One of my favorite Gloranthan critters is the fabled Loper, the mount of the Loper People, who once caused havoc from Slontos to Teshnos. They have the ability to teleport to any…
Latest posts
The Origin of Belintar
Greg and I both agreed never to publish a definitive answer as to the origin of Belintar. If the Only Old One couldn’t learn his origins, your player characters sure as heck…
Top Five favorite Elder Races
My personal Top Five favorite Elder Races: 5. Black elves. The Dark Plant People are fungi – they are concerned about the recycling of death into life. Everyone ignores them, or assumes…
Origin of Rune traits
As you all know, the Runequest character sheet sets the various Power Runes against each other as opposed polarities, e.g., Death-Life, Movement-Stasis, etc. It also sets up Man against Beast. The use…
Machine City and God Forgot
As we all know, magic is the result of drawing upon the timeless and eternal “God Time” to affect the material world of Time. And so sorcery as a magic system is…
The Kingdom of Sartar is hardly paradise
So after pointing out some of the horrors the Lunar Empire is built upon, I think it is also worth pointing out that living in the Kingdom of Sartar is hardly paradise….
The Moonburn
Of all the many crimes of the Third Age perhaps the worst was the Moonburn. As we all know, back in the First Wane, Dara-Ni was refuge for the River People and…
The Dragon Pass
Dragon Pass is the name often applied to the broad 180 km wide pass between the Rockwoods and the Skyreach Mountains (which are a subrange of the Western Rockwoods). Those ranges have…
The Stitched Zoo
Among the stranger ruins from the Empire of the Wyrms Friends is the Stitched Ruins in Dragon Pass. You can still see the ruins of corrals and prison cells, and the whole…
Solar Pentans
There are 600,000 Solar Pentans. A crude breakdown of the cult numbers would suggest that they have about: The remaining 200k are children so they are not in a cult? Yes Those…
The Size of a Tribe
Let’s try a little to get a sense of scale of an Orlanthi tribe. Let’s start with one of the biggest – the Colymar. The tribe has about 13,000 members. Most are…
Solar Book – Yelmalio description
Here is a nice description of Yelmalio from the Solar religion materials: Yelmalio is the Solar deity found where Yelm’s imperial rule does not reach. Associated with the planet Lightfore, his cult…
Zola Fel Valley
This is another one of those posts about scale. Pavis County and Sun Dome County are where New Pavis, the Big Rubble, and the Sun Dome Temple of Prax are located. It…
Minor Gods
Among the more interesting (and culturally important) minor gods in Glorantha include: Additionally, most Chaos gods rate as minor – Bagog, Krarsht, Krjalk, Pocharngo, Tyram, Vivamort, Xamalt, etc. Now some of these…
Lunar Occupation of Sartar 1622-1625
I posted elsewhere a few thoughts on the Lunar Occupation, and I thought they might be of interest here. Remember that the Lunar Empire is not all powerful or all knowing. So…
Minor Gods in the East Isles
So my recent post on greater and major gods of Glorantha caused a few stirs, so let’s go a little further with it. One question is what are the Greater and Major…
The Monomyth
Glorantha is a unified setting – by that I mean that all of its pieces fit together to form a whole. The cosmology of Glorantha can be fit together to tell an…
Daliath’s Well
At the bottom of the ocean is a Sacred Well that reaches down to the mysterious underworld waters of the Styx, the primal waters that arose from the Void. Those who drink…
Greater and Major Gods
So as I check over some of the material about to go to the printer soon, I was comparing things to a list Greg had written some years ago, listing all the…
Yelmalio Adventurers
Yelmalio is the Frontier God of Civilization. He brings Light to the quarrelling Storm tribes. He is a god of honour, a god of citizen-soldiers. He has a soldier aspect, a mystic…
Navigating the Hero Plane
So when thinking about any heroquest, I start by looking at one of Greg’s old Hero Plane maps. This is a map of archetypes – and not the same thing as the…
Dreams in RuneQuest
Many Gloranthan religions hold that dreams can be two types of experiences. The first is most common – expressions of inner desires, fears, random recollections, and so on. Such dreams may communicate…
The Man Rune
The Man Rune is the Form of all mortal sentient beings. The races of the Man Rune include trolls, elves, runners, dwarves, ducks, beastfolk, and triolini, as well as humans. It does…
Thoughts on city size
When we think about most cities in RuneQuest, they are pretty small. New Pavis is a little over 5000 people. Jonstown, Swenstown, and Wilmskirk are even smaller – none are more than…
Languages in Sartar
Let’s think a little bit about languages. So in Sartar pretty much everyone either speaks Sartarite (aka Heortling) or Old Tarshite as their first language. Pretty much everybody also some knows Tradetalk…