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- [00:00]
A
Have you seen me Dice Bag.
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B
The.
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A
Grognard Files hello, my name is Dirty Dice and this is the Grognard Files podcast where we talk bobbins about tabletop RPGs from back in the day and today I'm coming live from the Emily Bronte room of a holiday cottage that I'm renting here in Haworth, Yorkshire, uk. Each room is named after a member of the Bronte family. Charlotte and Anne are bedrooms and Bramwell is a toilet. So there you go. It seems fitting that I'm recording the introduction here in Haworth, a short distance from the parsonage where they lived together, producing their enduring literary fiction. I've argued elsewhere along with others, that the family were possibly the first recorded fantasy role players in the same sense that we know it today. The siblings were responsible for creating the worlds of Gondal and Angria, complex fictional fantasy worlds that came alive through journal entries, poetry and other works written under aliases of characters who lived in that world. From one world building exercise to another in this grog pod, we look at Greg Stafford's creation, or discovery, as he would put it, of Glorantha, the world that has been used in many games, including Runequest, the first role playing game that we played together in the 80s and at the time of recording. It marks five years since he passed away. It coincides with the release of the Cults of Glorantha Mythology book, a volume in the EPIC 10 book project that captures the gods of Glorantha. Geoff Richard, the creative director of Chaoseum, joined the book club this month as we looked at the King of Satire, the 1992 book written by Greg Stafford, which was revised in 2015 with annotations by Jeff this is a collection of stories, papers, fragments and artifacts telling the story of Argrath Jar Eel, the people of Satar, the epic cosmology of Glorantha seen from the eyes of people living there. Geoff guides us through the history of the book, how it came to be made, some of the influences that created Glorantha, and the story behind the Cults of Glorantha project. Judge Blythey, our resident rules lawyer, joins me in the zoom of role playing rambling. This time we're looking at a couple of magazines, Chaosium house magazines, which were essential in developing Glorantha as a setting. We talk about secondary world building, what we think about Glorantha as a setting, and how our attitudes have changed over the years. I know that for some people, Gorantha might feel like a closed Book something that's hard to appreciate, but I hope you'll listen and at least have your interest piqued to discover the game world or return to it. If you turned your back on it, you'll see that we continue to be intrigued and compelled by it, drawn by its quirky nature, the fantastical locations and the unusual denizens, while at the same time repelled by the complexity of the lore and the preciousness that sometimes protects the finer details. I hope that you'll be encouraged to turn the page and at least give it a try. I'll be back at the end to say goodbye and give a couple of house notices. Until then, remember ramblers, let's get rambling. Welcome to the room of role playing. Rambling. This time I'm pleased to welcome the person who is keeping the Glorantha torch alive, Jeff. Richard. Hello there, Jeff.
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C
Hello everybody. It's great to be here this morning.
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A
And it's very early for you, isn't it? When I did this invitation, I assumed that you're still living in Berlin.
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C
No, my family and I have relocated to the high mountains of Colorado.
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A
This morning at the book club, we've been looking at the King of SA, which was Greg's book that he produced in 1992. For people who don't are not aware of the book, how would you describe it?
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C
I would describe King of Sartre as one of Greg's most remarkable pieces of experimental fiction. And so the book is structured as if it is a series of contradictory, insetting articles about Glorantha. It's got stories, it's got histories, it's got kings lists. It's a sort of thing that if you were a historian and an archeologist, you would have. And it, it's, hey, this is our sources for understanding this, this culture. What really makes it to me really remarkable is of course Glorantha is a fictional setting. And so to create a series of documents that opens the door to this fictional setting, but also intentionally are, are contradictory, I think is, was, was really one of Greg's most remarkable bits of writing. You know, it's, in some ways it's easy to say what it's not. It's, it's not a storybook, it's not really a setting book. Greg always was somebody who was willing to push the envelope and experiment with, you know, what we could do with role playing games and, and with fantasy literature. And I think King of Sardar is.
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A
One of the high points and do, you know, some sense of how it came about.
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B
So how did.
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A
Oh yeah, to decide to collect. Collect this together and produce.
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C
Well, so admit initially what it was is the bulk of it belonged to what we call the Orlanthe Yellow book. So Greg wanted, In the early 80s, he was writing an Orlanthe supplement for Run Quest. This was part of the legendary. Either it was going to be the Dragon Pass book or it was going to be called the starter Source Book.
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B
I.
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C
You have to look at one of the, one of the main indexes of the lists of stuff that never got published. And Greg had put this together. He had a bunch of sources. He had an overview of the history of Dragon Pass. He had a bunch of little short snippets of short stories of the. The tales of the House of Sartor. And then he was also right trying to work out the, the Argra story. Chazam licensed out RunQuest to Avalon Hill and Avalon Hill came out with RQ3. Chazam realized that they actually lost money every time they worked on an RQ3 product because they had to do all the work to generate the product. But the way that the royalty split went, they rarely got enough money to even justify the work that they put in. So which is why you could see that there stopped being, you know, a whole lot of new greg material for RQ3. And so this whole thing went into kind of went into a box of don't know what to do with it. And I believe it was David hall who had, who suggested to Greg, Greg, why don't you put this all together? I assume initially what people thought he would do is he'd write a source book for it, a game book. Instead, Greg decided he would put it together, warts and all materials that he had put together in different periods of his exploration of put them all together and then create a framing device around it. The person who's gathered this document is a historian trying to figure out the mystery of this Argrath fellow. I find the way that it was put together just really, really remarkable. But it had a long, long back history.
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A
You obviously have the role in going back to this as a foundational text and generating more material from it. Where did it come from? Did Greg create this at the table or was it from conversations or How.
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B
How did he.
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A
What was his creative process?
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C
Greg went through periods of being an unbelievably prolific writer. And, and I, I don't put that lightly. I mean, I, I like to think I've managed to get a fair amount of words out in the, the last decade, but my output is much lower than Greg's. Greg's was when he was. Was on and Greg would come out and, you know, we would talk about stuff and we bounce ideas back and forth. And the next thing I would see is a 10,000 story just. And then you have to go in and in and let the story, or the text, whatever, would go backwards and forwards and you'd edit and make changes. But, you know, Greg was incredibly good at coming out with this remarkable outpouring of fascinating stuff. There was a period it was harder to do that in. In the mid-90s through early 2000s, it was a lot harder for Greg to do that in. In part because a lot of his reference materials that he had had and put together weren't accessible for him. Actually, the source material that became King of Sardar we didn't get our hands back on until the year before Greg passed away. You know, and. And I would say for everything that Greg ever published, there's 10 times that material of stuff that Greg rejected. Sometimes he published stuff that. On retrospect, I probably shouldn't. I. That's probably not what I should have published. I should have published this other version of it. But again, that's, that's. That's. That's part of the life of being a writer or an artist, because I.
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A
Was playing in the 80s and then I stopped at the 89. So I've come back to a lot of this material. And as I mentioned in the book club, what was striking to me is back then it was all about Prax. And what I've seen coming back is how Dragon Pass became to be populated. And I believe that was based on his campaign.
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B
Was it the Columnar campaign?
