Nick Brooke’s

Volume Two

Nick Brooke’s Gloranthan Manifesto, Volume Two is copyright © 2021 Nick Brooke.

This collection of essays uses trademarks and/or copyrights owned by Chaosium Inc/Moon Design
Publications LLC, which are used under Chaosium Inc’s Fan Material Policy. Nick Brooke is expressly
prohibited from charging you to use or access this content. This collection of essays is not published,
endorsed, or specifically approved by Chaosium Inc. For more information about Chaosium Inc’s
products, please visit www.chaosium.com.

i
Introduction
My first Gloranthan Manifesto seemed to go down well, so here’s a second collection of my archival
ramblings about Chaosium’s RuneQuest role-playing game and its setting – Greg Stafford’s world of
Glorantha.
While Volume One was largely a collection of recent posts to the BRP Central forum, this installment
includes some much older posts to the old Glorantha Digest mailing list, as well as my contributions
to the RPGaDay hashtag on Facebook.
The main themes this time are a grab-bag of miscellaneous Lunar subjects, an interminable argument
about succession crises in the Lunar Empire (to illuminate the depth of thought that went into both
our freeform Life of Moonson and ILH-2: Under the Red Moon) and, of course, more songs. Much
has been selected from the archives of Volume Seven of the Glorantha Digest (July 1999 to August
2000), but there are some newer and older pieces too.

Acknowledgements
I requested and received permission to include the following quotations that would not have been
permitted by the Fan Material Policy alone:
/ The excerpt on p.62 from Greg Stafford’s article on the Red Emperor, published in Tales of the
Reaching Moon #8 “The Chaos Feature” (1992), is copyright © 2021 Moon Design Publications,
used with permission.
/ The excerpts on p.73 from Greg Stafford’s book The Fortunate Succession (1995) are copyright ©
2021 Moon Design Publications, used with permission.
/ The excerpt on p.88 from Greg Stafford’s article on the Lunar New Year, first published in Heroes
Vol.1 No.6 “RuneQuest Forever!” (1984) and now available in the Glorantha Sourcebook, is
copyright © 2021 Moon Design Publications, used with permission.
/ The excerpt on p.89 from Greg Stafford’s article Why I Dislike Mostali, published in Different
Worlds #24 “Special Dwarf-Mostal Issue” (1982), is copyright © 2021 Moon Design Publications,
used with permission.
/ The excerpt on p.94 from Greg Stafford’s article Gods & Goddesses of Glorantha, Part 1: Myths
of Pre-Creation, published in Wyrms Footnotes #4 (1978), is copyright © 2021 Moon Design
Publications, used with permission.
Quotes from Gloranthan Digest contributors (e.g. Alex Ferguson, David Cake, Martin Laurie)
are presented as they appeared in my posts to the Digest, with links to sources.
The Soviet Analogy on p.67 is by Chris Gidlow, used with permission.
Gloranthan Songbook lyrics are filk music parodies of the following original songs:
/ Don’t Cry For Me, O Peloria, by Tim Rice (1976)
/ Lola, by Ray Davies (1970)
These are fair use parodies under Section 107 of the US Copyright Act.
Boxed comments on the Gloranthan Songbook pages are used with permission of the authors.
I am hugely indebted to Hartmut Steffin, who maintains the Search Engine of Lhankor Mhy, an
invaluable resource indexing the archives of many Glorantha- and RuneQuest-related mailing lists.
RuneQuest is a Trademark of Moon Design Publications and is used with their permission. For more
information please visit Chaosium’s website: www.chaosium.com.

ii
 Table of Contents
Page numbers run continuously from Volume One.
A Lunar Miscellany
Who Rules the Lunar Empire?.................. 59
The Three Realms of Glorantha ................ 63
The Lunar Mission .................................... 63
Mistress of the Three Worlds .................... 64
The Old Gods & The Lunar Way ............... 64
Orlanth, the Last Enemy ........................... 65
The Evil Empire ........................................ 66
The Soviet Analogy .................................... 67
Use of Analogies ........................................ 69
General Sor-eel’s Early Career .................. 69
Pol Joni & Moonbroth .............................. 70
The March to the Paps .............................. 70
Imperial vs. Arrolian Moonboats ...............71
Why was Paulis Longvale the Bat Man? ....71
Dart War Assassins .................................. 72
Blue Moon Cult Assassins ........................ 72
Succession Crises in the Lunar Empire
The Red Emperor’s Proxies....................... 73
What Happens in the Interregnum? ......... 74
Testing the Candidates .............................. 76
Stages of the Imperial Succession ............. 78
Life of Moonson & Red Emperor Cult....... 79
Problems with Parts ..................................80
Moonson, Body & Soul ............................. 81
One Nightmare Scenario... ........................ 83
Mistakes & Inconsistencies, etc. ............... 85
Lunars vs. Romans .................................... 86
The “Reaching Moon Model” .................... 87
The Lunar New Year Ceremony ...............88
The Role of the Egi ...................................88
A Digest Miscellany
Elder Race Adventurers ............................ 89
Closed Worlds ...........................................90
Other Universes ........................................ 92
Subjectivism & Revisionism...................... 93
Wakboth’s Family ..................................... 96
The Red Star .............................................. 96
Whimsical Things in “Serious” Worlds .... 97
On Brithini Script ...................................... 97
A Barbarian Glossary ................................ 98
Channeling Roy Batty............................... 99
Gloranthan Songbook
Don’t Cry For Me, O Peloria .................... 100
Androgeus ................................................101
My RPGaDay Posts .......................... 102

iii
 LUNAR Freezeday Waterday Clayday Windsday Fireday Wildday Godsday
HOLY
DAYS o w e g . K X
Yara The Seven
Disorder Aranis Mothers

Danfive
Harmony Etyries
Xaron

Jakaleel
Death the Witch

Queen Hon-eel
Fertility Deezola the Artess

Stasis

Hwarin Verithurusa
Motion Dalthippa Teelo Norri

Sedenya
Lesilla Gerra Rashorana Orogeria Natha Moonson
Illusion Jakaleel Queen Deezola (She Who Waits) Danfive Xaron Yanafal Tarnils
Zaytenera
Argenteus
Irrippi Ontor

Yanafal
Truth Tarnils

Crescent-Go Dying Moon Black Moon Crescent-Come Empty Half Full Moon Full Half
Phase Day
2 1 7 6 5 4 3
iv
 A Lunar Miscellany
Who Rules the Lunar Empire?
MOONSON is an absolute ruler within the
Empire; ruling beneath him are his appointed
Satraps, Sultans, Governors, and others. All
power is ultimately awarded by Moonson, and
can be revoked at his pleasure. If Moonson
chose, he could shut down government
departments, close ancient temples, or
condemn office-holders to death and disgrace.
These things don’t happen all that often, and
are remarkable when they do. Although
Moonson is a God, there are limits on his
power, knowledge and willingness to act:
/ Power: Moonson has not single-handedly
performed any feats of gross destruc-
tiveness (massacring cities, frex) – he is
able to do these things because, as
Emperor, he has lots of powerful people
working for him. The Moonburn happened
because Moonson told his priests and
sorcerers to do it, not because he waved his
arm and the forest burned down. When
Moonson uses his personal heroic and
magical prowess (Nights of Horror, Fall of
Boldhome, Jannisor’s Siege, wrestling with
Sheng), history shows that he tends to get
twatted, even against opponents who are
not, on the face of it, first-generation divine
entities with the magical resources of an
entire Empire to draw upon.
/ Knowledge: The isolation of the Emperor
from the common folk of the Empire and
the restricted access to His Sacred Person
are important themes for scenario writing
and campaign plotting: there are zillions of
exciting things you can do if Moonson’s
information is – or appears to be – limited
(tip him off, dramatically expose the
plotters, scheme to bring nefarious deeds
to light), all of which which are less
plausible if Moonson is (1) mystically well-
informed about everything and (2)
inhumanly unwilling to intervene even if he
knew what was going on.
/ Willingness to Act: Incidentally, striving
for months to reveal something dastardly
and then learning that Moonson not only
knew about it all along but is also unwilling
to do anything about it is, in my opinion, an
excellent campaign twist. But it should not
be something everyone assumes from the
start, or else nobody would ever strive for
months to reveal dastardly schemes. For
example, I think the Lunar Coders assume
their investigations have a purpose: that
they are learning things people higher up
the chain of command (a) do not know, (b)
would like to know, and (c) will take action
upon. The fact that each of (a), (b) and (c)
could demonstrably be false in the late,
decadent Lunar Empire is Prime
Character-Building Stuff for the “Good
Servants of the Evil Empire” campaign
theme.
THE EMPEROR’S PROXIES each think
that they are the Emperor, unless Moonson
himself is telling one of them otherwise. When
an Emperor dies, the Proxies assume one of
their Proxies has died, and that they must
continue ruling; they then see “rival” Proxies as
false claimants to be put down. I prefer to think
of the Proxy Wars as a Horrible Mistake
between equally-loyal, equally-Lunar factions,
myself. Note that Moonson Argenteus is not
known to have active Proxies, though again this
could be a good campaign twist.
(Note that most people in the Empire don’t
know what’s happening in the highest Imperial
circles, including some of the people in those
circles. The interregnal period between
recognised Masks of Moonson is thus terribly
59
confusing for people used to doing what wealth and private armies, and their collective
Moonson tells them to. And when confusing influence (if they can agree on an agenda) is
things happen, we get good game stuff out of it) considerable. Nowadays, Issaries’ authors
probably have to pretend that nobody has ever
THE IMPERIAL HOUSEHOLD (which is
called the Satraps of the Lunar Empire
run by the Imperial Chamberlain) controls “Sultans”: let’s pity them.
access to Moonson, and therefore has a degree
of power and influence. Remember that when THE PRESIDIUM: when a Mask of
Moonson wants something done, he tells Moonson is uninterested in mundane affairs
someone who tells someone who orders (as e.g. under Argenteus), rule may be wielded
someone to do that something. And the reason in his absence by an executive council of those
he wants something done is that someone was who have direct control over the military,
able to tell him something. It is therefore very economic and spiritual power of the empire.
important to consider his sources of This Presidium is not a formal institution, and
information. (And, currently, Argenteus’ its existence is symptomatic of the Empire’s
rather laid-back attitude to the nitty-gritty decadence. A more involved and
everyday business of rule). interventionist Moonson would take on
himself many of the responsibilities currently
GREAT SISTER counts as a member of the handled by others.
Imperial Household, I suppose, although she
despises her brother and is usually resident in In our games, the members of the Presidium
her city of Graclodont. (She considers his (and their power bases) were:
current mask the most ineffectual she has seen.
Remember that Great Sister hasn’t changed Moonson The Red Emperor:
since the Fifth Wane, so she saw the dynamic Argenteus usually doesn’t attend
post-Sheng empire at its best under
Magnificus, and has lived through the decline Bellex Red Army:
into decadence ever since). She has adoring Maximus all military forces
worshippers and a private army, so don’t mess
Grand Master Black Army:
with her.
Orsorkhon internal security
INSTITUTIONS Marshal Blue Army:
THE IMPERIAL SENATE advises Volkhovos military intelligence
Moonson, but its powers are highly
circumscribed. It is more a talking-shop and Tatius Field School of
the Bright the Lunar College
supreme court than an executive parliament.
NB: I think the Senate had more power under Red Dancer Directress of the
Takenegi [i.e. Moonson of the First through of Power Imperial Economy
Third Wanes] than under any previous Yelmic
Great The Red Emperor’s
Emperor: this way, the “old Republicans”
Sister interfering sister
strain of thought – cf. I, Claudius and Lindsay
Davies’ Falco books for examples – can be
more vibrant in the contemporary Empire. THE ARMY does not run the Empire, but its
generals can have great influence. The “Proxy
THE SULTANS meet as a collegiate body in Wars” of the early Seventh Wane show that in
the Court of the Silver Gate. Moonson is a times of turmoil the Army is always loyal to the
member of this group (as Sultan of Silver true Mask of Moonson (translation for cynics:
Shadow), but seldom attends. This is not a that the “True Mask of Moonson” is the one the
“House of Lords” (or some such – the Senate is Army backs!). The Army (including the Field
nearer to this): the Sultans all possess great School of the Lunar College of Magic) is

60
directed by the Imperial Warlord, Bellex
Maximus; Moonson Argenteus is the titular
commander-in-chief, of course, and could
order Bellex around if he wanted to.
THE ECONOMY of the Empire is directed by
the Red Dancer of Power, who controls (inter
alia) the collection of Tribute, the awarding of
Imperial Monopolies, and the work of the
Imperial Revenue Service. Luckily, she is
completely round the twist and has an innate
understanding of the economic cycle. There are
lots of very fat and wealthy people in the
Empire, who can buy anything they want.
Including power, natch, so lots of them are
Senators or Nobles nowadays.
THE SECRET SERVICES (in our games, the
Black Army and Blue Army, plus the Spoken
Word; David Gadbois suggested several in an
old Codex article; traditionally, the “Blue Moon
Assassins” and other branches of the emperor’s
secret police) have absolutely no political
power or influence. Why, that would be quite
unthinkable! They are all utterly loyal to the
interests of the state (not their political
masters’ more narrow interests), and have no
interest in shaping policy. Of course not! The
very thought!
THE NOBLES of the Empire provide many or
most of the Senators, Satraps, Sultans,
Governors, Judges, Generals, etc., though
others can rise to these roles on merit. This is
less common now than in the Fifth and Sixth
Wanes, again a symptom of decadence.
LOCAL POTENTATES: there are lots of
local nobles, khans, cults, tribes, councils and
dynasties, centrally-appointed magistrates and
roving investigators from Glamour, military
governors, and the like. But let’s not go into
those. Some are local and regional (e.g. the
Buserian Temple is huge in Yuthuppa, but it
isn’t one of the “rulers of the Lunar Empire”;
likewise Shargash in Alkoth, or Pavis in Pavis);
others will ultimately derive their power from
rulers of the Empire proper (e.g. our Red
Tribunes are agents of the Imperial Cult,
deriving their authority from the Imperial
Senate, the Household, and ultimately from
Moonson himself; a soldier is a member of the
Lunar Army and can trace his authority back
through his officers to the commander-in-
chief).
THE ALLIES are not part of the Empire, and
are not ruled directly by Moonson. Their
relations with the Empire are determined by
treaties and personal relations between the
rulers. (This includes the Thrice Blessed, the
Char-Un, the Sable Riders of the Hungry
Plateau, as well as more minor or temporary
allies like the Red Earth Alliance or the Praxian
Oases and Sables).
THE REDLANDS and ARROLIA are not
even allies of the Empire, but they contain
Lunar societies of Pelorian origin so it’s
probably worth making this completely clear.
They pay no taxes to Moonson, but their
religion shares common roots and there are
often religious links between the disparate
groups (e.g. Redlander priests studying in
Torang; Arrolian tribute sent to Great Sister for
the Goddess).
THE GODS: Cultic figures like the Egi, the
Red Goddess, the Seven Mothers, etc. do not
have any role in the day-to-day running of the
Empire. To put it another way, the Lunar
Empire is directly ruled by its gods to about the
same extent that the Yelmic Empire before it
was. (That is to say, not noticeably except in
extreme, miraculous and temporary
circumstances). The Emperor is that aspect of
Divinity which directly concerns itself in the
running of the Empire. Therefore, almost by
definition, no other entities of the Pantheon
routinely play a part in this vitally important
task.
The gods do not provide information or
resources to Moonson except through the
normal operation of their cultic functions.
(Examples: Moonson may have a prophetic
dream, but this must be interpreted in the
mundane world. Senators worship the Egi, and
hope thereby to be able more perfectly to
emulate and advise their Emperor. The powers
of the gods are made manifest through their
cults’ and devotees’ actions, not through gross
and regular displays of divine power. The High
Priests of the cults worshipped within the
61
Empire represent their deities to the public and
to the Imperial Court).
Manifestations of divine beings are
miraculous, not routine – the examples which
spring to mind are (1) Moonson himself, divine
ruler of the Empire; (2) the Twin Stars who
may return to save the empire in its hour of
greatest need; (3) the various Inspirations of
Moonson; (4) a handful of special cases (the
Red Dancer of Power, Great Sister...); and
that’s about it. The Empire is ruled from the
city of Glamour, not from the surface of the Red
Moon.
THE EMPEROR’S CULT is written up in A
Rough Guide to Glamour (revised and
expanded edition) and was originally
published in Tales of the Reaching Moon #16.
Each new Mask is a theological revelation. And
The Size of the Imperial Cult
In V7#549 (2000), Martin Laurie wrote:
Greg said that the Emperor is not worshipped
on a large scale, he also said his devotees are
a tiny bunch, mostly close relatives and
special agents of his power. All the Proxies are
devotees though.
Way back in Tales of the Reaching Moon #8
(1992), Greg Stafford wrote:
The Emperor is worshipped as a separate
divine entity, apart from his mother, by the
common populace of the Empire. It is very
easy to become a lay worshipper of his cult,
and most cults will include it without notice to
their worshippers. His shrine can be found in
any Lunar moon temple and most allied
temples as well.
But: are we necessarily being gregged again?
We all agree (Nick, Chris, Martin, Greg) that
there aren’t many “high-up” members of the
imperial cult (i.e. our Tribunes, Moon Lords,
Sultans and Senators). Given this, I don’t see
why we should necessarily lose the “mass
membership” aspects of the imperial cult (our
Subjects and Citizens) which sit at the bottom
of the food chain.
62
there are some very irritated (and partly
rehabilitated) ex-priests of the imperial cult
whose sacred treatises about Masks that
turned out to be proxies or false emperors are
now considered heretical texts.
A note on hero cults of the imperial cult – we’ve
speculated that the ancestral shrines to
Moonson Imperator maintained by various
Sultans’ households are (of course) shrines to
the particular Mask which was their Ancestor,
and perhaps this shapes the powers and
outlooks of those Sultans and Nobles (e.g.
descendents of Ignifer may get zippy war or
command magics, unavailable nowadays
through worship of Argenteus). One for the
mix?
Lay membership is a neat way of explaining
that almost every subject of the Empire, by
acknowledging that they are in the Empire,
necessarily acknowledges the Living God of the
Lunars. I see this as analogous to e.g. Uleria
“lay membership” (you’re a member each time
you, well, “lay”). It’s vague and meaningless,
and confers no powers or benefits.
Citizens possess duties and rights and know-
ledge and opportunities and an outlook that
non-citizens don’t, just like cultic initiates. And
if every Lunar Citizen has sacrificed 1 POW to
Moonson, and sends him Magic Points every
Holy Day, it helps explain how the Emperor
has so much magical energy sloshing about.
Other than mundane stuff, the biggest magical
“benefit” a Citizen receives is that appeals to
Moonson are possible, but they cost POW as
well as time and money.
Below Red Tribune (Moonson Soldier), then,
the cult does very little for its “members.” And
there aren’t that many Red Tribunes, in my
opinion. Looking above that, in all there’s
probably less than a hundred Moon Lords, less
than twenty Red Sultans (Moonson Imper-
ator), and I’d guess only a few hundred Red
Senators (Moonson the Elder priests): not such
a huge cult at all, compared with the many
millions of inhabitants of the Empire.
 The Three Realms
of Glorantha
The Lunars know that there are three ways of
viewing the Gloranthan Cosmos, and although
they may appear mutually contradictory, all of
them are equally true. The Red Goddess binds
together the three realms of the Cosmos: she
exists within each of them, has mastered all
their secrets, and is willing to share this
knowledge with her followers. The purpose of
the Lunar Way is to bring individuals closer to
the infinite reality of the Cosmos. Those who
have succeeded most in this endeavour are the
new deities of the Lunar pantheon.
The Mortal Realm
The mortal realm consists of all that is
measurable, finite and destructible: it is the
world within which we exist, the place of
matter, time and history. It is ruled by
Malakinus, God of Logic. We who live within
the mortal realm are limited beings, and must
strive to understand the divine and mystical
worlds with our limited faculties. If we perceive
an impossibility in the other realms, it is only
because our own limited perceptions and
understanding make it appear so.
The Divine Realm
The divine realm consists of all that is infinite,
cyclical and unchangeable: it is the eternally
recurring world of Godtime and myth. It is
ruled by Yelm, Emperor of the Universe. When
we reach out to contact beings from the infinite
realm, they reach down to meet us part-way:
because these entities are so much greater than
we are, we cannot fully comprehend all that
their nature encompasses.
The Mystical Realm
The mystical realm consists of all that is
transcendent, mysterious and unknowable. It
is, perhaps, a mirror, or an illusion, or a veil
before the great Mystery. It is ruled by Nysalor,
God of Illumination. Barbarians sometimes
refer to the Mystical Realm as “Chaos”, though
there is far more to it than that. The Westerners
may know it as “Solace”. Earlier civilisations
neglected the mystical world-view, and
suffered from that neglect.
“The Mortal World is a reflection of the Divine
World, yet the Divine World in turn can be seen
to reflect the Mortal World. The Transcendent
World of Self, then, can be seen as a mirror
between the two. But on which side do we
stand? Where is Reality to be found?”
– from the Musings of Philarchus,
a text of Illuminated paradoxes
The Lunar Mission
The Lunar Empire is a means to an end, not an
end in itself. Its actions are calculated to
protect the Lunar Way while bringing insight
and Illumination to the greatest possible
number, whether this is done through the blunt
tools of expansion and conversion, or through
more covert means. Imperial policy is
determined by Illuminated Masters and
transcendent beings, who have attained the
true insight and understanding which can only
come to those most steeped in the mysteries of
the Lunar Way.
The goal of the Lunar Way is not a worldwide
Empire ruled from Glamour, but a
fundamental transformation of the whole
Gloranthan cosmos. This has already met with
partial success, during the mortal life of the
Red Goddess and again since her death:
devotees of the Lunar Way have effected
grandiose changes to the nature of the world,
and there are more to come.
One effect of this is the apparent uncertainty of
many aspects of Lunar doctrine. The Lunar
Cosmos is still evolving – to give one obvious
example, during the life of the Goddess there
was no Red Moon for the souls of her followers
to reside upon post mortem, and no mention of
the physical moon itself (or the Wanes, the
Glowline, and sundry other matters) appears in
records from the Zero Wane.
This does not trouble the faithful, however.
They take their Goddess’ own death,
dismemberment, rebirth, disappearance, and
subsequent return as ample proof of her
knowledge of life after death, and view Lunar
history as an ongoing process of constant
improvement: temporary setbacks are
outweighed by major advances, and the future
looks rosier with every passing Wane.
63
 Mistress of the Three Worlds
Sedenya, the Red Goddess, is mistress of the
three worlds. She participates in each. She can
teach us everything about all of them. That’s
what makes her special. In order to compre-
hend the teachings of the Goddess, you must
have participated in all three realms.
That is why you (a Mortal) must be Illuminated
(Mystical) and a Rune Lord or Priest (Divine)
to be initiated into her cult.1
/ The Material World is ruled by Malkion
(Malakinus), Lord of Measure. It is the
world we live in, and is in some ways the
least of the three. Its magic is Sorcerous.
/ The Divine World is ruled by Yelm,
Emperor of the Universe – just as the Dara
Happans always knew it was. He still
orders the Hundred Gods, smites Rebel
Gods, etc., just as they always said. (And
the Hundred Gods, Rebel Gods, etc. are still
a shifting cast of characters as the Empire
interacts with different outsiders). Its
magic is Divine.
/ The Transcendent World is ruled by
Nysalor. We can never know anything
about this for sure, although our greatest
mystics have made the attempt. Its magic is
Mystical.
Following this scheme, traditional Yelmic (or
other) patterns of worship can continue just as
they always did.
Like the Carmanians (one of the root cultures
for the Lunar Way, remember), the Empire is
happy to preserve knowledge of the great secret
magics at its heart for the elite. (Among the
Carmanians, this is the Magi and their special
divinatory contact with Idovanus, “too good for
the masses.” Among the Lunars, this is the Cult
of the Red Goddess).
The populace can worship the gods they always
did, the gods they want to worship; we need not
rub their nose in the fact that we possess a
transcendant Wisdom and Insight (through
our direct communion with Cosmic Truths)
which they may never know
.

