So. There was this event yesterday that might have been on the news...
Okay, it wasn't exactly like this, but you get the idea. From the RuneQuest Starter Set Book 2: Glorantha. Artwork is by Hazem Ameen, found here on Artstation.
Given that Cincinnati is right on the edge of totality --if I drove about 15 minutes to the west I'd be in totality-- I decided to take the day off and enjoy the view.
I'd planned this well enough in advance that I'd bought a couple of packs of eclipse glasses and had distributed them to family and friends. We still had enough left over for my wife and myself, and I figured I'd use a third pair to try to get a photo via my smartphone.
Wherever we ended up going to watch the eclipse, that is.
I wasn't exactly worried about where we'd end up, but my wife wanted things to go well, and so we ended up driving 50 miles north to Dayton. We left at 11:15 AM, with Totality set to reach the Dayton area at 3:09 PM.
Traffic was expected to be heavy with people heading west on I-74 into Indiana and north on I-75 toward Dayton, and for midday I-75 certainly felt like Rush Hour traffic on the trek north.
Things began to clear out once we reached the Dayton city limits, and we got off the highway right by the University of Dayton*, thinking that maybe the UD Arena's parking lot might be available for eclipse watching.
It wasn't.
So, we drove into downtown Dayton and had lunch at a favorite haunt of ours from when we attended 33+ years ago, The Spaghetti Warehouse. For those interested in whether I could find something that fit my diet requirements, yes I could. (I had a salad.)
A little after 1:00 PM, we set out to try to find a place to watch the eclipse.
We knew some spots, such as the National Museum of the US Air Force, were not a good idea. That place was expected to be a nuthouse. We also knew that the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum, about 45 minutes north of Dayton in Neil's birthplace of Wapakoneta, was supposed to be swamped. Other places on our radar, such as local parks and even Woodlawn Cemetery (immediately next to UD, where the Wright Brothers are buried) were holding watch parties and you had to pay some decent amount of money just to attend. There's a Native American archaeological site nearby, SunWatch Village, but their watch party required payment of $500**.
Again, not happening.
We quickly realized that most of the city and surrounding area had cancelled classes and businesses, so a lot of people were simply home for the day. So... we decided to check out the area around the Dayton Art Institute (the Dayton art museum) to see if there was a crowd there.
No, not our car. It's not visible.
There wasn't.
We parked on the street and walked over to the Masonic Hall next to the DAI, found a cherry tree to sit under, and pulled out some books to relax with while the eclipse began.
As the eclipse came closer, the telltale crescent shape began appearing on the shade through the tree...
The eclipse glasses I'd bought did the trick, so we could take a look as the Moon slowly ate the Sun. The only bad part was that the filter on the glasses did their job too well, and I couldn't get a photo from my smartphone because the phone couldn't resolve to a sharp image. I decided I wasn't going to bother and left the phone alone.
Daylight slowly dissipated until the moment of totality, then everything dipped immediately into twilight:
You'd think this was after 8:00 PM here on the edge of downtown Dayton. Yes, this was during Totality.
The eclipse glasses even protected against the Sun's corona, so I had to take them off to steal a glance of the eclipse itself. Just a second or two, but it was quite a sight. I could even see Venus nearby, but since I wasn't in a dark sky area I couldn't see any other stars.
I can see why earlier civilizations thought a total solar eclipse was a sign from the gods --or a portent of disaster, your choice-- because it's one of those things that your brain has trouble processing while it's happening. When you've seen the sun in one state all your life and then this occurs it gives you pause, even though you knew intellectually that this was expected.
Can confirm it looks like this. From a Facebook post by the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library.
Although it felt that time stood still, it was over all too fast. Just like someone flicked switch, the daylight returned.
The sky was still a brilliant and rich blue.
Most everybody else who came to watch the eclipse left soon thereafter, but we hung around for an hour to let the traffic on the highway clear out a bit.
Then what did we do?
We went to a bookstore, of course.
I sent this pic to my Questing Buddy, who has read both of these books, as I was amused by the small print on the poster.
*Yes, our alma mater. Class of 1991, thankyouverymuch.
If you post coffee memes, beware: your readership will explode.
Given that there's literally hundreds of coffee memes out there, why on earth I got a sudden explosion in views on PC when I posted a few of my favorites is beyond me. It's not like they're that new, either, but oh well.
I'm not above using one of the ones that missed the cut for a few extra pageviews. What I find disturbing is how close the 'After' picture looks like David Tennant. From Laugh Lore.
***
Under the header of 'video games getting a board game treatment', there's a beloved Bioware franchise that has a boardgame in the works:
This landed in my Inbox on Monday from Modiphius.
