>> Certainly at some point many newcomers are going to want
>> the more in depth coverage of the Digest but by that time they will
>> have realised that none of it is required for understanding or
>> playing in Glorantha.
>
>Digest esoterica may not be required to understand or play in
>Glorantha, but that depends entirely on what you are doing with
>the game. The moment you start heroquesting, or experimenting
>with magic, especialy ritual magic, the esoterica can become
>very relevent indeed.
>
>One of my players is playing a priestess of Natha. He was finding
>it very frustrating, and has a lot of difficulty understanding
>what the affinities and feats meant, and how to use them. You may
>remember me raising this here at the time. I skimmed through
>The Entekosiad, and summarised every mention of Natha or her
>aspects and put down on 3 pages of A4. he now plays the game with
>that next to his character sheet, and uses information from it
>in almost every session. It's become an indispensable tool.
In my view this is a good example of the problem Glorantha has with attracting newcomers. Experienced players respond to areas which are not fully detailed in the current publications with references to unfinished works and articles printed in fan magazines years ago. In a list aimed at newcomers such answers give the impression that such material is essential and discourages them.
The answer is to encourage people to do what the more experienced of us have done all along - if we haven't got an answer make it up. Certainly it causes our version of Glorantha to vary but there's no way Issaries are ever going to publish everything so there will always be gaps for the narrator and players to fill. OK so a year or two down the line something is published which contradicts what you made up, either you ignore the change or let your version be an exception to the general rule.
That's why I say the esoterica is *not* essential, which doesn't mean to say it isn't very useful at times.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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