The Old Gods & The Lunar Way

The Red Goddess demands only that her freedom (and that of her worshippers) be recognised and
respected by other living powers and gods. She does not reject their rights or powers, and she does
not insist on changing their worship. Because her Lunar Cosmos encompasses the mortal and mystical
realms as well as the divine realm within which the Old Gods exist, she knows their importance in the
world and has no desire to interfere with their worship or power.
The Old Gods who preceded the Lunar Way still receive worship within the Empire. The Lunars accept
Yelm as Emperor of the Cosmos, and Malkion as ruler of the Material World. Citizens in Dara Happa
and Peloria worship Lodril, Dendara and Yelm; provincials in the highlands follow Ernalda, Barntar and
the Seven Lightbringers; allies beyond the Glowline preserve their ancient tribal ways. All are welcome to
participate more deeply in the rituals of the Lunar Way, and many choose to avail themselves of this
opportunity, while remaining devout followers of their traditional rites.

1 As an aside, it’s possible that supernatural, mystical and meta-cosmic beings have to gain a mundane nature

in order to join the Cult of the Red Goddess. (The rest of us have that part already). This explains:
/ The Red Dancer of Power having to give birth to a new child by a mortal every year while she remains in the
mundane world;
/ Moonson’s occasional bouts of decadence, in which he positively revels in mundane pleasures;
/ Great Sister’s deliberate involvement with the squalid everyday realities endured by the grindingly poor and
dispossessed of the Lunar Heartlands.
They’re all “grounding” themselves, so they don’t float off to the Moon...

64

Orlanth
The Last Enemy
The only exception is Orlanth, the Last Rebel,
eternal enemy of peace and stability. Worship
of this turbulent and barbaric deity is
prohibited within the Empire, and its
campaigns of conquest have been intended to
break his power. Former worshippers of the
Storm God are encouraged to worship tamer,
more palatable atmospheric deities, such as
Molanni, a consort of Yelm, or Entekos,
goddess of Good Weather.
Orlanth was not chosen by the Red Goddess as
her Last Enemy. Their hostility is a cosmic
process, and inevitable. When Rufelza’s
cyclical revolution replaces Orlanth’s turbulent
rebellion as the motive principle of the Middle
Air, then Orlanth will no longer have a place in
Glorantha. The defeat of this troublesome and
disobedient god will finalise Rufelza’s
integration into all Glorantha. Vast lands in the
East, West, and South will not need to be
conquered by the Lunar Empire to defeat
Orlanth. Their ultimate acceptance of the
Lunar Way will be inescapable after Orlanth’s
forthcoming demise is bound.2
The boxes on The Old Gods & The Lunar Way
and Orlanth: The Last Enemy are extracts
from my article The Lunar Pantheon which
appeared in the original edition of A Rough
Guide to Glamour. The articles on The Three
Realms and The Lunar Mission were cut from
that article for space reasons.
For what it’s worth, the passage on Orlanth was
somewhat revised by Greg Stafford – possibly
more so than any other section of my article –
and thus probably faithfully represents his
thoughts on the subject in the summer of ‘97.
The Lunar Pantheon was not included in the
revised and expanded edition of A Rough
Guide to Glamour as substantially similar
material is now in the Glorantha Sourcebook.
2Scriptorium must amend text as shown in all copies: original version is unsuitable for wider distribution, any
copies that cannot be amended must be destroyed. The Chief Scribe is ordered to the Xaronea for appropriate
Penance.
Attributes of the Three Worlds
Mortal Divine Mystical
Material Cosmic Transcendent
Mundane Cyclical Unknowable
Knowable Eternal
Perishable
Random comments from the early Hero Wars
era (Three Worlds / Four Magic Systems guff):
Q: There is no Mystic otherworld?
A: Correct.
Q: Are there Chaotic otherworlds which are
separate from the three ordinary ones?
A: Not within Glorantha. There is certainly
Chaotic contamination of parts of the Gloran-
than otherworlds (e.g. Darkness Age realms of
the God Plane; bad places in the Spirit World’s
landscape; the Hell Plane of the sorcerers’
Invisible Measure: places where Chaos has
invaded parts of the Theistic, Animist and
Sorcerous otherworlds), and these probably
become even more confusing than the way the
three Underworlds intertwine (cf. Hero Wars
Narrator’s Book, p.24). But any hypothetical
Realm of Pure Chaos would be external to
Glorantha, by definition. Therefore, I would
say, it does not count as a Gloranthan
Otherworld. (Perhaps it’d be a non-World – a
Void of Chaos?)
You can certainly go on the God Plane, as an
Orlanthi, to witness the horrible things the
Unholy Trio got up to in the Great Darkness.
But it might not be all that safe to do so...
Maybe the Great Secret of Primal Chaos allows
you to “become one with Chaos” and thereby
enter into a Chaotic Otherworld, but by doing
so you’d remove yourself from Glorantha,
permanently.
65
 The Evil Empire
Back in May 2000, a poster to the Glorantha
Digest wrote:
I like the Lunars. I think that they are, funda-
mentally, the good guys. Correct me if I’m
wrong, but the Reaching Moon Megacorp
material seems to assume that the Lunars,
while they may be rather sympathetic, are
ultimately the villains of Glorantha.
This was my reply:
Speaking for myself, I like the Lunar Way. I
think that it is the most optimistic religion in
Glorantha. It offers a genuine hope of rebirth
to the world.
I view the relationship between the Lunar Way
and the Lunar Empire as similar to that
between Marxism and the Soviet Union, or
primitive Christianity and the Vatican State, or
Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité and Robespierre’s
Committee for Public Safety. Mundane reality
inevitably betrays the pure idealism: even if it
doesn’t intend to, and especially if villainous
characters are involved. After all, who’d want
to game in a “perfect” world? This friction
between the mythic and the material generates
many plots and motivations.
I believe that many Lunars are good and pious
and wonderful idealistic people. Others,
however, are despicable, amoral, selfish
opportunists. And still others are insane, or
chaos-tainted, or illuminated beyond
humanity. (I enjoy writing and playing all sorts
in freeform games).
Remember: the Lunar Empire employs both
Teelo Norri nuns and Danfive Xaron torturers;
Fazzur Wideread and Roan-Ur; honourable
Yanafali and Char-Un cossack butchers; the
Granite Phalanx and the Vampire Legion;
illuminated levitating moral teachers and the
devouring chaotic obscenity of the Crimson
Bat.
I dislike suggestions that everyone in the
Empire is “good”, or “evil”. However, in view of
the means it employs, I don’t think the Empire
itself could ever be considered wholly “good”.
There is plenty of room for characters like the
Coders, who oppose what they see as the “dark
side” of their society: campaigns could easily
revolve around Watergate- or X-Files-like
66
investigations into corruption and the secretive
abuses of power; or White Moonie protesters
and reformers trying to bring the Empire back
to the path of virtue; or Vietnam POW / Clear
and Present Danger-style plots involving
misuse of the armed forces by corrupt nobles in
the Heartlands.
Think of Dominic Flandry, upholding a
decadent Empire as the “least worst” option.
Or the officers of Babylon 5 looking on aghast
as the government they work for descends into
Orwellian totalitarianism. The adventures
generated by these tensions are in my opinion
more satisfactory than the old simplicities of
“good barbarians vs. bad Empire” or “good
Empire vs. bad barbarians.” To make them
work, you have to have good Lunars and bad
Lunars. Luckily, this isn’t a problem for us.
I believe the Empire is fatally compromised (to
my non-Illuminated understanding) by the
unwholesome and unspeakable things it
permits to happen in its name. Thank the
Goddess there’s more to the Lunar Way than
that one manifestation.
5
Followup to the HeroWars Yahoo!Group,
13 August 2002:
Generally speaking, the shortest version of the
ongoing history of the Lunar Empire and the
Lunar Way goes like this:
a) a good and pious Lunar discovers something
marvellous that will make life more
wonderful for everybody;
b) the Empire gets their hands on it and puts it
to use. This almost certainly involves not
making life wonderful for everybody, and
quite possibly involves Bad Things
happening to the original discoverer.
 The Soviet Analogy
by Chris Gidlow

First, and I think everyone agrees with this, the
Lunar Empire is of itself. There has never been
a culture like this in our world, and no-one
intends (I hope) to diminish it by making it a
clone of a Real World culture.
I chose my analogies according to context. In
Tarsh War it is seen as the British Empire with
late Roman trappings (the pictures of the
Troops are pictures of individual regiments,
and I do not wish to suggest that all Lunar
troops look like late Romans. See Moon
Runners illo in Tales #17 for a completely
different regiment of Peltasts). In Revolt in the
Redlands, the Lunars are Americans of the
Nineteenth Century, in Citizens early imperial
Romans, in Hunt for Red Storm Season
Soviets. I just take a paradigm that fits the
game I am writing to squeeze out MGF.
The Soviet analogy works on several levels.
First, it is a humorous recognition of one of the
(probably subconscious) influences on Dragon
Pass. The rugged individualists fighting
against the aggressive Red Empire. It seems
pretty obvious where that idea was coming
from (we are talking late sixties/ early
seventies here!).
Unlike the Americans, a lot of us Brits feel that
the Evil Empire of the USSR was a construct as
much of American paranoia as of reality. And
Socialism is not a dirty word here. I have voted
socialist all my life and intend to carry on doing
so.
But why I think a lot of us Brits sympathised
with the Lunars from the start was we could see
another influence in Greg’s mind was the
previous time the rugged individualists had
been up against the evil Red Empire: 1776! And
in any Gloranthan film we knew just what
nationality of actors were going to be playing
the Lunars.
But I digress. The Soviet analogy began as a
humorous reference to the origins of Glorantha
but proved useful in a number of ways. The
analogy works on five levels, which I think
makes it rather more useful than a (I hope it
was just for argument’s sake) “let’s use the
Incas as a model because I know about them.”
1. The Soviet Union is an excellent example of
an ideological Empire. There have
actually been very few of these in the
history of the Real World. It had an
ideology which was particularly its own,
shared only by its client states. And it was
an ideology which most outsiders viewed
with very deep suspicion and usually
hostility. I think the Lunar Invasion of
Tarsh should have the same gut feeling to
it that the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
has, rather than the Sassanid invasion of
Georgia, or the Ummayad invasion of
Persia. This is one reason why I think the
Red Army conjures up the right sort of
feelings. It is an army with an ideological
purpose behind it. The Party seems to me
an excellent model of the way membership
of the specifically Lunar cults works.
2. Most modern people reading about the
Lunar Empire will probably see nothing
wrong in the Lunar Way. It seems a
benevolent and reasonable ideology.
This is exactly the feeling which many of us
(perhaps not in America) have about
Socialism. Yet the Soviet Union was an
atrocious state, with hypocrisy, corruption
and down-right evil from the top down-
wards. In many ways it could not be
distinguished from the hierarchical feudal
Russian Empire which had proceeded it.
Isn’t this the way that we all see the Lunar
Empire? Count Julan may be James Bond
in armour but behind him is Appius Luxius
the sinister “Provincial Overseer,” behind
him Grand Master Orsorkhon, and behind
him the yet darker forces, (as we saw in the
British run of Life of Moonson) working for
the accession of Damien the Monster
Emperor. The Rough Guide to Glamour is
just the latest in a line of Lunar Propaganda
documents telling us all is for the best in
this, the best of all possible Empires,
playing on the fact that most of us have
gamed in Sartar and Pavis, where we can
see just how nice and benevolent the
Lunars really are.

67
3. For relations between Lunars and historic Soviet Steppes Nomads, Soviet Shamans.
Pelorian cultures, the Soviet Union is an They all existed in our real world for us to
excellent model. It positively gloried in its compare our visions. Tamberlane the Great
ethnic diversity. Indissoluble Union (the must surely be one of the models of Sheng
Soviet National anthem) goes on about it, Seleris. And where are his stamping
and you could hardly buy an Intourist grounds and tomb? The Soviet Union.
brochure which didn’t have a pageant of the
5. Soviet chic. Luckily the visual style of the
Peoples of the Soviet Union in colourful
Soviet Union provides enough red, silver
ethnic garb. The Union was organised into
and gold, stars, sickles and so forth to be a
autonomous (most supposedly inde-
ready source of artistic inspiration. I would
pendent) republics just like our Satrapies,
suggest that this derives from Greg’s
Sultanates and Kingdoms. Yet as far as
subconscious idea of the way an evil empire
everyone outside was concerned, it was a
should look like.
Russian Empire, with Russian the main
language and the main culture of its ruling The Soviet Paradigm, which works for the
bodies. This is exactly how I see the reasons above, is a very fruitful source of
relationship between the Empire’s Lunar- inspiration. We can deduce that there is a great
ness and its base cultures. square at the heart of Glamour which hosts
grandiose military march pasts and over which
4. The base cultures of the Soviet Union are
Moonson waves from his balcony (we can even
luckily ones which we also draw on for our
deduce its name. The real “Red Square” has
other real world analogies. Russia was part
always been called that, even under the Tsars,
of what Obolensky calls the Byzantine
derived from the old word for beautiful). Who
Commonwealth, and after the Fall of
knows what was at the heart of the Ummayad
Constantinople Ivan the Great declared
Caliphate or the Inca Empire? We know what
Moscow as the Third Rome. So, if you want
kind of songs Lunars are likely to sing, how
a Soviet take on the Late Roman Empire,
their propaganda is likely to be worded, the
there it is. Next there is the huge Moslem
medals they get, the sort of food served in
aspect of the Soviet Union. Islam was
restaurants, and what the main pleasure park
certainly an original part of Greg’s thinking
in the capital is called. These are very handy
behind the Lunar Empire. Just look at the
mental short cuts which I defy anyone to argue
Crescents, the Scimitars, Sultans, the
exist if we say the Lunar Empire was rather like
William Church counter illustrations of
Archaemenid Persia or the Assyrian Empire.
Tarshites. The History of the Lunar
Empire is pure rise of Islam (perhaps And is anyone going to tell me that the Kalikos
filtered through the Dune books). So, if you Icebreaker was a complete coincidence?
want to see Soviet Islam, there it is in Glorantha Digest, V7 #586
Central Asia, with a skyline of minarets,
crescents, domes and red flags. And so on 27 April 2000
through all the minorities, Soviet Cossacks,

t / y

68
 Use of Analogies
Posted to the Lunar Discussion Group, a
short-lived working group set up in the early
days of Issaries, Inc.:
When we use an analogy, it is because it “fits.”
Aspects of the British Empire, the Soviet Union,
etc. do fit the Lunar Empire remarkably well. We
would be foolish not to bear these in mind when
exploring how the Empire might work, how its
citizens would feel, how its policies would be
manifested and defended.
But note: I said “bear these in mind”. If we can
extract the real-world “jokes” from any “official”
Issaries publication, but retain the underlying
Gloranthan realities which the real-world joke
served to illuminate, I would be happy.
You may not realise that we have generally been
in the business of communicating a vision of the
Empire to our readers. I firmly believe that the
Masters of the Danfive Xaron cult are as
described in Mike Hagen’s write-up: black-robed
self-torturing sickoes. I was delighted when Mike
added the blind Yelmic priest Cenobius to the
mix, as Danfive’s cultic founder. If these two
elements survived the transition from fandom to
Officialdom, I’d be completely happy. I would not
miss the word “Cenobite” from the Official
Source; while I would use it myself in unofficial
discussion, in panel talks, on the Digest, and in
anything I wrote for Hero Wars, I’d not feel that
this word – multiple-meaninged and resonant
though it is – was worth chucking the exquisite
Cult of Danfive Xaron for.
Likewise Raskolnikov, my own coinage for the
Danfive Xaron Spirit of Reprisal. I believe that
“initiates” (ex-cons) of the cult do come over all
guilt- ridden and remorseful if they slip back into
criminality. The name is just the icing on the
cake. It tells people what’s going on, far more
efficiently than a half-page description of the
effects would do.
We have been writing material for people
unfamiliar with Glorantha, for people to seize on
and use in gaming. We have been deliberately
“obvious,” while Greg has slid down a path
towards deliberate obscurantism. Our source-
books, cult writeups, et al are accessible and
approachable to newcomers; the deliberate,
jokey use of real-world analogies helps people see
what we’re on about. (Take a non-Gloranthan,
and tell them to play a Zasturnic Illuminate, and
they’ll look at you funny. Say “you’re like a guru”
and they’ll get it at once. That’s what I’m on
about!)
Given the presumably larger page-count of an
Official Lunar Book, we won’t need these
shortcuts. We can lose the surface gloss (of the
more obvious and “offensive” Soviet or English or
Roman analogies), while retaining the
underlying Truths that those glosses served to
illuminate.
If you see what I mean.

General Sor-eel’s Early Career

An historic trivia question: who was the commanding Lunar general at the Battle of Moonbroth? I
can’t see any case for Sor-eel not taking this role; Fazzur is said to have been second-in-command
when the Lunar Army invaded Prax.3
I’m guessing that between 1607 (March on the Paps) and 1610 (Invasion of Prax), the Glorious Sor-
eel overtook the Provincial Fazzur in the army seniority stakes. The Battle of Moonbroth was executed
to Fazzur’s strategy but under Sor-eel’s command; their subsequent falling-out at Pavis (and Fazzur’s
demotion to impatient militia-training in Tarsh) was perhaps a cunning and underhanded political
ploy by Sor-eel.
Maybe the 1607 invasion was all Sor-eel’s idea, after all? Finding out for certain who planned that
military fiasco could be a fun revenge motive (“My daddy was killed in the Dead Place, so that fat-
headed fool could become Count of Prax...”).

3“He had proposed the invasion plan which worked so easily, but became embroiled in an argument about how
to handle the occupied city” – Wyrms Footnotes #12, p.17.

