Re: Barbarian Adventures

From: ian_hammond_cooper <ian_hammond_cooper_at_...>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 17:19:33 -0000


Gareth wrote:
> Indeed, and there lies the rub. HW suffers a personality crisis
about whether it is for newbies or established gloranthaphiles.< No idea, but I guess it must cause them some heartache over what to include/exclude. Some poople on rpg.net complain Glorantha is too detailed and not ownable enough, some people here complain there is not enough detail. Difficult for Issaries to juggle I would guess. The same argument rages forth with a number of older game universes. SJG really upset Traveller fans by including a map of the Spinward Marches that gave a couple of lines on each world, because they established a 'canon' that 'broke' existing games. RPG players can be hard customers to please.

>The suggestion was made that if Issaries were to specify tribal
lands and whatnot this might conflict with player-established data.<

I know I commented that I did not want to see all the clans for that reason - but I'm just me, not Issaries, and its just my opinion. Argue your case, they may listen.

> Introducing geopolitics is hard when there is no geo to politic. <
IMO BA is about clan based scenarios, not geopolitics (the lunars arepresented as villians who appear from offstage). Geoploitics is I assume to come later, but YMMV. Still I guess this does depend on the kind of game you want to run - I guess BA serves best as a toolkit for playing clan based adventures. Be constructive and let them know what you want to see covered in future releases.

> Well, Harn has some very good material culture stuff, as does L5R,<
I've not seen either of these so I cannot really comment on how comparable they are in terms of infromation to what we have so far. However they are obviously closer to what you want, I can't argue with that.

>But here we are talking about a totally different cattle-based
economy which frames the interactions of its members and which is largely not, IMO, seriously addressed.<
Though an alternative viewpoint, and it is just a viewpoint, would be that such information is the preserve of academic texts and gaming products should draw on them and maybe even refer to them but not try to be them. One common criticism of Glorantha frok non-fans is it fills like I have to have a Phd to play it. Would you not be concerned that going further than TR (which generated that criticism) would just create more of this criticism? People who want this level of detail will probably research it from real-world sources.

But yes, I agree, a gazetter and map would be useful.

Ian Cooper

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