What to get Next?

From: Nick Brooke <100270.337_at_CompuServe.COM>
Date: 26 Jul 96 03:28:03 EDT



Jonathan delurks to ask:

> I have been lurking on this list for sometime. I have not been
> playing RQ for very long. I have owned it for years though. All I own
> is the box set does anyone have any suggestions for what to get next?

If you want to play RuneQuest in Glorantha, I'd recommend buying the books "Sun County" and/or "River of Cradles" as a first purchase. "Sun County" is good because the Sun Dome Templars in Prax have an isolated, xenophobic culture which is fairly easy to get the hang of, but is full of flavour for your characters and adventures (we once characterised them as "uptight Spartans in the Wild West"). "River of Cradles" includes lots of information about the other peoples of the river valley the Sun Domers live in. Both campaign packs include some ready-to-run adventures, and "Shadows on the Borderlands" has more still, all set in the same area. After that, it's "Ho for the High Plaines!" with "Tales of the Reaching Moon" #14 and #15 telling you everything you needed to know about Prax (but were afraid to ask) and including yet more scenarios.

If you like monster-killing, "Dorastor: Land of Doom" and "Lords of Terror" make a good set about the indisputable Evil Bad Guys of Glorantha (the creatures of Chaos), with "The Book of Drastic Resolutions" a neat supplementary source. "Dorastor" has a good campaign setting for new players (the dangerous frontier settlement of the Risklands), but there's a danger that games here could centre around "getting tough enough to fight the bad guys" without careful referee intervention.

If you want to learn about Glorantha as a world, I'd recommend the boxed sets "Glorantha: Genertela" (orange box) and "Gods of Glorantha" (red box) as a starting point. Apart from lots of "factual" material presented from a neutral standpoint, these also have the excellent "What My Father Told Me" and "What The Priest Said" sections: a page or two presenting a culture's worldview (temporal and spiritual) in its own terms. By their nature, these are approachable and player-friendly. I'll also plug our book "Wyrms Footprints" here: although it includes no RQ stats or rules, it does reprint some of the best Gloranthan articles ever written, Greg Stafford's 50+ page series on the Gods and Goddesses of Glorantha, along with another 60 pages of articles (old and new) illuminating various corners of the world.

My advice would be to avoid the recent, non-RuneQuest publications "King of Sartar", "The Glorious ReAscent of Yelm" and "The Entekosiad" first time out: these books contain a fair amount of obscure mythical stuff which would be hard to fit into a game, given the lack of supporting material (cult writeups, character generation rules, overview information, etc.). That said, if you can get the "Dragon Pass" boardgame, "Glorantha" and "King of Sartar", you'll have a useful set of background information on one of the key Gloranthan settings: we old hands have been resenting the lack of immediately-playable material in Sartar since way back when.

If all that information is bewildering, please write again to say where you're wanting to go with your boxed set. Glorantha is a broad setting (one of the few fantasy worlds where you can play just about *anyone*, in *any* kind of story), so there will be a lot of material circulating that may not be immediately useful to your gaming. (Like, I've not even mentioned the Troll books and boxes, etc...).

And, finally, if any silly buggers tell you "Your fucked" (sic) or "Buy everything indiscriminately", report them to me for a quick session of destructive sarcasm. :-)



Nick

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