69

Pol Joni &
Moonbroth
Prior to 1607, the Pol Joni are dominant in the
Good Place (around Moonbroth) and Better
Place (around Jaldon’s Rest); from 1607 to
1610, they’re clinging onto power at both Oases
but have lost their grip and are suffering
increased Animal Nomad pressure; in 1610
they’re evicted from Moonbroth by the Lunar
advance (or sensibly flee ahead of it) and
Moonbroth and the Good Place become solidly
held by the Sables; over time thereafter, the
tribe consolidates again around Jaldon’s Rest.
My supposition is that the Pol Joni were
always hated to some extent, but with the
defeated Kingdom of Sartar no longer able to
support its horse-riding allies on the Plains, the
Animal Nomads saw their opportunity to drive
them off forever. The “mauling” in 1607 left a
pitiful remnant clinging onto Moonbroth Oasis
and its immediate surrounds; they were then
chucked out of the oasis by the Lunar invasion
in 1610.
The March to the Paps
“It was the campaigning season of 1607, and the
General wanted us to move into the desert. Since
the fall of Sartar, the horse-lords of the border
marches had been losing their grip, and an
unlikely posse of nomad khans were all set to ally,
raise their demigod founder Waha – or Jaldon, or
some such ancient hero – and repeat Alavan
Argary, wiping out the Pol Joni or driving them
into the Pass.
“Now, the General knew we could handle that,
but didn’t need the extra complications, thank
you, and besides, the last thing he wanted was
another costly battle so soon after the Building
Wall, and a strong alliance of nomads under a
Great Khan. Nobody needs another Sheng,
especially given his plans for Pavis and the
Valley…
“So, the Commander gets the independent duty
he’s been chasing after all this time. Not an ideal
mix of troops, maybe – that’s the campaign where
we learned not to use horse soldiers in Prax, and
nobody’s too keen to send hoplites unsupported
through the high chapparal again.
70
The “good news” for the Pol Joni was that the
new Lunar/Sable dominance in north-western
Prax prevented aggrieved Animal Nomads
from wiping out the remnant stragglers.
(Normal Praxian “ecology” would usually have
prevent this in any case, but with the precedent
of Alavan Argary and the extermination or
banishment of the Pure Horse Tribe, there’s all
kinds of unpleasant possibilities for defeated
horse clans in Prax)
Below is a fragment I was writing to present
this in trooper-speak. “The General” is Fazzur,
who I assume planned the invasion of Prax;
“The Commander” is Sor-eel the Short, who led
the 1607 incursion. Note that this mission is
generally seen as a military defeat and politico-
religious victory for the Lunars – the speaker
here was in on the “victory” part at the Paps,
and knows that his comrades on the Plains
were bled white by the nomads.
/ B t
“Still, the plan worked all right – enough
skirmishes to show the nomads we could bite,
some neat combined-arms tricks they’d not seen
before, and while our outriders were skirling
around the Plains, the Commander marched
overland to the Paps, this ancient Green Age
temple in the middle of Prax which all the nomad
tribes hold sacred, and cut a deal with the
priestesses there.
“We recognised the neutrality of all the oasis
temples in Prax; they accepted our protection and
stopped working to bring all the tribes together
against us. The Goddess knows the whole story,
mind – and everyone says that’s when the Sable
Conversion began.
“So, three years later when we move in on this
Oasis, three of the biggest Praxian tribes are
gathering all their braves to settle our hash.
Except that one of them’s the Sable Tribe, and the
night before battle they all up sticks and join our
army instead. Goddess, how the Bison and
Impala khans must have fumed at that!”
 Imperial vs. Arrolian Moonboats
Within the Glowline, Moonboats can cruise
around under steady power all the time. It’s
almost like changing from sailing vessels
(dependent on the waxing and waning
moonlight) to powered craft.
Also within the Glowline, the weather is much
milder (through geography) and better
managed (thanks to Kalikos, Molanni, and the
like), and there are fewer uproarious storm-
worshipping barbarian rebels trying to bring
down these valuable craft.
NB: Clouds can affect moonboat travel, if they
obscure the moonlight: take plenty of “Cloud
Clear” spells if you’re in a hurry. You won’t
come crashing to the ground all of a sudden if
they’re blocked (well, that’s what they tell you
in the in-flight safety briefings).
Those delicately-suspended moonboats are
also very vulnerable to high winds, thunder-
bolts, lightning strikes, and the like. Best to
steer well clear of turbulent regions like
Dragon Pass. (Yes, it’s a pun!)
The Empire has ever risked a moonboat in a
military operation against opponents with
weather-control magics: that’s why you don’t
see them in the Dragon Pass boardgame. (Save
it for a special event of the Hero Wars!)
The Moonboat captains from Arrolia are the
finest in the world. Because they don’t have the
advantage of working within the Glowline, they
can beat the pants off the humdrum, spoiled
Imperial Moonboat pilots, tacking and weaving
to take best advantage of available moon-
beams. They get all the practice, y’see: an
Arrolian sky-captain sail under what for the
Imperial Lunars are unimaginably bad
conditions, all the time. Almost none of the
Imperial moonboat pilots have ventured
beyond the Glowline: they aren’t used to
working with unsteady, variable moonlight.
This may not be a major issue yet, but if the
Empire starts recruiting Arrolian pilots, or
tries invading Arrolia, or anything like that, it’ll
be a major consideration. You might even see
Imperial Moonboats operating competently
outside the Glowline in Dragon Pass; or,
contrariwise, a lumbering Imperial invasion
fleet cut to pieces by nimble Arrolian air-
privateers...
All neat imagery, anyway. I was toying earlier
with hijacking a Moonboat at Kitor and fleeing
the Empire in it, laden to the gunwhales with
White Moonie renegades…

/ s
Why was Paulis Longvale the Bat Man?
Two reasons, really. We wanted to have Paulis in the freeform (as he’s a Lunar almost everyone’s
heard of), but couldn’t initially see how to make him particularly powerful – in a game where other
players command armies, satrapies, empires, mystical powers, etc., it’s kinda hard to be drawn as “the
author of Cults of Terror.” (It was tempting to use MOB’s “embittered Paulis” from years ago, but
even so we didn’t see how to make this fly).
And we needed to have a Chief Feeder of the Crimson Bat, but couldn’t at first see how to make him
interesting.
The eventual solution wrote itself.
I was particularly glad to see there’s nothing in the ethos of the Crimson Bat cult to prevent its priests
dressing up in terrifying batlike robes and pulling criminals off the streets to feed them to the Bat.
Once we knew that the Crimson Bat sometimes lives on the Red Moon (confirmed in Greg’s piece in
Tales of the Reaching Moon #16, though we suspected it earlier), we even had the Glamour location
and the all-important Bat Cave.

71
 Dart War
Assassins
Individual noble houses employ whatever kind
of assassins they can train or acquire, the more
originally-skilled and sorcerously-enhanced
the better. The paranoia and tension (and
constant war footing) of satraps’ households
when a Dart Competition looms is like
something out of Dune – and, like House
Atreides, no Lunar noble household is
complete without its Master of Assassins,
Swordmaster, House Sorcerer, etc.
So: houses train up their own assassins; they
could be worshippers of any god (or sorcerous
school, or whacked-out philosophy, or nihilis-
tic mystical tradition); they are meant to have
zany and original powers (unique to each noble
household), rather than conforming to a stock
template. Each Sultan’s court assassins will
have different strengths.
For some reason, the goddess Natha springs to
mind as a good choice for assassins to worship.
Although there are plenty of other demons and
deities who’d do just as well. Natha, of course,
is the proto-Lunar goddess of Murder and
Blasphemy and Sacrilege.
They wouldn’t necessarily be subtle, refined or
sophisticated: some leaders might prefer to
employ unrefined house assassins: savage
tribesmen who can’t be bribed; demonic
crossbreeds whose loyalty is unquestioned (or
assured); brutish thugs like Harrek (the most
successful Lunar assassin we know, after all).
One of the Sultans of the Empire is a Sable
Khan, after all... mind you, I suspect he gets
some top-quality assistance from Moonson’s
court, to help him keep a grip on faithless
Kostaddi.
72
Blue Moon
Cult Assassins
The Blue Moon Cult are the state-sponsored
assassins of the Lunar Empire. They should be
dead scary. I wouldn’t allow one of them as a
player character, because that would demystify
them too much. Killing may well be a
sacramental act to the Blue Moon cultists, so
they have to bump people off once in a while
just to keep their demented goddess happy.
It’s quite possible the Blue Moon Cult has no
centralised knowledge of what its individual
temples and members are getting up to
(paralleling the way Annilla’s intellect was
destroyed).
Even the most skilled house assassins would
fear the Blue Moon cultists, and I think that
they’d be right to do so (though they pretend
not to be). The Blue Moonies are by no means
a lowest common denominator. Other
assassins would kill (how appropriate!) for the
training and magics the Blue Moon can take for
granted.
Plus, of course, if the Blue Moon assassins are
after you, you know you’ve pissed off someone
powerful, who can call in favours from the
Emperor’s Cousin or others among the
unfathomable veiled leadership of the Duchy of
the Blue Moon.
I prefer this to having Blue Moon assassins a
commonplace or sub-standard bunch, a
murderous bunch of Thuggee. They should be
scary and mysterious: the epitome of assassins,
not the dregs.
/ t o
 Succession Crises in
the Lunar Empire
The Red Emperor’s Proxies
The first Proxies were created by the Red
Emperor Reclusus, who ruled thirty or forty
years ago. The Fortunate Succession (the
best source for info on Moonson) says: “He
even created the Silver Proxy and the Bronze,
Brass, and Bone Proxies to rid himself of
duties which took him from his personal
endeavours. His tasks included many long-
term magics which required his attention.”
(The Fortunate Succession, p.67)
I find it helps to think of the Proxies as rather
like Moonson’s identical twins. Or stunt
doubles. Or Blofeld’s many doppleganger
lookalikes. Or Elvis-impersonators, nowa-
days. They are stand-ins for the Red
Emperor, created by him, and used to
perform tasks that he can’t be bothered to do
(or can’t do) himself: pinning medals on
veterans, visiting orphanages, waving to
crowds at the colosseum, official visits to the
wire manufacturers of Upper Kostaddi,
greeting diplomatic envoys from the Sable
Tribe of Prax, that kind of thing. You get the
idea.
So: Moonsons who don’t like bread and
circuses will send a Proxy along to sit in their
seat at the Circus and the Amphitheatre.
Moonsons who don’t like fighting will send a
Proxy along to lead their glorious armies in
Dragon Pass. Moonsons who don’t like the
Presidium, or the Court of the Silver Gate, or
the Imperial Senate, will send a Proxy along to
sit on the highest councils of the Empire.
Again, you get the idea.
4 Now available in two volumes in printed and digital formats from the Jonstown Compendium: Life of
Moonson, Book One: The Characters and Life of Moonson, Book Two: The Freeform.
Clearly, it is necessary that a Proxy should both
look like Moonson and act as if he’s Moonson,
as otherwise everyone will know that Moonson
isn’t doing something himself. This leads to
problems when Moonson dies, and there are
still loads of lookalike stunt doubles walking
around saying “I’m Moonson”. Proxies aren’t a
problem when “their” Moonson is alive – but
afterwards, they can be a cause for
embarrasment.
This is what happened when Reclusus died and
Ignifer became Emperor: “When the
bureaucrats refused, he personally led groups
of people through the capital to whip the false
Proxies out, and then to hunt them and their
friends down through swamp, city and
mountain. Ignifer took back command which
had rested in the hands of the Proxies.” (FS
p.68)
(We refer to this last event as the “Proxy Wars”
in Tarsh War, partly for a convenient name but
mostly, I must confess, for the punning value).
In our freeform Life of Moonson 4 we hint that
Bellex Maximus may once have been the Steel
Proxy, and that Argenteus himself may be no
more than a Silver Proxy – look at the
suspiciously similar names. These issues are
unresolved in the freeform, but they’re the kind
of conspiracy theory that could easily circulate
at the highest levels of the Empire, where
Lunar piety alone requires one to look below
surface appearances and assume everything is
concealed by mirrors, masks and veils...
73
 What Happens in the Interregnum?
In May 2000 I spent an inordinate amount
of time on the Glorantha Digest discussing
Lunar imperial successions, and how new
Masks of the Red Emperor emerge, in the
face of a persistently belligerent and ill-
informed performance from Martin Laurie,
at the time co-authoring Imperial Lunar
Handbook 2: Under the Red Moon, one of the
HeroQuest books published by Issaries, Inc.
I think I see part of the problem we’re
having. Maybe if I talk through what I
think happens in the interregnal period,
some light will emerge.
(1) In my view, when a Mask of Moonson dies,
Moonson’s parts fly apart – like those of Yelm
or Murharzarm. In the “interregnum” (which
lasts a minimum of seven weeks) before a new
Mask passes the Tests and is acclaimed in
Glamour, Takenegi’s Self is somewhere else
(perhaps on the Red Moon, perhaps not?).
Much heavy-duty heroquesting goes on during
the interregnum to retrieve the scattered parts
of Moonson and prepare for his reincarnation.
Some of the heroquesters may have political
motivations for getting involved, as well as (or
instead of) a pious Lunar desire to re-create the
Emperor. And even if they don’t, it will surely
reflect well on (e.g.) the Eel-Ariash Clan that
they spent more time, money and lives on these
quests than (say) the Sable Khan of Kostaddi
did, and they could reasonably expect the new
Mask to reward them for this dedication.
(2) At the same time and in the mundane
world, there is a search to find those persons
with what we have called the Mandate of the
Moon, who might be suitable to serve as the
Body for the next Mask. These are likely to be
high-up Lunar nobles, descendents of
Moonson, powerful cultic figures, and the like.
In any given interregnum, there could be
several suitable candidates; moreover, the
continued existance of Proxies for the previous
Mask (who may, with their followers, sincerely
believe that they are that Mask and that
Moonson has not been killed) can serve to
confuse matters (i.e. to a Proxy’s followers, a
claimant looks like a rebel). There may be
74
armed struggles between rival camps (e.g.
Proxy Wars, Rebels Resurrecting Gbaji); there
may on the other hand be an orderly queue of
claimants waiting patiently to undergo the
Tests (e.g. the Mask of Artifex who passed the
Tests when a Dara Happan High Priest
“imposter” withdrew).
(3) It may well be, as Joerg suggested (V7#592,
Singularity of Moonson), that some candidates
“appear” from the Other Side during rituals to
fill the role of Red Emperor, as happens in
other known Lunar cases (Jar-eel v. Belintar;
ambush of Kallyr’s Stationary Lightbringers’
Quest). There is no reason why this should
happen only once in each interregnum, in my
opinion, and no reason why its mere
occurrence should lead to instant recognition
of the jumped-up claimant as the One True
Moonson Reborn. (Compare the story of
Basko’s “comic opposition” to Yelm,
RuneQuest Companion p.33: just ‘cos you
dress the part and turn up at the right time and
place, doesn’t mean anyone with real power
has to take you seriously).
(4) I do not think it is the case that every
institution in the Empire can infallibly detect
the future Body of Moonson against all its
rivals. Remember that we are in an
interregnum, here: the claimants do not yet
have (and do not claim to have) Takenegi’s Self
– they only assert that they are fit to receive it.
Perhaps imperial institutions (e.g. the Army,
the Household, the Senate) can validate
claimants’ Mandates? But as I said above, there
can be more than one valid Mandate, so this
doesn’t resolve matters.
(5) I do not think it is the case that only the
future Body of Moonson can overcome (and
even “re-integrate”) a Proxy relict of the
previous Mask’s. Thus, defeating a Proxy does
not prove that you are going to be the eventual
winner. It proves that you can beat up someone
who denies your right to compete in the Tests,
nothing more. Further, I do not think it is the
case that the future Body of Moonson can
always overcome (and re-integrate) a Proxy.
History shows us that Moonson cannot always
defeat every foe, even when he is an enthroned
and empowered Emperor. Thus, defeating or
being defeated by a Proxy proves little in itself.
So followers of a defeated claimant may well
look for someone else to support, rather than
falling in behind the guy who just beat up their
leader.
(6) In passing the various Tests, the Emperor
is re-integrated. Through rituals performed in
Glamour, in the City of Dreams and upon the
Red Moon, his Singular Self and his Imperial
Soul come to inhabit the Suitable Body of the
victorious claimant. At this point, there is a
new Mask of Moonson. He possesses the Lunar
Seventh Soul of Takenegi, the Imperial Fiery
Mantle of Antirius, a new and different-looking
Body (retaining some of the mundane skills,
interests and abilities from its previous life),
and various other knobbly bits as well.
Moonson Lives Again!
(7) Throughout the interregnal period,
Moonson – the singular Red Emperor – does
not exist in any integrated form. He is
reintegrated when the new Mask is acclaimed,
and not before. This happens at the end of the
interregnum. In fact, it defines it.
If I understand his posts correctly,
Martin Laurie believes that:
(A) When a Mask dies, a new one “naturally”
appears (just like that: bing), already
possessing the soul of Takenegi. No rituals or
heroquests are necessary to bring this about.
As soon as this new Mask appears, there is
obviously no contest, and everyone loyal rallies
round to support him.
(B) The Emperor’s Body is a magical thing
which “just appears” at the same time as the
new and singular incarnation of Takenegi. It
doesn’t look like anyone in particular. And it
certainly hasn’t had a prior life (unlike, say,
Doskalos or Teelo Norri). It appears out in the
boonies, “proving” that it can’t possibly be a
powerful noble or similar figure. (After all,
none of the powerful nobles in the Empire are
aware that the Red Goddess herself first
manifested out in the boonies...)
(C) Until the new Mask appears, there is
usually no contest (although the forthcoming
55It was: Martin replied to confirm it. Other posters were incredulous when he confirmed this was his version.
Eventually, he pled the Nuremburg Defence.
Secession Crisis will differ in this respect),
because everyone is waiting for the New,
Singular and Easily Identifiable Mask to
manifest itself, without this manifestation
requiring any input or effort on their behalf.
High-up Lunars do not think they should be
doing anything practical to assist in the
reincarnation of their Emperor: they merely
wait and see. Powerful nobles in the Lunar
Empire never have political or selfish motives
for doing anything during an interregnum, nor
would they dare act upon them if they did
because they know that when the True
Emperor returns, they will be discovered and
punished.
(D) Opposition to the new Mask once he
appears is, ipso facto, treachery. There are no
plausible alternative candidates whom anyone
sensible and loyal would support: their backers
really are trying to resurrect Gbaji, or break up
the Empire, or knowingly support a False
Proxy.
(E) The Tests serve to confirm that the One
True Emperor is who he says he is. He is in no
way changed by undergoing the Tests. He goes
into them with the Self of Takenegi and the
Soul of Antirius, and comes out the other side
the same way. There is, in a very real sense, no
contest. Nobody else could ever complete the
Tests. Thus nobody ever tries to and fails.
Anybody else who attempted the Tests would
be (ipso facto) a traitor, or a madman.
(F) The Interregnal period includes a time
when Moonson is apparently “gone”, and a
time when Moonson is fully reincarnated in a
new Mask and wandering around Peloria
brushing aside traitors and waiting to pass the
Tests again. There is no “in-between” state. The
interregnum ends when the new Mask has
completed the Tests, but in fact Moonson has
been around all along. His re-integration
happens “off-stage”, and normal humans (and
priests, politicians, heroquesters, etc.) don’t
have anything to do with it.
Is that a fair summary of where we
differ? 5
75
 Testing the Candidates
Alex [Ferguson] says (rightly): The ‘problem’ her Son”). And some people are mad as
case is if you want to keep the Lunar Empire hatters.
much as it is, but ‘can’t agree’, as it were, on
Rival claimants who “drop out” (assassinated,
who the ‘real’ Red Emperor is.
defeated in battle, overcome in a test) may be
In my opinion: “reabsorbed” into the eventual victor; they may
lose their Mandate and become broken has-
The “real” Red Emperor is the only being who
beens; they may be slain out of hand.
can pass all of the tests that prove him to be
who he is. If the guy you thought was Moonson is killed or
reabsorbed, or fails a test, you could say:
Rival claimants may pass some or none of the
tests, but they cannot pass all of them. 1) I must have been mistaken: I’ll follow the guy
who defeated (and “reabsorbed”) my preferred
So you don’t know who the “real” Red Emperor
claimant, instead.
is until he has passed all of the tests. If you’re
following someone and he passes one test (say, 2) Maybe the False Proxy slew Moonson before
the one administered by the Army, or the all his powers were properly manifested. No
Household, or the Senate), that’s well and doubt he will return again soon, and I must be
good, but he’s still got some way to go. on the lookout for his second coming.
WARNINGS: the tests could be rigged 3) Curses! I’m getting out of here...
(horrors!). Rivals could generate their own
The claimant who “becomes” Moonson
“proxies” to pass tests that they themselves
contributes his mortal, mundane elements to
would fail. Rebel claimants (regional
the “mix.” The Egi reconstitute the Red
secessionist traitors, as opposed to rival
Emperor’s being, using this mortal clay as an
Lunar claimants) aren’t even trying to pass
important construction material.
all of the tests, and therefore have a head
start. The new Red Emperor’s Mask will resemble
the successful claimant (though not identical to
The “Mandate of the Moon” is conferred on
him); its personality and interests will be
people who are suitable to become the
shaped by the claimant’s (though of course the
Emperor’s Body. (It may be parallel to the Body
Emperor will still retain knowledge and
or the Corpse of Yelm, in the “Six Parts of
experience from his prior life).
Yelm” myth. But there are other, non-Dara
Happan parallels too). The new Mask is likely to reward people who
assisted in his Manifestation, and punish those
It usually descends when Moonson dies:
who opposed it. This may involve (e.g.)
selected high-ups feel “a disturbance in the
rewarding collaborators who assassinated the
Force” and become aware of their potential
preceding Mask, or punishing people who –
destiny.
though utterly loyal to the Empire – mistakenly
Claimants without a Mandate may be unable to followed a False Proxy in the interregnum.
pass any of the tests; they are certainly unable
WARNING: Moonson has nothing to learn
to pass the Lunar tests which determine
from Machiavelli: he may just as well
whether a claimant is suitable to be recognised
choose to punish the people who would
as Moonson.
dare raise their hand against the Son of the
WARNINGS: Some people know they have Moon, and reward his loyal but misguided
the Mandate while Moonson is alive and servants.
well; some people can “force” a Mandate
One certainty is that the new Mask will be
upon themselves, through ritual or
severely disposed towards Rebels and those
confidence or evil sorcery. Some people
who back them. It’s all very well to support a
don’t believe in Mandates and just
(potential) Moonson in the interregnal period;
“pretend” to have them (“The Goddess
it’s a very different matter when rebels “cast off
came to me in a dream and told me I was

