Glorantha previews?

[Turloigh]

This same problem is usually given as the biggest reason for the failure of the Dragonlance setting. After you read the books, what else is there to do? The threat has been taken care of.

Then I suppose Star Wars and Lord of the Rings RPGs aren't for you, either... :wink:

Seriously - IMHO, you can still create stories that are only slightly related, or completely unrelated, to the Main Story. If the setting isn't big enough, it grows with your game.

 

[Ravage]

if the villians of the 3rd age were the Lunars....

...who are the two forces in this systems timeline. EWF? Hardly the evil empire?

Me, I think both the God Learners and EWF qualify as Evil Empires if you accept the idea that the road to hell can sometimes be paved with good intentions.

To quote the HW Glorantha book (now I started reading up on the time period)...

The EWF...
"their type of mystic practice required huge amounts of worship. To raise the vast energies for maintaining this type of magic caused many people to be severely oppressed. After a time they no longer believed that their leaders could return the Golden Age to them, and begain revolting. Aided by the foreign gods, the rebellions spread, civil war ensued and then the dragonewts destroyed the EWF in 1042"

Ok, so that sounds like the start of a campaign plot for me to be thinking about prior to release Oppressed people wanting freedom... Sounds just the ticket for Gloranthan gaming to me!

Mind you, "aided by foreign gods" reference... Hmm... wonder if theres more info out there alreayd to explain this one or detailling the coverage of the EWF.

As for the God learners... Thats more harder to get my head around and will wait and see whats explained....

Ravster

 

[Urox]

As for the God learners... Thats more harder to get my head around and will wait and see whats explained....

While we don't have all the details, we know that the EWF was wiped out in one big secret attack.

I'm not sure if it's clear how the God Learners eventually disappeared -- yes, a lot of places were sunk over the years, but Mid-Sea Empire should have been all over the place.

I know there have always been hints of secret enclaves of the God Learners in the Third Age, but I don't think it was ever really detailed.

Rob Laws blog says the Glorantha:TSA will have one locale as a campaign setting, but doesn't say which one.

Hopefully we'll get some previews of the Gloranthan stuff soon.

 

[SwordSage]

I was thinking that a fun Second Age campaign would be playing guys whose job it is to hunt down and kill the God Learners. Or playing God Learners desperately trying to outrace the Closing in order to preserve their knowledge and further their research.

 

[kpmcdona]

I was thinking that a fun Second Age campaign would be playing guys whose job it is to hunt down and kill the God Learners. Or playing God Learners desperately trying to outrace the Closing in order to preserve their knowledge and further their research.

I particularly like the latter option. It has a nice doomed horror feel to it since everyone knows the Gift Carriers of the Sending Gods get all the God Learners in the end... don't they? <evil grin>

http://glorantha.temppeli.org/digest/ndaily/1994.05/3938.html

~Kevin McD

 

[Urox]

Doing some surfing, I found the below (http://glorantha.temppeli.org/digest/ndaily/1994.06/4691.html).

Outright labelling the God Learners as min/maxers will make for some interesting role-playing...

THE GOD LEARNERS' STICKY END
The God Learners, at first, were Heroquesters. They went everywhere on the heroplane, and learned all the ropes. They also developed a certain mindset -- the gods were expressed as collections of Runes, spells, and POW. In a sense, they approached the world of Glorantha just like a minimaxer. They _were_ minimaxers. Scientific ones, but minimaxers.

To learn more about the hero plane, they did many experiments. The Goddess Switch, Temple of All Trickster, and other such are well-recorded. Other, more successful, projects of theirs are still around today (Caladra & Aurelion, the suppression of Teleos, etc.) In the process of their learning, they eventually discovered a most powerful secret -- a "trick" if you will that they were able to use to do amazing magical feats. Few could withstand the God Learner magic in warfare. Certainly the Waertagi could not.

