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The Glorantha Sourcebook
The Glorantha Sourcebook is an essential resource for Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha, one of the most extensively developed and renowned fantasy settings of all time. A world of mythology, gods, and heroes, Glorantha has inspired roleplaying games, board games, computer games, comics, fiction, and more, a setting beloved and revered worldwide.
An invaluable resource for gamemasters, players, and readers of fantasy worlds, this sourcebook is gorgeously illustrated and filled with informative maps and diagrams. Drawn from a variety of out-of-print and rare sources, this material has been dramatically revised, updated, and expanded. Alongside this foundational material are new essays, insights, and extrapolations on the world and its incredible denizens.
Inside this sourcebook, you’ll learn about the creation of the world; the main ages of its past; the history of Dragon Pass and its people; the pantheons of the gods, including the Lightbringer and Lunar pantheons; the Coming of Argrath; Elder Races such as the Elves, Dragonewts, Dwarves, and Trolls; genealogies of the major royal dynasties; legends and lore of the various tribes and peoples inhabiting Glorantha; the fundaments of Gloranthan magic and the Runes that shape the world; the history and gods of the mighty Lunar Empire; and finally, the Hero Wars!
This systemless sourcebook can be used to enhance and support any fantasy roleplaying game of your choosing, including RuneQuest, HeroQuest, and 13th Age Glorantha, and others.
An invaluable resource for gamemasters, players, and readers of fantasy worlds, this sourcebook is gorgeously illustrated and filled with informative maps and diagrams. Drawn from a variety of out-of-print and rare sources, this material has been dramatically revised, updated, and expanded. Alongside this foundational material are new essays, insights, and extrapolations on the world and its incredible denizens.
Inside this sourcebook, you’ll learn about the creation of the world; the main ages of its past; the history of Dragon Pass and its people; the pantheons of the gods, including the Lightbringer and Lunar pantheons; the Coming of Argrath; Elder Races such as the Elves, Dragonewts, Dwarves, and Trolls; genealogies of the major royal dynasties; legends and lore of the various tribes and peoples inhabiting Glorantha; the fundaments of Gloranthan magic and the Runes that shape the world; the history and gods of the mighty Lunar Empire; and finally, the Hero Wars!
This systemless sourcebook can be used to enhance and support any fantasy roleplaying game of your choosing, including RuneQuest, HeroQuest, and 13th Age Glorantha, and others.
220 pages, ebook
First published February 12, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 10, 2019
Full review on the blog here https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/201... - plaintext below
LAYOUT AND ART
My favourite thing about this book and most powerful sensory experience is the quality, variety and integration of the art throughout the whole of the book.
There are some minor quibbles with the diegetic elements. I fantasise about an epistolary world and
this attempt is imperfect, but still noble and good.
Firstly, this book is BRIGHT, which I very much appreciate and which fits the tone and feel of the world it describes.
As someone who has been quietly disappointed in Games Workshops slowly dulling aesthetic and not really happy with its art or the way it integrates image, world-building, infographics and DIFFERING STYLES of art within the same world window;
THIS IS HOW YOU FUCKING DO THAT.
THE DIVINE INFOGRAPHICS
My favourite part of the book is these repeated family trees of the divine hierarchies for the different cultures and celestial courts. Since the superstructure of Glorantha is all about divine powers, these are essentially cosmic maps of the setting.
They are tremendous fun, and very well made. They also feel 'real' or sub-real, they have a pleasing harmony of pseudosense
THE INTEGRATION OF STYLES
There are many different artists throughout the whole of the book but the sense of them as a whole, as representing the same reality, though seen through different eyes, is sustained throughout.
This feels more like the kind of book where the artists have been allowed to draw the bits they find most interesting and then space has been found for it, rather than the other way round.
The fact that there is no absolute, crushing 'Gloranthan House-Style' means it feels like the art as a whole, across the book, can breathe. There is a pleasing range of variety of methods and approaches within a loose but cohesive whole.