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C
That was part of it. That was part of it. But Dragon Pass, so, so Greg. For Greg, the centers of Glorantan interest initially were what we would now consider the West. So back in the 60s and early 70s, Greg wrote this whole series of stories set in a fictional kingdom of Seshinella with places like Ralios and Kralarella and Teshnos and Pameltella. And in these stories, it's a lot of the framework of what became Glorantha and Greg these stories around. But it was the late 60s and early 70s, and he got this rejection letter from his. One of his editors at the time, Tanith Lee, and she told Greg that there was no future in fantasy fiction. The fantasy is a dead genre. And go on and do something else. This has got to be like. This was like 70. Greg decided, well, I'm not gonna, I don't think I'm ever going to get published. He, he, he, he submitted to everybody. You know, back in the days when people really did read Playboy magazine articles and all the centerfolds submitted to them to Reader's Digest, you know, you name it. At a certain point decided well I really enjoy fantasy. I'm not having any luck on publishing as literature. But you know we could make, we could do something where we have a, a game and we create the fantasy setting and the stories and the sagas every time we play that game. So we created a board game. The, the board game. A board game. You know this is the of war games. So it was, it was very war gamey initially it was going to be in a completely new fantasy setting. He knew he wanted to have it be an empire fighting against a rebellious previous province would be storm and moon and then you know, moon changes its phases. Wouldn't it be cool if we, if I create a magic system where one side their magic fluctuates throughout the game. But you know that really in play testing that really sucks. If the mag magic always fluctuates in the game. There's got to be some ways for it to, to be stagnant that or static. So I became the glow line and that became the Bat where the bat came out of. You know he had these cool characters. He, he took one of his Gloranthan characters, R. Gat and made him Argrath and he would be the leader of the Sartre faction and Argat appears in a whole lot of Greg's stories. He was the great rebellious war leader who fought against Gabaji etc And so he adopted the name in the story and gave that to his character Arat and he made Arg's best friend. This bare skin wearing berserk who I still think has some sort of. He must have looked at a Wolverine comic or something with those claws, you know, because that came out of the time and you know, so you started having all the elements of, of what we recognize that as, as Dragon Pass and that resurrected and reinvigorated Glarantha and that became the center for I'd say 90% of Greg's writings after about 1975. And then you had Praxis at the edge of it again. I think the inspiration for Prax is driving across the western United States. If you've ever made the drive from South Dakota to Wyoming and Utah and Nevada, you know you have this just long arid semi arid desert with bits of chaparral and then bleak areas, but remarkable geography. And then you get to that. The Sierra Nevada, that. That gets you into Dragon Pass. You know, one of the tricks to getting Glarantha for me is. Is to it maps. Most of fantasy maps onto Europe and in particular onto the British Isles. Glorantha maps onto the United States. To me, you know, it's part of its. Its uniqueness.
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A
Absolutely. You know, you say he took those kind of archetypes, but they've changed, haven't they, by the time we get to King of Sarta? Because one of the things we commented on is that the Lunars back in the day, when playing Moon Quest, were a bit of an equivalence to the Roman Empire. But it's not quite the same, is it, in. No.
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B
And if you go back to the.
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C
Original board game, you know, you've got sultans, they've got the curved swords, they've got the references to towers, which are clearly minarets. There was always, you know, going way back a Arab empire, Persian element to them as all as well. And if you go and look at those original chips, that was it William Church that did the original chip. I think it was those original pieces.
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A
They.
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C
Some of the units do look like Romans, some of them look like Greeks, some of them look like Arab cavalry. Certainly in the modern art that we've been doing for the last 10 years, I think we've. We've hearkened way back to the original inspirations of this and gone back to the roots of the setting, rather than really model them strongly on the Romans.
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A
I think. I think what we. What we noted is that as an invading force, the Lunars were more. It's more of a cultural invasion than a militaristic invasion, as depicted in King of Sartre.
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C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the King of Sartor is very much from the. You know, given its origins, is what was originally going to be the starter book and trying to figure out the history of Argrath, which. There's some amusing stories about how that developed down into what was presented in King of Sardar. So of course it presents you the Sardarite take on things and the Sartorite view of the Lunar Empire is they are a threat, they are a military threat, they're a cultural threat, they're a religious threat. They are. They basically are a threat on. On every. Every way imaginable, at least as is presented in the. In. In the text assembled for King of Sartaur. One of the amusing things on this is. Is initially the Hero wars and Greg's earliest drafts, the Hero wars were going to last something like 150, 200 years. They just were going to go on and on and on and on and on. And that gets reflected in some of the goofy dating in King of Starter is great. Thought it would be cool. Well, why don't we keep that? My early drafts use the dating system that I had for my early drafts of. Of things. And I'll just throw them. Throw them in there. And it'll have the feel of historical scholarship because these dates simply do not agree with my own internal reference dates. And so when we came time to do the second edition of it, I told Greg Greg that, you know, it's cool, I totally respect that. But, you know, a lot of people are trying to build their campaigns around the information on this and somewhere you got to give them the decoder ring. So if you look at the most of those footnotes, that's all me coming in and saying, okay, here's the. Here's the decoder ring if you actually want to use this for the game. Because clearly that's not an event that you want to have in your campaign take place 100 years in the future. Argrath Saga. So that's the first. That's the first story in that that corresponds pretty closely to the outline of what Greg was putting together as what was going to be the. His grand Rgraph campaign. So he initially was going to make this grand huge campaign about the history of Dragon Pass and all the events going forward. And then with the Avalon Hill deal, that idea and concept got ported over, but it became the Boy King and it became the framework for what became the Pentagon campaigns. So, I mean, this is another thing to think about in the creative process is if I'm working on Runequest, I also am working on Pendragon. I do some work on Call of Cthulhu and I'm working, you know, I'm working on most of the other BRP projects we have in it. And of course, all of these ideas cross fertilize between between the Lines. And King of Sardar is this great example of stuff that you can also see in King and in. In the book, some of the genesis of what became Pendragon.
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A
I think David. David Larkins said that to us when we spoke to him last year. He made the same comment. I guess you could see this as investigator handout for Call of Cthulhu, a way of discovering the world.
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C
I actually prefer personally the approach taken in King of Sartre, where you have a. What you're doing you present is a whole series of incomplete packets of information that contradict themselves because that gives me the. It gives me a tremendous amount of creative room to play around with because my, my sourcebook doesn't agree with itself. That being said, that's not really what I think the, the game market wants to have. They, they. They would much rather have as a source book. They would much rather have something. Okay, here's the framework. Don't play this postmodern unreliable narrator stuff on me. I just want to have a setting so I can put my campaign together. King of Starter is to me much cooler than a lot of the stuff that, that I put together for it. But at the same time it's much harder for. It's not an RPG book.
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A
Well, let's talk about your role now and your role in actually developing it because I've got here a Ashkan version of the Gods of Gorantha which is going to be one book that was going to be produced. This is from 2018. Jeff, what happened? What happened next?
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C
Well, so we start. The original plan was let's create a Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror book to support the new edition of Renquest. And it started initially with well, let's just hit that roughly 20 cults that are in the core book. And Greg and I had been swapping, you know, Greg was. We started putting this together before Greg passed away. The original kitchen cabinet on that was myself and Greg and Ken Rollins Charleston was involved in that as well, giving some feedback. Scott Martin was giving feedback early on in this and at a certain point, you know, I was talking to Greg and saying, you know, we could do them all. We could just do. There's, you know, Greg and I had talked many times that there's roughly about 100 gods in the setting. We could just do them all. Let's give them all long form write ups. Because Greg always, you know, Greg didn't like the RQ3 Gods Glorantha book. It would. It presented these deities as really nothing but a collection of spells and skills. Right. There really was no story. There was none of the stuff that he thought was really the cool and interesting part about the cults. So let's, let's start doing it for all of them. And the number of cults started growing. I don't know how many was in that Ashcan version of it. I think that was like 25, right? It grew and then it became about 50. And then at a certain point it honestly was a hundred cult write ups and, and you know, this is part of the reason it took so long. But I also, you know, decided, you know, this is. We get one chance to do this, because if I release, if I do part of this and don't finish the rest of it, I will never get back into the place where I'm able to finish this. So screw up. We're going to put this whole thing together. And then I did something else equally nuts. I decided I would bring on Luik Muzi, who had had been largely known for doing Call of Cthulhu art, and said, I want you to do a hundred color images of. Glad you'll do the bulk of the illustrations in this. You know, Louieque is an amazing artist, in my opinion, one of the very, very best artists, fantasy art. And so. But it was a big book and it kept getting bigger. And then in a certain bit we were done.
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B
We're.
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C
We were starting to talk about, let's do the layout. How are we going to lay this out? And that was when Michal, who is the. He's. He manages production and printing and warehouse. He's. I, in my opinion, much more of the success of the company goes to folk like him and, and Daria, the new team, than to old Grognards. They're the ones who actually make the trains run on time. And he was like, yeah, you can't. How the heck are we going to print and sell two books that are bigger than the Guide to gla? I had to agree. You've got a fair point. And so we decided we will bust them up into 10 volumes. And I think it's way more handy. I mean, on retrospect, I think it was a brilliant idea to do this this way. That's how it ended up being going from that one big ashcan collection to a whole series of books.
