I was going to post about my hopes for roleplaying in 2021 a few months ago but I kept putting the post off. The reason? I wasn't quite sure I knew what I wanted. But now I know. I want to play in Glorantha, preferably Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha but if I'm honest the "system" is irrelevant it's the world I want to play in. Whether I GM or play I don't care (although I believe a mixture of the two will work best).

It's a feeling that has slowly been growing on me since I first purchased the RQG rulebook back in late 2018. You see, for me, this is the best RPG I've ever experienced and has now even eclipsed my love for D&D B/X. Sure I liked RQ 2e, my longest played, most experienced and best loved character was in RG 2e but I only ever played (back in the mid to late 80s) and never GMed and just as I was writing material to run myself the group I was playing with moved onto other systems.

I'm actually now wondering why we moved systems. If I'm honest I can't remember; it's too long ago but I can remember Shadowrun, Rolemaster & Aftermath! all being played and I while I enjoyed all those systems back in the 90s but I can't help feeling in an alternative universe, given a second chance I'd like to see what would have happened if we'd have carried on with Runequest.

Anyway, that's all irrelevant. What I have found since getting back into the hobby late in 2017 is that despite many enjoyable games under many different GMs and groups of players is the thought that I want to be playing in Glorantha. That's not to say I want to exclusively play in Glorantha, just that I want to playing it in the mix. I'm lucky enough that I've GMed a RQG campaign since around March 2020 which has been immensely pleasurable and up until recently this has allowed me to scratch that itch, 

However, the next step is to play in a regular Glorantha game. I joined a game run by Che Webster running Six Seasons in Sartar but that has just folded and I was hugely disappointed (but if you are reading this Che please take that as a compliment in that I enjoyed the game so much). I've reached out to another group and may join their campaign in RQ 2e if schedules match and joined a couple of Discord groups related to Glorantha that I've tracked down.

If I fail to find another game I think I will offer to run another campaign, but one starting with 16 year old characters in the old timeline of 1615ish. 

So what has attracted me so much to Glorantha? A number of things starting simply with the breath and depth of the information, the quality that Chaosium are producing at the moment, discovering the quality of the Avalon Hill 1990s supplements, and the intelligence and helpfulness of the Glorantha community. Chaosium themselves are active on social media. The people who run the company are active in various groups, answering fans questions and offering advice, keeping us up to date on what they are working on. The Jonstown Compendium has been a roaring success. This is fan based material published by Chaosium on DrivethruRPG.

I'm even writing a scenario for publication in the Jonstown Compendium myself, although whether I ever actually finish it is another matter ;)

My Glorantha shelf before late 2017 consisted of the softback RQ 2e book and for a reason I cannot explain a single Games Workshop hardback publication, Runequest, Land of Ninja (which I can't ever recall actually reading). It now contains probably 50 publications.

My current Glorantha collection guarded by Yinkin

I am firmly in the belief that we are in a second golden age of RPGs (if you take the late 70s/early 80s as the firs golden age) and this is lead by Chaosium. 

One of the things that truly puzzles and frustrates me is why other RPG players cannot see in Glorantha and Runequest what I see and why it is so superior to those other systems. But then I guess that what makes us different!

2020 GMing Review

So over 10 months since my last blog post. Where did the time go? Well mainly it got taken up with Covid related issues but also pleasingly a lot of table top roleplaying.

After re-reading my post, My Plan To Run Some RPGs, from November 2019 I was quite surprised to see I'd largely met the goals I set out, although in different ways than I'd outlined in the post.

Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha

First up was running Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and while I did manage to run at least one session at Bean Gaming RQG really took off online when I ran a campaign with sessions every two weeks, on Saturdays, pretty much constant from April and still ongoing now. This included two players from our gaming group that started in the 1980s as well as Tim Challis, who I'd formed the East Midlands Runemasters with and two new players to me, Richard & Kevin.

The characters we have are:

• Dogmaz, a member of the Black Spear Clan and Humakti initiate
• Darin, a Grazelander and follower of Lankhor Mhy
• Ælfflæd, from Wilmskirk and a Chalana Arroy initiate
• Jarang, from the Narri clan and a follower of Orlanth
• Saronil, from the northlands around Alone and a follower of Odayla

We use Roll20 for the virtual tabletop; dice rolling, handouts and maps and Discord for audio. The sessions run from approx 12:00 until 16:00, although we usually try and wrap up once we get to 15:00 and we have a couple of 10 minute breaks during the session.

