One of the intentions of the Cults books is to liberate us all from consulting old HW books or old digest discussions to provide insight into the cults. What is presented in these books are the core myths of the cult, its like and dislikes, the nature of the cult, and so on.
If there is some detail from some old Hero Wars book or fan discussion that is not in the Cults Books, it means one of two things:
- That detail is simply not part of the cult (or at least the mainstream versions of the cult) any more.
- Maybe that detail is present in some community (as long as it does not contradict the core details of the cult presented in the Cults Book), but it is not part of the mainstream version of the cult.
So IMO books like Thunder Rebels or Storm Tribe, don’t really provide any useful additional insight into these cults. I was perfectly aware of those books, and if a detail from those books is not present in the Cults Book, it likely means it is gone from this and future publications. You are of course welcome to make your Glorantha whatever you want, but it still probably won’t appear in future books.
These books are the baseline. People are welcome to add their own YGWV elements, but that’s on them.
What Hero Wars and other past publications would you say would be especially contradictory to the new canon set forth by the Cults of Runequest? I’d just ignore the Hero Wars publications. The old RQ2/3 stuff is pretty much fine with a few minor details changed. But the HW stuff was just wildly off.
But since that stuff is LONG out of print and isn’t ever going back in print, it should be easy to ignore.
What about the HeroQuest books? I wrote many of them. As far as I am concerned, if I am playing RQ, I’d stick to the RQG books (again you can always supplement them with the RQ2 materials). I certainly wouldn’t encourage people to try to hunt down and find out of print HQ materials as a gloss on the RQ material. If you already have that material, use it as you will. YGWV and all that.
To be blunt, the new materials really don’t need an additional gloss.