there are sister worlds of Glorantha, sharing the same metaphysics, prehistory and many of the same gods and cultures, but seperated since Time began.

That way you can steal any idea you like without running into any considerations of canon.

So you perhaps have a chariot-using Solar empire, with ruling god Jalm, presiding over tributary, rebel and enemy kingdoms that also fight with chariots, while in the hills the barbarians and animal-people lurk, ignored because they can´t fight on the plains where real people live.

Somehwere far to the East are the primitive horse hsunchen, an ignored and exotic people who guard the secret of the bond between man and horse, the magics that allow them to transform into centaurs at time of battle.

Hey all

rstites wrote:
However, if you're going to write out horse riders in the Dragon Pass area, the Pol Joni are storm worshipping horse riders that exist as a buffer between Sartar and Prax.  Also, to the west of Sartar in Dragon Pass are the Grazelanders (Pure Horse Tribe) who are also horse riders.  To the north of Prax, in Pent (borders the Lunar Empire in the far north) are the Pentans who ride horses and herd cattle.  Just some peoples to think about what you're going to do.  Also, if your game is in Dragon Pass, do the Lunars have cavalry (including the famous Antelope Lancers - riding the same Sable Antelope as the Praxian Tribe).  If they only have chariots, those won't be of much use in the rugged terrain of Dragon Pass.

Jane wrote:
Yes! I'm not into Campbell myself, but Graves and Renault - yes! HQ is the right vehicle for it, I'm less sure about Glorantha. Shifting the emphasis to get the resonance to work for you will be interesting, but really, whether your hero rides a horse or uses it to draw a chariot is window dressing. What's its name, where did he get it, is it loyal to him? GO for it!

soru wrote:
...Somehwere far to the East are the primitive horse hsunchen, an ignored and exotic people who guard the secret of the bond between man and horse, the magics that allow them to transform into centaurs at time of battle.

soru wrote:
One possibly interesting way of doing what you want is to steal the idea from Questworld that there are sister worlds of Glorantha, sharing the same metaphysics, prehistory and many of the same gods and cultures, but seperated since Time began.

Chariots in East Ralios

Sam.

Many thanks, Sam

The source for the Questworld thing is my vague memory of a very old White Dwarf article on the RQII supplement -  I don't have any inside info on the new generic game coming out.

Oh, interesting. Sorry to have side-tracked...

Mike