God Time of the Golden Age of Blog

Morning, Sartarites.

I’m Andrew. Thirty-three of my forty-three years have been spent playing tabletop RPGs. This blog is about a very specific segment of that hobby: gaming in the setting of Glorantha.

Now “Glorantha” is a pretty easy word to type. It’s also an easy idea to wrap your head around – a bronze-age fantasy world abundant in magic and riven by warring gods. But doing so is like describing the sea by looking at its surface. There’s Glorantha and there’s GLORANTHA – the vast, mythopoeic world created by Greg Stafford and others across five decades of fiction, board games, tabletop RPGs, fanzines, folios, computer games and who-knows-what-else.   It’s colossal, a creative act beyond compare, and, aside from the broadest details, I know very little about it.

So this is a blog of exploration; of the world and systems that enable play in it. It won’t be a deep survey of fictional cultures – although Big G happily accommodates that – nor will it be a misty-eyed retrospective. Most of this stuff is fresh to me, so that’s how I’ll treat it. My aim is to explore various sources as prompts toward the production of useful, playable content for people who enjoy rattling dice and talking in weird accents. At each turn I’ll try to summarise what I’ve read and the implications for enterprising players and GM’s who want to sit down and game with this stuff.  With that in mind I’ll also look at how innovations and resources from other games – like OSR encounter tables as a means of setting transmission – can be synthesised with existing material for fun and ease of use.

That’s the plan, at least.  I’d bid you a suitably Gloranthan adieu but I don’t know any yet.

'Til next time!