In the last article of the “Reading Classic RuneQuest” series, I looked at the Introduction chapter of the RuneQuest 2nd edition rulebook and noted that I would have things to say about the map of Glorantha we see here… as many of you know, I love maps, and this is one of the three classic and famous maps in this book! It deserves its own article!

I’m coming back to my “Reading Classic RuneQuest” series after a hiatus caused by, you know, having to deal with my twelve other hobby projects 😄 Last time I read through the “Basic Role-Playing” booklet and now I’m finally getting into the actual RuneQuest book proper! Yay! But don’t get too excited, we’ll only do the Introduction chapter! Booo!

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!

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.

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?