To really make sense of RuneQuest as a campaign setting, I think it is handy to give the players a short version of the monomyth and a little history. Not a lot, mind you – but just enough to see how your cult fits into the Big Story. And this isn’t necessary to start the game or play a one-shot; more of the sort of thing that helps develop a campaign.
Here’s what I view as the 8 essential mythic beats for most campaigns:
- Creation of the world and Golden Age.
- Orlanth kills Yelm, which starts Gods War.
- Unholy Trio give birth to the Devil (and from there the destruction of the world). Chaos enters the world and nearly destroys it.
- The Lightbringers Quest (how Orlanth rescued Yelm from the Underworld). This results in the Cosmic Compromise.
- Storm Bull fights the Devil at the Block.
- I Fought We Won (how mortals survived the Gods War).
- The Cosmic Compromise, Time, and the first Dawn.
Most of these mythic events can be summarized in a sentence or three. But most player character cults are tied into them and knowledge of the bigger story help ground your cult in the mythic narrative.
After that, pretty much the whole First and Second Age can be summarized as:
- Dawn Age, a legendary time when humans and nonhumans cooperated for the revival of the world.
- Gbaji Wars, started when people created a new god and brought Chaos back into the world.
- The God Learners, fiendishly clever (and amoral) magicians who discovered the secrets of the gods and eventually got destroyed for their hubris.
- The Empire of the Wyrms Friends, or when humans learned to talk to dragons and made a great empire. The rulers demanded to be worshiped as gods and eventually got killed by the dragons.
- The Dragonkill War, or when everyone decided to kill the dragons but instead everyone in Dragon Pass got eaten by the dragons instead.
That’s pretty much everything before history really starts in the Third Age. That’s it. A page of deep background that pretty much everyone knows at least at about this level of detail.
After that we get into different stories, but they all involve one thing:
A bunch of renegades create a new goddess and she’s somehow associated with Chaos. She defeated her foes and rose into the sky as the Red Moon. Her son, the Red Emperor, rules the mighty Lunar Empire and has gone on to conquer much of the world. We’ve only recently been freed from them, and that might only be a temporary thing.
This basic story applies to Sartar, Esrolia, Grazelands, Prax, and of course New Pavis and the Big Rubble. Now you might complain that this is one-sided and ignores the trolls’ view or makes the Lunars out to be villains or whatever, and you’d be right. But this is all that most players in most campaigns need to know about the monomyth and the cycle of history. Everything else they can read for enjoyment!
The presence of this Big Mythic Story is a key part of what gets people interacting with the setting. But it doesn’t need to be any more of an info dump than William Smith gives Conan. in an ideal world I’d imagine one voice actor giving the first group of mythic beats and another giving the second historical beats. Say six minutes total instead of William Smith’s two.
If this is so critical, why is it not published in the starter set? It is – just go to pages 20-22 of the World of Glorantha booklet.