Glorantha Initiation: Matt, Old-School Rules, and the Overly Long Character Creation

RuneQuest is copyright 2023 Chaosium Inc., Old-School Essentials is copyright 2023 Necrotic Gnome This new initiation episode features Matt, a school teacher who recently moved to Virginia and does the Lord of Chaos’ good work by introducing kids to roleplaying games. Show Notes Things we mention in this episode include: Starting with D&D (of course). Getting “sucked” into Vampire: The Masquerade and the World of Darkness setting, particularly Mage: The Ascension. We don’t need to get into the weeds of the WoD metaplot. Discovering the OSR movement, and especially OSE. Going from Troika to Seth Skorkowski to Call of Cthulhu to RuneQuest 2nd edition (classic reprint) Reading RQ2 cover to cover. It has layers of complexity but somehow in a simple way. It’s less crunchy than, say, Lancer. Rurik’s saga in the RQ2 rulebook gives a fascinating glimpse of the setting. The idea of ransom is very interesting, especially to prevent PCs from always killing everyone. Cults of Prax also has a very interesting narrative, and expands nicely upon the cults glimpsed at in the RQ2 rulebook. The new RQG books are like RQ2 but with a lot (a lot!) more pages, and great art (some of the best ever found in an RPG product). Matt had a false-ish start as an RQG gamemaster, but has now found a player spot in someone else’s game. RQG character creation is way too long and complicated. Too many choices to make. Lots of information that that needs to be looked up about the setting. Somehow RQ2 did a better job teasing the setting but implying that “nobody knows more that this”. Comparatively, RQG teases the setting in a way that sends the reader to the Glorantha Sourcebook and other lore books. This might be because reading RQ2 puts the reader back at the origin of the game. Matt ran the Broken Tower but the first character took three evenings to create. He therefore used a more “we’ll figure it out as we go” approach, co