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A
And what's the idea behind the release schedule? So a couple have come out and I believe there's one coming out tomorrow. So just talk us through that and how they'll be released.
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C
Okay. So we decided to launch it with the Prosopedia, which in my head, Canon is actually the last book of the series. But we launched it with the Prosopedia because the marketing team on this rightly realized the Prosopedia would generate a tremendous amount of interest. It's a beautiful book. The art is remarkable. There's nothing really like that in RPGs. So let's release that one first and then let's start go with Lightbringers, which, let's be honest, that is 90% of the player character cults that have ever been created for rq. So let's launch it with that one and then Earth Goddesses and Earth Goddesses because that's probably of the remaining 10%. That's probably 7% of all the other cults. And also because it's one of the few treatments of goddesses and fertility deities and these archetypes again in fantasy fiction. So let's launch those and see what the market response is. Which was fantastic. I mean the reception of this has been really, really good. Tomorrow you can buy mythology, which in my head canon is actually the first book that's actually supposed to be the first book. But if it's a series, it's a stupid book to launch the series with. You know, people want to have their cults, they want to have their, their rune spells, et cetera. You gotta start with that early on in it. And so we have the mythology book out and then that's the last one for this year. Then the next one that comes out will be in first quarter next year and that'll be the Lunar book. And then after the Lunar book, the next one will be the Solar book which is the Celestial Deities. Then I believe the next one following, I think we're going to shoot for about one a quarter after that. And it goes Darkness and Chaos and water and horned God, etc. And trails on. And part of the other reason of doing it one a quarter is we've got a lot of other books coming out. I think people are willing to buy a couple of books, a quarter of RPGs, but I don't think they want to buy 10 volumes at once.
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A
I'm looking forward to the bad guys getting their book because my favorite RQT book is Cults of Terror.
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C
Absolutely. And, and Cults of Terror, you know, that was one we, we, we added to it and built out from it. We added a few cults that didn't appear in that sustain is in it. There's, there's several other major Chaos gods that was one of the most complete books that had been done previously. So on that, you know, we've added to it, reworked parts of it, made sure it works for rqg. But a big element of that, of, of, of doing that one is to give it the art that it deserves. So because I still love my Cults of Terror but it's, you know, it's a little thin on the art.
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A
I think the reason why I enjoyed it so much is that it's coming back to Greg's idea that monsters have a culture too and they exist in the world. And you know, you got that from, from the sea caves even, you know, one of his early adventures, this idea that they're living, breathing in the world and they have as much organization as the, their human counterparts.
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C
I, I absolutely, I mean it gives motivation. I mean the interesting thing, one of the things I, I've always found interesting in Gloriantha is that, you know, if we think about it in terms of a lot of classic fantasy, the trolls are the bad guys. You know, the dark trolls, they're actually, you know, they eat humans, they, they worship the deities of hell and the underworld. They cannibalize their own misformed youth. You know, the Trollkin are their kids. So they're actually, they're not objectively good guys, but we love the trolls. Everybody loves the trolls. You know, and then when you get into the chaos, the, the followers of the chaos entities you're dealing with, you know, some of these entities, there just isn't a whole, you know, these are the, the, the truly awful parts of the cosmos. And it's one of the things I really love about the old original Lords of Terror is there's no attempt, like with Vivamore, there's no attempt to whitewash or, or romanticize Gloranthan vampires. Gloriant vampires are horrible, but they, they, they reflect a, you know, they reflect some of the very horrible fears that we as humans have. And that's part of mythology and, and, and with the, you know, with the, the troll deities, you, you know, they're, they're violent, they're destructive, they eat us, but they're not really our nightmares, if that makes any sense. Whereas the Lords of Terror are, are at least for me, they're, they're a lot of the things that terrify me. You know, they are the bad. There's, there's. And that's one of the reasons if you look into the cults books, you know, we've got that little disclaimer the same, you know, mythology doesn't just deal with the, the better angels of our souls. It also deals with the things that disturb and terrify us. You know, it's one of the things I find really compelling about Greg's Gloranthan cosmology is to me if as a result of that, it feels complete, it's got beauty and ugly.
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A
Well, it's an exciting prospect to look forward to those books and I want to thank you very much, Jeff for spending the time, particularly getting up so early spend this morning with us. Thank you very much.
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C
Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you all.
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A
Library use. Welcome to the zoom of role playing. Rambling. I've got Blithey with me. Hello, Blithey.
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B
Hello, Dirk.
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A
So what we do with this, this is library use, where we reach down from the shelves and pluck a couple of items out of. Attracted our interest to do with the topic of today's podcast. And we're going to be looking at a copy of Worms, Footnotes and Different Worlds and the brand new all new mythology book that's come as part of the cult series A Gloriantha. I mean, we're not going to get into the weeds of it because there's a lot of detail, isn't there? So for a general audience, don't worry, we're not going to start arguing over about the minus shy of. Of Glorantha. For one thing, we don't understand it ourselves.
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B
Do it. That could be one of the issues we discuss. The fact that we feel unable to get into the minutia.
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A
We'll get. We'll get over that. Unfortunately, I've not done a prefab spot game, so.
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B
Well. Well, yeah, haven't done one, but I have, I have. You've done one. Turn the tables. I've. I've done a prefab sprout. I couldn't resist it. I looked at the. What's it called? I say, you can't even pronounce it. The Priestly. The presupposia.
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A
Prosopedia.
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B
The Prosopedia. I presupposed it was a presupposia, but it's Prosopedia. Right, The Prosopedia. That's like.
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A
That's like a gazetteer, isn't it? A listing of all the gods of Grantha.
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B
Yes, it is, it is. And that's, that's why I. I was. I was tempted. I couldn't resist when I saw all the gods in there. And there's lots and lots of them, isn't there? Lots of deities and gods and I suppose, demigods and things like that.
- [32:36]
A
Yeah, it's a bit like. It's a bit like the Yellow Pages, isn't it? So I don't know if you have it.
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B
The God of plumbing. Right, let's have a look, see if there's a God of plumbing. I need a plumber and I need to do some rituals to sort me plumbing out. Is the one. Yeah, it is a bit like that. Yeah. It's essentially. I mean, it's quite an. It's an enjoyable book actually, because it doesn't really. I mean, in one way, obviously it does bombard you with Galanth because there's so many deities and so many gods that go. You go back to our day of culture practice, where there was about what, 10, something like that. And whilst they're in it, there's tons and tons and tons of them. So in a way it is, it is like overwhelming, but at the same time it's not. It's quite a fun book to just flick through and look at all these strange deities and gods and stuff like that some way. It's quite, quite a good way into it, I would say, because it doesn't overwhelm you, does it? You know, you can just pick a. Pick a God and it gives you a little bit of background and you go, all right, okay, that's interesting.
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A
They're more like capsules, aren't they, the descriptions? Like a couple of paragraphs that describes where the gods distributed and a little bit about the worship of it. But as you say, no more detail than that. It's just like a bit of tantalizing detail. I think it's meant to be a companion to the full set of books, isn't it?
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B
It, yeah, but it is quite, it's quite enjoyable, I think. I find it quite, quite a lot of fun. But it was also fun because I thought this is a perfect opportunity to test your knowledge of Glorantha, which you previously is non existent. Right. So I've picked. Well, I've picked three. There are four. There are four gods here. Four gods. Right, okay. Three are real, three are from the prosopedia. One I've made up. Okay, okay.
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A
I've got a train spot.
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B
The ones what the ring is about, the one I made up. You know, it works because you, you do it for me all the time. So there we go. Okay. First one, first God is comb and bread. Comb and bread. The God bread. Coleman bread. The God of barbers. He's the God of barbers. It's called common bread.
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A
Are you sure that's not a hairdresser in Tilsley?
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B
No, it could be. No one would describe my barber as the God of barbers. Quite the opposite. The demon barber, maybe.
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A
God of barbers.
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B
It's an exotic. It's an exotic deity.
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C
Where.
