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Thursday, September 1, 2016

Glorantha - I love it but...

Glorantha has been around in gaming since the late 70's. It was the default system for the Runequest rpg. If you are interested in bronze age roleplaying, it's one of the best options available (outside of ancient Greece).

However, it went through a long period of navel-gazing, with products focusing heavily on daily life, spirit quests, and pre-ordained battles. This stuff is really cool to read, but is largely worthless at the gaming table.

I'm also not a fan of the Heroquest/Hero Wars system. I like the 100 word character essay, but I just don't "get" the actual system. It's very poorly explained. I suspect that if someone who knows it could actually sit down and teach it, it would work well. Trying to figure it out from reading a book didn't, at least for me.

Runequest itself has gone through a whole bunch of editions lately. I'm not even sure which edition is the current official one, or if one even exists right now. RQ6 was published and then Chaosium yanked their license (not sure how, since it was released under the OGL). In any case, I like the world, but the rules situation is stupid and finding players is very difficult.

Anyways, the Lunar Empire are the good guys and the Orlanthi scum should be crushed under heel immediately, other than this cool Vingan warrior:


1 comment:

Cross Planes said...

I agree about HeroQuest. It's a great idea and I end up just adding hit points and importing RQ's armor and weapons.