Now, as they continued their heroquesting and experimentation, they gradually began performing the equivalent of destroying the ozone layer -- as heroquest paths were destroyed forever, or merged with others, so the Godplane began to alter. The Godplane is a complex place, and the God Learners were unable to predict the exact results of their actions (just as Western civilization was unable to predict that one effect of widespread DDT use was the near-extinction of many bird populations).

In the end, the Godplane was rendered unstable. After a while, it "shifted" on its own, moving back to a new, stable position. The entire nature of the universe was changed. One of the changes was that the God Learner Secret was no longer possible to exist. Yet it still existed. The universe reacted by sending the Gift Carriers to expunge every single vestige of the now-impossible God Learner Secret. It was part of natural law, like gravity. That is one reason that the destruction was so complete -- the God Learners themselves acted as weak points in the universal fabric that attracted "antibodies", which proceeded to wipe them out.

THE MONOMYTH
One of the God Learner "secrets" was that the Monomyth was/is TRUE! They found that when they went on an Orlanthi heroquest in which he slew the sun, they could "jump tracks" at the Solar contest, and now go along the Yelm side of the quest. There's been a lot of spouting about how there are different aspects of reality in Glorantha, and the Sun God is "Elmal" for the Orlanthi and the "Sun Dragon" for the Kralori, etc. but the God Learner usage of creative heroquesting demonstrated the essential unity of Gloranthan myth and made sense out of the jungle of fairy tales and legendry that had existed up to that time.

Now that the God Learners are all gone, the Monomyth is gradually disassembling, and the once-useful unity is degrading back into the myth-jungle that existed before Arkat's time. The reassertion of local beliefs that occurred at the end of the Second Age (re: the destruction of the False Dragon Ring and the Six-legged Empire) also played its part in the Monomyth's break-up.

 

[andakitty]

*sigh* The more I learn about the 2nd Age the less inclined I am toward it. It sounds like one has the option of working for the bad guys or working for the bad guys. I'll still have a look at it, but right now it doesn't look like my sort of setting. Any more info would be appreciated.

Especially, a preview would be helpful.

 

[HyrumOWC]

*sigh* The more I learn about the 2nd Age the less inclined I am toward it. It sounds like one has the option of working for the bad guys or working for the bad guys. I'll still have a look at it, but right now it doesn't look like my sort of setting. Any more info would be appreciated.

Especially, a preview would be helpful.

OTOH, I'm excited. I've always been a bit partial to the God Learners and find them absolutely fascinating.

Hyrum.

 

[kpmcdona]

*sigh* The more I learn about the 2nd Age the less inclined I am toward it. It sounds like one has the option of working for the bad guys or working for the bad guys. I'll still have a look at it, but right now it doesn't look like my sort of setting. Any more info would be appreciated.

Well... The "bad guys" are all we have talked about in this thread so far, but there are plenty of "good guys" to be found resisting the bad guys if that is the sort of game you want to play. As I said, my game will follow the Carmanians as they liberate Peloria from the EWF. Although the Carmanians could be viewed as bad guys in other historical periods, in the year 908 ST they look pretty good to me.

Other good guys would be just about anyone whose people were oppressed under either of the two big empires in much the same vein as the modern Orlanthi vs Lunars setting.

Especially, a preview would be helpful.

I agree! Although if we wait much longer it won't be a preview any more.

 

[Urox]

It sounds like one has the option of working for the bad guys or working for the bad guys.

The only "real" bad guys in Glorantha are chaos creatures. Everything else is relative.

For example, there is no nuetral word for sorceror in the heortling (orlanthi) language. Instead they only have a word for bad sorceror (meldrath? can't remember the word...).

 

[Lord Twig]

Same here Hyrum. I find that I think very much like a God Learner. I would want to search to find the Truth (capital T), whatever that might be.

I find it interesting that really the God Learner belief supports the divinity of the Gods more than the individual myths do. If the individual beliefs are all true, then it proves that the gods are just a mortal concept given power by the belief of it's followers. The God Learners, on the other hand, propose that the God are the Gods and it doesn't matter what you believe. So regardless of what you call the Sun, the Sun is Yelm (or Elmal or the Sun Dragon) and it is the same being no matter where you go or how you worship it.