76
the shackles of Lunar rule” and try to bring
back a Sun Emperor, or Sable Stud, or Big Bird
of Rinliddi, instead.
Sometimes, the succession may be “fixed.” I
would postulate that when a Moonson is
assassinated, the assassins have likely
arranged to have “their” candidate ready to
sweep all before him through the tests. This
may have happened when Ignifer was slain by
Harrek and quickly replaced by Argenteus
(who showed conspicuous clemency to his
supposed murderers); it may have been tried
and gone wrong when Venerabilis executed the
assassins of Voracius.
REMEMBER: the Lunar Empire is devoted
to Veils, Masks, Illusions, Mirrors,
Changes, Insanity, and Balance. It is not a
Solar Empire of straight-forward, upright,
honest truths. This should be reflected in
the nature of the interregnal succession
struggles. They should be confusing and
chaotic, not orderly and proceeding
towards a pre-ordained and self-evident
conclusion. (Solars in the Lunar Empire
are, of course, greatly upset by this).
It is normally certain (these days) that the end
result of this interregnal activity is a new Mask
of Moonson. If many years went by without a
Mask becoming manifest, then the secessionist
centrifugal tendencies represented by non-
Lunar Rebel claimants might well manifest, as
I believe they are intended to in the Hero Wars
period. However, I think that the “normal” case
is for an obvious Lunar candidate to quickly
come forward and be recognised as the new
Mask of Moonson. Rivals are damned
posthumously by Imperial propagandists.
(“The opponents of Celestinus were wild rebels
conspiring to resurrect Gbaji”).
The Proxy Wars were an aberration, not the
norm. But we are working within a political
6A freeform game about the birth of Nysalor, played once at RuneQuestCon 2 in San Francisco, January 1996.
British and American guests of honour made up the court of the Dara Happan Emperor Khorzanelm the
Magnificent; I played as the Emperor, and then (after a typically brutal usurpation by MOB) as his Majesty’s
youthful son and heir. Much of the game appeared to be a complex variant of Magic: The Gathering, which
none of us really understood.
landscape shaped by those traumatic events in
the recent past: utterly loyal Lunars unable to
discern which of the many contenders was the
true Red Emperor. In some ways, this was the
“worst case” scenario for the Empire – or at
least, the worst case until the next time around.
Of course, the next time around will be even
worse, because the scheming plotters
manipulating events next time have the
experience of the Proxy Wars to draw upon.
They’ve seen just how confusing things can get
when there are many plausible rival claimants,
and they’re prepared to use that knowledge,
enhance that confusion, etc. to suit their own
agendas. Maybe that’s a part of the reason the
Red Emperor “disappears” for ten whole years
– the rival Lunar camps have become just too
damn’ good at identifying his manifestations
and then squishing them before any of them
can inherit their full powers.
Please remember: even when fully manifest
and recognised, Moonson has been defeated
quite straightforwardly, by e.g. Jannisor,
Sheng, or Harrek. Opponents of such power
are likely to become more common in the Hero
Wars period than hitherto. And their rivals’
propagandists’ quills stand ready to write off
premature failures as False Proxies (and likely
Gbaji-worshipping dupes of the Dark Lord, to
boot).
FINALLY: Life of Moonson does not
accurately depict a normal Imperial
succession crisis. It’s a freeform game,
dammit! Greg helped write The Broken
Council, 6 but if you tore strips off his Gbaji
Wars material because that game
presented the creation of Nysalor as a
perversely complex trading-card game, he
would be justifiably amused (or annoyed,
depending on his whim).
77
 Stages of the Imperial Succession
First up: I agree 100% with Dave Cake’s post in
GD v7 #580. An excellent summary. Surely
nobody could disagree with this.
Alex: Firstly, is it possible that reasonably
‘informed sources’ can find themselves
backing the ‘wrong’ candidate to be Red
Emperor, or being uncertain as to whom to
back, or is this practically impossible or
unlikely?
In my opinion, this is certainly possible. You
find out after the denouement that you were
following a “False Proxy,” or a “Gbaji-
Resurrecting Dupe of Chaos,” or a “Menshevik
Revisionist,” or whoever. At the time, you think
you’re doing the Right (Lunar) Thing to do.
Second, is the new Mask necessarily and
always born/created after the death of the
previous one?
Mirrors, masks and veils. Imperial high-fliers
who are convinced they possess the Mandate of
the Moon may realise that the current Mask is
not the real Mask – he could be a Proxy, and
they themselves are the Real Emperor-in-
Hiding.
I don’t like using “born” of these Mask/
candidates at all. That leads us down a Tibetan
Buddhist road (i.e. “Moonson is reborn as an
infant when his previous Mask dies”), which
doesn’t appear at all appropriate given the
documented history.
The final stage in the creation of a Mask takes
place on the Red Moon, and is when the
Council of the Egi sanctify and elevate the
various soul-fragments of Moonson into a new
integrated manifestation. The mundane
succession conflict (if any) which produces the
Body of the new Mask is but a part of this
process – but it’s the part most visible to
mortals and the part which affects them most.
There is much Lunar heroquesting skul-
duggery going on Up Above, and Down Below,
and Way Out There, after the Red Emperor
passes on, and I would hate to sideline or
ignore this just because we are focussing on the
mundane politics. By its nature, this kind of
stuff is (1) more ritualised/ formulaic/
mythically and philosophically resonant, and
(2) less understood by the vulgar plebs and
78
indeed the high-up nobs of the Empire in
consequence.
Third, and I suspect most crucially (or at least,
about which I ‘know’ the least) what’s the state
of the Red Emperor (or the portions thereof, as
the case may be) before, and after the ritual of
the Egi?
Before: not integrated. Dispersed in many
parts throughout the Six Worlds. The part we
humans worry about most – the Body of the
New Emperor – is walking around alive and
well, somewhere in Peloria. It’s just been hit on
the head by a Mandate of the Moon, and is
probably somewhat stunned.
There may also be various Proxies walking
around who look just like the dead Emperor,
think they are him (and that he hasn’t died),
and may also (just to add to the fun) be prime
candidates to receive the Mandate and re-
integrate the “deceased” Mask of Moonson in
their own flesh – and this only has to happen
once in the whole of Imperial history for
various of the more confusing Lunar memes to
receive corroboration. (“There’s no point
killing the Emperor, as he comes back just the
same!”)
After: mostly re-integrated. Any surviving
Proxies must be hunted down and re-
integrated to complete the new Moonson (NB:
his personality and powers may change
radically as this occurs). Any rival claimants
likewise, although in their case “re-integration”
is likely more cosmetic and less beneficial to
either participant.
Where does this fit into the usual ‘timeline’ for
the death, rebirth, testing, and (re-)
enthronement of the Red Emperor?
There ain’t a “usual” timeline – it’s only been
done nine or so times (Masks since
Magnificus), and some of those appear to have
been remarkably smooth, others fraught with
fratricidal civil wars, conspiracies,
assassinations and the like.
How much ‘input’ is there from mortal sources
(to wit, those that can be threatened,
blackmailed, bribed, or otherwise ‘influenced’)
in this part of the process, and how does it
effect the ‘final product’ of the new Mask?
There is surely a great deal of input from
mortal sources. But they are playing with fire if
they “twist” things too much, as there is Real
Mythic Power behind the Red Emperor.
However, due to the mysteries and
uncertainties and evolving experimental
nature of the Lunar Empire, ambitious nobles
are always testing the limits, trying new things
to see what they can get away with. (While
pious priestesses are trying to improve the
process, cut out the unnecessary bits and
enhance the end product: Building a Better
Emperor!)
In my opinion, the new Mask will look like a
successful claimant and possess recognisable
elements of his personality, skills and interest.
He will, however, be Moonson. Think about
how Bluff Prince Hal turned into Henry V, and
magnify a thousandfold. The Emperor is not as
other men. He cannot afford to be. The weight
of new Lunar knowledge and experience he
gains when he is re-integrated encompasses
and can easily overwhelm the mortal core
which makes up part of his being.
Perhaps the real losers of some succession
conflicts are the nobles who thought they had
won – they’ve put “their” candidate on
Moonson’s throne, only to discover that he is
now Moonson, and not their creation at all.
BUT – and that’s a big BUT – I think the
leaders of the Empire could still have
everything to play for, and believe that they do,
by playing politics in the interregnal periods. I
did not intend, in the paragraph above, to
suggest that “there are no succession contests
because whether your candidate wins or loses,
you lose anyway (and Moonson wins).” I
mention it because it could add a nice “twist” to
an ongoing campaign, not just to undermine
months of players’ honest striving with a sneer
and a cackle and an ice-pick on the head.
7 Reprinted in the revised and expanded edition of A Rough Guide to Glamour, available in printed and digital
formats from the Jonstown Compendium.
88 Twenty-one years later you can find them in Life of Moonson, Book Two: The Freeform, available in printed
and digital formats from the Jonstown Compendium.
Life of Moonson &
Red Emperor Cult
Catching up with Martin Laurie in V7#590:
What do I precisely disagree with? The Red
Emperor cult 7 in Tales #16 and the succession
system in the Moonson LARP.
(1) What, precisely, do you disagree with about
the published Red Emperor cult?
It seems to fit the bill for what you desire: a
small-membership cult of high-powered
imperial courtiers and family members (that is,
if we ignore the “token” cult ranks of Subject
and Citizen, which confer no real benefits on
their members), devoted to a singular
Moonson, who is part-human and part-divine.
It doesn’t say much at all about how Masks are
identified, about Proxies, about succession
crises, etc. The nearest it comes is in the
account of Ignifer => Argenteus, and that’s
written in Fortunate Succession-style Lunar
doublespeak, not bare-faced cynical/manipu-
lative political materialism.
(That is to say, I believe that if Martin had read
those same words about Argenteus’ accession
in The Fortunate Succession, he would not be
batting an eyelid, and would indeed be loudly
explaining to us how they prove that Moonson
is, was, and always will be, “singular.” Which,
of course, they do, if you read them that way).
(2) What, precisely, do you believe that you
know and dislike about the succession system
presented in Life of Moonson?
Since the game mechanics for this have not
been published, 8 and since from your earlier
comments it is clear that you didn’t pick up on
several major elements of the freeform while
playing it, I would like to know what you think
you disagree with, rather than merely hearing
ad nauseam that you “don’t like it” (or, worse,
that it “doesn’t exist”).
79

Problems with Parts
Walking through part of Martin’s post in
V7#590, paragraph by paragraph:
When the Red Emperor was created the
Genesis was of a single being...
Agreed. Doskalos’ body became that of
Takenegi. The Red Emperor was more than
Doskalos before him had been. The single
reincarnating entity that was created was
Takenegi, not Doskalos.
His role as tanist was effectively that of her
proxy on earth...
Agreed, and a nice way of putting it. Later in
this paragraph you repeat that Takenegi, unlike
the Masks, reincarnated as someone who was
clearly the same being. I think we all agree on
this. It is not a disputed area. There do not
appear to have been succession crises con-
joined with identity crises during Takenegi’s
reign, nor would I want to try identifying them.
(NB: viewing each re-integration as a personal
identity crisis for Moonson might be a
profitable line of investigation. Schizophrenia,
multiple personalities, etc. all nicely illuminate
the Madness and Insanity that lie at the heart
of the Lunar Way).
The Masks came about as the Emperor
became more Lunar and the Empire became
more Lunar.
Agreed, though this seemingly “natural”
evolution created a terrible crisis for the
Empire. Just because the Lunar Way requires
painful death and dismemberment before
rebirth, doesn’t mean that these are enjoyable
for anyone concerned.
The Takenegi form of the Emperor was much
more of a Dara Happan ruler than the later
forms...
I have long-standing caveats regarding this,
which Martin is familiar with, and which are
not germane to the Masks/succession issue.
Suffice to say, if true, he had funny ways of
showing how Dara Happan he was (conquering
the Tripolis, carving up the land, stripping
power from the nobles, changing the official
language...)
80
That said, the rest of this paragraph (re: how
much more “Lunar” the confusion of Masks is
than the one-true-way certainty of Takenegi) is
fine by me.
[Life of Moonson] shows Moonson as being a
noble who became Emperor after completing
the rituals.
That is a simplistic interpretation of what
happened, I agree. But have you been reading
anything MOB and I have written here
recently? I suggest you move beyond your
facile, minimalist approach, and try to engage
with our material on a deeper level.
I agree with MOB and Nick that this is fun and
playable from the players perspective, I think
it is less theologically correct than a singular
Emperor. So while their work is excellent if
one follows their argument and approach, I
disagree with the core theological concept of
the Emperor’s form.
Hang on: Life of Moonson explicitly ended with
a single Emperor (not multiple Emperors).
And the Masks of Moonson are explicitly stated
to take on different forms (not a single form).
What on earth is the “core theological concept”
which you are taking issue with?
Besides, we know the history of the past
Emperors and we know that future history
will see the Emperor gone for good, so for
practical purposes it doesn’t matter one whit if
he isn’t singular becaue noone will become the
Red Emperor in the future anyway.
So why are you buggering everyone around by
insisting that he is (in some strange,
undefinable, acknowledgedly fun-reducing
sense) “singular,” if it doesn’t matter at all to
you whether he is or isn’t?
The Dara Happans see the Emperor as the
Righteous Ruler accepted by Antirius. The
crux issue here is the Red Emperors singular
status. This is independant of his Dara
Happan Emperorship. I am talking about the
core being who was born Takenegi and
became Emperor later.
Dara Happan Fire
Antirius
Emperor Part
Singular Red Great
Takenegi
Emperor Self
What, then, is your problem? This seems to
resolve your “crux” neatly enough. Nobody
would deny that all Red Emperors have had the
Fire Part of Antirius (like many Dara Happan
Emperors before them), and the Great Self (i.e.
the Lunar Seventh Soul) of Takenegi, singular,
unique and indivisible.
Only you, it appears, feel that Moonson has
some weird non-Dara Happan and non-Lunar
assemblage of Parts (neither Six nor Seven, but
more or less depending on unexplained
criteria); only you, it appears, feel that the Body
Part of each re-integrated Mask must
necessarily be something magical and
wonderful and in no wise related to any “body”
we’re familiar with in the mundane world of
Glorantha.
For someone who appeared at a ritual in a
small city (and had witnesses to the fact)
[Artifex] seems pretty darn tough to be just a
local lord making good.
Like Alex, I won’t waste my time engaging with
this straw man. I have never suggested or
implied in anything I’ve said or written that
Moonson’s Masks are “just a local lord making
good.” The Emperor is reincarnated, dammit!
Why, I wonder, does Martin want to waste our
time with this diversion?
It appears (on my brief perusal) that Martin is
trying to tell us that nothing interesting should
be read between the lines of The Fortunate
Succession (e.g. that the on-the-face-of-it
fascinating events around Voracius’ and
Celestinus’ accessions should be ignored as
trivial). I would be utterly astonished if this is
what Greg intended.
BTW, I can’t see any problems with Joerg’s
post in V7#592 (Singularity of Moonson). All
enjoyable, useful stuff.
I get the feeling that many of our problems
could be resolved if Martin asked Greg to
explain the Six (or Seven) Parts to him, with a
copy of The Fortunate Succession handy for
reference. Until now, it appears he has been
taking “The Red Emperor’s Body” as being
wholly equivalent to “The Red Emperor” – a
mistake few Pelorians (other than the hated
Darjiini) would make.
Moonson,
Body & Soul
Martin [Laurie] writes:
So what you are saying is that all along, the
Reaching Moon Megacorp has put forward
the view that ...
Well, I’ll speak for myself here. “The Reaching
Moon Megacorp” is a bit of a corporate entity,
and I’d probably need to check with about as
many people as Takenegi’s Parts before saying
anything definite.
This is my take on what’s really going on in Life
of Moonson. It is consistent with that game,
and with our other publications. It was my
intent when I contributed to Life of Moonson
and to the Red Emperor cult writeup; I spoke
up for it during design, and feel it is adequately
represented in the end products. What more
can I say?
... the person who ends up being Emperor is
simply possessed by the eternal spirit of the
deity and that the past history of the person is
irrelevant to the singular nature of the
incarnated deity?
It is not a “simple possession.” (If you want to
see that, we have Delecti and Belintar already
in Glorantha, who take over their new host
body only to use as a body, disposing of its
previous spirit to various fates. When you
enthused about “simple possession” as a
mechanism in V7# 572, you were shot down,
and I believe you now acknowledge this). It is
something more than that.
But yes, I agree that “the past history of the
person is irrelevant to the singular nature of
the incarnated deity” – whatever that means.
Moonson is not less Moonson these days
because he wears a Mask. And there’s still only
one of him.
Or are you saying that the deity incarnates
but is somehow affected by the spirit and
thinking of the person it inhabits to the point
where they are subordinate or an equal
partner?
Certainly not an “equal partner,” but yes, I
believe that the bits that make up each Mask
(including the spirit and nature of the Body), as
81
well as the members of the Council of Egi who
re-integrate Moonson into his new Mask, do
affect the singular composite whole. This is
why Lunars are willing to “play politics” to
“become” Moonson and/or play a part in his
reincarnation.
[guff about demigods having more than seven
parts to their souls]. Yep, Still agree with that.
One part is his self. The other parts of his
Emperorship he picks up through politics,
religion and role. Orignally he was
Takenegi:and nothing else.
Martin, it seems to me that you are creating a
great deal of difficulty for yourself by insisting
that Moonson is always 7/7ths identical to each
of his previous appearances, when we know
from The Fortunate Succession that he is not,
and we know from common sense that his
shape, his body, his outward form is nowadays
different for every Mask.
You write that “one part is his self.” Others
(including Peter Metcalfe and David Cake)
have repeatedly agreed that Takenegi’s “Great
Self,” his Lunar illuminated Seventh Soul, is
always the same in every Mask of Moonson.
I fully agree that Takenegi’s Self is always 100%
Takenegi, singular, immaculate and perfect,
and has never been anything else, and has
always been in Moonson.
I also think that the Dara Happans would say
Moonson is also 1/6th (or 1/7th) Antirius, giving
him continuity with the previous Dara Happan
Emperors. This sixth (or seventh) is not
“Takenegi, and nothing else.” If it was, there
would be no such continuity. Moonson’s soul
part is that of Antirius.
In Life of Moonson we showed a contest to
become the Emperor’s Body, and have 1/7th
input into the creation of the new Mask of
Moonson. Moonson’s “body part,” we propose,
is that of somebody else. Like the Soul of
,/W
82
Antirius, this body is incorporated into a new
entity whose Great Self, whose Lunar Seventh
Soul, is that of Takenegi.
This directly parallels the way Rufelza (a divine
being) became manifest in Teelo Norri (a
human being with a prior history), and the way
Takenegi (a divine being) became manifest in
Doskalos (a human being with a prior history).
It is hard to get more Lunar than these two,
frankly. It is hard to see why you would want
to get less, when the alternative is clearly more
fun.
When the new Mask is created, it has the Body
of the Mandated “winner” (cf. Life of
Moonson), the Soul of Antirius, and the Self of
Takenegi (plus some other bits the Egi slap
together which we aren’t very interested in
[yet]). It is a singular entity. It has the same Self
that Moonson has always had. But it is
continuing in its mission to experience
humanity through different forms.
Or, maybe it wasn’t clear at all and that is why
I made my apology to David?
It wasn’t clear at all. It looked like you were
challenging David to discard or double-up
established Dara Happan and Lunar concepts
because they aren’t point-for-point identical.
Not that you were making some “practical
political point” about the nature of the imperial
succession.
I strongly recommend that you stop using the
phrase “soul part” to refer to anything political
and practical (and not magical). I mention this
because I see you using “soul parts (political!)”
in a later post in V7 #607 to Alex. It only creates
confusion. I suspect that you are now
deliberately generating this confusion to cover
up your past use of “soul” to mean “soul” (and
not “political role conferred in a practical
manner”). But that’s just my opinion...
 One Nightmare Scenario...
There seems to be some confusion as to how
and indeed whether the Reaching Moon
Megacorp’s account of imperial succession can
be married to Greg’s desire for Moonson’s
failure to return, leading to the fragmentation
of the Empire into a welter of “old-style” un-
Lunar successor states.
Here’s a “nightmare scenario” that would in my
opinion allow both. I only came up with this
today,9 and none of the Reaching Moon
Megacorp materials were designed to allow
this. So let’s see if it flies:
Argenteus dies, and there’s an interregnum.
This could be “no worse than usual” (e.g. some
Dart War action, minor Proxy troubles, normal
levels of heroquesting, maybe lasting several
seasons until everything’s in place to bring
back Moonson); alternatively, it could be awful
(Proxy Wars, deliberate interference in the
reincarnation, conspicuous deployment of
“other means,” etc.).
But we can pass over that. The key thing is that,
there are no parochial secession attempts at
this time. (Everybody knows they wouldn’t
work, right? As Moonson is always singular,
and always victorious, and is the same person
behind every Mask, etc.). Everyone is focussed
on identifying the new Mask of Moonson.
Again, for purposes of this scenario, it doesn’t
matter where the body of the new Mask comes
from. It could have “just appeared (bing)”; it
could emerge Megacorp-style from the cut-
throat noble power-plays of the interregnum.
Which method is followed becomes largely
irrelevant, as you will see...
At the end of a seemingly-normal interregnum
(Megacorp or She Guides Us10 style, doesn’t
matter which), the Egi hold their final ritual to
reintegrate Moonson. And almost everything
goes perfectly. Except that those members of
the Council of Egi (including some of the
remaining Elder Egi from the Zero Wane) who
9 5 May 2000, which is to say, 51 days after the birth of my handsome son Wilfrid Brooke.
10 This was the working title for what became ILH-2: Under the Red Moon.
should have been integrating Takenegi’s
Seventh Soul into the new Mask of Moonson,
fail: they suffer, disappear or die horribly as the
ritual reaches its climax.
“Moonson” is re-created, but has only Six Parts
(or, he has a new Seventh Part – doesn’t matter
which for discussion purposes). Previously,
Takenegi’s Seventh Soul has dominated his
character. Now, it’s not there. Instead, the
dominant part is his Antirius Soul: divine, Dara
Happan, archaic, patriarchal, and not remotely
Lunar. (Though, of course, in the Megacorp
model he also acquires the scheming know-
ledge of a hugely successful Lunar politician,
which is handy). He passes the Ten Tests of
Dara Happa with the greatest of ease – of
course! – and is enthroned. He is now the
Emperor.
(But is he Red?)
The new Mask descends from the Red Moon in
his Moon Barge, to the acclamation of the
masses. Possibly there is some confusion
(“He’s wearing golden robes this time. Doesn’t
he usually wear the red and silver?” “And what
happened to his warm ruddy glow?” –
“Shaddup!” / “Mind your own business” / “You
don’t know who’s listening” / “It’s only a
Mask,” etc.). But the people of the Empire are
used to their ruler’s singular oddities, and are
prepared to treat this new Mask with caution
until they work out what makes him tick.
Some of his initial acts provoke unrest in the
Senate and elsewhere, though these are muted
at first. (“In this Mask, Moonson is evidently
indulging in a throwback to a more primitive,
phallocratic behaviour pattern, involving
extreme displays of patriarchal intolerance. It
must be a lesson for us.”). He might announce
his intention of moving the Imperial Capital
from Glamour back to Raibanth, start expelling
women (including his Great Sister) from public
83
life, overturn modern progressive laws in
favour of antiquated traditions, et cetera.
Dara Happan traditionalists are overjoyed.
(“Praise be to Moon-Sun,” they cry). They now
have exactly the kind of Emperor they always
wanted: antique Yelmic virtue personified,
with no time for all this “modern nonsense.”
Others are less pleased. Big Doubts start to
circulate. (“I looked at him sideways, and saw
that this Mask doesn’t have Takenegi’s Soul...”
– “Right: that’s already high treason, heresy
and thoughtcrime: don’t make me add
‘resisting arrest’ to the charge sheet”).
The new Mask does not manifest any Lunar
powers, relying solely on his Solar Imperial
inheritance. (In fact, he cannot manifest any
Moon Powers: he doesn’t have any: he isn’t
Moonson, remember?). He doesn’t have the
memories of Moonson’s former incarnations.
Eventually this can’t be hidden any longer and
the secret is out: this time around, the Emperor
isn’t Moonson.
Secessionist movements in the rest of the
Empire, already provoked by the new Mask’s
Dara Happan intransigence, are inflamed by
this revelation. “Sod this!” they cry, in Torang
and Kitor and Jillaro alike. Rival rulers are
established, with genuine popular enthusiasm.
A Dara Happan Emperor ruling in the old style
from Raibanth confronts a Paradisal Aviator in
Rinliddi, a Carmanian Shah in Pelanda, a High
King in the Provinces, and whatever other local
challengers emerge.
All this time, our Lunar heroes embark on
increasingly desperate (and doomed?)
attempts to find out what went wrong. Should
they strive to replace the Council of Egi and re-
Divine Plan? Are we doing the best thing?
Should we resist, or submit? Lots of questions,
very hard to find answers. Much Game Fun.
Meanwhile in Dragon Pass, the Hero Wars
continue to rage...
Now, it seems to me that this is (1) compatible
with Greg’s desire for Moonson’s failure to
return leading to a fragmented Lunar Empire,
and (2) compatible with the Reaching Moon
account of the mechanics behind the Red
Emperor’s reincarnation.
It is not necessary to specify whether the
interregnum after Argenteus’ death is a hard-
fought Proxy War or an inevitable procession
to the Ritual of the Egi, as this does not in any
way affect the outcome (a “Mask” which is not
Takenegi).
Nor is it necessary for anyone to be an “anti-
Lunar traitor”: everyone genuinely did their
best to bring back Moonson, by whatever
means, while the rebirth of secessionist
sentiments occurs specifically because
Moonson isn’t there, and the new Emperor is
acting in an un-Lunar way to the outlying
regions of the Empire.
The point I’m trying to make is, I suppose, that
the Megacorp account does not mean that it’s
always possible to “create” a Red Emperor, or
that the Red Emperor is a fake, or that he isn’t
a singular and unique person (but just a
jumped-up noble). The fuckup described above
would hit just as hard in either model. All it
needs is for Takenegi’s Soul to be mysteriously
“unavailable” following the death of Argenteus.
Thoughts? Questions? Comments? 11

