Glorantha

• 1. Introduction

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  Glorantha is a fantasy world that Greg Stafford first dreamed up in 1966, not to write a game or sell a product, but to teach himself how mythology actually works. He was a student at Beloit College, and the experiment he set himself was ambitious: build a mythology from scratch, draw on the deepest patterns he could find, and see what emerged. What emerged, over the following decades, would become one of the most complex and debated settings in the history of role-playing games.

  The world Stafford built is flat, covered by a dome-like sky, and shaped at every turn by the mythic deeds of gods. Magic is not a special power reserved for wizards; it runs from everyday prayers and lucky charms all the way up to the forces that hold the world together. The 'historical' present of Glorantha is a kind of aftermath, a world that has recovered only partially from a catastrophic ancient war against Chaos.

  What separates Glorantha from almost every other early American fantasy setting is something it does not have: the long shadow of Tolkien. Elves in Glorantha are not noble and wise. They are alien, plant-like, and deeply unfriendly to what they call 'meat men'. Dwarves are not gruff miners. They are literally made of stone, living expressions of the rigid laws of creation. How did a setting this strange find an audience? And what kept that audience devoted for more than half a century?

• 2. The Mythology Behind the World

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  Joseph Campbell shaped Glorantha more than any other single thinker. Stafford absorbed Campbell's argument that myths are not decoration but the frameworks through which people understand their lives, and he built that argument directly into the world's architecture. Within Glorantha, competing magical systems, theism, shamanism, and mysticism, each offer a different account of why reality is the way it is. No system is declared objectively correct, even from outside the game. Players who aligned their characters with a particular religion were not just picking bonuses; they were choosing a worldview.

  The game supplement Cults of Prax, published with the second edition of RuneQuest in 1979, put this philosophy into practice. Characters could join any of a number of religions, each carrying its own political and cultural obligations. Cults of Terror went further, offering cults dedicated to outright evil gods, including Vivamort, a vampire cult, and various Chaos and Lunar cults. The moral universe of the game refused easy alignment charts.

  The story of the God Learners, a civilization that tried to master and exploit the underlying grammar of all mythology, is Stafford's most direct meditation on Campbell's idea of the monomyth. The civilization fell. The story of Prince Argrath is an extended reworking of Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949. These are not incidental references. Stafford built his world to be a living argument that myths are how human beings give shape to their experience.

• 3. From Board Wargame to Novel

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  White Bear and Red Moon, the board wargame Stafford published through Chaosium in 1975, did not even name the world it depicted. The game placed players inside a war between the land of Sartar and the Lunar Empire, during the reign of a king called Argrath Dragontooth. Its board covered Dragon Pass; its rulebook mapped out factions, lands, and leaders; a separate large-scale map showed the Greater Lunar Empire surrounding Dragon Pass. All of this geography, all of this political detail, existed without the word Glorantha appearing once.

  The name arrived in print for the first time in 1978, in issue four of a newsletter called Wyrm's Footnotes, which published three articles on the setting and the first printed map of the world itself. That same year, Chaosium released Nomad Gods, a second board game, this one set among the beast-riding, spirit-worshiping tribes of Prax, a cursed land east of Dragon Pass. Nomad Gods also omitted the world's name.

  By 1993, Stafford was ready to do something entirely new with the setting. King of Sartar, his first major prose expansion of Gloranthan mythology, was aimed at readers rather than players. It was the first Gloranthan work deliberately addressed to someone who did not want to roll dice. The Stafford Library, a collection of non-game works Stafford continued to develop, extended this side of the project further, though most of those works remained unfinished.

• 4. RuneQuest and the Avalon Hill Years

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  RuneQuest launched in 1978 and introduced the world under the misspelled name 'Glorontha'. The second edition, arriving in 1979, corrected that and expanded the setting with sophisticated sourcebooks. Griffin Mountain offered a detailed campaign region. Using Cults of Prax, a player could root a character in specific religious and political obligations that ramified across sessions.

  In 1984, a third edition of RuneQuest was published through Avalon Hill, a much larger games company. The business logic was scale; the cultural cost was significant. Avalon Hill's edition defaulted to a setting described as the 'Dark Ages of fantasy Europe', with Glorantha available only through a separate booklet. Later supplements, including Gods of Glorantha and Glorantha: Genertela, Crucible of the Hero Wars, did push the setting forward, but the core game had moved away.

