I recently wrote an article about how the “RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha” product line is getting bogged down with too much lore and not enough playable content. A comment I saw a few times in response to it is that Chaosium “has to” release more lore supplements to establish a “baseline” for Glorantha. Let’s address this… with random tables!
The idea that a non-historical game setting like Glorantha needs a “lore baseline” isn’t bad. Gamemasters and players need some kind of common ground, so that how they think Glorantha works is close enough between them. Without a “baseline”, the gamemaster and players might have mismatched expectations, leading to misunderstandings and unexpected turns in the campaign’s worldbuilding and storyline. But surely it isn’t controversial to say that we shouldn’t need almost 2000 pages of history, geography, cults, and more, to establish a “baseline”?
And yet, here we are. And if you have ever interacted with the Glorantha community, you can sort-of see how we ended in this situation. Here’s a typical newcomer conversation:
Newcomer: Hey there, I discovered Glorantha a couple months ago and it’s awesome, I love it!
Person 1: Welcome to the tribe!
Newcomer: I especially love the Ancient World vibe, it’s so much more interesting than the usual bland medieval European stuff from other games.
Person 1: Definitely! You’re in the right place!
Newcomer: So the Sartarites are sort of like ancient Greeks, right? I love that.
Person 1: Oh no no no, not ancient Greeks.
Person 2: Yeah you can’t really map real-Earth cultures onto Glorantha.
Newcomer: I mean, yeah, sure it’s not a one-to-one correspondence, there’s a bit of Vikings or Celts thrown in too, but…
Person 1: Oooooh no no no, Sartarites aren’t Vikings at all either.
Person 2: In some older out-of-print supplements they might have looked like it but Vikings are a totally wrong way to think about Orlanthi.
Person 1: Definitely, at worst you could look at proto-Celtic cultures such as La Tène artifacts, which would…
Newcomer: Uhhh, but…
Person 2: No, those are early Iron Age and much too late for use as an ontological framework of…
Person 1: Yes, my apologies, I should have mentioned the Hallstatt culture instead, whose long-houses could be the basis for…
Newcomer: I just wanted to…
Person 3: I actually think the Orlanthi are better thought of as a syncretism of Vedic tradition and Storm/Earth duality that is hard to find on Earth, although you can find ideas by looking at proto-Indo-European cultures, which means Orlanthi houses would look like…
Person 4: No, the Weapons & Equipment sourcebook on page 104 clearly shows that all Orlanthi houses are two-stories buildings that are painted blue. Anything else would be non-canon.
Newcomer: <recedes into the distance>
This has maybe become better in the last couple years (I can’t say for sure, I mostly gave up participating in RuneQuest and Glorantha online spaces), but for a while this was almost literally what you’d see, both from fans and from the authors.
What happens here is that people are denied the ability to reach for easy tropes when building their understanding of Glorantha. Orlanthi can’t be Greeks or Vikings, they have to be “actually learned” for what they (supposedly) “truly are”. You’re supposed to put in a lot of work to learn all the lore. Glorantha is “so unique”, and “so brilliant” that you really can’t reduce it to some Greek/Viking mashup or whatever.
Of course, this is bullshit, but that’s how we end up with a “baseline” that’s “has to be” a shitload of lore.
Lore vs Tropes
The problem is that a “baseline” shouldn’t be established by lore: it should be mostly established by tropes in my opnion. And yes, those who know me know that this is a topic close to my heart. I wrote a whole article about this, but because it’s a long article, I’m going to try and summarize it here.
Lore is the sum of facts about a setting. The name of kings, the dates of famous battles, the location of the towns, the maps of cities, the cultures, the religions, etc. It can often feel like homework. Tropes, on the other hand, are a bunch of random details, styles, and “general vibes” about the setting. In many cases, you can generate the lore out of the tropes. This is why many settings are pitched as “X but with Y”. “Cyberpunk, but with elves and dwarves and magic”. “Wild West, but with zombies and spirits”. “Arthurian legends, but the knights are on motorbikes”. You can get started with even a minimum amount of lore, because the tropes guide you, one way or another, as you build the world around the player characters.
Let’s use an example. I’m pretty sure that most of you would be at least somewhat comfortable playing in a “samurai” game. You know the tropes of Medieval Japan, after all, right? Majestic mountains, bamboo forests and cherry blossoms, stern-looking men in kimonos wielding katanas, the importance of honour, ritual suicide, drinking tea, geishas, warlords and bandits, farming villages in need of protection, hidden shrines, martial arts, those gnarly weapons with the chain and the blade. You can probably list a bunch more. But do you know any lore? What year would you set the game in? Who is the Emperor at that time? Who is the Shogun? Where is the Imperial Capital? Do you know the terms “Daimyo”, or “Yōkai”, or “Kami”? Do you know who Amaterasu is? Do you know the difference between Buddhism and Shintō? Do you know if any Europeans are here? You get the idea… I’m convinced two-thirds of those who are somewhat comfortable playing that “samurai” game don’t actually know the answer to the majority of these questions. You can easily get started with tropes, without the need for much lore.
Now let’s use another example: are you comfortable playing a game set in 17th century Ghana, during the rise of the Ashanti Empire? I assume most of you have no idea what the fuck that entails. Maybe you can’t even place Ghana on a map. Is there any amount of lore I can give you that would make you grasp the “baseline” for this game? Can I show you maps, tell you the name of the kings, who’s fighting who, with what weapons? Can I add a bestiary of West African creatures, including tree-dwelling vampires with iron teeth, or witches with glowing armpits and anuses? Would that help? Yeah, it’s… going to take a long time to grasp, right? That’s because most of us don’t know the tropes of that time and place in the world. We haven’t been exposed to any pop-culture related to Ashanti warriors the same way we’ve been exposed to samurai.