/ . i
run their Ritual (against determined Imperial
opposition)? Seek out Takenegi’s Seventh Soul
(is it imprisoned? destroyed? on holiday?)?
Maybe even start a new Seven Mothers’ Quest
to reincarnate the Goddess, against the “Evil
Empire” their homeland has become? Whose
fault is all this? Is it all part of the Goddess’s

11 Crickets, as it turned out.

84
 Mistakes & Inconsistencies, etc.
Martin writes, rather self-pityingly:
Freeforming the debate as I go will lead to me
misstepping andmaking mistakes.
Evidently. And sometimes they’re whoppers!
� have the guts to put yourself through this
I don’t have the time to be labouriously
checking over my posts to make sure I’m
current and in tuen with previous comments.
This is what we call “consistency”. If you have
a consistent, well-researched and well-
supported POV, it is not hard to stay “current
and in tune with previous comments”. I do not
find it “laborious” to produce posts about the
nature of Moonson which are consistent with
one another, because I have done a lot of
thinking and writing about this specific subject
over the past six years or so. As have my
talented co-authors (Chris Gidlow, Michael
O’Brien, and David Hall among them). Perhaps
there is a lesson for you about the utility and
robustness of the “previous version” in this?
As for digging up past digests, I don’t know
where you get the time or the will. I think I
need a Gloranthan secretary.
I am sorry if I upset you by paying attention to
what you write as if it were important. As you
may appreciate by now, for some of us the
apparent scrapping of three to six years’ of our
best work is important. Watching you blunder
through Dara Happan history and Lunar
mythology armed with a blind faith in
Moonson’s “singularity” (and, apparently, little
else) is a grotesque spectacle.
I doubt I’d spend so much time correcting your
mistakes, if you weren’t an anointed Expert
and prospective author for Issaries, Inc. and
Hero Wars.
Martin, it is no secret that when your book is
published, people will read it carefully and try
to make use of it. 12 It is a good thing that your
ideas are being subjected to scrutiny now,
rather than after publication. I am glad you
ordeal. But it would surely be less of an ordeal
for you, if you presented yourself with less
arrogance, and more willingness to listen and
learn.
I have believed in the past that the RMM 13
model was based on the idea of mortal men
taking on the mandate of heaven (sorry, of the
moon) and becoming Emperor, the mandate
being a set of powers that the Emperor gains
but having little or no impact on his
behaviour.
That is not how it was at all. That is a very facile
interpretation of Life of Moonson. Which of the
Life of Moonson authors did you check your
beliefs with, before deciding to dismiss our
work out of hand as if it had never been written
or played?
The Mandate in our game conferred no
powers: it indicated suitability. The mortals did
not “become Emperor”: they played a part in
the re-integration of the Emperor. Our
freeform ended when the (singular) new Mask
was revealed: it in no way revealed what the
character and behaviour of that new Mask
would be. (Though the imperial history in The
Fortunate Succession suggests that “different
to those of any previous Mask” is a safe bet...).
They seem to be saying that that is not how it
was at all. However, I’ve been told that all of
this was GAG. 14
Have your experiences in this debate led you to
think otherwise? Perhaps there has been a vast
groundswell of support for an Obviously

12 Unheeded warnings: the book in question was Imperial Lunar Handbook 2: Under the Red Moon, which is

no longer considered part of the Gloranthan canon by Chaosium Inc.

13 David Hall’s Reaching Moon Megacorp, the leading Gloranthan fan publisher throughout the nineties.

14 “Generally Accepted Glorantha,” meaning something along the lines of “the corpus of community-developed

ideas which nobody sensible would ignore in ongoing Glorantha Digest discussions.”

85
Singular Moonson and a Non-Confusing
Imperial Succession in a tidal wave of private
emails to yourself? Posters in your predica-
ment often mention this sort of thing happen-
ing: I think we should be told... � 15
Greg wants the Emperor[‘s] rule to be
percieved as continuous over the near 400
years of Empire so that when the collapse
comes it will be the biggest disaster it can be.
Clearly. But in The Fortunate Succession he
spent much effort building up doubts about the
singular identity of Moonson. Gloranthans are
shown doubting that the Red Emperor was
truly who he said he was. “Frauds” who might
break up the Empire have emerged during
succession crises, only to be put down. The
Dara Happans doubted whether both
Magnificus and Artifex were Moonson. We see
succession crises within living memory:
Celestinus’ opponents allegedly sought to
“resurrect Gbaji”; Ignifer drove out the false
Proxies and their followers.
Moonson’s rule can indeed be portrayed as “all
but continuous for almost four centuries,” but
The Fortunate Succession paints a far more
interesting picture than “400 years of
unbroken continuity.” The break between
Masks (the “interesting bit,” the interregnal
period when the new Mask is formed) has
never been less than seven weeks, and at the
Empire’s lowest point, early in the Fourth
Wane, Takenegi took thirteen years to
reappear after being defeated and destroyed by
Sheng. Moonson has not always been
recognised easily and unanimously: he has to
struggle to regain the power and recognition
that are his by right.
The collapse of the Empire into fragmented
secessionist states, exacerbated by the political
ambitions of its leaders, will still be disastrous.
But I don’t think we need to over-emphasise
the continuity and indubitable sameness of
Moonson – at the expense of Greg’s written
history, available GAG sources, common sense
and MGF16 – to make it so.

Lunars vs. Romans

It is a Generally Accepted Pseudo-Gloranthan Truth (one of the things both Greg and Sandy would
agree on, I believe) that the Lunar Army (with magic) would fare very well against a Roman Army,
and that the Lunar Army (without magic) would be likely to lose.
In my opinion the weapon mix for Pelorians in the orange box’s Players Book: Genertela is lazy and
wrong: the typical Lunar infantryman simply ain’t a Roman legionary (with pilum and gladius). Roll
back to Hellenistic or Classical Greek if you want to see what’s going on.
The Greek kopis sword used as a sidearm by hoplites is kinda betwixt and between a shortsword and
a scimitar, so I don’t have problems with Lunar hoplites carrying a scimitar for use in emergencies.
The primary offensive weapon of the hoplite is his spear, not his scimitar. He uses the scimitar when
something has gone horribly wrong. (NB: that great big shield he carries is also important as a
secondary offensive weapon, useful for slamming opponents aside and inflicting broken bones).
It is unusual in my opinion for a Lunar Army unit to use scimitars as its primary weapon in massed
combat, although some cases are known (these include the famous Steel Swords Legion, an all-
Yanafali elite force who fight en masse using iron scimitars and look really cool on the battlefield).
But Yanafali officers would almost always carry a scimitar, as a matter of honour and a symbol of their
rank. A Yanafali without a scimitar is only slightly more common than a Humakti without a sword.

See The Lurkers Support Me In Email, a poem by Jo Walton, sung to the tune of My Bonny Lies Over The
15

Ocean. [archive.org]; see also my final contribution to this debate/debacle, here.

16 Maximum Game Fun, a principle championed by MOB since the nineties.

86
 The “Reaching Moon Model”
Martin writes: I challenge you to actually find the model in
any product you have in print.
Answer me this, if you will. In what article,
precisely, done by the RMM is there a detailed You are barking up the wrong alley, Martin.
description of the Imperial succesion?
I can’t find it in any RMM product I have.
In no article have we presented a detailed Occasional snippets, hints and sound bytes
description of the Imperial succession. perhaps, but no serious step by step essay as
(Speaking for myself, I think it would be rather Nick has produced.
unusual to do this if we were also running a
Until now there has been no need to “clarify”
freeform game in which the imperial
the model. Nobody until now has seriously
succession is sprung on players as a surprise
asserted that in Life of Moonson we present
part-way through the game, but maybe Martin
multiple Moonsons (etc.). Nor has anyone
would have presented things differently)
previously told us that our work does not exist
In our freeform Life of Moonson, we present and/or is not worthy of consideration.
the events of an imperial succession as
Nor, may I add, has Issaries’ “Lunar Expert”
involving leading figures in the Lunar Empire,
bothered to contact any of the Life of Moonson
in which suitable “candidates” gain high-
authors to clear up his misconceptions about
powered supporters and participate in Lunar
our work. 18
and Dara Happan heroquest rituals in order to
embody the next Mask of Moonson. This debate has proved to me that these ideas,
even the RMM ideas were not fully formed or
This model does not involve any fakery,
written and that this debate has provoked a
multiple Moonsons, jumped-up local nobles
solid set of concepts from people.
usurping the throne, etc. The game ends with
the recognition of the new Mask. We say Ur, do you already have a published article
nothing in the game about the personality, supporting every one of your opinions, Martin?
policies or “soul” of the new Mask. In my I think not.
opinion, he is Moonson, just as every Mask
Personally I don’t think that Greg[’]s version
before him has been. will contradict yours very much, perhaps in
This “GA” 17 model is largely being crafted by detail and perhaps in succession methods, but
Nick and put on this digest as he clarifies his in terms of actual stuff in print, he will really
ideas, which has had for a long time, for sure contradict you very little indeed.
Thanks, Martin, but in saying this you are “Not for lack of trying,” it appears.
ignoring the sizeable contributions by my co-
authors (including MOB, David Hall, and Chris
Gidlow). Life of Moonson was not a one-man
show, and I could not have come up with it on
my own.
4321
I think these discussions show why ILH-2 failed. In effect, Issaries’ authors decided or were
directed to take a “my way or the highway” approach when detailing the workings of the Lunar
Empire; as it turned out, most fans preferred the highway.
By re-sharing them now, I can also shine more light on the inner workings of Life of Moonson,
since that cat is now well and truly out of the bag…

17 “Generally Accepted.”

18 The Lunar Discussion Group had failed and folded by this point. There was no dialogue.

87
 The Lunar New
Year Ceremony
The closing action of Life of Moonson
represents an unusual hero plane ritual
performed during a crisis in the Lunar New
Year Ceremony, and is not an “accurate”
reflection of a “normal” succession crisis.
To quote Greg Stafford’s article (now in the
Glorantha Sourcebook, p.172):
At the sunset of the sixth day, the Emperor
dissolves his body, leaving the Annual Staff
suspended in the air until his return.
Surrounding the floating Staff are the most
intimate friends, relatives and trusted staff
members. They face the floating staff and
maintain magical contact with their beloved
leader as he traverses the magical planes.
Certain among them, in ritual turn, will rise
and address the crowds gathered outside the
circle, explaining the routes and rites which
the Emperor is experiencing. At the end of the
sixth day, if all is successful, everyone loses
contact with the Emperor. Usually a stupor
passes over all the assembled crowd, most of
whom simply collapse in the court.
No one knows what happens to the Emperor
the next day. However, he has always
returned, and so the rite is a perfect success.
The Empire takes that as a sign of their
“correctness”.
I mean, come on, now: the action of Life of
Moonson takes place in the imperial capital at
the time of the Lunar New Year Ceremony.
When suddenly! the Empire is attacked from
all sides by its foes, both internal and external!
The Emperor dies! The Empire shakes! All
seems lost! But no – by pulling together, all the
Good Lunar Citizens present can bring
Moonson back, and all is restored. The New
Year brings the reborn Lunar energies of the
Empire. Hurrah, and Three Cheers for His
Imperial Majesty!!!
88
The Role
of the Egi
My take on this: pre-Sheng, the original
Council of Egi was always the same when they
arranged each reincarnation. When Takenegi
was offed, he came back exactly the same
because their “inputs” were exactly the same:
the Egi didn’t remake him any differently.
(Insert a certain amount of mystical hand-
waving here to explain the identical body each
time, but how hard can this be? Trivial
differences between the Four Quarters’
specialisations aren’t enough to bother me).
Post-Sheng, the Egi are imperfect (including
some “mere mortal” replacements). What’s
more, those Egi who have the most input into
each Mask are in my opinion the ones most
likely to suffer from unpleasant, head-
exploding feedback (etc.) when that Mask
perishes.
So, let’s say it’s mostly the original/ immortal
Egi who are seeing to Moonson’s core essence
(Great Self, Antirius Soul, etc.), while the
mundane mortal ones see to his perishable
bodily parts and worldly aspects (body,
personality, personal interests, political
alliances): that sounds like a sensible division
of labour to me.
The more you shape each Mask of Moonson (as
one of the Egi), the less of you is left to do it
next time. Finite resources; natural limits on
maximum input. Like piling on the years in a
game of Kremlin – it’s necessary if you want to
do anything (other than sit on the Politburo
and look pretty), but it does shorten your life
expectancy. That’s the price of power. (Insert
appropriate mystical aphorisms about
“unwisdom of becoming entangled in worldly
affairs” to taste).
/
 A Digest Miscellany
Elder Race Adventurers
A normal elf, dwarf or troll wants to live among ecological balance, deforestation and environ-
humans, have humans for best friends, work mental harmony: some may, but they’re weird.
for human ends, etc. just as often as the reverse
My own gloss on this is that “immature” (PC)
situation occurs (humans giving up all of their
elves will, in the course of time, “mature” into
time to elf, dwarf or troll concerns). There are,
harmony with the Forest. It’s quite natural for
however, exceptional/abnormal cases where
young elves to wander forth, see the world,
members of any of these Elder Races (and/or
interact with other species, etc.: and just as
humanity) may make common cause with
natural, in time, for them to “set down roots” in
other species.
a home forest and devote themselves to its
These are the “broken”/apostate dwarfs (who care, upkeep and feeding.
no longer devote every thought to the service of
The Mostali dwarfs were intentionally written
the World Machine), “rootless” elves (who
to be a parody of industrialised factory-age
don’t hear the Song of the Forest and are freed
culture: it wasn’t for nothing that the seminal
to follow other imperatives), and trolls who
article on the race (by Greg Stafford, in
know humans. The fact that Glorantha
Different Worlds #24) was called Why I Dislike
institutionalises the existence of some PC-
Mostali. But even there, there’s an outlet: both
worthy members of the Elder Races, and
apostate (“broken”) and/or heretical (esp.
specifically allows that they may get along with
Openhandist or Individualist) dwarfs make
humans, other races, etc., lets the Elder Race
fine player characters.
societies retain their alien flavour (factory-
worker / tree-hugger / hungry-scary-monster), While normal dwarfs are fun, either for
while you’re fine to go ahead with “weird and amusement value (cf. the Elder Secrets
different” PCs, and indeed with “weird and scenario-sequence where their general use-
different” Elder Race societies, if you so lessness is revealed), or as an alien, implacable,
choose. inhuman, crafty, scheming and greedy race of
monstrous foes, seeking to build their
The greater ease of playing trolls is partly
Doomsday Machine and “repair” Glorantha,
because Uz are closer to humans (and to RPG-
while doing so obliterating the “errors” of
monster norms) than the plantlike Aldryami
Growth (cancerous), Free Will (distracting),
and machine-slave Mostali, and partly – of
Humour (obviously faulty and counter-
course – because so much more has been
productive), etc., I’d suggest it’s unlikely to be
printed about them. The two factors are of
much fun playing normal dwarfs in a normal
course linked.
dwarf context:
“Rootless” elves are the most suitable for use as
“Their life is set for them in exactly
adventurers: other elves “ought” to be
the way their parents did it, and as
concerned with the well-being of their own
long as they do not fail in their
forest to a degree that would normally preclude
ancient way then they, too, can join
their use, though clearly there are settings
the assembly line right there next to
(including locations, scenarios, campaigns,
mom and dad, and grampa, and
adventurer parties...) where this wouldn’t be a
great-grandpa, and great great
problem. In general, Aldryami are as likely to
grandpa... (I cannot go on).”
get involved in “meat animal” business as
normal Gloranthan humans are to worry about – Why I Dislike Mostali, by Greg Stafford,
Different Worlds #24