  The relationship between Chaosium, which held the rights to Glorantha, and Avalon Hill, which held the rights to RuneQuest, fractured entirely in 1995. Avalon Hill began asserting its trademark over the RuneQuest name and started developing RuneQuest: Slayers, a game entirely unrelated to Glorantha and to the third edition rules. That project was canceled just before printing, in 1998. RuneQuest did not prosper under Avalon Hill, and Glorantha spent the second half of the 1990s evolving primarily outside official channels.

• 5. Fans and the Internet Era

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  While the breakdown between Chaosium and Avalon Hill played out through the mid-1990s, Glorantha's actual creative energy was migrating online. The arrival of the internet triggered what observers at the time called a boom in fan creation for the setting. Unofficial ventures, including Reaching Moon Megacorp, organized and distributed fan material. A convention scene developed, with freeform games that could accommodate up to eighty participants, as in the case of a game called Home of the Bold.

  Loren Miller proposed a principle he called Maximum Game Fun as a basis for approaching Gloranthan play; the principle attracted enough interest that it grew into a game system in its own right. David Dunham developed PenDragon Pass, a nearly freeform system, and ran ambitious convention games under it. These were not hobbyist distractions. They were how the setting stayed alive during years when its official publishing situation was tangled.

  The video game King of Dragon Pass, released by A Sharp in 1999, reached an audience that had never engaged with the tabletop. Players took on the role of an Orlanthi hero working to unite the clans of Dragon Pass into a single kingdom. The game covered the region with unusual depth and gave players their first compelling public view of Stafford's ideas about the heroquest. Stafford was simultaneously self-publishing historical and mythological material about Glorantha in non-game form, in a series called The Glorious (Re)Ascent of Yelm.

• 6. A World of Creatures Unlike Any Other

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  Dragonewts are among the stranger inhabitants of Glorantha. They are neotenic dragons, locked into a cycle of self-improving reincarnation, with a mindset described as genuinely incomprehensible to human characters. To communicate with humans at all, they require oral surgery. Nothing quite like them appears in other fantasy settings.

  The Uz, Glorantha's trolls, are large, intelligent, and equipped with a sonar-like sense called darksense that functions as a primary means of perceiving the world. Their societies are matriarchal. They worship Kyger Litor, a goddess of darkness regarded as the mother of the Trolls, and Zorak Zoran, a more violent and sinister figure. Aldryami, the Gloranthan elves, are plant people; they worship the sun and the plant deity Aldrya, and they regard humans with hostility rather than the distant benevolence familiar from Tolkien.

  The Broos are chaos creatures capable of mating with nearly anything, producing offspring that eat their way out of the host at birth. They worship Malia, the Mother of Disease, and Thed. Scorpionmen are scorpion-human hybrids described as stupid, vicious, and organized into violent matriarchies with a religious emphasis on devouring. The Mostali, Glorantha's dwarves, are xenophobic machine-like beings who invented iron, a metal with extraordinary magical properties in a world where bronze is the ordinary standard. These creatures are not variations on familiar archetypes. They are arguments for what those archetypes might become if mythology, rather than Tolkien, were the generative source.

• 7. Publishing After 2000

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  In 2000, Issaries, Inc. published Hero Wars, a new Gloranthan role-playing game entirely independent of RuneQuest. The game was written by Robin Laws in collaboration with Stafford, and it took a radical formal departure from RuneQuest's more naturalistic mechanics. Hero Wars used quick contests and an almost free-form approach to skills and abilities, aiming to reproduce the mythic rhythm of rising and falling tension rather than the simulation of physical action. Some longtime RuneQuest players found the adjustment difficult.

  Hero Wars became HeroQuest in 2003. Moon Design Publications published an updated second edition in 2008, followed by HeroQuest Glorantha in 2016, which fully integrated the setting into the rules rather than treating it as an add-on. A second edition of the HeroQuest game was rewritten and published in Spring 2009, supported by sourcebooks covering Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes that year, Sartar Companion in 2010, and Pavis: Gateway to Adventure in 2012.

  RuneQuest's path through the same period was more fragmented. Mongoose Publishing licensed the game from Issaries in 2006 and produced 17 supplements and adventures set in Glorantha's Second Age, against the backdrop of the God Learner empire and the Empire of Wyrm's Friends. Mongoose's licence for Gloranthan material lapsed in May 2011. The Design Mechanism, formed by the authors of the Mongoose edition, published RuneQuest: Sixth Edition in 2012, but without any Gloranthan content. Glorantha returned to RuneQuest properly in 2018, when Chaosium published RuneQuest - Roleplaying in Glorantha, advancing the in-game date to 1625 and refocusing the game on Dragon Pass. A Sharp, the company behind King of Dragon Pass, returned to the setting with Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind and its sequel Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out.