This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu’s crowing about one of his Christmas gifts, The Meints Guide to Glorantha, by Chaosium president Rick Meints. The book amounts to the definitive guide to all publications to include material on Glorantha in existence (well, all the ones Rick knows about, which is certainly most of them, if not all of them). Entries consist of product photos as well as notes on production and design. He even has entries for Glorantha books that don’t exist. How’s that for exhaustive? There should be a book like this for every RPG line.

* * *

Grab a copy from Chaosium!

* * *

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!Available on iTunes, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients.Send questions, comments or corrections to info@vintagerpg.com.The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

The post MIG3: The Meints Index to Glorantha appeared first on Vintage RPG.

* * *

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!Available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients.Send questions, comments or corrections to info@vintagerpg.com.Follow Vintage RPG on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. Learn more at the Vintage RPG FAQ.Follow Stu Horvath, John McGuire, VintageRPG and Unwinnable on Twitter.Intro music by George Collazo.The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

The post Glorantha appeared first on Vintage RPG.

As treasure books go, this is a pretty good one, especially considering how early it is in RQ’s history. There is a selection of generic magic items that carry stat buffs in the mode of D&D style. There are also many pages of tables. But getting past that, there are some delightfully weird things in here.

The back half of the book details notable items. A few of these are unique. In D&D you’d probably call them artifacts – a shield or weapon that was once owned by a specific hero, say. But the vast majority are cultural items that, while unusual, are still tied to the lives of every day people.

For example, my favorite: rhino fat. Which is exactly what it sounds like, enough rendered rhino fat to cover one person head to toe. When it hardens (ew?), it provides extra armor until it dries up and falls off an hour later. I love it for a couple reasons. One, it sounds totally gross. Two, it doesn’t sound that different from practices you might find in a book about our own ancient cultures. Three, it strongly implies that even the things we might think are familiar in Glorantha, like rhinos, may have surprising properties.

Another favorite: Morokanth thumbs. The morokanth are a weird tribe of tapir-like humanoids that three fingered hands that lack thumbs. Because thumbs are handy (is that a pun?), they found a way to get magical prosthetic thumbs. Not exactly useful for your average adventurer, but it teaches players about the world and paves the way for interesting roleplaying, which is better than a stat buff in my book.

That cover though. I think this is the only example of a cheesecake cover in Chaosium’s history and I kind of love that it gallops right past the chainmail bikini cliche into some kind of weird dominatrix parody.

The post Plunder (1980) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

The cover boasts that the book contains 1200 monsters, which is true. They just aren’t unique monsters. What’s inside is 1200 sets of stats for a pool of about 30 types of monsters. There are a lot of early RQ books like this, just full of stat block after stat block. This one at least has art.

Which I like. Rick Becker definitely has some of those oh-so-sweet old school vibes. I love the cover art with the hand-drawn typography. And the interiors are well rendered. It doesn’t feel terribly distinct, though. The dwarves look like dwarves, the elves look like elves. Everything is cut from the same late 70s, early 80s cloth.

This isn’t entirely Becker’s fault. RuneQuest was still evolving and, as was common at the time, the rules were doing so at a greater pace than the aesthetics. You can see this particularly well with the trolls. Becker’s look pretty much like trolls from the folklore of northern Europe, with a little bit of orc thrown in. But as soon as two years later, with 1982’s Trollpak, Gloranthan trolls are distinct and unlike any other fantasy troll. It took a while for everything else to catch up to the trolls, but in modern RuneQuest, dwarves and elves are downright alien. As they should be! But it definitely makes looking back a curious experience.

The post Foes (1980) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

The approach follows along the lines of the massive, two-volume Guide to Glorantha, though this is more focused. There are two histories, one of Dragon Pass and one of the Lunar Empire, which sets up the two main factions of modern Glorantha (the nearly 40 pages on the Lunar Empire, which embraces ideas of chaos and apotheosis that are taboo in other cultures, is probably the best overview on the subject to date). There is also a broad look at the important non-human races, magic, and Glorantha’s peculiar concept of time.

The rest of the book is given over to the rich mythology of Glorantha, which is the inevitable destination of any Glorantha book, honestly. In this case, it takes the form of a theogony, an intricate accounting of the genealogy of the various pantheons. You’re either going to love or hate Glorantha’s focus on religion. I am generally not one for lore, but I find this stuff fascinating, in part because it seems so weirdly familiar – much of Gloranthan myth is built out of themes and archetypes remixed from the real world myth. Not to sound hippie dippie, but it has a kind of mystical resonance. And unlike a lot of game lore, it figures strongly in construction and execution of the games. Adventuring in Glorantha means interacting with living myth.

The Glorantha Sourcebook is an excellent introduction and guide, and probably the exact amount you’ll ever need to run your own Glorantha campaign. Perhaps best of all is the strong visual aesthetic, which mashes up the styles of many bronze age cultures. Glorantha has kind of lacked this in the past and having it now really breathes life into the world and fires the imagination. Strongly dig that painting of Orlanth, the storm god, in particular.

The post The Glorantha Sourcebook (2018) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

Well, complain no more – the Glorantha Bestiary’s got you covered. Within, you have all you need to know to created elf, dwarf, troll, duck and other non-human PCs (which, honestly, I don’t see why you’d want to create anything other than a duck or a troll – the others are a bit too alien for my tastes for PCs). More importantly, though, it has all the monsters.

I love Glorantha’s selection of monsters. Many of them are super weird (Walktapus! Jackobears!), but they all feel like they have a place in the larger mythological ecosystem. Even conventional monsters seem fresh and exciting (see that Babylonian gargoyle). And there is something about the bronze age trappings of the world that makes things like giant bugs and dinosaurs super compelling (compared to D&D, where they get outshined by more exotic critters).