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B
Or data where worshipers believe that properly grooming one's hair is an act of sacred import and can reveal mystical secrets. That's Coleman bread, the God of barbers. Right, so that's. That's your first one.
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A
I'm immediately suspicious of that one because it just sounds like. It sounds. It sounds like you having a go at the Israelian hairdos that appear in the books.
- [35:38]
B
Well, we'll see, won't we? But don't say it sounds made up because, I mean, they are all made up up. I just made one's one. I've made up the others. Greg Stafford or someone else made up anyway, so. Common bread. That's for some. The second one is Hatch Rat. Blow hard. Hat Rat. A troll. Hatch Rat, Blow hard. Yes. He. He is a troll hero of a lamp. He was a troll hero in the Second Age, and he was inspired by the winds and sought to study them. So he's an unusual troll in that he. He was a follower of our lantern. Must have then been elevated to some minor deity. Hat Trapped. Blow hard.
- [36:24]
A
Hatchet blow hard. Now, if you've made that up, that's really good because it sounds like a Staffian name because they generally either nicknames that they've got because of the deeds that they've done, or it's like numerative determinism, you know, that they've got a name that describes what they do, what.
- [36:45]
B
They do in life. Yeah, yeah.
- [36:47]
A
Like. Like Goldfinger.
- [36:48]
B
Next one, right, Next one is Stink Bal.
- [36:52]
A
Stink Battle.
- [36:53]
B
Stink Bell is the. The God of Dung. He's the God of Dung. He's the one of the sons of a Nell and an elder and Stormbula, in truth, more than a God of Dung. He's a God of fertility and agriculture. And he's often depicted as a man scattering seeds. And you go, Stink Bow.
- [37:17]
A
That sounds familiar, that.
- [37:18]
B
So a son of an elder and stumble.
- [37:21]
A
Okay, yeah.
- [37:23]
B
Is it fine?
- [37:24]
A
An elder in Stone Ball have got loads of deities that come off them. So Stink Ball, that sounds credible.
- [37:32]
B
Okay, cool. Final one. Swims.
- [37:37]
A
Swims.
- [37:38]
B
Swims is the goddess of worms. And when I say worms, I don't mean wyrms. I don't mean with a Y. I mean with an oh, garden worms. Like worms in your garden. The goddess of worms. That's very clear and very clear. Goddess of worms. Worshiped. Worshiped by those who raise worms. So trolls, so specialized, you know, but also by worms themselves, the intelligent race of worms that live at the bottom of the sea beyond the line. So apparently in Goantha. In Goantha, your revelations here under the sea, there are some intelligent garden worm type things. You thought ducks. People complain about ducks, apparently. Or is there apparently, the worms who worship Swims, the goddess of worms. Swims.
- [38:29]
A
So there's worm. It's a Worms worship. Swims.
- [38:33]
B
Swims.
- [38:34]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [38:35]
B
S W E M S Swims.
- [38:38]
A
So you could have a player character worm, couldn't you? I'm already thinking of a scenario.
- [38:44]
B
Could you? I don't know. You could, but would you want to? I mean, would you want to?
- [38:50]
A
It certainly solved the left leg problem, wouldn't it, if you did call it.
- [38:55]
B
D21 1 to 20. It's your body.
- [38:58]
A
Right, so let's go through these then. Swims the worm Gods and swim sounds like an acronym for some. Like some youth scheme run by the council, so I'm suspicious of that one. What was it? Stink bar.
- [39:17]
B
Stink bow's the God dung. He's in an alder and stormbulls.
- [39:22]
A
An older and I, I, I. I'm gonna say that one is almost certainly a real thing. Attracts blow hard. I think that's real as well. That just sounds like. Like I say something that Greg Stafford had done. And Coleman Braid. I still remain suspicious of that. So I'm gonna stick to my instinct and say Coleman Brad is something you've made up.
- [39:50]
B
All right. That's what you're saying. Incorrect. Stink bow. I made stink ballot. I Stink ball. I made up. There's a clue as well. God of dung and stone ball. You see, There you go. Yeah. It's an interesting exercise, though, because you're right. If someone had presented this to me, I would have probably said comb and bread as. As. Or maybe swems as the fake ones. But that's what made it quite easy going through them. There's some. There's some great things in the versus some that you'll think this is a bit strange. It's a bit odd. Common bread is like something out of some slightly more gonzo game, isn't it? You know, like the more SR game where you go to an island where everyone has a fancy head. It's like. It's almost Valancy, really, that, isn't it?
- [40:38]
C
It.
- [40:39]
A
Yes.
- [40:39]
B
Yeah. As I was preparing my dcc dynast game for Grog me, I read that and I thought, that's like something Jack Van's that going to a place where people's hairdos reveal mystical secrets and they all have ridiculous hairdos. It doesn't feel gloranphant to me anyway. At least, you know, feels more.
- [40:59]
A
What's notable about Glorantha is that its origins are not in Tolkien. They do come from Moorcock. They come from Vance. And as we look at some of the details in Worms, footnotes and different worlds. You can see that it's quite eclectic. Popular culture references that are built in there. I want to take you back, though. I mean, we've done this before, haven't we? But take us back to, like, 81, 80, maybe 82, when we were in your bedroom and you were on that very small MFI desk, sat there.
- [41:37]
B
I still am on a very small MFI desk. It's a different one, but it's still a very small mfi.
- [41:42]
A
It's probably IKEA now, isn't it?
- [41:44]
B
Yes, I think it is ikea. Yeah. That's replaced on a fire. But it's all intensive purposes. It's no different.
- [41:50]
A
Yeah, yeah. So you're on that little desk and I was sat on your bed and can you remember, we've told the story before of how we got that RuneQuest box and we were baffled by it. It had no box in it, no board in it. And we were trying to break it down. And can you remember what we did, the first thing that we did with it?
- [42:14]
B
Did we read chapters each to try and get our head around it?
- [42:18]
A
Yeah. We went through. I think we did it as paragraphs. For some reason, we decided the way that we would get this. In this thing that we didn't understand into our brain is to read it to each other.
- [42:30]
B
Yeah, yeah. Let read a bit and to the other person and then say, right, what do you think that means then? What's all that about? And. And explain it then. Yeah, and move on, then. Right, we get. Right, we understand that. Move on. Do the next bit. Right, we get that. Move on.
- [42:46]
C
Yeah.
- [42:46]
B
That's how we decided to do it. And I probably, as we did that, made some misinterpretations of things. Things. But, you know.
- [42:52]
A
Yeah.
- [42:53]
B
At least we moved on.
- [42:54]
A
That we probably still carry to this day, don't we? The stuff that we. The errors that we made in that breaking it down. But I remember that I was fixated on the setting, on this idea of Grantham and the primal chaos and all these different. The rise and falls of these different councils and trying to fathom it out and work out what it. What it was about, because there's very little in there in that book, that initial rule book that actually told you about the world, if you discount the monsters. There's about 10 pages. That's all there is about Glorantha and. Yeah. And obviously you spent most of the time trying to work the rules that I was kind of hoping that you'd.
- [43:41]
B
Work that some things don't change.
- [43:43]
A
Yeah, but I think at the back, I've got it here right at the back under the appendix. Appendix or other Glorianthem material. And what it says here is that over a million words have been written by Greg Stafford about this world, Granthor. And that was so intriguing and fascinating and gave a promise of wow. We'll eventually understand this because there's millions of words out there that will impart on us what this world is actually about.
- [44:20]
B
It's astonishing though as well that there were a million words written then.
- [44:26]
A
Precisely.
- [44:27]
B
Then in the early 80s, then, not, not now then, you know. That is incredible, isn't it?
- [44:32]
A
Yeah, really. And then there was a list of published sources, including worms, footnotes, which we'll get back to this idea of the, the Wild Hunt where Stafford was writing up his, his campaign in a, in a fanzine. And then this promise of things to be published. So a third board game called Masters of Luck and Death is going to be a thing called the Hero Wars. We've not had that, have we, yet?
- [45:06]
B
Waiting for that. We're still waiting for quite a lot of it.
