Stu :
> 1. BE REALISTIC.
> An incredible wave of optimism spurred and accompanied the Hero Wars-led Renaissance of Glorantha; a feeling that was more vital than anything that has developed since. This was what Glorantha had been waiting for. An army of authors was ready to unleash a horde of Gloranthan supplements on the world. Of which few appeared.
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> I wrote 10,000 words for--hang on, let me get this right---the book after the book after the book after Men of the Sea. Thankfully, Rick et al. are pushing a sensible publication model. 'Official' Glorantha has consolidated. There simply isn't the market, nor the resources, to serve Glorantha as some want.
As my contribution to the REALISM theme of this thread, I'll have to start by saying that I'll always be a far better editor than writer.
As an editor, well, the fact that your creativity was vehicled into some dead-end project like that is very dismaying.
In terms of world-building, and still with my editor's hat on, well, there should always be a place for some broader world-building with no obvious gameability, both for the exploration of potentially new areas of gaming, and (more importantly) for colour and GM reading pleasure -- but if this should ever become a primary focus of a publication project, rather than just some colour and background descriptions, you are then stepping away from the concept of publishing RPG materials.
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> 2. FORGET DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS: YOU SHOULD BE BURNING TROLL PAK.
> Yes, I did just type that. Troll Pak is arguably among the greatest of RPG--nevermind Gloranthan--supplements. It's also had the worst influence of any supplement on Gloranthan publishing. The optimism I mentioned above? It was mingled with Gloranthaphiles' arrogance. Glorantha didn't just allow a wealth of splatbooks into diverse topics - it deserved them. Every race, every culture - they all needed their own Troll Pak. Duck Pak. Elf Pak. Dwarf Pak. Nasobeme Pak. We'd devolved into the paradigm of the microstudy.
I'm in two minds about this suggestion.
First, the RQ2 version was amazing, but it morphed into some unnecessarily bloated collection of marginalia in RQ3+, notwithstanding the sheer chutzpah of whomevever was behind the writing and publication of Troll Gods.
Second, yes, absolutely -- the sequels that it deserved weren't TrollPak 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, etc -- but the DwarfPak, ElfPak, DuckPak, and the related DuckPak, GrotaronPak, and other essentials and parodies -- focused nevertheless of gaming, not Gloranthan Encyclopaedics.
> But with Hero Wars? The focus fell on individual races or religions to the detriment of the broader picture, and their relationship with other Gloranthan elements - no, text boxes and bullet-pointed adventure hooks tacked on as an afterthought don't count. It was the paradigm of regional experts and project leaders focusing on narrow topics. Analysis overrode synthesis. We'd lost the sense of perspective.
I worked a fair amount on the French version of HW with Multisim, and this was one of our primary problems with HW. We felt that the game system was diluted into some unnecessary levels of detail, rather than focussing on the structural narrative freedom possibilities of Robin's design ... and we were very unhappy with the counterproductive level of detail provided in the gaming materials ; not just the zillion subcults, but the failure by Issaries to translate Robin's fundamentally simple design into some similar simplicity in the character design and management.
The constant revisions of so-called final texts did not help either :(
For world-building, well, it is clearly more desirable to have a little information about all regions, than to have a surfeit of information about a minority of them.
> Collections were discouraged; they would diminish the possibility of writing in greater depth elsewhere. "We can't let you incorporate X in Y; that would tread on the toes of the person who's writing Z." (Z, incidentally, would never see the light of day.)
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> It's time to stop taking Glorantha apart, and start putting it back together. Recent supplements are a good start.
More than this, the apparent requirement that all published materials should be coherent with each other is a stifling one. Glorantha is a world where multiple points of view and multiple realities coexist, but there has been a very annoying tendency in recent years towards blank description rather than the delicious openness of the 1980s materials.
Multiple realities exist in Glorantha, and contradicting any of them on the fly for simple purposes of story-telling or whatever can be a good thing.
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> 3. WELCOME TO FANTASY EUROPE.
> Related to the above is the next point. Glorantha has always, from the first stories of Snodal, through the Superheroes and Heroes of WB&RM/Dragon Pass, etc. had a human focus. I don't deny this. But this focus was nested in a web of wonderful, magical races and cultures. Trolls. Dwarfs. Ducks. Newtlings. Wasp Riders. Beast Folk. And so on.
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> Look at the WB&RM/Dragon Pass board--which, I believe, is the most brilliant, inspirational piece of art created for Glorantha--and count those massive, magical Dragonewt cities. And roving dinosaurs. Now think of the paradigm of Sartar as explored in the past dozen years. Bit of a disconnect, eh?
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> Recent Glorantha has been written by people whose predominant interest has lain in human cultures. Their efforts are considerable, often brilliant--and nobody else is writing bugger all, so we can't complain. But the trend is noticeable.
I agree.
> Men of the Sea certainly wouldn't get done under the Trade Descriptions Act (1968). There are twenty-seven herobands in Masters of Luck and Death; only three deal with Elder Races in any detail. All of them were written by Peter Nordstrand. If Peter hadn't contributed to the book, I doubt there'd be any. HeroQuest is the worst. Ten homelands. All of them human, bar one. The exception? Puma People. (Don't. Just don't.)
Frankly, I can't stand Hero Bands as they appear to add some quite unnecessary level of detail that most RPGers simply do not care about.
The Homelands are an extremely useful invention, as they provide _exactly_ the sort of starting detail that players can pick up and run with, even though there is a slight imbalance between too much dry technical detail and not quite enough roleplaying information, and it is very disappointing from a world-building perspective that there appears to be no project to describe most of Glorantha using this tool.
> Gloranthaphiles lambasted RuneQuest 3 when it moved from Glorantha to 'Fantasy Europe'. Yet Hero Wars and HeroQuest have spent much of the past dozen years doing something similar.
hmmmmm, well maybe, but only if you consider that vast and unwieldy levels of spot detail are comparable to a generic and shallow world design providing no level at all of gaming detail whatsoever. I mean, it's not as if maps of Europe and European clichés are hard to come by...
Julian Lord
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