I personally have no problem with the Monomyth. It is how I see things working.

 

[andakitty]

*shrug* Whatever. :? I'm so worked up by MRQ I will remain open minded until I can actually see the book. That much I promise Mongoose.

 

[atgxtg]

It sounds like one has the option of working for the bad guys or working for the bad guys.

The only "real" bad guys in Glorantha are chaos creatures. Everything else is relative.

Spoken like a true Storm Bull devotee.

If Urox got illuminated would there be any more Chaos left for him to fight? :roll:

 

[atgxtg]

Whew! Glad they got that figured out. For a while there I thought I would actually have to play the game to see how it turned out! Now I don't have to!

Seriously, the stupidest thing you can do in a Role-Playing Game is tell everyone how the game ends.

1) THe game doesn't end, just the Hero Wars.

2) I disagree, the worse thing you can do with a role playing game is let it stagmnate by not allowing time to pass and letting everything stagnate. Eventually the players will get tired of waiting and move on to a different game. I've waited 25 years to find out how the Dragon Pass conflict turns out in the "official" Glorantha (our milage may vary), I don't want to wait for another 25 years.

I think one of the smart things White Wolf did was to print a book that deals with thier "World is comming to the end" games and lets players move on. After 15 years, it time to teach the pony a new trick.


3) Knpowing how the story ends hasn't hurt the vast majority of RPGs based on a particlaur setting or series of books. Games such as Pendragon, Strombringer, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings all let the cat out of the bag bewfore you enven crack open the rulebook.

 

[Urox]

1) THe game doesn't end, just the Hero Wars.

I have the feeling that the Hero Wars pretty much is the end of RuneQuest as we know it. I suspect that the Gods and most magic is removed beyond the mortal world at the end of the Hero Wars, leaving a more mundane place.

I was thinking about the Second Age and it has sort of a problem -- what's left to put in it? If you look at Third Age Glorantha, you find that most of the ancient societies have been crammed into it, not leaving much undone for the past.

Since the God Learners' Secret(s) has been obliterated, it really could be anything... So, what if it something a silly as electricy? That would be interesting - "honey, you need to replace the porch light or we'll have trollkin in the garbage cans again..."

 

[GbajiTheDeceiver]

Does anybody have a date for when everyone who knew the secret was wiped out? I haven't been able to find one anywhere.

 

[Urox]

Does anybody have a date for when everyone who knew the secret was wiped out? I haven't been able to find one anywhere.

I was digging through some of the old AH RQ material and I found something I had forgotten about -- There are pretty good odds that Ralzakark has some God Learners tucked away in Fort Wrath during the Third Age. This is mentioned in both Dorastor (where it gets a 1/3 page writeup) and again in Lords of Terror.

 

[GbajiTheDeceiver]

It sounds like one has the option of working for the bad guys or working for the bad guys.

I prefer taking an "ordinary guys stuck in the middle just trying to get along" approach.

 

[Ravage]

1) THe game doesn't end, just the Hero Wars.

I have the feeling that the Hero Wars pretty much is the end of RuneQuest as we know it. I suspect that the Gods and most magic is removed beyond the mortal world at the end of the Hero Wars, leaving a more mundane place.

Greg pulled a blinder in his book King of Sartar which looks retrospetively back on Argath, the Hero Wars from hundreds of years in the future in some new moderner culture ("Hail Harshanx") and some of legends are forgotten much as we dont remember ancient rome or greece faithfully.

Whilst it doesnt outline this 4th age, it does show at the back of Greg's mind that he's ruminated beyond the Hero Wars.

It a great read if you can find a copy, when I first read it I was sceptical but its really grown on me since.

 

[Decurio]

For example, there is no nuetral word for sorceror in the heortling (orlanthi) language. Instead they only have a word for bad sorceror (meldrath? can't remember the word...).

IIRC, the Orlanthi word for sorcerer is "meldek" (from Strangers In Prax), and means, somewhat poetically, "emptied."