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What I Love About Glorantha

Posted on October 3, 2024

Among the little things I so love about Glorantha as a gaming setting:

  • The world really is flat. The sky really is a dome. The sun travels up the sky, dies at dusk and then traverses the underworld only to be reborn at the dawn.
  • Spirits are everywhere. Most completely ignore the physical world (unless compelled by magic), but there are the occasional malevolent ghost or disease spirit that seeks to harm those in physical world.
  • Initiates have a deep personal and spiritual tie to their deity. Rune magic is not something “thought through” – it is how the god acts through you. Initiates know the manifest reality of their gods.
  • During sacred time, normal mundane activities are subsumed into the magical rituals and ceremonies that revive the cosmos. Not just for the Orlanthi, but for everyone. Trolls, elves, dwarfs, Lunars, nomads, you name it. Even dragonewts!

This is the kind of stuff that makes the setting unlike any other fantasy RPG and as far as I am concerned, makes it light years better.

Oh here’s another one – the moon is red and it just hangs in the same place in sky, day or night. It goes through its phases from red to black in one week. That’s always a fun one to mention to new players, as it breaks those who are compelled to impose real-world physics on the setting. The moon just hovers there. You can work out how far away it is through triangulation, and you can see it does not move in the sky.

And I always remind new players at some point – there are no bacteria, no viruses, and the like. Disease has a spiritual source – disease spirits, Mallia worship, and other things tainted by them. Why are swamps unhealthy? Because broo live there and attract disease spirits and other spiritual pollution in droves.

Myth is sacred stories, and in Glorantha it is experienced and revisited through ritual, worship, and heroquests. It is truer than the written chronicles of scribes.

Here’s another one – the sun sets because the storms killed it. Just like the sun disappears when the clouds come before it. That’s why we have day and night, and the source of the seasons. The sun rises because the world was set right by the gods and Chaos was overcome.

All of these little details encourage the GM and the players to think about magic and mythology as the foundation of the setting, rather than something tacked on at the end.

These are the sort of details that I always try to weave into any game, and most importantly with new players.

Jeff Richard

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