> What the hell are you talking about? Where do you get all this stuff from?
Welcome to the den of the Glorantha-maniacs...
> This is what I hate about being a newbie to Gloranta. There is so much information and I don't know even where to start. Is there something like 7 or 8 rulesets now?
> Confused!!!
My take on this issue is that the rulesets hardly matter as far as background information is involved. It may take a little experience to recognize rules artifacts in the presentation of the background material and then to ignore what doesn't fit your gaming.
Basically, there are two quite different sets of roleplaying rules that have each seen several generations of development and adaptation, with side branches that may have left data you can mine for your purposes. It is quite hard to get access to all the information if you look it up for yourself.
There are currently two online tools that allow you to check where older information on a given topic has been published, and if you are lucky, there will be a useful abstract. If there is none, you should address the people behind those projects about it, and they might make it a higher priority to make that information accessible.
One is the Glorantha Wiki, a wikia-project run by a bunch of Glorantha scholars:
http://glorantha.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
The other is a reference to (by now mostly out of print) sources of older Glorantha material with a list of associative links to other facts or topics that gets erratically updated whenever the maintainer (myself) gets interested:
http://www.glorantha.com/tools/buserian/search
Between these two (and of course ordinary search engines), you will be able to find at least some bones of the information about e.g. Black Hralf. Neither of these is really catering for newcomers.
There are two major collections of Gloranthan facts that may both be mostly out of print, one for the RuneQuest lineage of games and one for the HeroQuest lineage.
The RuneQuest material was bundled around 1988 and published as "Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars" as a box with three flimsy A4 booklets. (Flimsy at least after decades of intensive use...) All the regional material not about Genertela had been cut and published much later as "Missing Lands" in the Stafford library, and can still be obtained. The Buserian index should be able to convey about 70% of the information in the Genertela Box, but spread over the multitude of interlinked entries there.
MRQ's "Glorantha - the Second Age" serves in a very similar function and is way more recent, but as the name says, limited to around 900 years of Gloranthan history rather than the 1620 years of material including the Third Age.
The basic collection of Gloranthan background for the HeroQuest lineage of rules was "Glorantha - Introduction to the Hero Wars", published as first background material for the earliest incarnation of those rules.
If you are looking for general information on any region (known at the time of publication of these collections), there should be at least some references in these, and they should be covered by both online projects, giving you hints where else to look for information, and what might be related topics.
For a more newcomer-friendly introduction, you'll be well serviced by picking up a regional background book.
Right now I know of (but haven't read yet) two recent sources for Loskalm - Jamie Revell's Book of Glorious Joy which details Third Age Loskalm for rules of the HeroQuest lineage, and MRQ's Fronela which gives information about Second Age Fronela for the RQ lineage of rules.
Old material can (and will) have information which has been since overruled or at least reinterpreted, because every writer for Glorantha can only try to base his writings on the information accessible to him, and in case of conflicting information often has to decide which of the presentations to follow.
Then there is the influence of fan-based material which wound its way into Glorantha canon because few writers isolate themselves completely from the ideas and concepts tossed about in this environment and its precedessors, fanzines, and freeform games and similar convention material. Often the web can give you forensic traces how certain ideas were introduced, pruned, rehashed, repruned, and finally included as matter-of-fact by-sentence statements or fully developed new material.
All of this makes Glorantha a living environment offering a damn whole lot of depth. And all of this makes Glorantha look as a daunting environment to enter.
So what?
Grab one of the regional descriptions, and go with the information there. It is like learning a foreign language - use what you know, look up only what you absolutely cannot do without, and make good use of hands and feet getting those things across that you don't have the right words for.
Any topic you ask about here runs the danger of being ground to death by (us) nitpickers and scholars, but usually the first few replies and maybe one or two generations of follow-ups tell you all you need to know. Ignore the confusing stuff afterwards, or ask for a concise abstract of a specific facet. People here will usually try to offer one, often along with their own set of pet peeves and preferences.
If anything strikes your imagination, pick that up, ignore the rest. Glorantha experience has a lot to do with filtering, unless you are one of those hopeless nerds who strive (or claim) to know everything. Many a cool addition to the canon comes from fresh inspiration.
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