King of Sartar (currently in print as an Issaries book and begotten solely by Greg Stafford) gives us a relatively detailed and straightforward account of how the Maboder tribe refuses to fight for Sartar against the Lunars in 1602 and thus earn the hatred of their Telmori neighbours and all anti-Lunar fanatics who attack and destroy them in 1607.
The Lunars initially treat this as no big deal but are driven to intervene by the apparition of the Maboder ghosts at their holy day ceremonies and send Jomes and his peltasts against the Telmori. Jomes defeats them pretty comprehensively and is given the Maboder lands as his duchy of Wulfland which is settled by his veterans and other lunar colonists.
John E Boyle uses this background as the basis for his novel the Road of Kings part of which is considered Gloranthan enough (despite the odd Runequestism like everyone knowing healing spells) to be included in Visons of Glorantha published by Issaries only four weeks ago.
However now in the Glorantha book the Maboder tribe are characterised as rebels against the lunar empire who are punished by being slaughtered or exiled and have lunar colonists settled on their land.
If Issaries/Greg are going to continue producing naff retconns that replace interesting and complex situations with lots of gaming potential with ones that are flat, boring and obvious can they at least be consistent enough to restrict them to retconns of material that is safely out of print and that doesn't contradict material they produced a couple of weeks earlier?
After all if you want examples of the Lunars being beastly to rebellious Sartar tribes there are several good examples already published including the lengthy write-up of Starbrow's rebellion in both KoS and Wyrms Footprints - both sources still in print - Retconning out of existence the most detailed description we have of a Sartarite tribe other than the Colymar just smacks of laziness and change for change's sake.
Other than this there's a lot of good new Pelorian material in the book and it's nice to see so much of the old historical material from Cults of Terror back again after 20 years out of print.
But the real shame is the abysmal production quality of this and the Hero Wars books which barring the covers and box are so inferior in design, layout and artwork to virtually every Gloranthan 'fan' publication that has been produced in the last few years by amateurs in their spare time that it's positively embarassing.
If Issaries really think proper bookshops are going to carry publications that can't even get the table of contents right and include obviously photocopied at the last minute inserts then you must know some pretty tolerant/undemanding booksellers.
Is it really so difficult to produce decent tables of contents, indexes, maps and character sheets or to run a basic spelling and grammar check? (and let's not forget that Hero Wars bought separately has 'everything you need to play Hero Wars' except character sheets, maps, creature stats or detailed examples of play - although the character sheets are no great loss as with no design skills whatever I managed to produce a better character sheet in 5 minutes by cutting and pasteing the Kallai sheet from the website into Word, reducing the ridiculously wide margins and resizing the boxes to allow you to write in mental skills and affinities without resorting to 'Write Tiny Letters on Grains of Rice 5w')
Anyway I could rant on at some length in this vein and I actually quite LIKE the basic rules system and the books - it's just infuriating to wait so long for something and then see excellent material produced so sloppily and it really does worry me that genuine newbies who buy the books and don't have access to the ever-growing errata or these lists are going to end up binning them as so amateurishly produced as to be virtually unplayable.
Roger McCarthy
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