This fudges the diegesis somewhat. Some elements, like the bas-reliefs at the start of the book,
or this vase on page 160,
seem highly diegetic, as if they are literal artefacts which have been transcribed directly onto the page from the imagined world.
Other pieces have an un-specific diegesis, pictures from inside the world, but with no particular named artist or exact in-world point of view.
We could regard this as imperfect in the abstract but in function, as the book is read, it works fine. The human mind can deal quite easily with this mixture of levels of diegetic and less-diegetic elements, as we do when we are children, and the concept of the book never leans on that structure so heavily that the differences become a problem.
Simply - these images speak in different voices, but they all feel like they are talking about the same thing.
THE TEXT - THE AMERICANNESS OF GLORANTHA
In both its world-concept and in its writing style, Glorantha feels to me, really intensely American.
This might not make sense initially as, in its subject and its openness to influence, I think it draws hugely from a staggering range of real-world religions and cultures. There is a shitload of Hinduism in there for a start, but there is a lot of Everything in there.
I'll begin with the language
This is really hard to define, and none of it is intended as a criticism. There is a quality here I think of as 'plains English', which, by imagination or not I tend to associate with the middle bits of America. Friendly bearded protestant men with Hawaiian t-shirts and Tiki collections who go to church every Sunday. People who's grandfathers probably spoke German or Dutch.
"Then a great dark spot rose into the sky upon the net. This huge bloated shadow flickered with a smoky glow. The shadow crept across the face of the sun, blotting it out and making all the world cold for a moment. A snapping moment of terror pierced the world, then the dark sky-web vanished, and the edge of the sun crept past the shadow. The shadow disappeared and the sun brightened, but everyone thought it looked paler than it had before. Some said it moved differently, too.
In Pamaltela, the heat strengthened the many spirits of that realm. They entered the jungles, plants, and elves, and combated the rot in their fibers."
There is certainly nothing wrong with this and it does its work. There is something in it that reminds me of American ticker-tape just-the-facts prose. Americans, I believe, do not like compressions of meaning, or elisions. They like a word to be a word and a phrase to be clear, to be linked directly to the next phase and for its meaning to be what it plainly signifies itself to be. They also seem to dislike strong euphony and intensification of rhythm. There is a Germanic tendency there that its better to extend a sentence than to potentially leave any element of it open to inconstant interpretation. Brandon Sanderson is a bit like this in some of his things I've read. It is very clear, democratic, rather Methodist-bible language.
Theogony Gumbo
The simple fact that Glorantha takes from so many different world religions and the combination of its very open-hearted and very open-handed attitude to them, along with the simultaneous access of knowledge and systemisation of that knowledge, speaks itself, in the nature of the intellectual work done, of a particular time and place.
This kind of mingling together of influences would not have happened _in this way_ at many other times.
A little earlier in Anglo-diaspora history the 'foreign' bits would probably be more foreign, more orientalised. A lot earlier and the knowledge either wouldn't exist or the originating religion/cultures that make it up either wouldn't be in conversation with each other or wouldn't get on.
Post 2000's, I think most millennials would probably feel bad about taking aspects of IRL cultures and religions from different real-world ethnicities and just jamming them together anyhow. It seems like the kind of thing someone would get upset about.
So this reads to me as very much a product of the 1960-1990-s era of relative liberalism. And the willingness to systematise the whole thing (though the diegetic elements of the world itself do remark that there is no absolute systemisation of divine order from _within_ the world, only differing interpretations arranged around a wide but fuzzy 'general knowledge).
This is from what I think of a "Cultural Lego Times". Innocent times when a bunch of nerds could just reach out to grab elements of different cultures and fantasy elements and just jam them together like a child making something, without a great deal of angst or drama.
I do not think we live in Cultural Lego Times any more.
The Fantasy Elements
Glorantha has humanoid Ducks in it. Literally they are only in a few pages BUT THEY ARE ON THE COVER AND THEY ARE CANON. So, this is the kind of highly developed fantasy world where it has its own divine hierarchies but clearly at some point Sandy Petersens best friend or someone _really_ wanted to play a humanoid duck, and while they haven't really gone deep on the duck thing since then, they are still in there.