There are two ways to play this Ashanti campaign: I can throw a thousand pages of lore at you until you start seeing patterns and figure out the tropes yourself. Or I can just tell you that this game is basically “Robin Hood, but in a Western African jungle”. You defend poor farmers against an usurper King until the “real” King comes back. You have a bow, and some cool-looking feathers on your hat. See? It’s all the same. Almost. For now, the difference is you’re black, you have some cool magical talismans embedded in your armour, and your first mission is to get musket rifles from Dutch traders. We can learn the rest later. It’s fine if in the meantime we just use Robin Hood tropes with an African spin to them, even if it’s gonna be surely completely wrong and possibly racist. We’re not recording this game, right?
Glorantha’s Real Baseline
Between reading almost 2000 pages of lore and getting started with a mashup of easy tropes, I know which option I’d choose if I wanted to play in Glorantha. In fact, it seems obvious to me that the 2000 pages of lore were created by mashing up a few tropes together in the first place anyway…
So without further ado, I present to you: Glorantha’s Real Baseline!
Whenever you ask yourself a question like “what do Orlanthi temples typically look like?”, or “how is this Lunar platoon organized?” or “how do Pelorian women groom their hair?” or whatever, roll on this table:
D20
Trope
01-07
Main Trope
08-13
Secondary Trope
14-17
Whatever last relevant historical fact you learned about, or cool movie you watched
18-20
Make it up from Runic first principles
For Orlanthi, you can pick your Main Trope as “Vikings” and your Secondary Trope as “Ancient Greeks”. Or the other way around. Or make it “Vikings” and “Gauls” if you like Asterix more than the Odyssey. I don’t care, there’s no Gloranthan police. At least as long as you stay offline.
For the Lunars, you can go with the Main Trope as “Romans” and your Secondary Trope as “Persians”. Or the other way around.
Praxians are “North American Indigenous” and, say, either “Scythians” or “Tuareg” depending on your tastes. And so on. Just look at the art and go with your first two gut feelings.
So what do Orlanthi temples typically look like? Roll a D20!
Got a 7? It looks like a big wooden building with a pointy rooftop, in the middle of the forest. There are some animal skulls strapped to the trees all around it. Inside, there are big effigies to the gods made of stone and wood.
Got a 12? Ah sorry, no, the temples are built on top of hills, and they’re made of stone, with columns all around.
Got a 15? Well, the last cool thing I can think about is this podcast episode about Rapa-Nui (Easter Island) so I guess our Orlanthi temples have giant god heads in front of them.
Got a 19? The Air Rune is a spiral, so Orlanthi temples are not buildings, they’re on top of the tallest hill in the tribe’s land, and merely consist of a spiralling path marked with stones and wooden poles. You walk the path towards the centre to make your offerings. Ernalda temples are big squares dug into the ground, with an underground chamber built in the centre.
You’ve Got Questions
Of course you do!
But then everybody’s Glorantha is going to be different, it’s going to be a mess!
Yeah, you know that saying that Greg Stafford came up with? “Your Glorantha Will Vary”? Before it was used for ending online debates in a passive aggressive way, it was actually meant to say that, well, your Glorantha would vary. Let’s do that, maybe?
But my Glorantha itself is going to be a mess of inconsistent tropes!
Did you actually look at Chaosium’s Glorantha? Half of the pre-gens in the rulebook are dressed like ancient Greeks, but other Orlanthi characters have names like Kenstrelsson and Brandgorsson, all the while Kallyr is basically Boudica. Meanwhile, the Lunars have centurions and gladiators, but also satrapies and curved weapons. If it worked for Greg Stafford, it will work for you.
The RuneQuest rulebook shows Orlanthi temples as some square-ish looking stone building with a tower and some courtyards in the centre! I can’t have something different in my campaign, right?
Of course you can! That drawing is for the temple of Orlanth in Boldhome, or something. They probably had the dwarfs build it and they built it all wrong. Or maybe it’s the southern Sartarite style of temple. It’s warm down there, so they can use those courtyards. We can’t. We are northern Sartarites, it’s cold here, and our stone quarries keep being attacked by trolls. I can assure you it’s good idea our temples are built differently.
What if some official publication later shows northern Sartarite temples looking different?
That’s the other northern Sartarite tribe. We hate them because they build their temples wrong too. Let’s go steal their cattle.
No, that publication showed the actual same tribe we’re playing in!
That publication is wrong. Also, does it actually matter? You’re clever, I’m sure you can adapt the material easily. Seriously, stop thinking about it and go make yourself useful by sabotaging a Lunar caravan or something.
In addition to the usual tropes mentioned above, I have taken inspiration from the Vietnam war, the WWII French resistance, and various 80’s and 90’s movies, not just for adventure ideas but actual world-building elements. What are the weirdest or most surprising tropes you ever used in your game? Tell me about the cool unique things that only exist in your Glorantha!
And for the rest of you: you don’t need an official book telling you how Sartarite hair-styles look like, or whatever! As Nick Brooke likes to say, go find your Glorantha the same way Greg Stafford did: by making shit up!
