I have a lot of sympathy for Peters position. I don't think Glorantha is doomed, but it certainly needs to be something different if it is to grow and succeed. Which is hopefully what Issaries Inc plans to do.
What you see on the digest, the nitpicking and esoterica, is in part because what we have on the digest is a community with a lot of people trying to create their Glorantha, trying to work out a particular aspect, or come up with a few ideas that fit nicely with the rest of it. An internally consistent world created by the enormous number of people involved creatively in Glorantha, especially with the depth of some parts of Glorantha, is awfully hard and messy. And a lot of that takes place on the digest.
What we want to present to the newcomer is not this messy act of creation. What we want to present is products. A whole bunch of cool books, with the important aspects of the world simply presented, and then a whole bunch of cool adventure suggestions. That is how to bring new people in. Glorantha is not growing because the products are not there.
Now, imagine that there was a simple book, Gloranthan in style and packed full of introductory information - not always reliabe, but interesting and with lots of obvious gaming ideas. Imagine that not only Prax, but Sartar and/or large parts of Peloria were mapped in sufficient detail to set a campaign there without making it up, and scenarios set in those areas where available. Imagine that there was even a book or two of fiction. Imagine even a few other gaming products that could get you interested in the universe without you having to be into table-top roleplay (cards, miniatures games, freeform rules). Then suddenly Glorantha would be dragging in new players. But we don't have any of these things yet, because Glorantha doesn't have a publisher.
Klyfix
> Perhaps part of our problem is that the current view of Glorantha seems
>to invalidate almost everything published up to RQ III; the Monomyth record is
>wrong, the gods have no objective reality, all the stuff of about the God's
>Age and Time is only the Orlanthi view, all that was written about Yelmalio
>was wrong, and the Dara Happen stuff (The Fortunate Succession and so on) are
>more valid anything that's been published before.
Nope. The approachability to new players is the problem, and they don't care about this stuff. All this stuff might alienate some RQ2 veterans intent on recapturing that Golden Age - but the vast majority of it has almost no impact on actual play (unless you happen to be playing in Peloria, or running incredibly powerful heroquest games). What new players need is stuff they can get their hands on and play with.
>Sometimes that's been
>expressed with a certain amount of arrogance.
As has the converse view.
> And perhaps Glorantha has become so arcane that no beginner could
>possibly comprehend it.
A beginner doesn't need to comprehend its totality, they just need to be able to play in it. Its an enormous task, for example, for a beginner to understand the whole of World of Darkness, with its many dozens of supplements, half dozen games systems (not counting free form (another 4) or card (another 2 or 3?) game systems). Its too contains multiple, often incompatible, explanations of cosmology (and some extremely crap rules to boot). But White Wolf are adept at giving players exactly what they need to play, in a nice package, and letting them go ahead and play and leaving it to GMs to introduce the other aspects of their own world if and when they want to.
There is no reason why Glorantha can't do that. Except no one is publishing Gloranthan supplements right now, so we need to wait until they start, and until then a lot of creative energy that could be put into designing products washes around on the digest.
Think about it - the truly great Gloranthan supplements, the ones that even the wider gaming community, not fanatic about Glorantha, acknowledged as really good, where the ones that you could pick up, read, and start a campaign with. Griffon Mountain. Borderlands. And there is absolutely no reason why such a supplement couldn't be published about Peloria, or Fronela, or anywhere else. And then new people would be playing it, and then getting interested in Glorantha, and then buying all sorts of stuff.
Cheers
David
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