The post Glorantha Bestiary (2018) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

Inside: lots of goodies. First and foremost is the massive screen, depicting the Gods Wall and a religious procession. It is a great image for players to stare at every game, underscoring the importance of the various Gloranthan religions and their often monumental impact on the world (in this case, literally). There are several maps, a calendar (to track Glorantha’s unusual year), character sheets (both regular and deluxe) and some pre-generated characters, as well as a hefty book of adventures. One revisits Apple Lane, the setting of the first RuneQuest adventure, another tackles some cattle bandits and the final one considerably ups the ante and puts players up against a dragon. Dear god.

In general, I find RuneQuest fascinating while also intimidating. The new edition of the rules does a great job of reducing that intimidation – the way it tackles mechanics builds your confidence up to run it pretty effectively. At the same time, shifting the start date of the campaign world to several years after all the existing RQ material kind of messed me up (despite, you know, never having played RQ), because that earlier material – Snake Pipe Hollow and Borderlands in particular – so perfectly teaches you what you need to know about the campaign world, often without you even realizing it. The Gamemaster Screen Pack attempts to do the same and, though it does it in a different way, I think accomplishes its goal. I feel like I could use this to run a pretty solid opener for a RQ game (even though, at the same time, I lament that I will probably never run Snake Pipe Hollow or the Borderlands campaign now).

The post RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack (2019) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

The first book gives a broad overview of Trolls or, as they call themselves, the Uz. Humans in Glorantha were created by combining the powers of the Light rune with the Man rune, while the Uz were formed out of the Man and Darkness runes. As such, much of troll culture is familiar, while other aspects are quite alien – they can eat anything (even dirt can sustain them), they live underground, they breed giant insects as livestock and steed. More than anything, Trollpak emphasizes that trolls can be just as varied as human in both action and moral complexity and have an important role in the broader society of Glorantha – they aren’t mere monsters or fodder for adventurer swords.

Trollpak conveys this with heaps of detail, sober rumination and a surprising amount of good humor. RuneQuest is well known for subverting its seriousness with doofiness, and topics like troll restaurants and troll sports serve that purpose here.

The second book recontextualizes Uz culture for players desiring to play a troll. The third book is a series of adventures (supplemented by two pamphlets) that explore different aspects of Uz culture, giving players the chance to deal with, trade and in traditional RuneQuest fashion, drink too much booze with them.

Lisa A. Free illustrates the whole thing, which is worth the price of admission (OK, the 1982 price of admission, which was $18 – it tends to run a bit more now).

Really an outstanding piece of work from Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen. A big step, I think, in the evolution of RPGs from meat grinder dungeon crawls to a more thoughtful, narrative driven experience.    

The post Trollpak (1982) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

The history of HeroQuest (previously Hero Wars) is a bit convoluted (it isn’t connected to the Milton Bradley board game in any way) and I will cover it at a later date. For now, know this: for decades, Stafford wanted to develop an RPG that could tackle the exploration of Gloranthan mythology known as heroquesting. HeroQuest Glorantha, designed by Robin D. Laws, is that game.

HeroQuest is a narrative game focused on quick, collaborative resolutions of conflict. Your characters are defined by key words with a numerical rating that get added to die used in contests. Keywords are inherently improvisational – if you have the keyword “soldier,” you can apply that to any contest the involves the skills you successfully argue are part of that profession, like swordplay or horse riding. Because of this, the game easily scales from personal conflicts like man-to-man combat to large scale military battles to cosmic events while keeping resolution a simple die roll.

The omission of heroquesting, the practice of magically taking the role of gods outside of time to re-enact mythological events of importance in order to bring powerful magic back to the material world, from the original RuneQuest is at once strange and understandable. Strange, because heroquesting is integral to how Glorantha works – groups of all kinds do it regularly in order to survive. Understandable, because a system simulating the real world is ill-suited for metaphysical explorations. HeroQuest, though perhaps a bit hard to grok, is a key tool for understanding the spiritual ideas Stafford baked into Glorantha.

The post HeroQuest Glorantha (2015) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

This books is a goddamn masterpiece. Like the latest permutation of the Call of Cthulhu rules, the new RQ accomplishes the onerous task of updating a classic system (read: old, complicated, difficult for modern audiences, yet with legions of resolute partisans enamored of it) into something that is optimized for contemporary players while keeping the flavor of the original intact, and it does it with both skill and style.

Go ahead, flip through the illustrations. Tell me that the art team, particularly Andrey Fetisov, haven’t managed to create something that looks mysterious and intriguing and new while also somehow echoing a recognizable past (both historically and in the context of the visual language of fantasy RPGs). I am betting you can’t. And even if you can, I don’t care: I’m deeply in love with the new look of RuneQuest.

It is a hefty book, but it makes the vast store of Glorantha’s historical and cultural development manageable in game context. Centered in Dragon Pass, an elaborate character history generator roots players in the world while conveying a basic knowledge of the world. As the game progresses and characters become more involved in their cults and tribes, the act of “leveling up” in effect teaches the players the additional information they need to know. Exploring Glorantha can be an overwhelming prospect, but the systems of RQ7 carve off thin slices of the world for players to digest at a measured pace.

I don’t honestly know how involved Stafford was in designing the nuts and bolts of the system, but that is a bit beside the point. This is the perfect system for exploring the world of Glorantha and I can think of no better monument.

The post RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (2018) appeared first on Vintage RPG.