- [45:11]
A
Yeah. There's quite a few things listed on here that we, we're still waiting for. But we have such a lot, don't we? And such a lot promised. You know, looking at this mythology book, it looks beautiful, doesn't it? Yeah, it's stunning. It's stunning the way that it, it's been written.
- [45:26]
B
Yeah, it's. It is, it is, it is beautiful. And the illustrations in it and everything. But I suppose it's. There's a lot going on. I think this is. And this. I suppose that's always been the kind of standard criticism of Galanthus and if people make that criticism sometimes almost like a knee jerk reaction where they go, oh blimey, Galantha, oh God, oh, you know, that kind of thing.
- [45:50]
C
Yeah.
- [45:50]
B
And I always have a bit of sympathy for that. But as I, as I read it, the mythology book, and a bit like when I've read anything recently to do with Glamthra, I'm kind of conflicted because on the one hand I have some sympathy with that view that they recoil from it a bit because there's so much going on. So much going on and so much kind of mythology. And I'm always, I'm never sure how much that matters to the guy with the broadsword and the medium shield that I'm playing. You know, was it all matter, all this stuff really, in game terms, how much does it impact on the game and I'm kind of skeptical, but that it does. But at the same time I admire its brilliance. You know, as a world it is incredible that it's been built up over the years to become this kind of living, breathing mythology and it's living, breathing world. So I'm always conflicted and I admire it. I find it fascinating and in one sense brilliant, but, but in another sense it's rather a bit too much. So the cosmology, a good example is in that, in that mythology book there's a page where there's a diagram of the, the cosmology, isn't there? Yeah. And I look, I looked at that. This kind of sums it up for me. I looked at it. On the one hand I thought that is brilliant, that is beautiful illustration and it's fantastic. And it looks, it looks like something that's been found in a, a crypt or tomb. You know, if someone presented with that and said this is a depiction of the Persian cosmology from the, you know, 2000 BC, I would think it was, I'd be convinced. It's that, is that plausible? You know, it looks like something genuinely, you know, it's not like some, the stuff in some games that you look at and think that's a lot of made up stuff for a game does look convincing. So if it was, if it was a representation of some wall painting from a Persian king's tomb, I would go, yeah, I can believe that. But at the same time, at the same time when I looked at it I thought, oh blimey, what's this? Oh no, I have to understand all this. Oh my God. So I do, I always feel that weird confliction in it, that I was brilliant. And then I go, but oh God.
- [48:06]
A
Oh no, I, I, I, I, I agree. Because that 13 year old or 12 year old that was in your bedroom back then was dreaming of those million words that were going to reveal this world to me. And now I've got them and I'm still at a bit of a loss. I, I still struggle to get my head or render scope of it. And I think seeing the cosmology revealed in such detail in the mythology book, it's done a couple of things for me. It has helped me to appreciate the sheer scale of it. But I started to look at it and the different ages that it presents and the different alignments as understanding Gloranthus as sort of multiverse that actually, you know, the hero questing and replicating some of the myths that have happened previously is a way of imagining a multiversal game. You know, to go back to our previous discussion on the, on the podcast, that is one way of viewing Grantha that the different ages represent different multiverses, different myths and different stories and different ways into Gloantha.
- [49:30]
B
To go back to what you said earlier though, that, that 12 year old. What, what, I wonder what that 12 year old would have made of Glarantha. If all the stuff that's published now had been published, then I think it would be, I think it might be very different because I suppose one issue, practical issue with stuff like this is time, isn't it? You know, time as a grown up playing other games and having a life bored 12 year old, a load of time on our hands, didn't we? I wonder, I wonder how immersive. I think it would have been incredibly immersive when we were that age because we would have had the time, the effort and we didn't have the pocket money to buy other games so we, we would focus on that particular game. Whereas I suppose now there's an issue, I agree with you that multiverse thing and that fact that there's, there's different ways into it. But I suppose the issue maybe now for a lot of people is time and other games and commitment, I suppose. But when I look at those Gorantha books, it speaks to me and says you're gonna have to put some, some effort into this, you're gonna have to commit to this. And that's true of a lot of role playing games. But I think it's particularly true of Gorantha. You know, if you, if you want to. I mean maybe that. I think maybe that's just me perhaps who's someone who. You sometimes say this to me it's a veiled criticism where you say I'm the kind of person who wants to understand it all. I can't, I can't not. I can't just do a bit of it. I need to understand it. I just get it all in my head and understand it all. I'm the kind of person like you always say, I'm the kind of person who reads the manual and maybe that it's me that because I'm that kind of person, I struggle with the idea of say running a game of Glorantha Runequest at a convention as a one shot that. But I don't really understand the whole of Glorantha and I would need to understand it all. Even though I'm not going to use 90 of it, I still need to understand it all. And when you like that, I suppose it. It's a bit of a barrier. The barriers may be me rather than Room Quest, if I'm on.
- [51:30]
A
I think taking these two publications down from the shelf, it does reveal that actually most of the source material was available back then. It's just that we couldn't reach it because Worms Footnotes was like a mythical publication that we never saw. We did see different worlds that were. Picked it up at Odyssey 7 a couple of times. But Worms, Footnotes, if you look at this edition and it's issue number five, I think. Number five, yeah. Number five.
- [51:59]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [52:00]
A
And this is like a. It's almost like a fanzine, isn't it? And they're all available now. So that's the great thing about now, isn't it? That all these publications are available for download from Chaos cmo, from Drive Thru rpg. And it. You do get the sense that this is a labor of love that is slowly revealing some of this material that Greg Stafford has got to support the games. Because at this time when this was released, it was just on the cusp of Rune Quest being widely available. 1978 and the board game still having a lot of popularity. So. No, no, my gods. And it gives you some additional stuff to use for that. And Elric, beyond the Elric game as well, that they produce some extra bits and pieces for that. But it's the Glorantha stuff that attracts the attention here because you realize that those things are in mythology, this big mythology book. The seeds of them are here, aren't they? The words are more or less the same in. In this. In this format, in this document.
- [53:14]
B
Yeah. I think like the editorial is fascinating because you read the editorial. It's Rambles. It's Rambo. It's Greg Stafford, isn't it? He's rambling and it's all over the place in some ways. But what comes through is a genuine sense of excitement. It's almost as if there are those million words there. He knows there's those million words words. And it's like a tidal wave of stuff almost that he's trying to get across to. He's telling you about who's been employed to do this and where they've developed that and blah, blah, blah. All this kind of stuff that he's telling. It all comes in that editorial. It's quite a long editorial, relatively speaking, for that kind of magazine. And it's full of all this excitable stuff, isn't it? You can tell he's genuinely excited about all this stuff that he's doing in a. And I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but in a kind of amateurish way, you know, in the sense that it's moving. It's the sense in the editorial that it's moving from something that he's done with his friends. This, this thing that he's designed that's breaking into a kind of professional world, into a published world, and it comes across in the editorial. Do you not agree that there's. Yeah, there's this kind of excitement there, isn't there, in it?
- [54:27]
A
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it is rambling and chaotic. But I suppose that's where Chaosium derives its name, isn't it?
- [54:37]
B
Yeah, but I think that rambling, chaotic thing, nature is. It just. It, it. It sort of communicates to you an excitement about the whole project that there's this thing and they're kind of developing it and it's going to get out there into the world, you know, and be read by people, people played by people and all those kind of things. Yeah, genuine, Genuine excitement, which is quite nice. Nice to read, actually. Yeah.
- [55:00]
A
And in here, the articles about the celestial court and the thing that you refer to in the mythology book, and much of it remains the same, so the characters that are in that celestial court that are represented on this incredible diagram in mythology, they're all reference to here. So it's definitely a long time in the making and to see it, to see it in this raw form. But what I wanted to look at and because when I. When I think of Gloantha, I suppose it's that gaming utility thing. It. The gods are almost like a sideshow. It's the locations, I always think, because they were built for gaming, weren't they? The actual places on the map were built for things to happen in them. And in worms, footnotes there are focus on particular areas and in this one, it's. It's alone, isn't it?