My broad point here is that the genesis of the integration of fantasy elements, with trolls (but different), elves, dwarfs etc (but different) and not hobbits (but we have ducks), again seems to me to come from a particular time and place. The post-Tolkien 60's-70's boom. (Much of Glorantha feels very 70s to me). It has that slightly gauche summery tactile 70's vibe.
On the mid-20thC Paracosm-boom scale, it’s very clearly cooler and edgier than Greyhawk or Blackmoor, and more coherent than Coventry, but not quite as cool as Tekumel, which is like Gloranthas edgy brother who plays in a band and won't let Glorantha into their room.
So all of this makes me intuit that, though Glorantha is, very nobly, a combination of a vast range of influences and has many highly original elements and aspects, the range and origins of those sources, and the manner of their integration and expression, make it feel very American to me.
GODS IN GLORANTHA
If this is about anything it’s about the integration of a coherent Theogony as a magical, moral, cosmic, historic and philosophical superstructure for a fantasy world. If you want to play a game where there are lots of religions and where religion matters then this is for you.
Gods in Glorantha play a dozen roles.
Gods as Aircraft Carriers.
Their simplest is as tanks or artillery divisions in battles. Every culture has a god or godsquad and when they come into military conflict whoever has the strongest god(s) and can get them to intervene more effectually will win battles by having them lend power or simply turn up on the field.
So Gloranthan military engagements are actually 5th dimensional affairs in which ritual and spiritual elements can transform into simple military materiel and visa-versa (a little like 40k).
Gods as Culture-Leaders
Gods incarnate, visitate and reincarnate a whole bunch and this can lead the centre of any culture an effectively-immortal warrior/teacher/prophet/lawgiver who acts not only as a private superman but also as a kind of cultural and moral library and judge.
It’s a little like the British Sovereign is almost meant to be in law, a magical source of power, and a little like if George Washington could reincarnate on each death, but with all knowledge intact, and if all George Washingtons children might be born with a few grammes of divine Washington power. And if you want to invade America successfully, you need to find and permanently kill the reincarnating George Washingon, but once you do that, the rest of the place goes down pretty easy.
Or simply as if all that Eurasian stuff about bronze-age God-Kings was pretty much accurate and literally true.
Gods as Magical and Philosophical Superstrucure Soap-Opera
Since the gods are definitely real, though mainly outside time, and since there is a big library of gods and their exact relations and histories, learning magic, philosophy and history is really learning about this big divine Soap-Opera and trying to get close to, and understand, one or more of the characters.
Magical and divine power in Glorantha is so integrated, and so total, trying to understand it is one of the few useful things you can do. Societies and cultures that gain technological or philosophical dominance, don't do it necessarily by prioritising technology and science, but by getting close to a highly rationalist god or god-philosophy that releases these capacities in them.
God as Atom Bombs
You can basically smash any problem if you can get a big enough god on it.
There seems to be a theme in Glorantaha of Godwars and gods punching each other to pieces leaving holes or damaging reality so that the grainy sinister 90's CGI of Chaos can come through. Since its a D&D world where becoming a demigod is the last rung of promotion and since its quite and agonistic world where adventure needs to happen, this adds an element of tragedy; your super-adventure might end up punching a hole in the Real and brining Glorantha closer to DOOM
QUESTIONS
FOR PEOPLE WHO PLAY IN GLORANTHA
How the fuck do you play in Glorantha?
I'm waaaay into Warhammer 40k, to the extent that I have opinions on the different _voice actors_ for the Audiobook Readers in the Horus Heresy series.
Reading this Glorantha sourcebook is probably as close as I can get to what it must be like to be introduced to 40k for the first time. Holy crap this is a fucktonne of stuff to be slammed over the head with.
