Guy Hoyle asked
> If you were going to create a new setting campaign, > what lessons have you learned from Glorantha that you would apply to your > new setting?
I started thinking about this when I read Nick’s ‘Ten Things I hate about Glorantha’ web article, so my response is a bit of a mix of the two threads. Subject of course to the usual disclaimers and biases...
Glorantha has a wonderful mix of three elements: an all-pervasive mythic structure, an elaborate and lovingly (co-) created history and culture, and a wacky sense of fun. Try to keep all three. Though vary the mix.
There are other models for building worlds (strict analogue, trad
fantasy-derived, literary, spiritual, linguistic (phut!), masturbatory
(Duck Fornicators of Gor...), but Glorantha’s rich mythologic is fairly
unique in both its depth and its relevance to game structures and to the
everyday life of its inhabitants. (This point is too obvious, but worth
stating explicitly). The price and reward?
There *are* general principles. Map them broadly, map them early.
If you’re going to fiddle with the seasons and with time, state clearly its effects on aging, gestation, pregnancy. Different seasons mean different plant and animal processes, effects on migration, growth, breeding. (One personal pet Gloranthan hate: “squeeze and stretch” seasonal conversions from earthly calendars.) Define your basic ecologies, not just the weird hit-point monsters. Think seriously about plants that bloom in Dark Season, about the ‘armoured’ blooms that arise in Storm. Etc. Etc. Etc.
3. Home Sweet Stead.
Start with one small area (your pc base).
Spending eight months detailing Lunar-Uz brothel architecture in pre-conquest Tarsh is wasted if your Praxian campaign lasts two sessions and then becomes a Babylon 5-CoC crossover cause ‘all this detail is just too weird man’.
4. Demi-Birds For Courses.
Consciously choose your subgenre.
Is your campaign Pythonesque, MGF (loud or subdued), monster-bashing,
storytelling, or some mix? Is it the traditional ‘A duck, a trollkin, a
Storm Bull, two humakti and Malkoni sorcerer named Bruce’ on a ten day
Cook’s Tour of Genertela (with two days in Jolar cause we was geased)
searching for The Big Widget (TM)? A stead-based mud and cattle dung
lifequest where you have clan splits over the turnip crop? A trading
mission into strange new lands? ‘How I Became the Real Argrath and freed my
homeland from the Lunar *spit* yoke’? Each of these campaign types and
playing styles require developing very different types of background.
(Glorantha has to accommodate all of the above: individual campaigns don’t).
5. Eight Uses For Trollkin Urine.
Keep your vision broad, but love the fiddly bits.
6. Nurture Creativity.
Nurture creativity both individual and collective. Listen to co-creators
(they’re also called ‘players’). Put out half-baked ideas onto the Digest,
and be overwhelmed by the response. Also, celebrate the individuality of
your own campaign and vision.
7. Ordinary People, Ordinary Lives.
Focus down on what’s important. Concentrate on two key areas (subject to Point 4). For me this means -
Don’t be afraid to name your analogues. Steal widely. Read deeply. Analogues are a tremendous help in summarising a culture, but there’s a tendency to take them *much* too literally. Make sure that people understand what an analogue means. (Oh that a definition could be writ large across the top of every Digest.) As a rule of thumb, I’d suggest that a cultural analogue might describe something like 60% of the technology and society of a given group, and perhaps 20% of its historical development. Nothing more.
Cultural evolution is non-deterministic. Ideational realms can branch in a multitude of different directions. So your analogue culture is vaguely Anglo-Saxon. Should this preclude you introducing say, individualistic Amerindian type spirituality? No! Especially if it’s an isolated frontier area with few temples or priests. Just make sure you visualise and follow through the consequences into other areas of everyday life.
9. It’s Magic Stoopid.
Glorantha is a magical world. Before introducing any custom or artefact, think about magical alternatives, and follow through the effects of such alternatives.
A follow-on from Point 9. Take nothing for granted. Let the alien nature of your world surprise and delight you.
Orlanthi use a Norse/Anglo-Saxon/Celtic/ barbarian analogue, right? But today let them use buttons. Tomorrow let them brew beer using hops. Next week we’ll give them spinning wheels. And printed, scaled maps. And mounted cavalry tactics. And mixmaster slice&dice milk churners. We’ll give them C20 western ideologies that emphasise excessive individualism, communal neglect, material greed, abstraction, reductionism and sexual preference-based identities. Very soon we end up with barbarians that we’re likely to meet at the local video store - in other words, SCAers. *Horror!*. (This is a common trend on the Digest).
Give your examples from *within* the framework of a given culture. ‘Universal’ Godlearner cult writeups: JUST SAY NO.
Use traditional (i.e. stereotyped) fantasy elements sparingly. Beware elves, dwarfs and dragons. If you have to have them, re-invent them. (For the record, I have never, ever run a mostali in any of my campaigns. IMG they’re just too embarrassing and anachronistic to exist. Doubtless you will have biases of your own.)
If you can’t do it properly, don’t do it at all. And if you do it properly, it will be too complicated for people to want to absorb. “Anyong ha shimnika?”
If you Meet the Monomyth Upon the Road, (a) call it to adventure, (b) temp it with refusal, (c) face it with a threshold guardian.. (z) kill and bury it.
Greg’s thinking introduced many of us to Joseph Campbell, and to the richness, power and beauty of mythology. We’re grateful for that. But too rigid a Campbellism, especially with regard to the Monomyth and the journey of the Hero, can blind us to other ways to herodom, other paths and other strengths.
Include at least one race that epitomises nobility and endurance in the face of suffering and the cruel futility of existence (ducks) and one silly throw-away race that everyone thinks is a stoopid joke (trollkin).
Include lots of Maidenstone Archers and multi-hitpoint monstrosities left over from CoC campaigns.
If your intended audience includes non-californians, go easy on the wacky californianisms.
Richard the Tiger-Hearted. King Brien - before or *after* the re-spelling
(“He’s not the Liberator, he’s just a naughty boy.”) Leonardo the
Scientist. Puleeessse.
(Also applies to wacky Brit schoolboy humour, Strine Attacks and Seattle
farm jokes).
20. Gregged. Nicked. Mobbed.
If your name is going to be turned into a verb, try to decide ahead of time what its going to mean.
(I note that the association between my own name and ‘anthropowanking’ has
been immortalised in the Meintz Index. The only (small) consolation is that
I invented the term.) :)
21. Yelmalio Doesn’t Exist.
Never underestimate the value of muddy thinking.
21. Digest It.
Establish a mailing list where every point above can be argued against, rebutted and reinterpreted.
And finally...
22. Follow Your Bliss.
You’re here to have fun. So have it. None of us are in this for the money. Glorantha is neither a work of art, nor an excuse for a personal jihad/crusade. It’s a ramshackle, living breathing group experiment. Love it.
(So this point contradicts Point 19? of course it does! They’re both true
(see Point 1a)). The course of MGF never did run smooth...
There we go. Now I’m off to contradict myself on Point 14.
Cheers
John.
nysalor_at_primus.com.au John Hughesnysalor_at_yahoo.com
There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
>From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
that is not our own, and much more, not ourselves.
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
— Wallace Stevens.
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #314
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