89
The disadvantages of playing members of a
race who (when orthodox) strive to be
obedient, unimaginative, humourless and
inflexible are easy to see. Better to lift them
“out of context” – which is why I’d find it hard
to use orthodox Mostali in a Mostali setting as
player characters in a RuneQuest game. Harder
than Aldryami or Uz, certainly.
Note that I’ve seen a highly amusing scenario
by Mike McGloin and Oliver Jovanovic, set in
an orthodox Mostali society, where the PCs are
all secretly heretical. This borrowed heavily
from the idioms of the Paranoia RPG, in which
everyone is suspected of being a Mutant
Traitor, belonging to Secret Societies, etc. –
and, in fact, every PC in the game is a mutant
who belongs to a secret society – but where
society’s assumed “norm” is that they’re all
loyal agents faultlessly obeying their
benevolent superiors. So all the dwarf PCs try
to look “holier than thou” – ultra-orthodox,
above suspicion, etc. – in order not to be
suspected of deviance by the Nidan Conclave
(Paranoia players would say “The Computer”).
Nobody’s saying that all members of the Elder
Races are identikit clones without personalities
or differences: that’d be very unplayable (and
uninteresting).
It’s obviously easier for GMs to run scenarios
and campaigns where every player shares
common objectives. This is why single-culture
(and single-cult) adventures and scenarios are
usually so much more interesting than generic
dungeon-bashes: playing Yelmalian Militia in
Gaumata’s Vision or one of the many Oz Sun
County tournament scenarios is vastly more
fun IMO than playing a generic PC party
through the same experience.
And that explains why I think it’d be easier to
have fun playing members of the Elder Races
in a dedicated campaign (where background,
setting, plot, characters and nuances all further
exploration of the characteristics of Aldryami,
Mostali, Uz, or whatever society, myth, world-
view, etc.) than as weird one-off extras in a
“normal” PC party (where the unique concerns
of the inhuman members are a distraction from
the “common goal”, and tend to be sidelined, if
only because the GM lacks time to explore
them thoroughly).
90
You hate Dwarfs, I hate Ducks: that’s why
there’s democratic politics and horse-racing in
this world. Opinions are bound to differ.
Luckily for both of us, it’s easy to play games
set in Glorantha without ever needing to meet
either a Dwarf or a Duck (or, thank gods both
above and below, a Grotaron).
Closed Worlds
If the Devil came from outside Glorantha,
doesn’t that mean it isn’t a closed world?
A “closed world” means an internally-consis-
tent setting. The opposite (which I’m not sure
is called “open” – “crossover”, maybe; I can’t
recall the term that would commonly be used)
is a world where characters (etc.) from outside
the context of the setting can enter into it.
Some examples of how this might occur in
Glorantha would be:
• a Dungeons & Dragons player-character
turns up in Glorantha;
• a viking dragonship steers off-course into
the Banthe Sea;
• a Granbretanian sorceror-scientist uses
some technological device to cross between
the planes of the multiverse;
• an away team from the Starship Enterprise
beams down to Snakepipe Hollow;
• a Call of Cthulhu Gate connects Miskatonic
University to Festering Island; etc.
Since Glorantha defines Chaos as “that which
comes from outside Glorantha,” for as long as
Gloranthan Chaos fits this definition,
Glorantha will remain a closed world. Only if
things which are not recognisable as
Gloranthan Chaos enter into the world from
“outside” does it lose this status. Wakboth
eminently fits the Gloranthan setting; Sauron’s
Ringwraiths do not. Creatures which act like
the Ringwraiths would be fine; creatures which
are them, aren’t.
In my opinion, a “closed” Glorantha precludes
inclusion of any entities from worlds which
aren’t part of the Gloranthan scheme of things:
individuals from mortal lands which aren’t
part of the Inner World (Gondor, Hyboria,
Poictesme, Melniboné, Britain...), or members
of non-Gloranthan species (Hobbits, Orcs,
Quenya, Klingons...), would obviously breach
the “closed-ness” of Glorantha, as there’s no
room for such places and peoples in
Gloranthan cosmology, geography or history.
Individual non-Gloranthan monsters are kinda
OK, because (1) they’re fun, (2) there’s lots of
them, and (3) if you say they’re chaotic, who
cares anyway? But once you give them a
culture, species, history, (etc.) which aren’t
Gloranthan, you’ve again opened up the world.
If you want to have Melnibonéan sorcerors,
Dunedain rangers and 24th-level half-elf
warrior/wizard/rogues in your Glorantha, of
course you can have them. But one wonders
what makes you think you’re still playing in
Glorantha after you do these things.
(FWIW, another profoundly closed world,
MAR Barker’s Tékumel, also had early
flirtations with “open-ness”. IIRC, there’s a
solitary hobbit languishing in the freakshow
corner of the Avanthár Zoological Gardens,
relic of a misjudged attempt at hybridising
genres).
Could there be a Realm of Chaos or something
alike? What would it be like? Something like
Lovecraft’s Dreamlands? Could it be
explored?
I cannot think offhand of any Gloranthan
references to such a place existing, or to anyone
travelling there. “Chaos” per se usually
suggests a festering ooze or a devouring void in
Glorantha, not a Lovecraftian or Moorcockian
other-planar dreamscape. As Greg Stafford is
very familiar with the works of Lovecraft,
Moorcock, et al., and has never referred to a
Gloranthan “Realm of Chaos” (as a heroquest
location or otherwise) in any material I have
seen, it’s unlikely to be a feature of “official”
Glorantha. YGMV. 19
Can only Chaos can enter Glorantha, or could
other things as well? If so, is Glorantha really
a closed world? Would an alien to Glorantha,
maybe a painted Pict from Earth, be sensed as
chaotic? Maybe that’s the key to understand
Chaos: what does not belong here.
Glorantha is “officially” a closed world, though
in practice many games (including Chaosium’s
own house campaigns) have included
19I note in passing the existence of the “Chaosium”, the point at which Chaos seeps into Glorantha (“at the
bottom of the Underworld” on God Learner schematics), neatly described by Sandy Petersen at last year’s
Tentacle-Con (1998).
intrusions from other worlds, games and
genres. I don’t think that “inter-planar
travellers” would necessarily be sensed as or
believed to be Chaotic, unless they made a
point of emphasising their strangeness. A
painted Pict from Earth? Not likely to be a
problem. A Minion of Cthulhu? That’s another
question altogether...
If Chaos can enter the world, can something
escape? Is Glorantha embedded in a larger
universe, but confined by the Net and the
sacrifice of its Gods?
I don’t think the Gods believe this to be the
case, or that there is any evidence in Glorantha
itself that points in this direction. So if the Gods
don’t think so, Chaos provides no evidence,
and Gloranthan peoples have no reason to
suppose it’s the case – well, YGMV, but it looks
unnecessary to me.
This may also explain why Glorantha’s
history is so impervious to change
I truly cannot understand this statement.
Glorantha’s history is alive with change, and a
Good Thing Too. (One form of “change” is the
dramatic destruction of mighty experimental
Empires, but this doesn’t ever return the world
to the status quo ante).
Gloranthan humans are human
They think like us, live like us, look like us and
do the same kinds of things we do. That’s why
they’re called “human”. We don’t arbitrarily
change them for the sake of doing so – if we do,
the benefits of exploring our human mythic
and social identity through roleplaying are lost.
As soon as you have to fall back on
dehumanising arguments – “Gloranthans are
all religious fanatics”; “Gloranthans don’t
think the way we do”; “Gloranthans must age
differently to the way normal people do” – then
you’re damaging our potential for identifying
with and understanding the game world.
Unless there is a significant gain to be made,
I’d prefer not to do this: the price outweighs the
benefit.
91
 Other Universes
What would happen, if a Gloranthan
character travelled either deliberately or by
accident to another universe, multiverse or
whatever? What powers would change, would
he/she change any? Magic or non-magic? If
the character was like an Elf, would they
transform into a human, or disappear, or
what?
First up, “official” Glorantha is kinda isolated
from other universes and game-worlds.
Although there’s relics of a more free’n’easy
attitude from the late Seventies and early
Eighties (e.g. the list of gates to other worlds in
Wyrms Footnotes #14 20; the character
Redbird, a D&D magic-user in Glorantha; the
notorious vikings in Greg’s house campaign),
the general approach nowadays is that these
things don’t happen, or aren’t known to
happen, and if they do happen they certainly
don’t feature in history or mythology in any
recognisable fashion.
That said, the Intro to Glorantha book tells you
to do your own thing on its first and last pages,
so you certainly shouldn’t feel restricted by
this. Chaosium house campaigns have included
intruders from other worlds in Glorantha,
genre crossovers (Zorak Zoran Death Lords
armed with blasters from Worlds of Wonder),
etc. And it’s anyone’s guess where Belintar
came from – the future, the past, another
universe, who knows? (I’ll stick by my John
Carter theory for now).
Most Gloranthans possess magical powers,
often derived from their gods. If a Gloranthan
found himself unable to contact his god (e.g. if
he travelled to another universe where that god
didn’t exist), he’d lose a load of his powers; at
the very least, he couldn’t regain Rune spells
until without worshipping successfully, and I
20Q: “Dear Rurik, the rules to Stormbringer indicate that there are other planes in RuneQuest. How can these
be reached using the RuneQuest rules?”
A: “The general method is through the use of gates that can be entered by entering the Hero Plane and debarking
onto another world. These gates can be found in the ruins near the Flintnail Temple in the rubble of Pavis, in a
pool in Shadows Dance near the Giant’s Throne, in a gate in the wall of Glamour (the Lunar capital), in the
Dragon’s Eye, in Cragspider’s Castle, and in the Pharoh’s Castle in the City of Wonders on the Mirrorsea in the
Holy Country. All are heavily guarded... one way or another.”
92
doubt this can be done outside of Glorantha.
Spirit magic powers might survive in part,
perhaps weakened or elided – Glorantha is a
more magical world than many. Wizards’
magic derives from the Invisible God’s
Creation – in a universe He didn’t create, will
this still have power? Even unaligned sorcerors
may need knowledge of the true nature of
Glorantha – what happens to their magic in a
world without Runes?
Creatures dependent on Gloranthan magic or
Gloranthan physics to survive might well have
trouble outside that universe. In the script for
the never-produced (and non-Gloranthan)
RuneQuest Movie, the Dragonewt character
lost the power of speech when the Magic went
away. Perhaps a Gloranthan Elf would
gradually become more “plant-like” (you know
what I mean – rooted, immobile, seasonal?)
outside of Glorantha. There’s no way an
Aldryami would become a meat-thing (or,
contrariwise, an ersatz Tolkien elf become a
vegetable) just because different game worlds
use “elf” to mean different things. And it seems
strange to permit mixing between multiverses
but then restrict the species that are able to
mix’n’match – this looks more like a “different
rulesets” problem than a sensible constraint to
work within.
This really has to be down to individual GMs. I
would suggest looking at Jason Durall’s Big
Gold Book for BRP, or the Mythras RPG and
its supplements, both of which include rules,
guidelines and examples for mixing genres.
As for what happens to weird alien magics and
creatures coming into Glorantha – most folk I
know would say, “Kill Chaos!” and damn the
explanations. I’d be careful if I were you...
 Subjectivism & Revisionism
The Monomyth is a “good approximation,” not
a straitjacket: it’s like the difference between
reading a book about Shamanism and meeting
a shaman. If the people you meet abroad, in the
scenario, in your tribe, or wherever it may be,
do things in a way the book didn’t mention,
that’s a BONUS. It doesn’t mean the book is
“wrong”, just that it didn’t, obviously, contain a
comprehensive description of everything, and
nor would you expect it to, if you had any sense.
Read a book on comparative religion some day,
(e.g. The Golden Bough, The Destiny of the
Warrior, Patterns in Comparative Religion),
then realise that this is what the God Learners
were doing, in their own adorable way.
The objective reality of the gods has been
“questionable” at least since the Cults of Terror
four-way cosmology. Nobody denies that there
are powerful entities “out there” with apparent
personalities, etc. Even the Brithini, Wester-
ners, Mystics, etc. agree on this one.
What was shaken up in the nineties was the
cosy assumption that the Sun God is always
(and only) called “Yelm,” masculine, uptight,
imperial, etc., has a singular, comprehensible
personality, an agenda we can follow, and
communicates fluently, intelligibly and
consistently with all of his worldwide
community of worshippers. (Which makes the
wars between Yelmic nomads and Yelmic
empires rather hard to understand, setting
aside the more recent Dara Happan and Elmali
confusions). And/or the idea that it’s sensible
to “worship” such entities.
The argument is about what meaning people
should ascribe to the existence of the “gods” (or
“spirits”, or “demons”, or whatever): across
Glorantha, different cultures take different
approaches, with some worshipping, some
manipulating, some appeasing, some avoiding,
and some even pitying the poor benighted
deities. The Dara Happans say, “Yelm created
humans to worship him”. The Orlanthi say,
“The Evil Emperor enslaved everyone until
Orlanth brought freedom to the world”. The
Westerners say, “Thou shalt worship no other
gods beside the God of Malkion, who is the
Invisible God.” The Kralori say, “Some more
tea while you’re meditating on the folly of
intangible entanglements, honourable
Mandarin?” The Teshnans say, “Who is this
‘Yelm’ you speak of? The Sun God is great
Somash, who straddles the Elephant of Heaven
to bring Thunder and Monsoon at his
command!” And the Trolls just swear in
incomprehensible Darktongue (as ever).
Everyone can have their own view, but the
“god” (or gods, or God, or whatever) is still
there. We usually see them through the theistic
perception, anthropomorphic entities with
personalities and myths, but we can’t and
shouldn’t deny that there are other
perspectives. Unless you want to torch the
“Cults of Terror” cosmology, that is.
Obsessing about the difference between the
Gods Age and Time is, frankly, a bit of a red
herring. Most Gloranthans today believe that
the world changed the way you’ve always
thought it did from earlier sources, that the
first sunrise was in the year dot, and that time
and the world have been different ever since
then. All you “learn” from the stuff in the
Glorious Reascent of Yelm is that over a
thousand years ago, some people in Dara
Happa didn’t yet have this world-view. Does
that really damage your enjoyment of
Glorantha? And if so, why?
The Elmal/Yelmalio thing is perhaps the most
annoying/unnecessary change in recent years.
But back in Cults of Prax we were told that
“even the staunchest Orlanth worshipper
admits the presence of the Sun”; the discovery
of “Elmal” demonstrates how this works in
tribal Orlanthi areas bereft of any Sun Dome
Temple, while Cults of Prax had already
informed us that the Dragon Pass Sun Dome
Temple was a recent re-foundation of the
ancient cult (“In the Third Age, the cult moved
back into Dragon Pass at the request of the
House of Sartar. There it restored some of the
cosmic balance of the area and stabilised the
kingdom for the ruling house.”).
The saddest thing, in my opinion, has been the
extremist interpretations of what we see in
King of Sartar: claims that the cult of Yelmalio
sprang up overnight (with a fully-formed
thousand-year history, etc.), and that anyone
using “Yelmalio” (or not using “Elmal”) in their
games must be “wrong”. I’d prefer to take the
93
world as we’ve always seen it, and use the new
information about Elmal/Yelmalio to explain
how the re-founding of a Sun Dome Temple
“stabilised the kingdom” (by ending a near civil
war between Storm- and Sun-worshipping
Orlanthi), and resulted in the reintroduction of
the cult of Yelmalio, from Prax, into Dragon
Pass. Why muck around?
The Fortunate Succession has some neat new
stuff about recent Lunar History, which
complements the earlier articles from Wyrms
Footnotes and Heroes nicely; with the Glorious
Reascent, it has new bits of Dara Happan myth
and history which could be built into
interesting scenarios, treasures, lost temples
and obscure rediscoveries. But it’s frankly
unnecessary to think that this is “more valid” –
if it’s an area your game never encounters, it’s
irrelevant; if you aren’t a traditionalist Dara
Happan priestly type, who cares? We can mine
this stuff for background colour, obscure local
myth, etc. (cf. my article on the Oronin Valley
in Tales of the Reaching Moon #16 for an
example), without changing anything impor-
tant in our approach to the world and its use in
gaming.
Now, to something more important. This
“subjective” malarky seems eventually to infect
every Gloranthan argument, so I’ll choose my
words carefully, because I really do believe that
understanding it might just be the best way to
understand Glorantha’s mythic reality.
“Who invented hoplite warfare?”
If you ask a Pelorian worshipper of Granite
Phalanx, he’ll tell you that Granite Phalanx did.
Or maybe General Daxdarius, back in the old
days. If you asked a Dara Happan, he’d give the
credit to the Emperor Urvarainus. If you asked
an Orlanthi, he’d say that it was something the
Sun Dome Templars brought to their lands,
and that the Lunar Army seem to do things the
same way. The Sun Domers will (of course) say
that their own Yelmalian way is the “Original
and Best”, and that anyone else is offering a
cheap substitute.
Now, the great thing about all these arguments
is that they’re subjectively true. The Orlanthi
and Yelmalions really do think that the Sun
Dome Templars have the original phalanxes;
the Pelorians have their own origin stories
94
which don’t mention the Temple. But what on
earth would be the alternative?
Simply, all Gloranthan cultures would share
perfect information about all preceding events,
historical and mythical. There would be only
one True Answer to any question. A Grey Sage
of Lhankor Mhy in Boldhome would know that
the Pamaltelan Mask-God Bolongo was the
“Owner of the Disorder Rune”. A Dara Happan
in the First Age would know that his Emperor
either was, or was not, righteous in the eyes of
Yelm. A Malkioni Wizard would perfectly
interpret scripture, rendering schism and
heresy somewhat irrelevant. While this may be
an interesting thought-experiment, it’s a
damnably boring setting for a role-playing
game.
Instead, there can be a multiplicity of Truths.
This does not mean, BTW, that everyone
“makes up” their own version of events; that
cultures can just pretend to believe something
and, Picardlike, “make it so”. It means that
beyond a certain point, it is not possible to
determine the truth or falsehood of asserted
facts. This squares nicely with the myth of
Orenoar’s Torch (cf. Wyrms Footprints p.38),
with the fourfold Cosmology in Cults of Terror,
with the Philosophical Age and doubtful stages
of precreation myth from the World of
Glorantha, and with the various, dubious,
contradictory and confusing Emperor Lists in
the Fortunate Succession.
Let me refer you back to the first words of the
first article ever written about Glorantha’s
gods:
There are many different versions of
creation, and they are all correct.
Even if they mutually reject each
other the stories still contain truth
and value. These differences
represent local beliefs, magically
and psychologically valid for
normal functioning within a certain
geographic or mental sphere of
influence. Surrounding all of these
minor and limited perceptions of
Reality lies the Great Mystery.
If I understand it correctly, opponents of the
“subjective” approach wantsto be told what the
Great Mystery itself is. They think that
previously we were presented with Ultimate
Truths about Glorantha, but that these have
since been “rejected” in favour of other
Ultimate Truths. In view of the deliberate
uncertainties written into our sources since the
very beginning, this is obviously a false
dichotomy. (The first edition RuneQuest rules
told us, not that nobody knew which Rune
came first, but that everyone said their own
Rune had done so. If that’s not a “subjective”
explanation, what is?)
If we can accept that all the information we
receive about Glorantha is limited, imperfect,
approximated, abstract, and parochial, then
there’s no difficulty in encountering new ideas
and either adapting or rejecting them for our
own games. But let’s do it without the pretence
that everything used to be straightforward and
uncomplicated, and that it’s only recently that
“evil scholars on the Internet” have added
confusion to everyone’s gaming tranquillity. I
can quote you chapter and verse from the very
earliest published RuneQuest products to show
you that’s not so. If, when we were younger, we
used to uncritically accept the Praxian
cosmology – and/or ignore the parts we didn’t
really understand – then that’s an artifact of
our younger selves, not an accurate reflection
of what we were actually reading back then.
The Great Big Advantage of embracing
subjectivism is, of course, for gamers. When
there is no One True Myth, no One True Way,
no canonical source of answers to the Big
Questions, then we can all get on with
inventing our own tribes and traditions and
customs and kingdoms and cults and stories
and scenarios and suchlike, and know that
nobody can just come along and say, “That’s
wrong, because...” – as we’ll all know they’re
talking crap.
The benefits of a “scholarly” approach are best
seen in reconciling weird and contradictory
information. I hope we can settle how Telmori
magic, werewolves, and the phase of the Red
Moon are related, some day soon. I’m very
pleased with recent work on the Elmal/
Monrogh/Prax connections, with my own stuff
on the phases of the Red Moon, with the
nomenclature of Satraps and Sultans in the
Empire... but all of these take contradictory
sources and come up with a workable
synthesis, preserving as much as possible of the
existing information, but adding new insights
to it. There needn’t be a dichotomy between
“old” and “new” Glorantha: if we ground
ourselves in “Glorantha as she is played”, and
then look at newer material quizzically, asking
“How can I use this in my games?”, then we’ll
all benefit in the long run.
FWIW, I never say “Urox” or “Takenegi” or
“Rufelza” unless I’m provoked; while I’m
happy to believe these words exist, and are
accurate transcriptions of Gloranthan
originals, I’m happiest using the familiar old
names, “Storm Bull”, “Red Emperor”, “Red
Goddess”. Why complicate your game?
My version of Sun Dome history – seen on the
Digest recently – preserves the essentials from
“Cults of Prax”, “Sun County” and “King of
Sartar”, incorporating extra material about
Monrogh from “The Birth of Elmal” article, but
not, I devoutly hope, screwing up anyone’s
Glorantha in the process. (Unless someone’s
already retro-screwed-up their Glorantha to
eliminate all traces of the Yelmalio cult, in
which case they aren’t really my target
audience any more).
If anyone finds an article on the Digest, in
Tales, or elsewhere “useless scholarly wank”, it
might be because it’s completely irrelevant to
their Gloranthan gaming – most Pamaltelan or
Orientalist material fits this bill for me (but
others may feel the same about Western,
Pelorian, Praxian or even Orlanthi material, so
please don’t feel picked on!).
OTOH, it could be because they don’t like the
article’s approach to something they would
have had a use for (e.g. the KGB/Gestapo cult
of Danfive Xaron; the magic spells of Granite
Phalanx; the army officer cult of Yanafal
Tarnils), in which case the simplest thing to do
is steal any bits you do like, ignore the rest,
send a brief post stating your opinions and
version (in case everyone else out there feels
the same way and/or prefers your account),
and carry on gaming happily. We aren’t all
going to agree about everything, now, are we?
Or why would there be horse-races, or politics,
or any of the myriad other ways in which
differences of opinion manifest themselves? =
I find the worst arguments come when
someone writes something, however well-
meaning they might be, however well-
researched it might appear, that could only
95
damage other people’s games. Like saying
there was never a god called Yelmalio, or that
all Lunar myths are false, or that all Humakti
are homosexuals, or that simple Divinations
could clear up incorrect mythology, or that
Orlanthi are classical Athenian democrats.
This is silly and provocative behaviour, because
it gets nobody anywhere.
If your own game has spent years building up
its own “Gloranthan” background in isolation
from the published mainstream, good luck to
you: but unless something remarkable happens,
your material is unlikely to find its way back
into that mainstream. (This is a particular
problem with RQ2 diehards, I find, but maybe
that’s just a bee in my bonnet: “I spent the 80’s
playing RQ2 without buying anything from
Avalon Hill, and now I’m so upset to find that
you lot know much more than I do that I’ve
decided to stop playing altogether!”).
It’s possible usefully to present, say, a part of
the world that’s never heard of Yelmalio, or an
in-character rhetorical attack on Lunar
missionaries, or a Sacred Band of homosexual
Humakti, etc... but saying, “It must always
have been thus and so, and all other views are
wrong” is simply asking for trouble. And,
usually, getting it. (Hurrah!)
Since Glorantha lives through our gaming, not
through obscure scholarly arguments, why not
get on with your game and ignore the scholars?
(But don’t cull them: be merciful! Give them a
place to live, out on the Internet somewhere,
where they can carry on exploring the world in
their own way, contributing occasional gems
and insights, and answering questions from
humble lay members and returning lost sheep
alike).
This Digest is a great place for hashing out
consensus in some obscure fields, but in my
opinion this is pointless without an end in view,
and that end should be well-written, well-
thought-out articles that explain and enhance
aspects of Glorantha for use in gaming. And
given the number of Digest contributors who
have since been published in one place or
another, I think it’s working well. Without the
Digest, recent publications would have been
much poorer; and unless you refuse to buy any
recent RQ material, that can hardly be a bad
thing, now, can it?
96
Wakboth’s Family
The Red Goddess grants her worshippers the
philosophical and moral freedom to make their
own choices, their own mistakes. It’s hard to
see why Orlanthi don’t react better to this: after
all, their god is famous for making Horrible
Mistakes and trying to clear them up after-
wards, while his own brother’s experiments
with Chaos brought Wakboth the Devil
(Orlanth’s nephew, let’s remember) into the
world:
Quite a pedigree, eh? The gods of violence,
barbarism, madness, rape and evil all closely
inter-related: somehow, I’m not surprised.
The Red Star
… Who could
possibly resist
the lure of the
U.R.S.S.’s sky-
furnaces and
military-
industrial
sorceresses?
Just remember
that there are no
conceivable
Gloranthan
parallels for this
scientific-
sorcerous take
on the Soviet Union – forget the moonboats,
skyburns, state-sponsored military sorcerous
schools, etc. – and all will be well. It’s getting
harder now the otherworld is playing a larger
part in the heroes’ quest, but I can just about
manage...
The Red Star comics by Christian Gossett were
published back in the noughties, and they’re great
stuff: highly recommended.
 Whimsical Things
in “Serious” Worlds
I liked The Hobbit when I first read it, and still
do. I liked Lord of the Rings, but not as much
as I liked The Hobbit; it did grow on me,
however. I didn’t like The Silmarillion much,
and I still don’t.
The Silmarillion ignored the all things I’d liked
about Middle-earth from The Hobbit, and went
off down some arty-farty high-fantasy
genealogical linguistic high-falutin’ mock-
mythery of its own. Fair enough, I can safely
ignore all that guff – just as you don’t need to
read the Bible to understand the motivations of
the Wicked Bishop in a Robin Hood movie, you
needn’t read The Silmarillion to know that
there’s a lot of (doubtless beautiful and tragic)
history behind the Elves in Lord of the Rings.
But if someone tried to lay down the law that
(because they were silly, and whimsical, and an
early creation, and a barrier to entry for
latecomers wanting to get to grips with the Real
Middle-earth) there ARE NO HOBBITS, or they
had to be called “Halflings” and taken Very
Seriously, and the Shire was renamed with
some godawful Westron name, and familiar
names like “Bilbo” and “Frodo” had to be
edited into their Linguistically Accurate forms,
and Humour was Right Out, and all their
mock-Englishness (“jarring the characters’
sense of reality”) was Banned...
… well, I’d say “fuck it” and ignore them.
On Brithini Script
In my Glorantha (YGWV), Western priests and
sorcerers and lawyers and scientists and
doctors use high-falutin’ “Latinate” words
when they talk about their professional
specialisms. They can correspond with each
other across national boundaries in a self-
consciously “archaic” language, which is also
prominent in official courtly proclamations,
letters to rival monarchs, charters of nobility
and the like. Students are taught in often quasi-
monastic institutions where this “dead”
language is used throughout their everyday
routines, utterly unlike anything that happens
in the real world outside their confines.
What does any of this local colour have to do
with alphabets or syllaberies or logograms?
Nothing whatsoever.
Does “Brithini Latin” mean the Western
languages are very similar? Yes, it does, and we
are told that they are, and in normal practice
gamemasters minimise this sort of linguistic
issue anyway, so I hardly see this as a back-
breaker for the proposal.
Besides, I don’t care what you get up to in your
Glorantha, as long as you don’t insist on pissing
poorly-conceived Chinese analogies all over my
West. They have a home already, in Kralorela.
I think that if fans of “Brithini ideograms” saw
an alchemist’s symbology (but not his manu-
script), they would reasonably deduce that
alchemists used an ideographic script. They
didn’t – they wrote in Latin (usually), with
funny alien squiggles in their diagrams and
formulae to represent unique magical
concepts. Just like the Jrusteli God Learners
(in my opinion), who codified the Runes.
97
 A Barbarian Glossary
A foreign fan asked for definitions of several fyrd
barbarian words. These were my off-the-cuff
answers from 1999, plus a few modern glosses. The mustered armed forces of a clan or tribe.
I am not an Orlanthi expert, so there may be Usually very noisy. Nowadays, we would
nuances in what follows that are incorrect: my probably say militia.
apologies in advance for any confusion.
feud
weregild What happens when two families, clans or
tribes really hate each other. Usually arises
The life-price or blood-price: the amount of
when someone refuses to pay – or to accept –
wealth that must be paid to settle all of the legal
weregild to settle a dispute. Orlanthi are very
obligations which arise from killing another
good at hating: they will be said to be “feuding”
Orlanthi. (Also used as the basis for lesser
until they actually make up their differences
payments, e.g. for crippling or insulting a
and bury the hatchet. Meantime, both sides in
man). Nowadays, we would say ransom.
a feud will tell you how everything they’re
Note that Orlanthi are not obliged to accept the doing is honourable and how their rivals are
weregild – they can simply refuse to settle the dastardly and un-Orlanthi.
feud and carry on fighting. Also, there are very
A very good article about weregilds, feuds, and
few ways of making someone actually pay the
the role of chieftains and kings in making law
weregild. (Which may also be more than a clan
by Jeff Richard was published in Tales of the
can afford)
Reaching Moon #18.
housecarl or huscarl
kinstrife
Full-time warriors in the service of a chieftain
When relatives fight and feud with each other:
or king, as his bodyguards, bouncers and
for example, father against son, or brother
enforcers. These are carls (high-status clans-
against brother. Orlanthi have a cultural horror
men) who live in the chieftain’s house (or hus,
of kinstrife, which causes all manner of bad
I suppose). He’ll always be surrounded by them
things to happen on the otherworld. That said,
when he needs to impress others with his
it occurs all the time, because they’re so
power, at important meetings, moots, feasts, etc.
contrary and argumentative.
weaponthane
clan or tribal champion
A skillful warrior with good arms and armour,
The one warrior in the clan (or tribe) who will
as opposed to the run-of-the-mill tribal militia
personally fight for the chieftain (or king),
(farmers with “hard hats” and spears). Andrew
defend his honour, stand at his right hand, and
Logan Montgomery calls Sartarite warriors
participate as necessary in duels or other
hoplites in The Company of the Dragon.
contests on behalf of the ruler.
The difference between a “weaponthane” and a
“housecarl” in my opinion is that the housecarl godi or god-talker
is attached to a chieftain or king’s household. Much the same: these both mean “priest.”
Our collective gaming experience among the Among the Orlanthi most priests are normal
Orlanthi surely tells us that there are many clan members except when they’re leading
more competent warriors in Orlanthi lands worship services, rather than the social “elite”
than those attached to leaders’ personal (living in temples, surrounded by acolytes, etc.)
retinues. Ergo, there are more weaponthanes found in more civilised lands.
than housecarls.