Even as someone who is generally into pseudohistories, and this being, essentially, part of my job, bit parts of Glorantha were a real slog to get through. There is just a huge, HUGE amount of highly specific history here. Staggering levels of detail, highly specific and, due to Gloranthas close integration of divine order, magical power and temporal culture, highly _consequential_ information.
I know there are a huge amount of playstyles and cognitive/world-engine preferences out there very different to mine and this is probably exactly what a bunch of you are specifically looking for.
People who play in Glorantha, specifically, people who are introducing _new players_ into Glorantha. How do you do it? Is it a loremaster thing where the DM is just deeply read in the pseudohistory and drops it on the unknowing as things go on? Do you need a bunch of experts on Glortantha to play?
From my personal biases, Glorantha is so dense that its virtually unplayable as a game setting, but I know most are not like me, so what are you doing?
Where did Glorantha Come From?
I know there must be a forum somewhere purely about this, and with its own scandals and schisms, are we at the point yet where anyone can summarise 40+ years of paracosm development in a blog comment or medium article? Probably not.
How much of the legendary background is stuff that happened in some game back in the 70's? Or in some wargame? Very large amounts of this read like legendarification of someones play reports, specifically the oddness of the pseudohistories which come off very much like some player-character stuff.
Or am I wrong and its all designed-in? Or did it evolve over multiple books over different eras? Has anyone written the historiography of the creation of Glorantha? And then helpfully done the condensed version because I probably don't have time to read the whole thing.
LAYOUT AND ART
My favourite thing about this book and most powerful sensory experience is the quality, variety and integration of the art throughout the whole of the book.
There are some minor quibbles with the diegetic elements. I fantasise about an epistolary world and
this attempt is imperfect, but still noble and good.
Firstly, this book is BRIGHT, which I very much appreciate and which fits the tone and feel of the world it describes.
As someone who has been quietly disappointed in Games Workshops slowly dulling aesthetic and not really happy with its art or the way it integrates image, world-building, infographics and DIFFERING STYLES of art within the same world window;
THIS IS HOW YOU FUCKING DO THAT.
THE DIVINE INFOGRAPHICS
My favourite part of the book is these repeated family trees of the divine hierarchies for the different cultures and celestial courts. Since the superstructure of Glorantha is all about divine powers, these are essentially cosmic maps of the setting.
They are tremendous fun, and very well made. They also feel 'real' or sub-real, they have a pleasing harmony of pseudosense
THE INTEGRATION OF STYLES
There are many different artists throughout the whole of the book but the sense of them as a whole, as representing the same reality, though seen through different eyes, is sustained throughout.
This feels more like the kind of book where the artists have been allowed to draw the bits they find most interesting and then space has been found for it, rather than the other way round.
The fact that there is no absolute, crushing 'Gloranthan House-Style' means it feels like the art as a whole, across the book, can breathe. There is a pleasing range of variety of methods and approaches within a loose but cohesive whole.
This fudges the diegesis somewhat. Some elements, like the bas-reliefs at the start of the book,
or this vase on page 160,
seem highly diegetic, as if they are literal artefacts which have been transcribed directly onto the page from the imagined world.
Other pieces have an un-specific diegesis, pictures from inside the world, but with no particular named artist or exact in-world point of view.
We could regard this as imperfect in the abstract but in function, as the book is read, it works fine. The human mind can deal quite easily with this mixture of levels of diegetic and less-diegetic elements, as we do when we are children, and the concept of the book never leans on that structure so heavily that the differences become a problem.
Simply - these images speak in different voices, but they all feel like they are talking about the same thing.
THE TEXT - THE AMERICANNESS OF GLORANTHA
In both its world-concept and in its writing style, Glorantha feels to me, really intensely American.
This might not make sense initially as, in its subject and its openness to influence, I think it draws hugely from a staggering range of real-world religions and cultures. There is a shitload of Hinduism in there for a start, but there is a lot of Everything in there.
I'll begin with the language
This is really hard to define, and none of it is intended as a criticism. There is a quality here I think of as 'plains English', which, by imagination or not I tend to associate with the middle bits of America. Friendly bearded protestant men with Hawaiian t-shirts and Tiki collections who go to church every Sunday. People who's grandfathers probably spoke German or Dutch.
