Those Stories

About 15 years ago, I got back to the office and there was a message on the answering machine. “Those stories!” the caller repeated more than once. Long distance transmission and his accent made it hard to understand much more. I managed to get back to him, and learned that he was a high school student in Finland, who was so impressed by the Gloranthan mythology that he had called the United States.

The power of myth is basically why our next game will be set in Glorantha.

An obvious goal of Six Ages will be to capture what made King of Dragon Pass special. We did a very unscientific survey, and nearly half the respondents felt very strongly that a successor wouldn’t be like King of Dragon Pass without Glorantha.

The basic KoDP mechanics are strong and flexible, and could obviously handle other worlds. About 6 years ago, Robin Laws and I came up with a dozen settings that would allow for a community-based narrative game. (Perhaps a bee game where the hive is analogous to the clan is a bit of a stretch, but not much of one.) We didn’t mention Glorantha, perhaps because it was so obvious.

What does Glorantha bring to the table?

It’s Real

Greg Stafford, and now Moon Design, has been developing Glorantha for decades. This means that it’s incredibly detailed, but also that the details make sense. (As I read the Guide to Glorantha, I’m often impressed at how a sentence or two written in the 1980s has been fleshed out into the history of an entire culture. For example, we now know a great deal about the horse nomads who were driven from Peloria in the Dawn Age, and the Dara Happan emperor who fought them.) Gloranthan history may be a little shorter than ours, and the world a little smaller, but there’s still a significant scope and reach. It wasn’t simply assembled to order as a game setting.

It’s Not Real

By the same token, Glorantha is a fantasy setting. And despite the wealth of detail in print, there’s plenty of room for major creativity. This is really important in a game, since it means the developers can make up something that makes the game more interesting or fun, without having to worry that the Romans didn’t have the rudder or the stirrup. There is obviously a lot of Gloranthan continuity to be respectful of, but if we need to make up new characters or events, we can. (For example, Bad King Urgrain was not part of Glorantha before Robin Laws started writing King of Dragon Pass advice.)

It’s More Than Real

Glorantha is explicitly a world of myth. These days, “myth” is often used dismissively, but mythology has been key to human existence, probably as long as we’ve been human. (The art in cave paintings was surely not decorative.) Mythology is in some way baked into humans (Carl Jung wrote, “We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.”). Myth let us explain and understand the world. In a game, we can go the other direction, extrapolating from a myth.

Even better, Glorantha is not just one myth family, but many, which are sometimes compatible and sometimes opposed. Perfect for a game!

In Glorantha, a blue dragon is not just a quaint explanation for a raging river which flooded the land. The dragon is as real as the river, and if you want to dam the river, you need to defeat the dragon.

Is It Important?

Fewer than 20% of our survey participants said that Glorantha was not important. And we could certainly use a different setting. As I said, a non-historical setting is extremely convenient. While we tried to make King of Dragon Pass a realistic Bronze/Iron Age game, we didn’t have to worry about someone complaining that infant mortality was unrealistically low or that Sir Ethilrist didn’t start armoring his steeds until 1440.

One friend pointed out that fantasy settings give you lots of benefits in the market, but creating a good one (especially with any sort of coherent mythology) is a lot of work. Why not license one?

Which is basically what we did. We get a world with a history of conflicts and a rich mythology, both features well-suited for creating a story game. The fact that Glorantha is also a well-regarded setting, explored by games such as RuneQuest, Dragon Pass, HeroQuest, and 13th Age was a plus.