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!

I got into TTRPGs around the turn of the 1990s and, after my first few games, fell into a long tunnel of Call of Cthulhu gaming. I pretty much exclusively GM’ed Call of Cthulhu from the mid-90s to the late 2000s, including a lot of Delta Green, which back then was a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook.

I wasn’t online much at the time, so all the GMing techniques I picked up during that time were through adventure books, friends, or by myself. I suspect that investigative horror games like Call of Cthulhu are uniquely positioned to force the GM to develop good technique, and that’s sort of what I want to explore here through the lens of my own formative GMing years… and let’s start with “automatic clues!”

I’m back to reading the classic RuneQuest 2nd edition boxed set! See the first and second articles in the series if you missed them. Today we are reading the “Basic Role-Playing” booklet, written by Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis, with a couple illustrations by William Church.

This “introductory guide” to fantasy role-playing (FRP) and the Basic Role-Playing system (BRP) is a 16 pages-long booklet that, we are told, presents a “whole game system”. So in theory, you could completely ignore the rules in the bigger RuneQuest book and just play BRP directly from this. The BRP rules differ quite a lot from the RuneQuest rules, in that they’re much simpler, but you can tell they share the same chassis. I wonder how many early 1980s players decided to simplify aspects of RuneQuest by “downgrading” select rules to their BRP equivalent?

Anyway, let’s dive in!

If there’s a sure way to get my attention, it’s including some good looking maps in a game. But a sure way to get an instant buy is to include a big-ass cloth map in a game. That’s what Dragonbane did with their original crowdfunding campaign, and so of course I backed it at the “Deluxe Bundle” level. But wait! Instead of forgetting about it by the time it shipped, and then collecting dust on a shelf after receiving it, we actually played it! Shocking, I know. So here, let’s talk about Dragonbane!

Welcome to Open Box, the part of the blog where we look backwards to look forw… wait, no that’s not correct¹. It’s the part where we open the 2nd edition RuneQuest boxed set, like I said we would in the preamble! Let’s be careful with those corners, lift the lid, and take in the wonderful smell of old paper!

I started playing RuneQuest with the latest edition, “RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha”, colloquially known as “RQG”. I had fallen in love with the setting via its gigantic¹, critically acclaimed, system-agnostic “Guide to Glorantha”², so using the official game to bring it to the table felt like the next logical move. RQG looked great at first, even though I was immediately skeptical of some of its most idiosyncratic mechanics, like Strike Ranks³. But there was a lot of cool stuff! Divine magic that requires worship at your god’s temples to recharge! Rune affinities that model your personality! Passions that connect to your community!

But after a couple years of play, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

Chaos in Glorantha started as the pretty clear-cut mark for the “bad guys”, a tool for gamemasters to scare their players, and for those players to kill some monsters without remorse. But I’m a Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green player at heart, with some early formative years spent on Vampire and Cyberpunk, so I want my grey moral areas, my secret cults, my conspiracies, and my mission-giving patrons that turn out to be corrupt assholes! So let’s look at how to make Chaos in Glorantha a bit more insiduous and nuanced.

I never planned to become a TTRPG collector but, you know, it kinda just happened. I started looking on eBay for the games I used to play as a kid, and then I wanted to have a look at the previous editions of games I’m interested in, and then I’d hear about this or that old supplement or scenario that’s “worth checking out” and then… well frankly, OCD kicked in and I wanted to see all the books nicely lined up on the shelf.

But then I realized what I think most of you already know: books get fatter as new editions get released. How much fatter? Well, I’m glad you asked, because that means it’s spreadsheet time!

Chaosium may have a problem: Glorantha became the very thing that its critics warned us about. It’s mostly just a bunch of lore, now. How did that happen? And what does that mean for my RuneQuest games?

When Brindlewood Bay came out it seemed to become an immediate darling of my TTRPG circles. Being a fan of both the Cthulhu Mythos and TV series like Murder She Wrote, Columbo, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and more, I figured that “old ladies investigating murders that lead into cosmic horror” sounded totally like my jam! Plus, there was some promise of a “novel take” on investigation games! So, as is tradition, I backed some Kickstarter, and waited to receive the books.

That’s how, back in 2024, I ran my Friday group through a handful of cozy mysteries from both the basic Brindlewood Bay book and the Nephews In Peril supplement. Here are some notes about how that went!