Glorantha is Greg Stafford’s most famous creation. Countless tabletop RPG players have visited this strange land of gods and chaos.

Guide to Glorantha is a massive, two-volume, 800 page gazetteer of Stafford’s world. It weighs in at 14 frickin’ pounds. It marks the first time since 1966 that the world has been detailed in a complete manner (well, as complete as an encyclopedia about a place that doesn’t actually exist can be).

It is glorious. I am not sure there is a tabletop setting so richly detailed and strange. Stafford’s cosmology is elaborate, counting hundreds of gods and about a dozen fleshed out belief systems. They draw on aspects of real world religions, particularly shamanism, and are intrinsic to how the game world works – the gods walk among the people. I would not say that Glorantha is an easy world to get a handle on (I only visited for the first time a couple years back and was thoroughly engrossed, but it took reading basically everything I could get my hands on before I felt I – kinda, sorta – understood it) but that work pays dividends. I love lots of tabletop settings, but they all pale in comparison to Glorantha.

Campaign settings, no matter how singular, are collaborative spaces (at the very least between the designer and the players). Plenty of people have contributed to Glorantha over the years (most RPG books set in Glorantha stress that “Your Glorantha may vary”), but Stafford always retained ownership of the world and had final approval on what was “official” (again, as official as something in a made up world can be).  This ensured Glorantha had plenty of variety, but also felt somehow more gestalt than other worlds. I don’t fear for Glorantha now that Stafford is gone, but I do feel the absence of the one person who truly understood it.