- [56:01]
B
Yeah. Village. Is it called a village? It's called a village near Alone. A village near Alone. And it's just like a little sketch and a few paragraphs about a little location, isn't it? Where a village near. Near where the giants live. And occasionally the giants come down and cause a bit of trouble, that kind of thing. Yeah. And it talks about the village building trapped houses. So houses that are not houses, they're traps. So that when the giants come and smash a house up, it's actually trap to kind of fend them off sort of thing.
- [56:37]
A
Yeah, they're like the tree trunks carved into spikes and laced with poison. So when they come and kick, kick the houses, they get a tree trunk in the foot.
- [56:49]
B
Yeah, with poison, like. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very. It's very evocative. It reminded. It reminded me a lot of the kind of thing we would have had in our games back in the early 80s. Kind of nice, nice little setting and not quirkiness to it for me.
- [57:04]
A
That's what Glorianthem means. And you say that quirkiness, that is the bit, isn't it, that. That. That we really got our heads around and enjoyed. Quirkiness comes into it in. In many different ways. And it reminded me that this is the kind of thing that I would have really latched onto. This little idea, these little idea of the spiked trees and, and try and make a story because you're kind of looking for utility in it, aren't you? Trying to make. Look for adventure in it. And some of those descriptions of the gods, that's where even as a games master, it's hard to find your way through that and think, right, how do I bring that to the table? How do I make that into a game? And there's all this always this fear because there was this promise of a million words that somehow if we played in alone and did a little scenario in it, that somehow we would break the world because something would come along that would explain it differently and we were doing it wrong all the time.
- [58:11]
B
Yeah, that's. That's true. I don't get to worry much about that now, I suppose, but I know what you mean at the time. Yeah, it was a bit like that. And I suppose the thing with that, that village near Lorne, is it also highlights a unique thing about RuneQuest that was unique back in the day, in that whilst the giants are monsters and they are a problem for this village, they live side by side. So the villagers know there are these giant giants and most of the time giants don't bother them. It's just occasionally that there's a bit of trouble. Whereas in other fantasy games back in the day, that wasn't the case. The monsters were monsters who needed sorting out. But in Runequest there was this thing of communities is living side by side. They weren't. They were monsters and they were a problem, but they were tolerated to some extent. And that comes across as well.
- [58:59]
A
Yeah, yeah. And. And that they had a place in the world just as much as the human settlement was the fact that this human settlement had found a place that was a thoroughfare for the giants that they've always used. So it's just that alone far point is in the way to some extent and.
- [59:19]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But, yeah, like you said, a nice little depiction of something that I think you would have seen that at the time. You'd have definitely used that. You'd have been off into the woods to have, like, chop some trees down, get some spikes, be something happened in the woods. There you go. That's an adventure. Pre. Almost. Almost writes itself, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or.
- [59:42]
A
Or, you know, as part of a party who want the giants to destroy alone. So breaking down the traps, you know, taking the traps apart before the giants came, that kind of thing. Yeah, definitely. You mentioned that, that, you know, that you don't have that fear of breaking Goantha. And, you know, a short time ago, we started a campaign, didn't we, playing in Prax. What I think was different about that campaign, it wasn't the fact that I would. I was worried about breaking it. I still had that fear. Even though it was like a series of stories that were strung together by a migration path. And each time it was like a bit of a monster of a Week type format. I still felt like I was doing it at a superficial level, that it wasn't. I was enjoying Goantha in terms of its culture and some of the barbarian lands, also to bring in some of the gods and some of the monsters. But I. I just had a sense that. And it wasn't very deep and I was like I was letting my players down because it wasn't that deep.
- [60:57]
B
And I would agree that that's possibly the problem. Now, back in the day, we worried we were going to break it and do it wrong because there were all these words that were written to be published. You're right. Now I wouldn't so much worry about breaking it. But I think there's still that concern of, as you say, I'm not doing it justice, perhaps I'm not doing it justice. That's the thing. You read that cosmology and you read the mythology and all that stuff and you think. Think like I said earlier, because this is a fantastic world. You feel, as I feel, a sense of, if I run a game of runequest or a campaign, I'd need to do all this justice because look at it. Look at this monumental thing. Look at all this design. Look at this fascinating world. I can't just have people going down a hole in the ground killing monsters, can I? Well, I Can't. Of course I can. I can't. I know I can. But at the same time, I would feel like. Like you've just sort of alluded to, you'd feel a bit. I want to be superficial. This isn't it. It. Because there's all this stuff. It's all. Look at all this stuff. All you're doing is going into a. Do a. A hole in the ground, killing some bruise. I mean, it needs more than that, doesn't it? Because look at it. There is more than that. And that's. That's possibly the problem now, rather than breaking it. I mean, they kind of similar problems, but it's slightly different.
- [62:14]
A
Yeah, it's slightly different because there's a sense that it is a living world. It's a secondary world that's been created and as we've said in previous podcasts, it's been maintained by its fans. And there is a sense that it is. To really do it properly, you need to fully immerse yourself into the world as though it is a living world and your characters are part of that. That world. It's hard to get away into it, isn't it? It's hard to enmesh the. The. Your characters lives within the timeline of what's going on around them.
- [62:55]
B
Yeah, Like I said earlier, I think it's. It does feel sometimes like a commitment issue that you've got to put up a level of commitment to go, right, I'm gonna. I'm gonna do this like, next, you know, New Year's resolution. And I'm not saying this will be my New Year's resolution, it won't. But you could say, right, next year I'm going to run nothing but. Run Quest, nothing but RuneQuest, and I'm going to read it all out and done some campaigns and write some scenarios. That's all I'm going to do next year. And by the end of that, or halfway through, maybe by about August, September, you might get a sense of, right, I've immersed in this world now and I can navigate it and feel like the scenarios I'm running really do it justice. And that really is the part of the, the problem, I think that it's. Unless it's. Not. It's not a churlish, doesn't it? Because it's like, like, it's like you're criticizing something for being brilliant. Yes. You know what I mean? It's like. It's like a. I don't. It's like a beautiful, powerful sports car that you look at and think, I can't drive that. It's just too much. I just can't control it. You know, it doesn't detract from its fun brilliance. You know what I mean? It's a strange thing.
- [64:04]
A
Another factor is, you know, back then it was just you and I trying to make sense of it, and Eddie and, you know, that small group that we had in Bolton, and we had very little to compare it to. So as we were trying to make sense of the world, so was everybody else, and we found entertainment in it. I think another thing that's changed, there is this great deal in material. It's beautifully produced, but also you get the sense that everybody else is doing it better than you.
- [64:39]
B
Yeah.
- [64:40]
A
You know, it's. It's like, you know, I don't want to use like a. A sex analogy, but I think it's that sense that, you know, you read Cosmopolitan like I do on a regular basis and think, I'm not doing that. My. My life isn't like that. And then you get.
- [65:02]
B
You get. It's like the observer supplements, isn't it, about, like, drinking wine and, you know, Tuscany or something. Yeah. And you read. You think, I'm not. I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. He does it. Exactly. Exactly.
- [65:18]
A
He does it that way. He does it that way. And, And. But now we're exposed, aren't we, to other players that are playing it. And people come to you say, oh, you really must have a game in, of course, Hero Quest or Runequest with. With such and such wonderful Go Lantern games, Master. Wonderful. And you think, oh, I feel slightly inferior and not capable of. Of running something like this.
- [65:52]
B
Yeah. But then again, you go back to that, don't you, that if there are people who immerse themselves in it, and that's possibly maybe the only game they run, or they're really into it, then they will be. They will be better, won't they? Because they. They. They've done it more, haven't they? So there is. There is that problem, isn't there, of, you know, the commit. It's commitment, isn't it? The commitment. It was a game that requires commitment. Some games don't. Some games do. And Runequest is probably a very, very fine example of a game that requires degree of commitment to understand the setting.
- [66:20]
C
Yeah.
- [66:21]
B
More so. More so than other games, I think.
- [66:23]
C
Yeah.