Yes, Modiphius is going to publish Mass Effect: The Board Game, a cooperative and story-driven boardgame designed by Eric M. Lang and Calvin Wong Tze Loon for 1-4 players. It sounds interesting at first blush, and given how Modiphius tends to have high quality plastic pieces in their games, this ought to look pretty too. Here's the signup page for more info and to receive emails about the release of the game itself. Just make sure you fill out the correct info for US vs UK/Europe so you end up with the correct website.
***
You know, the Dracthyr race in Retail World of Warcraft has taken some lumps for it's decidedly un-dragonkin-like look.
From Wowpedia.
I was perusing some RPG sites the other day, and I came across some artwork from RuneQuest that made me go "hmmm..."
Look vaguely familiar? Found on Glorantha Bestiary, Pages 36-37. Verified with my copy. Also found here at Artstation.
These are Dragonewts, as drawn by Cory Trego-Erdner back in 2016-2017, for the RuneQuest Glorantha Bestiary.
In RuneQuest, Dragonewts claim to be the oldest sentient species and are one of the races found in the main starting area in RuneQuest, Dragon Pass. Now admittedly there's only so much an artist can do with the basic dragon design, but the reason why I don't mind the look of the Dracthyr is that they do evoke a similar look as that found in RuneQuest. The lore is obviously very distinct, but given that nobody seems to bitch about the lore of Dracthyr so much as that they don't look "cool enough", that's my two cents on the matter.
***
Finally, I wanted to mention a long departed podcast that really sucked me into RPGs back in the day.
Before "modern times" and the proliferation of podcasts in their current monetized form, Chuck Tinsley and Lonnie Ezell created the Dragons Landing Inn podcast back in 2005. They kept it going for about 126-130 episodes, and then Steve and Rob kind of picked up the mantle for a dozen episodes or so in a relatively unmoderated format until the podcast faded away. When I asked my brother-in-law what good RPG and gaming podcasts were out there, he said without hesitation "Dragons Landing Inn".
I've tried to find a better version of their graphic to no avail.
With the tagline "Gaming Goodness", Chuck and Lonnie would espouse on RPGs, whatever the news was in RPG space, and eventually would broach RPG specific topics on running a campaign and having a rules set fit the type of campaign you wanted to play. Although the news is quite dated --it began in a time before D&D 4e and Pathfinder existed-- the old podcasts are still available via the Internet Archive at this link. I don't believe they're complete, as the original podcasts start at Episode 27, so you'll have to search the Internet Archive for individual episodes to complete the entire run of DLI.
I still have my old downloads of DLI on my desktop. I've dutifully backed up and transferred them over the almost two decades that they came out, and have no intention of ever deleting them. Given how podcasting has evolved as a format since DLI's heyday, it's refreshing to find a podcast in a raw, unmonetized state (and low bit-rate) still providing entertainment.
Back when I was in high school, my Geometry teacher ran a club called the Rail Baron Club. Until I actually had him for Geometry my sophomore year, I had absolutely no idea what the hell Rail Baron actually was, much less why a club existed for it.
As it turns out, Rail Baron was a game produced by The Avalon Hill Game Company*, and since my Geometry teacher was a railroad fan, he'd fallen in love with the game and shared it with the students. A few of us bought our own copies of Rail Baron, and I joined their ranks sometime late in my sophomore year.
Imagine Monopoly but using rail lines, although that's a bit of an oversimplification. I'm nerdy enough that I laminated the destination chart to protect it long term. "I swear, Bill, if you buy Seaboard Air Line AGAIN I'm gonna scream!" --Me
Inside the box for Rail Baron was a postcard you could send in to Avalon Hill, requesting a game catalog, and of course I did just that.
I couldn't find any of these old cards, where the air of superiority was very strong, so I had to go to the Internet Archive to find this one. The cards I found from the late-80s onward were... much more polite toward prospective players.
When the catalog arrived, I would spend hours perusing the various board game titles, imagining what it'd be like to play them. But in the back, there was an ad for this:
Something I did not know was that SFF author Kate Elliot and her husband were the models for this artwork by Jody Lee. From Bill H from RPGGeek.
RuneQuest? I'd never heard of it before. Given that I was a couple of years into the RPG ban in my household, I just didn't draw any sort of attention to the fact that an RPG was right in a board game catalog. Still, the image that Avalon Hill tried to project --they were a "thinking man's company"-- meant that their Mensa-esque "superior" image rubbed off onto RuneQuest. I kind of knew about the game, but never played it, and I figured it was pretty highbrow as far as it went.