98
law-speaker
Usually a priest of Lhankor Mhy – someone
who knows all the Orlanthi laws and
precedents relevant to a clan, and will recite
them as necessary, both to resolve conflict
within the clan and ensure favourable
judgements when clansmen are in dispute with
other tribal members. The law-speaker
explains the laws to the clan members
(including the jurors, all respected decision-
makers), who come to their decision on this
basis. Just because there’s a precedent, doesn’t
mean it’s right (or accepted).
tula vs. stead
The tula is all the land claimed by a clan,
including outlying forests, meadows, hills,
marshes, etc. All of the plants and wild animals
on the tula belong to the clan (this is the only
game-compatible interpretation of “odal
property” I have been able to come up with).
The stead is a building, usually fairly large and
sprawling, in which an extended Orlanthi
family lives. Most clans I know are composed
of several steads, which can mean
“households,” “families” or “bloodlines” by
association.
Tula is defined thus in King of Sartar:
“The home territory of a clan is its tula. Within
the tula are always several places. These
include a meeting place where the clan moot
meets, a market center, and both a public
sacred area and at least one secret site for men,
another for women.”
Now, it’s entirely possible that this “home
territory” is a subset of “total claimed territory”
(and please note that this is not inconsistent
with its definition as the “territory occupied by
a clan”). But it seems most unlikely to mean “a
collection of farmhouses [and public spaces
and secret ritual sites and nearby sacred hills,
etc.],” and – unless you’re one of those inbred
one-bloodline clans we all joke about – most
unlikely that “the home territory of a clan” is
synonymous with a single stead.
In my opinion, when you walk onto a clan’s tula
you are still some way from the centre of the
clan lands. And you’d better have a good
greeting primed in case of challenge, as you’re
indisputably on their lands. This situation
arises in my opinion long before you set foot on
the clan market or mooting-place.
Channeling
Roy Batty
I have seen an Icebreaker cut scars across the
face of the Red Moon, while fires turned the
City of Dreams to ash.1
I have seen Moonson remove his Mask atop the
Footstool of Raibanth, and been condemned by
him to burn with Sheng in the Seventh Hell.1
I have seen the Crater Makers call in surgical
strikes against the Ministry of Peace, with
collateral damage to the capital “well within
acceptable operational norms.”1
I have sat on the Imperial Presidium, called the
unruly Senate to order, and served sherbert to
the Sultans at the Court of the Silver Gate.1,2
I have fought alongside Jar-eel on the Hero
Plane. I have led the Red Army into Dragon
Pass. I have seduced a Prince of Tarsh to
uphold the Lunar Way.1,3
I was midwife at the birth of the Black and
White Moons. I witnessed the acclamation of
the Dark Emperor, and lived. I know who
murdered the Bat Man’s father.2
I have revealed the man behind the Steel Mask
of Bellex Maximus. On the Hungry Plateau, in
Moonbroth Oasis, in the war-torn Redlands
and in distant Arrolia can my works be seen.2
All these things I have seen, in games, and
shared them with my friends.
1: The Hunt for Red Storm Season
2: Life of Moonson
3: Tarsh War
99
 Gloranthan Songbook
Don’t Cry For Me, O Peloria
Inspired by Evita
It won’t be easy,
You’ll think it strange
When I try to explain how I feel
That I still need your love after all that I’ve done 3
You won’t believe me,
All you’ll see is the Young Life you once knew
Although she’s gone up to the Sky
Turning through Seven Phases of Moon. 2
I had to let it happen,
I had to Change
Couldn’t stay all my life in Torang
Looking out for Carmania, staying out of the Sun. 1
So I chose Freedom
Running around trying everything new
But Chaos impressed me the most
I always expected it to.
7
Don’t cry for me, O Peloria:
The Truth is I’ll never leave you
All through my Cycles, my mad existence
I’ll keep my promise, don’t keep your distance.
6
And as for the Empire
And as for fame
I never invited them in
Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired.
5
They are Illusion,
they’re not the solutions they promised to be
The answer was here all the time
I love you, and hope you love me...
4
Chris Gidlow: “I wrote Indissoluble Union and Red Vexillum (“wrote” in the loosest sense of the
word...) for the first game of Tarsh War, at Nick Brooke’s parents’ house, with David Hall as Thrax. I
wanted a multimedia game and brought my cassette player/alarm clock and a tape of the Red Army
Choir. I was inspired by the fact that, at my first Convulsion there had been no singing. In Home of
the Bold (first run) everything had been set up for an “Everyone comes to Geo’s” moment where the
boorish Lunar officers sing Watch am die Oslir and the assembled clientele drown them out with the
Sartaraise. But frustratingly it never happened, not least because there weren’t any songs to sing. So
I wrote two songs which Lunar officers could sing under such circumstances.”

100
Androgeus
Inspired by the Kinks
I met him in a club down in Glamour Nick Brooke: “The Wyrm-
Where you drink pink gin and it tastes just like coca cola Tangled Banner and Sartar
C-O-L-A, Cola the Brave, obviously, were
written to be their counter-
She walked up to me and he asked me to dance parts. In those early days
I asked her his name and in a deep/high voice before the World Wide Web, it
She said Andro- was unreasonable to expect
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus folk to bone up on Only Our
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus Rivers Run Free, lovely
Well, I’m not the world’s most physical guy though the song turned out to
But when he squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine be. The lyrics appeared in the
Oh my Andro- Rough Guide to Boldhome,
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus and the tune caught up with
us a decade or so later.”
Well, I’m not dumb but I can’t understand
Why he walked like a woman but talked like a man
Oh my Andro-
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus
Michael O’Brien: “The
Well, we drank pink gin and danced all night
Gloranthan songbook proved
Under eclectic red moonlight
to be very helpful when
He picked me up and sat me on her knee
Andrew Bean and I were at
And said “Dear boy, won’t you come home with me?”
dinner in New Delhi last year.
Well, I’m not the world’s most passionate guy
The host, who had made his
But when I looked in his eyes, well I almost fell
fortune in Russia, insisted it
For my Andro-
be undertaken in the Russian
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus
style, which meant toasts
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus (x2)
every five minutes. Once we
I pushed her away had gone completely round
I walked to the door the table, everyone then had
I fell to the floor to sing a song or tell a joke
I got down on my knees (and toast again – fortunately
Then I looked at him and she at me for the Singing Tibetan Nun
sitting next to me, toasts
Well, that’s the way that I want it to stay
didn’t have to be with booze).
And I always want it to be that way for my Andro-
When the songs got round to
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus
Indissoluble Union, I couldn’t
Girls will be boys and boys will be girls do it in Russian, but at least I
It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Andro- was able to capably join in
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus singing the Lunar version,
Well, I left home just a week before and with Jerusalem, Andrew
And I’d never ever kissed a woman before was up there with his arms
Androgeus smiled and took me by the hand round the shoulders of the
And said “Dear boy, I’m gonna make you a man” White House chaplain belting
out “Dei-opolis.” If only
Well, I’m not the world’s most masculine man they’d got to Queen’s greatest
But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man hits, we could have given
And so’s half of Andro- them Pelorian Rhapsody... It
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus was a fun evening!
Andro-dro-dro-drogeus (repeat til finish)

101
 My RPGaDay Posts
Every August, the #RPGaDay hashtag invites
gamers to share their responses to a bunch
of often interesting prompts and questions.
Some years, I’ve joined in on Facebook.
Here is a selection of my answers that mostly
relate to RuneQuest and Glorantha.
RPGaDay 2017, Day 26: Which
RPG provides the most useful
resources?
Third edition RuneQuest introduced the What
My Father Told Me (Orange Box Players Book)
and What the Priest Says (Red Box handouts),
introductions to major Gloranthan cultures
and religions. They were a brilliant way for new
players to understand what made their
characters tick, introducing them gently to a
dynamic and fascinating world, and coupled
with the regional Common Events boxes from
the Orange Box’s Genertela Book they were a
great springboard for Gloranthan gaming.
(There had been generic What the Shaman/
Sorcerer/Priest Says sections in the RQ3
Magic Book, but without any Gloranthan
context, these were pretty bland).
When HeroQuest came out, I suggested to
Issaries, Inc. that it’d be worth collecting these
all together, refreshing them, adding missing
bits, and completing the set for all the starting
character options (and the major Elder Races
too, because why not?). Lots of happy
contributors set pen to paper, I managed the
overall project, and the resulting Gloranthan
Voices are still available as a free download.
Toot! (That was the sound of me blowing my
own trumpet)
It’d be neat to revisit the old Voices, refresh a
few (in particular, since the Guide came out we
know the Seshnelan/Malkioni ones need to be
made more philosophical and less mediaeval-
churchy), add the missing Fonritians, and
produce a Print-on-Demand version for
modern gamers...
102
(This was published with the stupid title
HeroQuest Voices. The rough first-draft game,
Hero Wars, had been accompanied by a short
fiction collection called Gloranthan Visions, so
in my head this collection of player aids was
always meant to be called Gloranthan Voices.
Some marketing genius thought it’d make
sense to give it a more confusing and system-
specific name. Go figure.)
RPGaDay 2019, Day 6: Ancient
One of the wonderfully different things about
the first role-playing setting I loved –
RuneQuest’s world of Glorantha – was its
ancient world feel. Where other fantasy games
assumed a cod-mediæval setting with knights
in shining armour, RQ was a world of “Bronze
Age” mythology, straight out of Sword &
Sandal monster movies. Decades before
Skyrim, we played games about Romans vs.
Vikings in a world haunted by Dragons.
As a kid, I’d loved books of Roman and Greek
and Egyptian and Babylonian and Norse
mythology and history, and here was a game
that threw them all into a blender, but did it
intelligently, with an awareness of shamanism
and worship practices, and the evolution of
religion and society. I didn’t read Monster
Manual-style stats to understand the gods of
Glorantha – I read Robert Graves, Georges
Dumézil and Mircea Eliade, to get at the roots
of things.
Add to that the constant tension between (as
we historians like to say) “ideal and reality” –
or as Gloranthans would say, the eternal
Godtime and the imperfect, mortal world of
Time – and there are so many happy avenues
to explore, so many broken remnants of
forgotten prehistoric myth to encounter, Ray
Harryhausen style. While wearing bronze
armour, a Corinthian helm, and – of course –
sandals.
RPGaDay 2017, Day 2: What
is an RPG you would like to
see published?
RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha, which is
– thank goodness! – coming later this year
from our friends at the Chaosium!
For the first time since RuneQuest’s 2nd
edition (which was, let me remind you, way
back in the late seventies), Steve Perrin’s
elegant RuneQuest rules and Greg Stafford’s
mythic world of Glorantha will be properly
spliced together. A core rulebook for a BRP-
derived game set in one of the most evocative
fantasy worlds ever created: imagine the
possibilities!
While RQ3 tidied up the rules admirably, it
divorced them from their setting (instead
bringing in Cormac the Pict and a default
Fantasy Europe setting), and I have no idea
what Mongoose thought they were doing with
all those lingerie models, but – at last! – it
looks like our long national nightmare is over.
Proper rules, Gloranthan examples of play
(following in the noble tradition of Rurik the
Reckless), maps and monsters and mythology
and artwork to die for, and all the other
goodness we’ve come to expect from the Moon
Design/Chaosium crowd. I can’t think of a
better way to bring more people into my old
corner of the hobby, knocking out the musty
cobwebs of the Great Darkness and letting
Yelm’s warm sunlight and Orlanth’s playful
breezes roam a world reborn in Time.
RPGaDay 2017, Day 7: What
was your most impactful RPG
session?
Twenty-five years ago this summer, I played
the role of Prince Temertain of Sartar in Home
of the Bold, an 80-player freeform
Gloranthan LARP by David Hall and Kevin
Jacklin, in its first run at the first Convulsion
games convention, held in Leicester in the
summer of 1992.
It was the first live-action role-playing game I’d
been in, and I spent the rest of the decade
playing and writing freeforms (playing that
same role twice more, co-authoring the game’s
two sequels, How the West was One and Life
of Moonson, and helping to run the next
Convulsions), so I suppose you could say that
was kinda impactful.
But more than that, it was a successful
Gloranthan game that worked on a large scale
because it gave the players enough information
to enjoy themselves, without expecting them to
know every detail of the world. It was happy to
use cliches and stereotypes, if that made for
more fun for more players. It didn’t get hung
up on small details, and was happy to work
with a broad brush. Having Roman Lunars vs.
Braveheart/Celtic Sartarites was an easy idiom
to grok: the setting was just like Life of Brian,
only with more woad and kilts (and much
worse weather).
And that helped my work with the Reaching
Moon Megacorp and my outreach activities on
103
the various Gloranthan mailing lists: if
something was so obscure that nobody could
ever follow it, it was getting in the way of
Maximum Game Fun. My most often
translated article, A Brief History of Malkion-
ism, was written as freeform background, to be
the shortest possible account of the Gloranthan
West’s myths and history. And we gradually
learned to make our writing more flexible and
modular, never writing a page when a
paragraph would do, sharing material between
characters where it made sense to do so.
And more than that: it was the first time I’d
played a character who was almost entirely
there for comic relief. The Prince of Sartar was
a tool for the GMs, a target for the rebellious
Sartarite chieftains, a puppet for the occupying
Lunar Empire, completely ineffectual. And yet,
through play, I had a whale of a time. Because
I wasn’t “playing to win,” but “playing for
effect,” I managed to make the game more
enjoyable for myself and everyone else. And
that’s something that has really benefited my
subsequent gaming.
(Over the next decade or so, I kept getting cast
in villainous roles, because “chewing the
scenery,” demonstrating megalomania,
shaking my fist impotently at heroes, devising
monstrous schemes with untrustworthy
accomplices and then failing hard in the last
reel is a valuable talent, and one every GM
should learn).
#RPGaDay 2019, Day 9:
Critical. 21
I’m a fairly lazy GM. I prefer to run with other
people’s settings and scenarios, because
although I can and do improvise, I like to have
a framework to support my stuff. I don’t as a
rule come up with character / campaign arcs,
or any of those other clever things the cool kids
do – I let the themes of a game emerge through
play, rather than building them into my
cunning plans from the get-go. I’m happy to
ignore the bits of a rulebook that strike me as
clunky or distracting, which is annoying I
21I think the RPGaDay people wanted me to say how exciting it is to roll a 01 or a 20 and overcome monsters,
but I took a more Maoist path today.
104
suppose if you built your character around
some feat / exploit and I don’t ever go near
those parts of the system. I’ve cancelled a
couple of sessions at zero notice because I
didn’t do enough prep and didn’t want to waste
my players’ time. I don’t ever like killing off
player characters, which is a weakness that can
be exploited.
And I can be an irritating player. My characters
are often happy to go along for the ride (ie:
they’re often supporting characters rather than
dramatic protagonists), and usually develop
their own weird obsessions and niches
(learning to pilot iconic Imperial Guard
vehicles; citing Muslim travelogues and
philosophers; paving the way for my eventual
ascension as Witch Queen; etc.) that might not
be everyone’s cup of tea. I have been known to
heckle and second-guess GMs, I don’t ever pay
enough attention to “clever” plots (where we’re
meant to piece together an intricate story from
fragmentary clues delivered across multiple
sessions of a campaign, my arse), and I
sometimes launch into distracting Monty
Python or Star Wars quotes, or start playing
music that seems appropriate and amusing to
me (and possibly nobody else) from my
phone’s tinny speakers.
I’m insufficiently tolerant of people who don’t
“get” why a particular gaming style or rule set
doesn’t work for me. Rules-wranglers, system
mini-maxers, private-note-passers, “you tell
me” players (refusing to contribute), and “err...
I hit the orc with my sword?” types. I’m getting
increasingly annoyed by people who always set
out to “Kill all of our enemies” (rather than
“defeat / overcome / drive off the enemies and
thwart their evil plans,” say). I can become
irritable if a game’s premise (“you’re cool secret
agents with amazing training and gear”) and
reality (“you have shit skills and will die if you
try anything dramatic”) don’t coincide.
I love this hobby, but I can’t pretend I’m
working particularly hard at it these days.
When I look at my written output back in the
nineties (all those mailing lists, zine articles,
freeform characters, convention materials) and
compare it to today – they’re worlds apart. And
my session prep time sometimes vanishes
down weird personal wormholes: I waste time
nailing down background fluff that won’t
matter during play, and prepare pretty
handouts as if totally unaware that my players
won’t ever read them.
Finally, I haven’t mastered the beer intake =>
boss fight slippery slope, so my big session
finales aren’t the most memorable elements of
my games for me, let alone for anyone else.
Those recaps at the start of each game aren’t
just for the benefit of the other players, you
know...
#RPGaDay 2017, Day 18: Which
RPG have you played the most in
your life?
I played RuneQuest throughout my teens and
early twenties: nothing else comes close.
Obviously I started out in gaming (in my last
year at primary school) with that strangely
malleable D&D hybrid that existed when
AD&D wasn’t yet complete, but a few years
later I took badly against some of the racist
ideas and imbalance that teenaged Nick saw as
baked into the structure of the game.
To wit: goblinoids as lesser, innately evil sub-
species that had to be killed; player characters
as übermenschen Heroes destined to rise in
feudal rank and destructive power; the weird
inflexibility of class-and-level categorisation
(wizards can’t use swords because we say so)
with the added insult of arbitrary racial
restrictions on class choice; and the
fundamental incoherence of the underlying
game mechanics (which added a strange new
subsystem for every situation).
Against this, RuneQuest was a breath of fresh
air. Everything had the same stats; everything
used percentile dice; everyone could use any
kind of skill, or armour, or weapon; other
games’ “monsters” got to join their own cults –
or yours! – and could rise to become Rune
Lords and Priests, the same way your heroes
did. (And the SoloQuest books even reminded
us to make experience rolls for monsters who
defeated your adventurer).
And I didn’t even mention the setting! Greg
Stafford’s world of Glorantha remains one of
the greatest creative achievements in gaming, a
place of living mythology and clashing cultures,
a “Bronze Age” sword & sandal world of
Californian wackiness crossed with Joe
Campbell’s thousand-faced monomyth, that
opens new depths of meaning and wonder
wherever you go looking for them.
As a teenage proto-simulationist, this was the
Biz: you could use Cults to define how cultures
and societies worked (what happens when
you’re a low-INT, low-POW member of an
hereditary Wizard caste?), see how every
character got to be the way they were, and –
most importantly – muddle through the
scavenged mess of mundane reality (cf. Oliver
Dickinson’s Guys and Dolls of New Pavis),
picking up a runespell here, an enchanted
vambrace there, an undying enmity there...
Beautiful.
Today, we have both Pelgrane’s 13th Age in
Glorantha and Chaosium’s RuneQuest:
Adventures in Glorantha to look forward to
(both are now complete manuscripts due later
this year); we’ve already got the HeroQuest
Glorantha rulebook, completing the Gamist /
Simulationist / Narrativist trifecta. All we need
now is coherent direction from the folks at the
Chaosium, and – whaddaya know? – they’re all
good people who want to publish my kind of
games.
Good times.
105
#RPGaDay 2020, Day 3: Thread
Insert platitude about how each player
character’s story is a single colourful thread,
but through the alchemy of the game they all
get woven together into a lovely tapestry that’s
more beautiful and detailed and textured than
anything you could make with just one of those
colours.
Insert platitude about astral souls (our in-game
avatars) remaining tethered to their mundane
bodies (that’s us, sitting around the table,
rolling dice and drinking beer) by a silver
thread: it’s always important to remember that
connection, and not to damage it, or your
projected character goes “poof!” and you have
an upset player at your table (possibly not for
much longer).
Finally, insert platitude about Theseus, and
Ariadne, and the Minotaur’s Labyrinth, and
whether there’s just one path through or one
way out, and what this might mean for
dungeon and scenario design, and who’s
Ariadne in this metaphor (the gamemaster,
surely?), and doesn’t she end up having
orgiastic revels with Dionysus on the island of
Naxos after Theseus pisses off home, and does
this mean that the after-gaming pub night is a
necessary part of the face-to-face gaming
experience...?
“Thread?” I got nothing. Sorry.
#RPGaDay 2020, Day 2: Change
I thought of writing about how my taste in
gaming has changed over the years (from
simulation towards narrativism, with some
odd preferences for GMs not touching dice
creeping in around the edges), but then I
realised I have an anecdote most of you won’t
have heard that nails this keyword. So let’s do
this.
In 1994, we ran the second big Gloranthan
freeform role-playing game for the first time.
106
Called How the West was One, it was a
seventy-player game set at an ecclesiastical
council attended by all the Malkioni Western
Churches. (Back then, the Gloranthan West
was always described using mediaeval
analogies; to some of us, it still is). The cast of
popes, knights, bishops and royals haggled
over abstruse doctrinal points in a Gormen-
ghastian gothic megacity poised on the brink of
Armageddon. And one of them got to play a
Vadeli.
The Vadeli are the hated pariah outcast nation
of the West. My own parallels when writing
about them included baby-sacrificing
Canaanites and Carthaginians, the ‘dirty,
stinking Tleilaxu’ of the Dune universe, and the
sundry blood libels levelled at all of the
Abrahamic religions by their enemies. Our
Vadeli character, Abdelcar, was a slave trader
and merchant who was the only in-game
source for sundry immoral desiderata –
twisted vat-grown homunculi, highly
suggestible clones, ingredients for immortality
potions and the like. He could supply them; he
knew everyone who’d bought them. And he
also owned all of the spare change in the game.
That’s right: as a last-minute decision while
setting up for the first run, we gave that
character’s player (Jon Quaife, who was
magnificently sleazy in the role) ALL of the
small-denomination currency in the game.
Princes and Kings and Popes would turn up to
the Council with high-denomination bank-
notes, but if they wanted to turn them into
spending money, they had to find the filthy,
outcast, abominable Vadeli money-changer
and do a deal with him.
Which turned what could have been a tedious
mechanical chore for the referees (making
change at a fixed GM station) into a role-
playing moment, and an opportunity for
players who might not otherwise have met to
encounter each other. I’m still delighted by
how well it worked.
 On Recaps
One of my favourite elements of every session I
run is a “story so far” recap, to which all my
players can contribute. That lets me know what
parts of the game were most memorable, which
places grabbed their attention, which NPCs the
players liked meeting, what their characters’
take on things was, and gives you meat for the
next session(s). Read up on the “Between
Towns” rules from Dogs in the Vineyard for
more on this.
A derailed game can be a great game, if
everyone’s having fun. At one of the RuneQuest
playtest sessions, we spent way more time
getting into our (pregen) characters and
bouncing off each other in amusing ways than
we did actually investigating the situation.
(Our solution to a complex cattle-raiding
situation involved two of us dressing up in a
pantomime cow costume, which didn’t feature
in the scenario-as-written). No complaints
from me.
#RPGaDay 2019, Day 8: Obscure
OK, here’s something I picked up a fair few
years back: no keeping secrets around the
gaming table, please. That stuff just dicks all
the other players around.
I was one of half a dozen players in a Call of
Cthulhu game, when the GM decided to take
one of us aside for what felt like half an hour of
special 1:1 time while his investigator was off
encountering something the rest of us weren’t
meant to know about yet. And at first we’re all
fairly patient, but gradually a sense of irritation
builds up around the table: can’t the GM see
he’s left most of his group twiddling their
thumbs, while he’s off telling a story to just one
of us? How rude. (Reader, we sacked his sorry
arse)
Nowadays, I have a few rules when I’m running
a game. No secret note-passing. No private
backstories. If your character wants to steal
stuff from the party, or sell their secrets, or
betray them for love, share it with the other
players – not in-character, doofus! You trust
these people, right? You’ve got together with
them to have fun and tell cool stories? So why
not let them use their out-of-character
knowledge to entertain everyone else at the
table.
Tell it like it is, let everybody see the story as it
unfolds, and who knows? Maybe one of your
friends will come up with something really cool
to add to the situation, and it’s certain they’ll all
have a better time at your game than if you
keep leaving people out of the loop while you
try to play a private game of your own that
nobody else is allowed to understand.
(I can imagine exceptions, but that’s my
general rule)
#RPGaDay 2019, Day 7: Familiar
One of my gaming bugbears, which probably
exists because our hobby grew out of
wargaming, is when a game lets players take
abilities or powers for their character that allow
them to “take two turns” instead of one. The
classic examples are haste spells (speedsters, in
a Superhero game), two-weapon wielding,
automatic fire, and allied spirits / summoned
elementals / animal companions / familiars.
At my table, as a general rule, you get just one
turn. If you want your character to take a back
seat while you explain how your genetically-
engineered marmoset / squad of storm-
troopers / summoned demon wins the day
(and roll their attack / use their powers /
narrate their triumph instead of yours), go for
it! But that’s your turn.
You don’t get to “go twice” because you brought
an imaginary friend, or have some delusory
notion about the effectiveness of waving more
than one piece of sharpened metal around.
TBF, anyone whose choices mean they need
extra “handling time” at the table kinda pisses
me off. Make a decision, roll the dice, see what
happens. Onwards!
“Thou shalt not monopolise the GM’s
attention.” These games are a collaboration,
not a competition. Act like it.
Now, I like rules systems that let a game “go
fractal” (diving into as much detail as the
107
situation requires): Fate does this out of the
box, HeroQuest does it with the split between
simple and extended contests, other games
sometimes have more or less handwave-y Mass
Combat systems, or Mook rules (so a mob of
bad guys acts just once, and is collectively
attacked), etc.
The difference here is that one player is “going
fractal” at everyone else’s expense. Not cool,
dude! Not cool, authors!
Some RPGs make bad design decisions. Any
design decision that says Player X gets to do
twice as much / be twice as effective as Player
Y is a bad design decision. Here endeth.
It’s about handling time / spotlight time. These
games always have a practical, social context
(we are sitting around a table, waiting for Alice
and Bob and Charlie to make decisions / take
turns). Writing a complicated rulebook that
ignores this element is kinda daft.
This is about courtesy at the table, and the
fetishisation of (some) details.
• “I use my phenomenal speed to disarm the
enemies” – OK, roll for effect.
• “I use my remarkable swordplay to disarm
the enemies” – OK, roll for effect.
• “I use precisely-targeted shots to disarm
the enemies” – OK, roll for effect.
• “I summon a flurry of elemental energies to
disarm the enemies” – OK, roll for effect.
Why does one (and only one) of these
situations require multiple attack rolls?
Does every issue of the Flash comic have more
pages than any other superhero’s comic book,
because he’s moving faster so he can get more
done? I think not.
(The way the old Golden Heroes RPG broke
combat scenes down into “frames” impressed
me when I was a kid, although I’m otherwise
unfamiliar with the system and may have read
more into this than is there: on your hero’s
turn, you can achieve the kind of stuff that’d
take up one frame of comic-book artwork)
Your wizard’s mob of elemental demons is
taking on the bad guy’s skeletal guards, so now
we can focus on the main event.
108
Your space marine boarding party has seized
the main access corridor and is holding back
enemy reinforcements: so are you going to the
bridge, or the hangar bay?
On a related note, I wish more games worked
like 13th Age or the Powered by the
Apocalypse family of games in taking dice
and/or tactical decisions out of the GM’s
hands.
In combat, the heroes should get hurt when
they screw up. Not when something they can’t
possibly control randomly happens to them.
If your game system of choice makes it
mechanically challenging to achieve awesome
results, because it insists on fetishising weird
details at the expense of the stories being told,
have a long hard look at that system.
If your game system of choice means you need
to know explicit details about exactly how
badly you injured your incapacitated enemies,
that wouldn’t ever be the focus of a TV show or
movie or novel, then maybe it’s not focusing on
the right things.
As I grow older and (possibly) wiser, I’m
increasingly disconcerted by games and players
whose default combat mode is “set to kill,” and
I’ve started calling it out. I have no idea how
many Nazis (grunts or supervillains) Bazooka
Badger “killed,” and I don’t really want to
know. He battled his way through hordes of the
bastards: that’s good enough for me.
I blame the hobby’s origins in wargaming. If it
had grown out of fanfic or improv theatre, we’d
have very different expectations.
In my last Fate game, I played an astromech
droid with a (useless, liability) protocol droid
counterpart. There was never any situation
where I tried to get an advantage by doing two
things / being two people / taking two actions.
Having a 3PO let me take part in conversations,
be a worry-wart and get the party into trouble
(or point out how their plans would fail), while
flailing my arms around ineffectually and
generally despairing; while my R2 got to be
slick, combat-effective and use its leet hacking
skills to pull off the Heist of the Kiloparsec.