- [66:23]
B
So, like when I look at. When I look at commitment. Yeah. Like when I look at, say, Deadlands, for example, Example, just one off top of my Deadland setting, there Is there is some setting guff. There is some stuff there that you can read, but the basic setting is very, very simple. It's a really simple concept. And you can go away and do adventures, fighting monsters and stuff like that without worrying too much about the. The history of it and all that kind of stuff. I think that's, you know, the mythology of Deadline Deadlands has a mythology and as a reason why all these monsters are doing what they're doing and why they've suddenly emerged in the supposed real world. But you could write that, you could summarize that in a couple of paragraphs and that's all people would need to know. That's all you need to know as a games master. And I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it. It doesn't require that level of commitment to get playing and to feel that you're playing it properly. Whereas Galantha does. Does feel like you need to get grips with a reasonable, maybe not all of it, but a reasonable proportion of it to feel like you're doing it right.
- [67:35]
A
I think that has always existed. We look at this final publication, we've got Different Worlds, one which came out a year after Worms Footnotes, that we've been looking at. And you know, this is clearly chaos in moving into yet another level of publication history where they're getting more confident. And again, it's similar to Worms Footnotes. There's a few articles trying to wrestle with the idea of what is role playing these early days and trying to communicate to people. And we're still struggling to communicate, particularly in the context of Calantha, what it is we want to get out of it. And you get a sense in these articles that both in Worms Footnotes and in Different Worlds, when they talk about role playing, is they are struggling just to articulate what it is you get out of it. And I suppose we're still doing that to some extent 40 years on, aren't we? What is it that we get out of it? Why do we do this thing?
- [68:43]
B
Look at us sat here talking about it.
- [68:45]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [68:47]
B
Yeah. I don't know.
- [68:50]
A
The reason why I wanted to look at this Different Worlds number one is because it has a cult write up, but it's not in the format that we get in RuneQuest. It's fairly rudimentary. But I think the character of Jaw this. This I suppose is the God of pubs, really, and then bars and hospitality. I find it amusing because it shows the paradox that's at the center of Grantha about the sacred and the profane in the sense that you have all this mythology and all these different stories. But at the heart of it, it's just a load of jokes. A little bit of in jokes and a little bit of Stafford's quirky sense of humor that we've referred to previously. And I think this is a good example of it. Joe is a good example of it.
- [69:49]
B
Because it's about the cult. It's spelled Geo, isn't it?
- [69:51]
C
G. Yeah.
- [69:52]
B
G, E, O. And it's like a God of hospitality, isn't it? So there's a rationale behind why this God's kind of emerged as a.
- [70:01]
C
A.
- [70:01]
B
As a God of hospitality and a God of taverns. And there are Geo. Taverns, aren't there? But like you say is. It is kind of eat at Jaws thing, which I didn't. I didn't quite get the joke quite click with me, but I get it now. So the idea of like a chain of. Almost like a chain of taverns, almost. It's not a chain of tabs, but it is in the sense that they're all linked to this culture and there's certain codes of behavior within them and they offer people certain sort of protections if they followers and all the usual kind of stuff. But like you said, it is a. It is a joke, isn't it? Yeah, like. So there's that odd thing, as I said earlier. There's that picture in the mythology book that looks like a convincing ancient diagram of the universe. It convinces you to convince him. Plausible, serious piece of art. And then you get stuff like this, which is like kind of a joke. Yeah, there you go.
- [71:01]
A
The patron. Patron God of weatherspoons in Gorantha. But also that reference to eat at Jaws is a Warner Brothers cartoon meme thing, isn't it? That repeats. And we know, don't we, Stafford? Like to. Daffy Duck and Daffy.
- [71:20]
B
Well, that's. That's. Yeah, that's where. Yeah, that's people. White wire ducks in golamp. So. Well, there you go. That's why. Yeah, he was a fan of that kind of thing. So there are these kind of joke. Joke things in there. I mean, they're quite good jokes, I suppose as well, because they are. They are kind of masked a bit. They're not. Yeah, it's not like tunnels and trolls, is it? Where there's a joke and you go, that. That. That's just a joke, you know.
- [71:48]
C
Yeah.
- [71:49]
A
Spell.
- [71:50]
B
I suppose they are jokes, but they're kind of. There's. There's Kind of something layered over the top of them to soften it a bit so that you can't quite see the joke until someone says, that's a joke. Oh, it is, yeah, I get it. Yeah. But, yeah, yeah, a lot of.
- [72:05]
A
In jokes like that. And again, this description has some utility. You could see. They describe the bouncers, don't they, Going with the. From 10 to 10 with their wagons, extolling justice onto times. Because they've got these gallows on the back of the wagons and.
- [72:26]
B
That's right, yeah. Bouncer, is it? Bouncer. Some kind of spirit or something as well. Some kind of. Yeah, yeah. Divine rock of the bouncer. Yeah. We would have reacted to that when we were younger. Would we have gone with it or would we have been sniffy and gone, oh, no, that's stupid.
- [72:45]
A
Well, again. Again. But doesn't it invoke that reaction? Doesn't it. It re. Invokes reaction. This is so complicated. I don't understand it. Or, you know, like the ducks. That is ridiculous. I'm. I'm not having that in my game. So it's. It does provoke that reaction. I think you have to being. You got to be empathetic with the scale of it and some of the quirkiness of it to. To really enjoy it. I think once you've got that, that's when Goantha becomes fun. And I still have. I still have ambitions of running. Running a game in Grantha and having a sustained campaign.
- [73:30]
B
Yeah. When we're old. When we. Well, we are old, but when we're old and retired and you'll have time to immerse yourself in it. What are you going to do when you retire? That eternal question, people, what are you doing when you retire? Oh, I'm going to spend my time reading Golantha and then run loads of campaigns and feel really that I'm doing it properly at last in my old age. I'm doing it properly.
- [73:49]
A
I promise you that. We'll have a scenario where you play barbershop.
- [73:57]
B
Or worms.
- [73:59]
A
No, I'm going for barbers, I think. Going for barbers, hairdressers, worshipers of corn and bread.
- [74:08]
B
That's funny. Well, they live on. I'll tell you where they live. They live on an island called Gold Blimey Wrath, Morassa, Mangan. A desolate island. And. Desolate and a wondrous contrast to the gorgeous coiffures of the inhabitants. There you go. We thought all you got to do, use that as your entry point, that island. Fancy hairdos. Off you go.
- [74:39]
A
And I, I, I see a group of PCs who are bald who are seeking out that.
- [74:49]
B
Well, it does suck. It does Saga just say that. Yeah, they know. Yeah. It says here that the, the cultists know how to regrow hair on a bald head and to destroy unwanted hair permanently. There you go. I mean that, I suppose that's a bit. That's a joke. That's a joke there, isn't that, you know?
- [75:08]
A
Yeah.
- [75:09]
C
Yeah.
- [75:10]
A
Well, next year I'm gonna make a commitment. I'm gonna make a New Year's resolution. Next year I'm gonna do it. Grog me a scenario set on that island. I'll do it. I'll do it as part of Grog Fringe. Grog Fringe.
- [75:25]
B
Oh, Grog Fringe. Very good. Yeah, I like it. Yeah.
- [75:30]
A
Cheers. Blazer.
- [75:31]
B
Goodbye.
- [75:32]
A
I'll get my coat. This is the part of the podcast where we head towards the door. We still got our coats on. We're still shuffling away from the gaming table saying goodbye, but we can't quite bring ourselves to leave because we've got a few things to cover. A bit of closing time chatter. What's your closing time chatter? Blinding.
- [75:53]
B
My closing time chatter is the other week I ran Liminal for the first time around. Liminal?
- [75:59]
A
Oh, brilliant. Because we played it over summer and we did a couple of podcasts about it. So how did you find it being a chance?
- [76:06]
B
I really enjoyed it.
- [76:07]
A
I think it should read.
- [76:08]
B
I'm quite taken with it, as I think we discussed on the podcast. When we discussed it, I was, I was quite taken, quite surprised how much enjoyed it because for some reason I got it into my head that I wouldn't as you do, but, but I did. And I ran it for my friend and his son, who, who kind of his son's kind of exploring role playing games. He's gone from DND to call a Cthulhu. Tried one or two other things. I ran it for them and they, they thoroughly enjoyed it. You know, they thoroughly enjoyed it. And it works really well. It's a very, you know, the system's nice and simple, but there's enough going on in it to make it interesting.