"Then a great dark spot rose into the sky upon the net. This huge bloated shadow flickered with a smoky glow. The shadow crept across the face of the sun, blotting it out and making all the world cold for a moment. A snapping moment of terror pierced the world, then the dark sky-web vanished, and the edge of the sun crept past the shadow. The shadow disappeared and the sun brightened, but everyone thought it looked paler than it had before. Some said it moved differently, too.
In Pamaltela, the heat strengthened the many spirits of that realm. They entered the jungles, plants, and elves, and combated the rot in their fibers."
There is certainly nothing wrong with this and it does its work. There is something in it that reminds me of American ticker-tape just-the-facts prose. Americans, I believe, do not like compressions of meaning, or elisions. They like a word to be a word and a phrase to be clear, to be linked directly to the next phase and for its meaning to be what it plainly signifies itself to be. They also seem to dislike strong euphony and intensification of rhythm. There is a Germanic tendency there that its better to extend a sentence than to potentially leave any element of it open to inconstant interpretation. Brandon Sanderson is a bit like this in some of his things I've read. It is very clear, democratic, rather Methodist-bible language.
Theogony Gumbo
The simple fact that Glorantha takes from so many different world religions and the combination of its very open-hearted and very open-handed attitude to them, along with the simultaneous access of knowledge and systemisation of that knowledge, speaks itself, in the nature of the intellectual work done, of a particular time and place.
This kind of mingling together of influences would not have happened _in this way_ at many other times.
A little earlier in Anglo-diaspora history the 'foreign' bits would probably be more foreign, more orientalised. A lot earlier and the knowledge either wouldn't exist or the originating religion/cultures that make it up either wouldn't be in conversation with each other or wouldn't get on.
Post 2000's, I think most millennials would probably feel bad about taking aspects of IRL cultures and religions from different real-world ethnicities and just jamming them together anyhow. It seems like the kind of thing someone would get upset about.
So this reads to me as very much a product of the 1960-1990-s era of relative liberalism. And the willingness to systematise the whole thing (though the diegetic elements of the world itself do remark that there is no absolute systemisation of divine order from _within_ the world, only differing interpretations arranged around a wide but fuzzy 'general knowledge).
This is from what I think of a "Cultural Lego Times". Innocent times when a bunch of nerds could just reach out to grab elements of different cultures and fantasy elements and just jam them together like a child making something, without a great deal of angst or drama.
I do not think we live in Cultural Lego Times any more.
The Fantasy Elements
Glorantha has humanoid Ducks in it. Literally they are only in a few pages BUT THEY ARE ON THE COVER AND THEY ARE CANON. So, this is the kind of highly developed fantasy world where it has its own divine hierarchies but clearly at some point Sandy Petersens best friend or someone _really_ wanted to play a humanoid duck, and while they haven't really gone deep on the duck thing since then, they are still in there.
My broad point here is that the genesis of the integration of fantasy elements, with trolls (but different), elves, dwarfs etc (but different) and not hobbits (but we have ducks), again seems to me to come from a particular time and place. The post-Tolkien 60's-70's boom. (Much of Glorantha feels very 70s to me). It has that slightly gauche summery tactile 70's vibe.
On the mid-20thC Paracosm-boom scale, it’s very clearly cooler and edgier than Greyhawk or Blackmoor, and more coherent than Coventry, but not quite as cool as Tekumel, which is like Gloranthas edgy brother who plays in a band and won't let Glorantha into their room.
So all of this makes me intuit that, though Glorantha is, very nobly, a combination of a vast range of influences and has many highly original elements and aspects, the range and origins of those sources, and the manner of their integration and expression, make it feel very American to me.
GODS IN GLORANTHA
If this is about anything it’s about the integration of a coherent Theogony as a magical, moral, cosmic, historic and philosophical superstructure for a fantasy world. If you want to play a game where there are lots of religions and where religion matters then this is for you.
