After Newt, two five fingers wot I learnt from Gloranthan world building ...
(For complete balance, look at some of my previous wrestling with this question:
Do ducks have teeth?
http://www.etyries.com/metaphys/ducks.htm (1994)
or this:
Campaign Myth-management
http://web.archive.org/web/20080719153220/http://mythologic.info/questlines/mythmanage.html (1996)
or this:
What The Arkati Trickster Shaman Taught Me
http://web.archive.org/web/20080719150133/http://mythologic.info/questlines/trickster.html (2000-ish))
It's a continuing meditation. Here's the latest installment ...
GLORANTHA: STATE OF THE LOZENGE 1619 ST / 2011 CE THE FIRST FINGER
Glorantha was once a roleplaying world. (Yeah, yeah I know it still is, at least partially, at least in theory, but this is Immod. I burned a hero point, ok?) It had neat ideas, great ideas, naff ideas, stoner ideas, but above all fun ideas, and we loved them all, even the ducks and grotarons. It was a game you were meant to play, not just read about or buy to keep your collection complete.
There were two main ideas in creative tension. Everything in Glorantha was stolen, it was a game world, a dumping ground for every over-played, over-ripe seventies fantasy trope, and that made it great for creative play al la Howard and Leiber and Moorcock and Arneson. Glorantha also had a unique genre schtick: an all-encompassing Eliadian approach to myth that governed every aspect of life. It was the interplay between these two that made Glorantha great.
Then gradually, Glorantha became less of a game world and more of a Work of Art(TM), supposedly some Tolkienesque Monolith of Great Insight (TM), except we seemed to have skipped the actual stories and gone straight to the Christopher Tolkien sub-literary notes and scraps phase. It became more serious. It became more turgid. It became unreadable.
There were still rays of light, moments of genius, but the trend was definite and strong. Detail. Background. Repetitive mythologic. Stodge.
It's a common criticism of Glorantha that it's all structure and no story. Ok, so scenarios have never been our strong point - though Loz is on board now, so maybe things will change. When I first bought Runequest in 1980, there was a single page of future history that outlined the course of the Hero Wars in broad strokes - Pavis Rebellion, Dragonrise, liberation of Boldhome, and on to Glamour. THIRTY YEARS on, and in official publications, we're still waiting for the story to START. Dates were moved forward. Events were put off. Then King of Sartar gave us even more detail. In 1990. And we waited 20 more years.
If we've moved forward from campaign date 1608 ST through to 1619 ST or so in thirty real-time years of official scenarios, that means we can expect the campaign for the Fall of Glamour (1670-ish) in about 2190. CE. (If man is still alive. If woman can survive. Woo oh...)
We almost got to Dragonrise, but then the Sartar campaign cycle was cut dead and replaced with several years of (sigh) deep background scribbles. And remember all those years of Hero Wars advertising... The Hero Wars are between Coke and Pepsi... etc. etc. etc. False advertising. Still waiting. Patiently.
Hope lives on.
(I suspect the Hero Wars will never be playable in the sense they were originally intended. Its mainly due to the cult structure and its lack of a moral centre - theists do what their gods do, nothing more. Fire fights Storm because that's the way its always been done. If your god is a windy teenage anarchist or a death dealing denizen of Death (TM) then you got to be like them. No choice. Until we destroy the gods. I'd buy that module ...)
2. Stick with what you're good at.
We're coming up to thirty five years of Glorantha as a shared world. Stafford's mythologics. Perrin's bright SCA-tinged humanism (sadly mourned). Petersen's organisation and structure. Reaching Moon's humour and creative imperative. Galeotti's labyrinthine subtleties.
Some things work - cosmological mythologic, level of detail, core of wonder and humour, and the rich and varied voices of hundreds of co-creators.
Some thing's don't - absolutist cult structures (nicked straight from DnD), scrappy, largely meaningless over-detail, and the new found idolatry of the One True Vision. Where the work of a discordian, chaotic trickster finger is tamed into its complete antithesis.
We need to celebrate, but also to name and shame.
Which leads to
2a. Cut away the failures.
Thirty five years. What works? Sartar works. Prax works, kinda, though its been ignored of late and a sense of the ludicrous is essential for sustained interaction. The Lunar Empire works, though we still don't have a decent vision of daily life. The West could work, if people would only stop stuffing Trotsky around and get his stuff out there.
But the East, the Isles, Pamaltela? Thirty years since they were first systematically described, and almost nothing of use has come out about them. Time to forget 'em? I've no doubt that there will be chapters about them in the next reprint of the World Guide, but you have to ask, WHY?
3. Don't fuck with established gods.
Will Vinga ever be mentioned in a SMJR publication? We can only wait and see.
4. Try to come up with at least one new idea every three years.
Or even every five. Endless repetition of the same basic tropes is not creativity. Genre fatigue is real, but it can be overcome.
5. In lieu of creativity, publish it again!
5a. Or announce that you'll publish it again. Even if you don't. Press releases for vapourware supplements have their own kind of artistry.
THE SECOND FINGER
There is a general perception that Glorantha is becoming more conservative. Or maybe its eighties feel and structure is just becoming more dated.
The creative network that once spawned stories and myths and scenarios and discussions and web sites and conventions is but a shadow of what it was five years ago. Boys-own adventure isn't what it used to be.
The basic Gloranthan mythologic is that whatever is True, whatever is Real, comes from the past, the deep past. In a value-neutral sense, it has to be conservative. The subtlety of Glorantha's mythic mechanisms are muted by its absolutist sense of religion and cult: there is little room for sociology, for change, for people. A basic criticism of the entire Eliade/Jung/Campbell approach to myth is that people don't matter, only ideas ('archetypes') do: Ideas can only repeat themselves, people can only repeat deep patterns. Derived from these ideas, Glorantha suffers in the same way.
There are ways around all of these. We need to work them.
2. Be aware that real people will try to play or read this stuff.
Once we prayed to the Gift Carriers for an end to typos and Kygor Litor reprints. Now we pray that the gods will send us an editor, and a publication that doesn't strip mine the past. How much **really bad** runic poetry can one supplement endure? Pages of it, apparently. :)
Mongoose Runequest showed us we can still attract new players, that the knowledge wall is not absolute. Even if its pretty high ...
3. Don't listen to anyone. Do your own Glorantha.
Doubly so on the Immod List. Stay tuned and in a week or so I'll post a rebuttal to every point I've just made.
In the meantime, reboot. Do G2! Do away with cult gender restrictions and rule-constipated subcult guffery. Play beefy male Ernaldans in a world free of Mostali. Let women worship Orlanth again, like we used to do in Pavis. Question the gods. Make Kallyr a duck. Allow cults to be affected by human needs and aspirations. Give your NPCs stats if you want to. Its your Lozenge.
4. STAY WELL AWAY FROM GREG'S TRASH CAN. Please. The absolute nadir of this came a month or so ago, when the breathless re-discovery of some of Greg's ancient Second Age population maps of outer Uz-bekistan folk dancing clans was announced with the amazing offer that fan magazines might be able to publish them. Hold the presses!
Then ask, 'Why would they want to?'
If it's useful, publish it yourself. Or put it on a web site where the three experts on Second Age Uzbekistan folk dancers can have their fan boy orgasms. And possibly write something playable.
5. If you inherit a world-wide network of co-creators who co-operate in world-building, writing myths and stories and running discussion lists and support websites, nurture it. Encourage it. Celebrate it. Don't be afraid of it.
So what *is* Glorantha, really? What can it be?
Have fun.
DimJim
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