Oh, I had no idea just how bonkers the game could be.
***
Okay, let me back up a bit.
As I have since learned over the decades, RuneQuest was created in 1978 as an RPG for the world of Glorantha, a setting created by the late Greg Stafford back when he was in college in the 60s. Greg co-founded Chaosium to publish his first game based on Glorantha, a board game titled White Bear and Red Moon, and RuneQuest came along a few years later. D&D was experiencing its first huge burst of growth, and people who liked the Glorantha setting in White Bear and Red Moon wanted an RPG for that setting.
Hence, RuneQuest.
The initial two editions of RuneQuest, published by Chaosium, were integrated with the Glorantha setting, but by the time the third edition was published, publishing had since been picked up by Avalon Hill.*** The biggest change from the previous editions of RuneQuest was that the third edition became divorced from the Glorantha setting; sure, there were plenty of Glorantha supplements published for RQ 3rd edition, but the "official" setting was Fantasy Europe****, which is just as it sounds.
Avalon Hill published RuneQuest up until the company imploded and was sold to Hasbro*****, and when the rights to RuneQuest became available once more, Greg Stafford grabbed it and got Mongoose Publishing to create a version of RuneQuest.
In typical Mongoose fashion, they ended up with two versions of the RPG. And let's just say that Mongoose's version of RQ had.... issues. Unlike Mongoose Traveller which continues to be well received, there were a ton of issues with RQ, and in the end a RuneQuest 6th Edition was created by The Design Mechanism.
Fast forward to 2015 and Chaosium was on the verge of collapse, and the founder, Greg Stafford, was brought in to save the company. (Apple fans, tell me if you've heard this scenario before.) When Greg came back, he helped to get Chaosium on good financial footing, and began work on a new version of RuneQuest. The Design Mechanism's version of RuneQuest was no longer needed per se, so that 6th Edition morphed into a setting-agnostic version of the game called Mythras. (Which still exists to this day.)
Greg passed away in 2018, but his vision for the current version of the RPG was realized with the publication of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, in 2018.
Got all that?
Oh, and I haven't even mentioned Greg Stafford creating HeroQuest, which also uses the Glorantha setting in a rules-lite fashion.
No, not this HeroQuest:
This is the current version of the Milton Bradley game, published by Hasbro. Pic is from all over the net.
But THIS HeroQuest:
Yeah, it's complicated, and I'm not done yet! From Moon Design Publications.
In a bizarre sort of way, the history of RPGs based on Glorantha is as complex as the Glorantha setting itself is.
***
Remember when I mentioned that RuneQuest was a bit bonkers? The RuneQuest system itself isn't bonkers per se, because it is a skill based RPG with a lot of crunch to it; if you think Pathfinder has crunch, let me introduce you to my little friend here.
No, it's the Glorantha setting itself that is bonkers.
When you first hear Glorantha and "Bronze Age Setting", your mind immediately leaps to, well, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Or maybe Ramses II of Egypt, or Hammurabi. Or maybe even the Hittite city of Watusa, the Nubian city of Meroë, the Elamites of Anshan, or the Indus Valley and Harappa.
Somebody should have told the Hollywood
execs that these should have been bronze weapons.
But The Rock's gonna Rock...
But Glorantha is... Well, it's kind of not what you might be used to.
For starters, the world of Glorantha is known by its inhabitants be a gigantic disk, with an underworld and a sky above:
I should mention that the artwork and the rules themselves do have an adult approach toward sexuality. I mean, I'm an adult so it's no big deal, but be aware of it in case you don't want kids asking uncomfortable questions of you. This is from writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com
There are also a veritable ton of gods out there in Glorantha, and none of them really fit into the standard Greco-Roman --or even Egyptian-- Pantheons. The gods aren't good or evil either in the standard Fantasy sense either, despite what the Chaosium rep tried to explain to me at Gen Con back in 2023. There are gods and goddesses of Nature, the Sky, the Underworld, etc., but whether they are good or evil is purely dependent upon the point of view of your cult.
Oh yes, the cults of Glorantha.
No, not this Cult...
but these types of Cults. Have I mentioned the adult themes? From Chaosium.
A Cult in Glorantha isn't what it means in our own terminology, but is closer to an extended tribe that embraces a god or goddess. If you roll with that, you're about 90% of the way to understanding cults. Your cult gives you identity and camaraderie, and a ready made community to fall back on for support throughout the game. You betray your cult at your own risk.
The player characters in Glorantha embrace their position as heroes by going on what is in-game referred to as Hero Quests# --if you think of the Hero's Journey as a template, you've got the right idea-- for the glory of your cult and your chosen deity. If you complete your Hero Quest successfully, you may take your place in the upcoming Hero Wars, where the great heroes across Glorantha gather to fight for the future of the world.