Gods in Glorantha play a dozen roles.
Gods as Aircraft Carriers.
Their simplest is as tanks or artillery divisions in battles. Every culture has a god or godsquad and when they come into military conflict whoever has the strongest god(s) and can get them to intervene more effectually will win battles by having them lend power or simply turn up on the field.
So Gloranthan military engagements are actually 5th dimensional affairs in which ritual and spiritual elements can transform into simple military materiel and visa-versa (a little like 40k).
Gods as Culture-Leaders
Gods incarnate, visitate and reincarnate a whole bunch and this can lead the centre of any culture an effectively-immortal warrior/teacher/prophet/lawgiver who acts not only as a private superman but also as a kind of cultural and moral library and judge.
It’s a little like the British Sovereign is almost meant to be in law, a magical source of power, and a little like if George Washington could reincarnate on each death, but with all knowledge intact, and if all George Washingtons children might be born with a few grammes of divine Washington power. And if you want to invade America successfully, you need to find and permanently kill the reincarnating George Washingon, but once you do that, the rest of the place goes down pretty easy.
Or simply as if all that Eurasian stuff about bronze-age God-Kings was pretty much accurate and literally true.
Gods as Magical and Philosophical Superstrucure Soap-Opera
Since the gods are definitely real, though mainly outside time, and since there is a big library of gods and their exact relations and histories, learning magic, philosophy and history is really learning about this big divine Soap-Opera and trying to get close to, and understand, one or more of the characters.
Magical and divine power in Glorantha is so integrated, and so total, trying to understand it is one of the few useful things you can do. Societies and cultures that gain technological or philosophical dominance, don't do it necessarily by prioritising technology and science, but by getting close to a highly rationalist god or god-philosophy that releases these capacities in them.
God as Atom Bombs
You can basically smash any problem if you can get a big enough god on it.
There seems to be a theme in Glorantaha of Godwars and gods punching each other to pieces leaving holes or damaging reality so that the grainy sinister 90's CGI of Chaos can come through. Since its a D&D world where becoming a demigod is the last rung of promotion and since its quite and agonistic world where adventure needs to happen, this adds an element of tragedy; your super-adventure might end up punching a hole in the Real and brining Glorantha closer to DOOM
QUESTIONS
FOR PEOPLE WHO PLAY IN GLORANTHA
How the fuck do you play in Glorantha?
I'm waaaay into Warhammer 40k, to the extent that I have opinions on the different _voice actors_ for the Audiobook Readers in the Horus Heresy series.
Reading this Glorantha sourcebook is probably as close as I can get to what it must be like to be introduced to 40k for the first time. Holy crap this is a fucktonne of stuff to be slammed over the head with.
Even as someone who is generally into pseudohistories, and this being, essentially, part of my job, bit parts of Glorantha were a real slog to get through. There is just a huge, HUGE amount of highly specific history here. Staggering levels of detail, highly specific and, due to Gloranthas close integration of divine order, magical power and temporal culture, highly _consequential_ information.
I know there are a huge amount of playstyles and cognitive/world-engine preferences out there very different to mine and this is probably exactly what a bunch of you are specifically looking for.
People who play in Glorantha, specifically, people who are introducing _new players_ into Glorantha. How do you do it? Is it a loremaster thing where the DM is just deeply read in the pseudohistory and drops it on the unknowing as things go on? Do you need a bunch of experts on Glortantha to play?
From my personal biases, Glorantha is so dense that its virtually unplayable as a game setting, but I know most are not like me, so what are you doing?
Where did Glorantha Come From?
I know there must be a forum somewhere purely about this, and with its own scandals and schisms, are we at the point yet where anyone can summarise 40+ years of paracosm development in a blog comment or medium article? Probably not.
How much of the legendary background is stuff that happened in some game back in the 70's? Or in some wargame? Very large amounts of this read like legendarification of someones play reports, specifically the oddness of the pseudohistories which come off very much like some player-character stuff.