I'm currently running the third campaign arc, the first one was travelling across Sartar trying to find a way to destroy a chaotic musical horn they had discovered, the second arc was travelling and participating in the Battle of the Queens and the third arc is travelling to New Pavis, where they have just arrived, and acting as emissaries for Queen Leika of the Colymar with instructions to report on Argrath's movements and intentions.

I wrote all the scenarios/encounters myself, initially because the players were familiar with the published scenarios and later on because I actually enjoyed writing my own content. 

OSE Wilderlands

I also ran an OSE Wilderlands campaign weekly, every Thursday from April until mid December with only a handful of sessions missed. These sessions were based on map 6, The City State of the World Emperor starting Tell Qa. I started with three players and over the course of the 9 months we had at least 9 players and ended up with 5 fairly regular players.

I again used Roll20 and Discord to run the game online. Sessions ran from 19:00 to 21:00.

It was a very enjoyable experience. I mainly wrote my own material but did run The Palace of the Silver Princess, a module I last ran back in the early 80s. I think three characters died (including one in the very first session) and we potentially had one TPK after all the characters failed their saving throw versus a Harpy. However, I got the harpy to send the party on a quest.

I called a day to the campaign mainly because the latest lockdown in the UK meant my kids are being home schooled and with my wife's health being poor at the moment I am pretty exhausted in the week and just not up to preparing and running a weekly weekday campaign. I may try and resurrect it if the players are still interested once lockdown in the UK ends.

Summary

I've GMed more (around 50 sessions) in 2020 than any other year since I discovered roleplaying games back in 1981 so it's been a massively successful year. In fact I've probably GMed more than I've played.

I've also found that RQG has become my favourite RPG over the course of the year. It's not a case of liking OSE/Wilderlands less, I've just found I've liked the RQG ruleset and more importantly the world of Glorantha more and more as I GMed it more. 

My Plan To Run Some RPGs

Although I'm playing in plenty of RPGs at the moment, I play in weekly AD&D 1e, Bi-Weekly GURPs 4e, Monthly B/X,  D&D 5e, DCC & One Shots arranged on the Audio Dungeon Discord Server (Barbarians of Lemuria, Black Hack, Bushido & Low Fantasy Gaming arranged so far) and a proposed 13th Age Glorantha Duck Campaign, I rarely get a chance to GM a game. I really need to change this as I ran some D&D 5e, D&D B/X & RQG last year and enjoyed it very much, although I was very rusty for the first few games.

To rectify my lack of GMing I'm starting a three pronged attack.

1. I've setup three dates early Next Year, Jan 12th, Feb 9th, Mar 8th, all on a Sunday to GM some RGQ over at Bean Gaming in Leicester and agreed to run a RGQ at Glorantha Games in April. I've also tentatively had agreement from my long standing (30+ year) RPG group for me to run some RGQ in January.
2. I've put some feelers out on Audio Dungeon Discord to see if there is any interest in a Old School Essentials Wilderlands session.
3. I intend to put some feelers out to see if there is any interest locally in playing OSE. TBH I don't hold out much hope as most people seem only interested in playing D&D 5e.

Runequest Glorantha

To run the RGQ I need to re-read the rule book and concentrate on understanding Shamans and become more familiar with all the magic spells. I also need to re-familiarise myself with the Broken Tower starter adventure and finish writing up my own adventure, Bye-Tore & The Snow Dog as well as putting the next couple of adventures down onto paper as they are currently sitting exclusively in my head. I was intending to format my notes using the Jonstown Compendium Creators Circle templates, which I also need to look at.

Old School Essentials & the Wilderlands

Old School Essentials (OSE) is the system recently published by Necrotic Gnome via a Kickstarter. It's effectively a re-formatting of the D&D B/X which is my favourite RPG system. The Wilderlands is Judge's Guild campaign world which first saw the light of day as a published work in 1976 as The City State of the Invincible Overlord. I created my own implementation of it over at scabard.

My intention is to run the OSE including the optional Advanced Fantasy books. I intend to run it within The Wilderlands set in Map 6, The City State of the World Emperor, around Tell Qa in the Smyrsis province. My Wilderlands setting would be a sandbox faithfully using Bob Bledsaw's original version of the Wilderlands where ever possible but taking from other sources as appropriate as well as including a lot of my own fiction. I'll use James Mishler's version of Tell Qa as the base for the city.

My Wilderlands will have a mixture of scenarios I've written and also some published scenarios, each dropped in at set locations, so the Keep on the Borderlands exists in my Wilderlands campaign, as does The Isle of Dread.