The traditional starting location for a RuneQuest game is Dragon Pass, where there's a ton of action and activity, and there's clearly defined "Good Guys" (Kingdom of Sartar) and "Bad Guys" (The Lunar Empire). Like I mentioned above, they're not "good" and "evil" in the traditional sense, but the Lunar Empire is definitely the aggressors as an occupying empire that the Kingdom of Satar has recently ejected from the area; like the Galactic Empire in Star Wars, the Lunar Empire is plotting to return to power in Dragon Pass, so they're not going away any time soon.
***
Okay, one thing I do have to address about Glorantha is that while humans are the current dominant race, there are lesser races that had their time in the sun. Such as the Elder Races.
Elves are not like what you typically find in RPG fare, but are akin to that found in Guild Wars 2: they are sapient plants.##
There are also spirits that reside within everything, which is very much an ancient way of looking at the world:
From RuneQuest: The Coloring Book, available for Print and PDF from Chaosium, page 15. If you buy the POD version, the PDF is free. Again, yes, adult themes, but the art is really fantastic.
They're formally known as the Durulz, and kinda-sorta fill the spot in a Fantasy RPG normally populated by Halflings or Gnomes. As for their creation, the most common explanation is that they were created by a curse, but I've also seen goofier creation stories. Still, they're a part of what makes Glorantha a bit nutty.
***
Okay, nuttiness aside, why am I so fascinated with Glorantha and RuneQuest?
Because it's a classless, skill based system that acknowledges that combat is dangerous.
Unlike MERP or D&D 3e or other skill based hybrid systems, RuneQuest has abandoned the level concept and gone full tilt into skills. If you want to 'get gud' at something, you have to actually do it. You know, like real life.
But RuneQuest has also abandoned the class structure as well, basically allowing you to do whatever you want as long as you actually work at it. It's like an Elder Scrolls game without even the pretense of a class structure.
There is magic, performed through the use of Runes that grant you access to spells. Runes are also intrinsic to Glorantha, and their in-game use is that they also allow you to augment your skill checks and your resistance rolls.
Combat is, well, not something you enter into lightly. You can quite easily be maimed or die. It's not quite the "you die on character creation" that Traveller has, but it's not the handwaving of the danger that you find in a lot of other RPGs. There are real consequences to combat, and even the best battle plan and warriors can be laid low if the gods do not favor you. True to the ancient world, you want to attack when the gods favor your success.
Yes, RuneQuest is crunchy; there's no denying that. But it also provides you with extraordinary freedom within all that crunch.
And yet...
RuneQuest can be dense. The reason why it never took off the same way D&D did is due to the denseness of the rules and the zaniness of the game world. You kind of need a RuneQuest evangelist to help you embrace the game and overcome it's quirks. For some, that's the video game The King of Dragon Pass that is set in Glorantha. For others, YouTube can come in handy, although I've found the official Chaosium videos on Glorantha to be somewhat lacking. If you've lived through a class at a university given by a boring professor who obviously knew his stuff but couldn't communicate effectively, you'll understand what I mean.
However, Chaosium has put out a truly high quality starter set for RuneQuest that is worth checking out. The Starter Set has premade characters --and the set doesn't teach you how to create characters, strangely enough-- but they stuffed just so much material into the box that it's frankly amazing how they were able to pull it off.
From Chaosium. You can find it at their website or at your local game store (which is where I bought my copy).
I've often wondered how RuneQuest would work in a rules-lite system. I've never played HeroQuest so I couldn't comment there, but adapting RuneQuest and the Glorantha setting to the FATE or, say, Burning Wheel systems would definitely pique my interest.
Still, if you're up for something definitely different, RuneQuest is a rabbit hole worth going down. I mean, where else can you create a character who is a Bison Rider?
This is Vasana, Farnan's Daughter, one of the iconic characters of Glorantha. From Book 3 of the RuneQuest Starter Set.
*3M --yes, that 3M that created sticky notes and various forms of adhesive tape-- was publisher of Rail Baron before Avalon Hill bought all of their board game assets, including Acquire and Facts in Five. The original Facts in Five (which is what we have) is kind of dated these days as far as trivia goes, although there was a reworking of the trivia part back in 2007 or so when University Games put out a version. As is usual, my wife tended to win those games we played in the 90s and 00s.
**Now most well known for the Call of Cthulhu RPG.
***Hence its presence in the 1985 Avalon Hill catalog.
****Not to be confused with the Mythic Europe setting for Ars Magica.