Or am I wrong and its all designed-in? Or did it evolve over multiple books over different eras? Has anyone written the historiography of the creation of Glorantha? And then helpfully done the condensed version because I probably don't have time to read the whole thing.
June 20, 2019
An essential entry into the Gloranthan canon, this book contains no rules, just detailed information about the now fifty-year-old world of Glorantha.
Set up as a series of scrolls presented by a Lhankor Mhy priest to a young ruler, the book starts with an overview of the geography of the world. Then comes a detailed history of Dragon Pass, essays on the four Elder Races, a long section on the Gods and their history, a history of the world since time began, The Gods of the Lunar Empire, a history of the Lunar Empire, Glorathan magic and the Runes, a section on Gods and heroes that includes a listing of Heroes recently involved in the world, and finally details about the Sartar Magical Union bands that have helped defeat the Lunar Empire, for now.
The entire thing is filled with rich illustrations supposedly taken from temple walls and palaces illustrating that various events. This really helps reinforce the Late Bronze Age feel of the setting. There are numerous maps, but many of them aren't overly clear and as such are of limited use in understanding how they relate to the text at hand.
If you love Glorantha, this book is for you. If you are running a Runequest game, this is a book you can use to no end as everything in it is information that can be learned with some ease by player-characters. Highly recommended.
May Lhankor Mhy protect and keep this information.
Set up as a series of scrolls presented by a Lhankor Mhy priest to a young ruler, the book starts with an overview of the geography of the world. Then comes a detailed history of Dragon Pass, essays on the four Elder Races, a long section on the Gods and their history, a history of the world since time began, The Gods of the Lunar Empire, a history of the Lunar Empire, Glorathan magic and the Runes, a section on Gods and heroes that includes a listing of Heroes recently involved in the world, and finally details about the Sartar Magical Union bands that have helped defeat the Lunar Empire, for now.
The entire thing is filled with rich illustrations supposedly taken from temple walls and palaces illustrating that various events. This really helps reinforce the Late Bronze Age feel of the setting. There are numerous maps, but many of them aren't overly clear and as such are of limited use in understanding how they relate to the text at hand.
If you love Glorantha, this book is for you. If you are running a Runequest game, this is a book you can use to no end as everything in it is information that can be learned with some ease by player-characters. Highly recommended.
May Lhankor Mhy protect and keep this information.
February 4, 2022
So, this is NOT a good place to jump into Glorantha. It's kinda like reading the Bible or the Silmarillion or something. Now, as a reference resource, I think it'll be great. If you run into a question in a game and you want more details...here you go. I can imagine reading certain parts will also help spawn story ideas and such. Reading it from cover to cover? I can't recommend it.
November 15, 2023
Soon to be re-issued with cover art more in keeping with the current RQ:G style (which I love) this remarkable reference book gives a historic and mythical perspective on Glorantha, focusing unsurprisingly on Dragon Pass, but also with detail of Peloria through the history of the Lunar Empire.
The mythology and details of the gods, which are pivotal to RQ, is excellent too although may be superceded now by the Cults series being released. For those who don't fancy the 10 books in that series, but who still want more context than the core rulebook offers, then this will suit.
Overall this is a great purchase and massively fleshes out the setting.
The mythology and details of the gods, which are pivotal to RQ, is excellent too although may be superceded now by the Cults series being released. For those who don't fancy the 10 books in that series, but who still want more context than the core rulebook offers, then this will suit.
Overall this is a great purchase and massively fleshes out the setting.
December 21, 2022
Digestible introduction to Glorantha, skewed towards RPG-worthy information. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
June 6, 2022
It's a great reference book but a tough singular read.
The Glorantha Sourcebook is doing some heavy lifting. It is trying to be a relatively complete guide to one of the most detailed RPG settings ever penned with complex geography, history, cosmology, and mythology. It succeeds at this but if you try to read it straight through it kind of feels like a slog.
