Re: Barbarian Adventures

From: contracycle <gamartin_at_...>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 11:03:03 -0000

Firstly, I'd like to apologise for my venom; we've just had an announcement that the site I work as it to close and its all looking rather grim. Needless to say I'm in a pretty foul mood.

> No idea, but I guess it must cause them some heartache over what to
> include/exclude. Some poople on rpg.net complain Glorantha is too
> detailed and not ownable enough, some people here complain there is
> not enough detail. Difficult for Issaries to juggle I would guess.

Yes, and I do sympathise with that. But I think that part of the problem is that Glorantha is differentially detailed. Harrek is a fixed feature; a fair amount of Truth is known about him and an even larger amount of rumour. In that regard, some might see it as too detailed - it certainly means that if you are interested in any sort of consistency you do have to trawl back through the canon. In many other ways its maddeningly vague.

> I know I commented that I did not want to see all the clans for
> that reason - but I'm just me, not Issaries, and its just my
> opinion. Argue your case, they may listen.

Fair point, although a goodly proportion of contributors to this list are contributors in one way or another to Issaries and its products.

>
> > Introducing geopolitics is hard when there is no geo to politic.
<
> IMO BA is about clan based scenarios, not geopolitics (the lunars
> arepresented as villians who appear from offstage). Geoploitics is

Villains cannot, by their nature, be off stage. And once they are on stage, audiences have a tendency to think and wonder about them. IIRC RiG makes it clear more or less from the get go that Orlanth is a proscribed cult; how then can Lunars possibly be off stage? The very act of worshipping Orlanth is virtually a request for said Lunars to appear on stage. What if you players say "cool, lunar symps - I wanna be one/hunt one"; what good is a lunar symp without any Lunars? Like a 7M cultist, say? But what good is a 7M cultist to GM who has very little information on the 7M? They cannot, really, be off stage in the period in which this is apparently set.

> Though an alternative viewpoint, and it is just a viewpoint, would
> be that such information is the preserve of academic texts and
> gaming products should draw on them and maybe even refer to them
> but not try to be them. One common criticism of Glorantha frok non-

Well I wholly agree, and had not suggested otherwise.

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