- [76:42]
A
It.
- [76:43]
B
And I do like the, I say setting. It's not setting. Is that supposed Is a setting, but it's not set the real world, isn't it? But I like the whole idea of it, you know, the factions and what have you. And we did, we played the Reed Legacy. The Reed Legacy, which. Written by Sue Savage. Savage.
- [77:02]
A
All right.
- [77:02]
B
Okay. Yeah. And it's about Jack the Ripper. I won't I won't know spoilers, but it involves the theft of Edmund Reed's diary, and Edmund Reed was one of the police inspectors who investigated Jack the Ripper and a discovery of who Jack the Ripper is or was. And the Ripper comes back with a vengeance in the adventure. And they really enjoyed it. You know, they enjoyed. I think what they enjoyed about it and what I enjoy about it is those kind of linkages to the real world, you know, so, like that Jack the Ripper, the hidden world, and how the Jack the Ripper mystery is part of the hidden world. You know, it's not just a murderer going around murdering people. There's something more behind it, that kind of thing. And they really enjoyed that. I suppose that's what I enjoy about it as well. You know, they enjoyed the kind of factions that they just discovered, a few factions and that kind of thing. And they want to play a bit more. So we're gonna play a little bit more. It's very, very good. I really enjoyed it. Yeah.
- [78:07]
A
And well done for extending the taste of the palette because it's normally a fifth edition and called Cthulhu.
- [78:15]
B
Like you say, it's Trap. My charity work, you know. Yeah. Doing good. Doing good in the community. Play this instead. There you go.
- [78:23]
A
I'll play this as well, actually.
- [78:25]
B
As well, of course. Yes. Not instead as well. Yeah, yeah.
- [78:30]
A
My closing time chapter. Well, as you know, we're 15 at the time of recording. We're 15 days away from grog meat. And so I'm in that kind of panic spiral of getting stuff ready. And in the afternoon, the Friday afternoon, we've got a bit of an OSR spectacular where we're each running games from White Dwarf in the Glory Days and Imagine Magazine. And I've started looking at mine and I've said, I'll do Eagle Hunt. The Eagle Hunt by Marcus L. Rowland. And I have fond memories of this because the diagrams and the maps that come with it are really, really good. And I remember reading. I say, I read it at the time. Did I really? Or did I just. Just my eyes glance over. I think Simon ran it for us as well, but I don't have many memories of that, do you?
- [79:29]
B
No, I. I remember we did play it, but like you say, it's a long, long time ago, and it could have been during the period where he only had the Dungeon Master's Guide or the Place I Live. So we might have played it, but to what extent we've played it properly.
- [79:44]
A
Exactly. And I. I think I. I Have.
- [79:48]
B
I'm.
- [79:48]
A
I'm. I remember was playing it, but it didn't make an impression on me. And reading it now, it, it is that fascinating process that I think we've talked about before, that when you read these old adventures that you as a games master have to read it very carefully and closely because the actual plot or the actual essence of the story is revealed to you as it's revealed to the players. So if you miss something that's in a room or something like that, in the description of a room, you miss the whole idea of the game because there's not, not a summary. There's a. There's a brief summary saying how it starts, but not, this is what's going on, this is what's happening from beginning to end, and this is what to expect. There's none of that. You have to read the entire thing in detail. And I'm finding that process torturous to, to say the least because, you know, I'm trying to extract what, what are the interesting things? You know, I've had a description of every single room here, but what is it that's going to make this interesting? Over 3 hours?
- [80:59]
B
There is that, that problem of, of deciphering them. Sometimes you have to kind of almost decipher the, the scenario. All the information is there, which is fair enough, enough. But yeah, you're right, you know, I mean, I'm. I'm running the American. American Alien, Werewolf in London, Mom. The Time Traveler. Time Traveling Traveler scenario. That, that's similar. It gives you all this stuff and it's a great idea, but just gives you stuff that you think, all right, that's, that's all this stuff. But how does it work as a in play? You know, quite a lot of work has had to be done to make it playable, I suppose. Suppose, because it just presents you with an idea, some descriptions of things and some historical stuff and it's like right off you go, well, yeah, but I just. How would it work? How would you play it? You know, as in from them getting the mission, going back in time, finding this, finding that kind of thing, you know, you're right. You have to kind of untangle it a bit, don't you, really?
- [81:58]
A
Yeah.
- [81:58]
B
And the worry as well that in within that one, you're right. Within that untangle in. I might miss something fundamental, you know.
- [82:05]
A
What is it in here that's exciting. That's going to make it a really fun session and sometimes you have to dig really hard because outside of the kind of initial premise and setup there's very little else to go at.
- [82:22]
B
Yeah, and I found that as well. There's a big. In the alien werewolf in London. But there's a big. The big paragraph of several paragraphs big section explaining how the time machine works. But it's not how it works, is it? Because it made up. Yeah, it's a made up thing. You know, it's like. Oh, it's very good description about it. Oh yeah, but it's a made up thing. So it's not, it's not like, you know, you could say anything, just say it's a box and takes back in time. Yeah. No one knows how it works. But it does. But it does work. There you go. Right, move on to something more interesting. It's a conceit, the design machines conceit for the adventure. It's not, it's not fundamental, it's just players are going to sit there, I mean they might. Whether the players are going to sit there on that Friday afternoon at Grog me and go, is it time machine work then? Yeah. Does it work? Well, I don't know. Hang on a minute. It says here. All right, well he says it works like. I'm not sure time machine would work like that. No one knows how time machine is going to work because it's not been invented.
- [83:21]
A
You just have to hold. You must have thought there's nobody at the table who's like you and really wants to understand it all.
- [83:28]
B
What's the manual? Have you got the manual for the time machine? Have you got a player handout? Manual for the time machine, please.
- [83:36]
A
I just. Where I just plug it in and see what had happened. You'd have to understand what every single knob did and whatever presetting was.
- [83:46]
B
Well, in fairness I think if it was a time machine, I think I'm doing the right thing. I mean it's one thing to try and put together an IKEA small IKEA desk like the one I'm sat at as we speak and get it wrong. That's a minor inconvenience. Getting it wrong in a time machine could be disastrous. I think you would want to read the manual, work out what the buttons do. At the very least don't plug it in and press a button at random them.
- [84:18]
A
If you ever needed a self justification for a rules lawyer, there you have it.
- [84:23]
B
All right then Bl Safety first in the time machines at all times.
- [84:28]
A
Cheers Bly. See you in a bit.
- [84:30]
B
All right, see you. Bye bye. The Save Rap podcast covers old school.
- [84:34]
C
Gaming and the modern games inspired by them listen in to hear about games from the 70s and 80s as well as their modern descendants.
- [84:40]
B
You can download Episodes where wherever podcasts are found on itunes, Google and other fine podcast distributors. You should also check them out on saferhalf.com or email them@saferhalfpodcastmail.com.
- [84:55]
A
I really recommend visiting the Worms Footnotes, which are available individually or as a bundle as a download directly from Chaosium or drivethrurpg. If you're invested in the new cult books, they're stunning. The Mythology book is a fantastic introduction to the cosmology, which is worth owning for the artwork alone. You'll dip in and out of it and discover new things every time. A full, unedited version of the interview with Jeff Richard will be available on the Patreon feed shortly, which includes Jeff's response to the questions from the book club attendees, which were more erudite than I could manage. Thanks Geoff. If you want to see some actual play of Glorantha that brings to life the adventure of the setting, then please watch the unconventionals DMs as they run through the 13th age scenario with vim and vigor and features me trying to shoo in a cow. Just a reminder that the book club is available to all on the first Sunday of every month. See the website for details and the best way of keeping up to date with everything that's going on in the world of the Grognard Files is to join our Discord. Drop me a line and I'll send you an invite. Thank you to all of our patrons who keep this show on the road. And next time I will be giving some individual shout outs to some new joiners. Until then, I really need to wrap up, put on my hat and conquer those wily misty moors. Until next time. Adios amigos.
- [86:52]
B
We love roll and fall in grief.
- [86:56]
C
You had a temper like my jealousy.
- [87:01]
B
Too hard, too greedy.