Some myths get repeated multiple times with some minor variations in the telling based on what the thrust of the section is. One god gives birth to another during a dormant sleeping period. The write-up for the god who was birthed states that they were born from a dead god. Both of these can be true in a sort of American Godsy way. Is Anansi a man or a spider? Yes. He can be either or both all at once. And it makes sense to vary it like this, especially based on the culture being discussed as it firmly frames it as "This is how the cult of this god tells the story" or "this is how these people tell the myth." It is a stark element of bronze-age verisimilitude that really makes Runequest's setting work. It's like how basically every bronze age Mesopotamian culture has a great flood story owing to the cataclysmic floods the Tigris and Euphrates rivers could be prone to. It really makes the setting feel alive and real.
Much of the book is stylized as in-universe documents produced by the God Learners, a now defunct group in Glorantha who studied the gods using what can only be called the scientific method. It's rather neat and adds an extra layer of immersion to the mythology of the setting. Runequest really is a game where you can dive into the lore and not come up for air for hours.
So, the book is a great reference book. Each section will cover its subject adequately and you won't be diving to cross reference different sections. This does mean it can feel repetitive reading it straight through. "I've read this story three times..." and all. However, for a reference book this makes sense. If I'm looking up the Lunar Empire for an upcoming session, I want all the information in one place and not having to cross reference with the Chaos section to figure out what the hell the Crimson Bat is. It does just mean it isn't the most enjoyable read straight through.
Call of Cthulhu is Chaosium's bread and butter game. It's their moneymaker. But Runequest is the company's baby, being the life's work of Chaosium founder Greg Stafford. And the love and care put into this sourcebook really makes that show. I really enjoy immersing myself in this setting.
The Glorantha Sourcebook is doing some heavy lifting. It is trying to be a relatively complete guide to one of the most detailed RPG settings ever penned with complex geography, history, cosmology, and mythology. It succeeds at this but if you try to read it straight through it kind of feels like a slog.
Some myths get repeated multiple times with some minor variations in the telling based on what the thrust of the section is. One god gives birth to another during a dormant sleeping period. The write-up for the god who was birthed states that they were born from a dead god. Both of these can be true in a sort of American Godsy way. Is Anansi a man or a spider? Yes. He can be either or both all at once. And it makes sense to vary it like this, especially based on the culture being discussed as it firmly frames it as "This is how the cult of this god tells the story" or "this is how these people tell the myth." It is a stark element of bronze-age verisimilitude that really makes Runequest's setting work. It's like how basically every bronze age Mesopotamian culture has a great flood story owing to the cataclysmic floods the Tigris and Euphrates rivers could be prone to. It really makes the setting feel alive and real.
Much of the book is stylized as in-universe documents produced by the God Learners, a now defunct group in Glorantha who studied the gods using what can only be called the scientific method. It's rather neat and adds an extra layer of immersion to the mythology of the setting. Runequest really is a game where you can dive into the lore and not come up for air for hours.
So, the book is a great reference book. Each section will cover its subject adequately and you won't be diving to cross reference different sections. This does mean it can feel repetitive reading it straight through. "I've read this story three times..." and all. However, for a reference book this makes sense. If I'm looking up the Lunar Empire for an upcoming session, I want all the information in one place and not having to cross reference with the Chaos section to figure out what the hell the Crimson Bat is. It does just mean it isn't the most enjoyable read straight through.
Call of Cthulhu is Chaosium's bread and butter game. It's their moneymaker. But Runequest is the company's baby, being the life's work of Chaosium founder Greg Stafford. And the love and care put into this sourcebook really makes that show. I really enjoy immersing myself in this setting.
January 5, 2025
The fantasy world of Glorantha is brought to life with an incredible richness of ideas of detail covering history, geography, myth, magic and lots more. Although closely associated with Runequest, The Glorantha Sourcebook is not specific to any one gaming system and can be applied to many systems and even enjoyed by anyone interested in world-building itself. Additionally, this book is beautifully put together with great art and layout. It is a pleasure to read and will be a pleasure to dip into again and again in the future. Highly recommended.
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