This may well be true -- for *experienced* players. I can call myself experienced, since I started playing in Glorantha with RQII. But there are darn few *new* players coming into the game/world, and that was true even when it was still in print. I believe that the roots of the problem go deeper than the lack of support and poor products of the early Avalon Hill years, and this problem may well continue with the new Gloranthan RPG.
I speak on RPG panels at local conventions, and get a lot of feedback from my RQ scenarios web page. Almost without exception, the RQ fans I talk to started playing in Glorantha back in the days of RQII. Younger gamers, if they know of Glorantha at all, talk vaguely of it as a boring, over-detailed, unfriendly world for a small cabal of detail-wonks -- not unlike Tekumel, for example, or Harn. At least, that's what they say when they talk to me about it.
> If you feel you have to pay attention to the GC (gloranthically correct)
> esoterica and over-complication produced in encyclopediac volumes by the
> people on the digest and let it cramp your style, you have only yourself
> to blame.
Um, that's not my problem. Among the group(s) I play with I *am* a Gloranthan authority. Talmudic discussions on fine points of Gloranthania have slowed down the games I've been in, but my point is that new people are being scared away from the *setting*, and that won't change with a change of *system*.
Old RQ/Glorantha people like me can keep on playing, but the lack of new players and the apathy/antipathy of young gamers towards Glorantha makes it hard to maintain a game as older players die, get married, or grow up and lose interest in gaming. :-)
> Glorantha is, first and foremost, a campaign setting.
As has recently been pointed out, originally Glorantha was Greg Stafford's fantasy world, not related to RPGs at all. But in another sense, your point is valid: if Glorantha hadn't been used as the setting of a RPG, I very much doubt that many people would have heard of it. There would be no Gloranthan Digest now. King of Sartar and the rest would probably not have been published.
What I'm trying to say is that Glorantha is *still* likely to live or die by its success as a game setting.
> So, you have yourself to blame for your bitterness. Well, not
> entirely, since the orthodox attitude on the digest can be pretty
> irritating at times.
"Bitter" might be too strong a word for it. I'm more annoyed at the lack of support for classic RQ than I am at the state of Glorantha lore. I've never kowtowed to any Gloranthan "true scripture". But it really bugs me that classic RQ loyalists have been left out in the cold, although I'm hoping that the new RQ-Rules list will give some good support.
-->Pete
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Maranci pmaranci_at_tiac.net Malden, MAEditor, Interregnum RPG/Science Fiction APA/magazine -- email for info. Interregnum WWW home page: http://www.tiac.net/users/maranci/index.html FRP adventures, art and more: http://www.tiac.net/users/maranci/rq.htm
End of The Glorantha Digest V5 #287
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