#RPGaDay 2017, Day 11: Which
‘dead game’ would you like to see
reborn?
I refer the Hon. Readers to the answer I gave
on Day 1: RuneQuest 2. Or, more specifically,
an edition of RuneQuest that’s proudly and
uncompromisingly set in the world of
Glorantha, making no concessions to “generic
fantasy.”
There are, broadly speaking, two flavours of
Role-Playing Games (RPGs) out there:
“generic” rule sets, and games tied to a specific
setting. (We could debate edge cases, e.g.
where the rules are designed for a particular
gameplay experience, but we can do that on
your Facebook thread, not mine, nerd).
On its first publication in 1978, RuneQuest was
a game with a strong built-in setting: Greg
Stafford’s fantasy world of Glorantha. This had
only previously seen print as the setting for the
wargame White Bear & Red Moon (1975),
although Greg had been developing his
creation since 1967 (NB: a second wargame,
Nomad Gods, came out in 1978, and had a
profound influence on gaming in Glorantha: all
those heroic Orlanthi rebels from Dragon Pass
found themselves exiled to the blasted
wastelands of Prax and the Big Rubble). The
runes, creatures and magic of Glorantha
pervaded the rulebook, and the beautiful
cartography of William Church at the back of
the book was the cherry on top.
Like many other creative people involved in
gaming, Greg at first assumed that other game
masters would develop their own worlds rather
than exploring his own (much the same
happened with Traveller, a generic science
fiction ruleset that quickly developed its own
“official” setting, the Third Imperium). But
with the excellent support from the Cults books
and Trollpak, Glorantha really took off.
Then the third edition of RuneQuest split the
rules from the setting: instead of following
Rurik the Restless of the Sun Dome Temple
through his misadventures in the Big Rubble
and Shadows Dance, we now watched Cormac
the Pict’s encounters in a bland Fantasy
Europe. Glorantha was relegated to a slim, top-
down overview in a separate pamphlet, the
evocative maps of Dragon Pass and Prax
replaced with a small overview map of two
continents, and the box contained a full-colour
poster map of... Fantasy Europe. (Which, in
case you were wondering, looks just like
Europe. Brilliant work, team!)
Still. Gloranthan RuneQuest is coming back
soon, and it looks better than ever. Can’t wait.
#RPGaDay 2018, Day 3. What
gives a game “staying power”?
For me, it’s the ease of adopting different
points of view within the setting. It can be as
simple as “playing as the bad guys” for a change
(eg: RuneQuest works just fine with Trolls or
Lunars or Nomads as protagonists), or as
complex as FFG’s game lines with multiple
takes on the same setting (their Warhammer
40,000 and Star Wars lines both did this,
though we don’t yet have any sourcebook for
Imperial characters in the galaxy far, far away,
hint hint).
It’s also fun when you get to make big changes
to the setting as part of your campaign – and
things like Fronts from the Powered by the
109
Apocalypse stable are a nifty way of codifying
these – although in general I dislike pre-
destined metaplot. Give me a grab-bag of
options, not the One True Way it’s going to
work out (usually with NPC protagonists to
save the day).
So, for example, I’d likely love a Company
Wars RPG that supported campaigns for
Alliance (Stations & Merchanters), Earth (Fleet
& Company) and Union (military & colonists).
One of the things I’ve always loved about CJ
Cherryh’s early sci-fi is the way the human
factions appear weird and alien and obviously
“wrong” to each other, but perfectly rational
and relatable within their own stories.
What I don’t like is lengthy single campaigns
for games which use “power creep” or levelling
tiers in place of viewpoint variety: the old
BECM D&D model, or the way you could
theoretically “ascend” your Dark Heresy
beginning characters to Rogue Trader or
Deathwatch levels of competence. Almost
invariably, power creep makes game mecha-
nics more cumbersome and clunky, with more
trivial bookkeeping or unforeseen game- or
world-breaking side-effects, and therefore less
fun for GM and players alike.
(Yes, I’ve noticed how I’m talking about games-
in-settings rather than games per se in this
post. I’ll probably keep on exploring this for the
rest of August).
From the comments:
Well done Nick Brooke for admitting that the
Lunars ARE the bad guys
“From a certain point of view...”
My point would be that Lunars don’t think they
are “bad guys,” and if you want to you can have
perfectly cromulent fun playing as heroic,
pious, virtuous Imperial Agents. Or as heroic,
pious, virtuous citizens of the Empire
oppressed by a corrupt bastard Sultan and his
court of sycophants and thuggish enforcers.
You might even get exiled to some Goddess-
forsaken backwater like the Cradles Valley, if it
all goes to pot...

Roleplaying in Glorantha
Glorantha is a Bronze Age world of living mythology, first explored by Greg Stafford in 1967.
It has been the setting for board games, card games, computer games, and – of more relevance to the
#RPGaDay crowd – three major role-playing games: RuneQuest (an old-school simulationist game,
the first BRP system, recently rejuvenated), HeroQuest (a pioneering narrativist system) 22 and 13th
Age Glorantha (a thoroughly modern gamist engine, “D&D done right”).
And that’s not to mention all of the live-action freeform games, short stories, myths, novels, comics,
poems, songs, artworks, conventions, discussion groups and community celebrations created by
people who love Glorantha. It’s a great crowd: come and join us!
The easiest entry point is to pick up one of the three games I mentioned (RuneQuest: Roleplaying in
Glorantha is the latest edition of RQ; HeroQuest Glorantha for HQ; if you go with 13th Age Glorantha
you’ll also need the core rulebook for the excellent 13th Age role-playing game).
Whichever way you go, I would strongly recommend also picking up the Glorantha Sourcebook, a
beautiful system-free hardback that collects some of the foundational Gloranthan articles from the
70s and 80s, bringing them to life with gorgeous album-cover-worthy artwork and fresh, clean
cartography.

22 Which will in future be called QuestWorlds, for reasons too tedious to detail here... maybe in Manifesto 3?

110

#RPGaDay 2020, Day 1:
Beginning
When you’re kicking off any new game, hold a
proper Session Zero in your first session.
Chat about the feel you’re going for, any house
rules or conventions, appropriate characters,
table conventions (snacks, phones, etc.), lines
and veils, safety tools, and so on. It is worth
doing this to make sure all of your players are
on the same page. I’ll link to some valuable
resources below.
This is the Session Zero checklist I stole. It’s
quite D&Dish, but covers lots of other stuff
well. Have a think about how you’d deal with
any of the potentially challenging content, and
be ready to talk through concerns with your
players. After all, if they end up not enjoying
the game, you have failed.
Lines and Veils. Lines are things the players
and gamemaster agree they will not cross. Veils
are things you agree you will not dwell on. 23
You can always update them in flight, but I find
it useful to cover torture and sexual content up
front, and eagerly seek player input.
The X-Card is a safety tool. You would only use
it if something comes up in play that somebody
at the table really doesn’t want to deal with.
What kind of bully insists on including stuff in
their game that upsets their fellow players?
I like the idea of these Tape-Deck Controls
(STOP, PAUSE, REWIND, FAST-FORWARD),
but haven’t used them myself. They formalise
the idea that you might need time out, or a
quick retcon, or a chance to discuss potentially
problematic content. Which all seems good to
me.
Here’s a free booklet on Consent in Gaming. I
recommend you read it, even if it sounds a bit
silly. (I think getting players to fill in detailed
questionnaires ahead of time is overdoing it –
that’s a lot of work, and could lead to people
23Examples of Veils: Bloody injury details. Blow-by-blow accounts of romantic or sexual encounters. The
details of Captain Jamieson’s accounts for his recent journey up and down the Spinward Main. Stuff you agree
the game won’t dwell on. Let’s say your villain has a process for turning people into monsters. If you “draw a
veil,” then yes that happens but nobody is going to get grossed out by anatomical details about the surgical and
spiritual violations involved in debasing unwilling subjects like that. See? It’s a safety tool! Meanwhile, Lines
are hard limits: Thou Shalt Nots.
imagining horrible things that won’t have
anything to do with your game. Better IMO to
agree to use tools that let you to interrupt and
rework things on the fly during play)
Finally, this TTRPG Safety Toolkit from Kienna
Shaw just won an Ennie as the best free game
or product for RPGs last year, and is well worth
checking out.
That’s enough about consent and safety etc.
The other thing you can do in Session Zero is
agree on the kind of AWESOME STUFF you
are going to achieve as a group in the upcoming
sessions.
I learned a lot from Phillip Stephen Wright –
one of the techniques he uses (before any short
campaign running for a dozen or so sessions) is
to agree on the medium we’re simulating. Is it...
An Epic Comics adaptation of minor works by
Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E Howard
(Barsoom; Solomon Kane vs. Cthulhu)? A big-
budget Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster
of WW2 superheroes fighting Nazis (All Nazis
Must Be Punched)? A pretentious camp
seventies disco spandex sci-fi movie (Space
Wurm vs. Moonicorn)? Filmed in black &
white with wobbly cardboard sets and
recurring bit-part actors (Savage Worlds of
Flash Gordon)? A prime-time BBC One
Sunday evening drama series (PTA: BBC One’s
Spitfire)? Or a redubbed Japanese cartoon
show crudely adapted for the American market
by Hanna-Barbara (Go Go Awesome Team
Goth Girls Go!)?
And this works, because it gives players ideas
about the kind of scene their characters will
appear in, and it gives the gamemaster tools
and techniques to focus the action where it
ought to be, and using dramatic visual
language is much stronger than the numbers
on character sheets when you want to get your
players immersed in the game.
111
 Thrilla’s Story
Afterwards, you get to talking with Thrilla. And marshlands past smouldering green-walled
this is what she says: Alkoth, and the unending sprawl of Raibanth
where Yelm’s Footstool shines, past the holy
“Sedenya 24 teaches that to tell others about
Gods Wall itself, and Glamour’s great grain-
ourselves, we should begin by sharing these
docks at Good Shore, and granite-walled
things: our name, our first memory, our
Melsorkorth... But Red Fish City is like none of
akindling25 and our sevening. 26 It’s a way of
those places. Red Fish is special. We do things
bringing people together. Who we are, where
differently, at home.
we stand, what we know, how the gods have
touched us – we need to know these things to “My first memory is of the Glamour Day in my
understand one another. We need to share third year, when the beautiful priestesses made
them to come closer. our temple shine with silver and moonlight. 27
I’ve travelled to other places, and I know now
“My name is Thrilla, daughter of Anstella and
that the buildings of Red Fish are nothing
Gorvion, of the Lantern Gable House in Red
special: just another Reconstruction town,
Fish City. You’ve never heard of Red Fish? My
copied beauty built quick and cheap in the Fifth
home city is a long, long way from Sartar: in
Wane, the oldest buildings all red bricks on
green Peloria, the Heartland of the Empire,
rubble heaps, stuccoed and painted to look like
only fifty miles north-east of the Crater Wall
marble. It’s a pale shadow of the High City of
which girdles the inner void of the Red Moon
Jillaro – now that is true grace and beauty. To
Goddess. My slim silver girdle is much prettier;
live in those precincts was bliss...
hers is made of mountains – so tight! so
constricting! I suppose the Moon Goddess “But when I was a small girl, I didn’t know that,
doesn’t ever need to breathe, though: that must and the Glamouring of Red Fish was the
make it easier for Her. loveliest thing I’d ever seen. Silver shadows
pooled everywhere, and red lanterns glowed,
“To get to Red Fish you’d travel through
and shoals of fishes swam through the streets
Dragon Pass to Furthest, then up the Oslir
as if they were rivers, all shining with red light
River or the Conquering Daughter’s Road. That
– my world became magic, and the Full Moon
journey would take you past many mighty
shone silver in the south-west quarter of the
cities of the Lunar Provinces and Dara Happa:
sky. My mother told me that not many people
proud Mirin’s Cross, where the Governor’s red-
have seen that face of the Goddess, and my
pillared throne-room stands empty, and Jillaro
father told me to tell nobody else. But I like you,
of the Prince’s Green, where the Daughter’s
and I said that I would share.28
Road began and ends. Then through the

24 Sedenya is the Red Goddess of the Lunar Empire.

25 Akindling is a Pelorian term for consciousness-awakening or initiation, commonly a person’s first contact

with the otherworld.

26 Sevening is a Lunar term for Illumination, being touched by a sacred mystery.

27The beautiful priestesses would likely have belonged to the cult of Glamour, the First Inspiration of
Moonson, whose most notable ability is making civic buildings appear more magnificent than they are. On
Glamour Day all the cities of the empire are briefly resplendent -- only in the capital itself is the effect maintained
year-round. Much Fifth Wane architecture now appears drab and derivative -- as the Empire rebuilt itself from
the rubble, though, these state-sponsored public works were a great treasure for its citizens.

28 Thrilla’s father knew that a child who sees a vision of the White
Moon is likely to attract unwelcome attention
from the organs of state and their enemies, and this could be why Thrilla was subsequently adopted into the
household of Enerian Scarlet (“the Mistress,” whose name she can never speak aloud).

112
“I was kindled by Uleria when I became a work, and none of them knows what the others
woman. Uleria is the Greatest Goddess, the get up to behind the three doors, though we all
sole survivor of the Celestial Court, and she has do. But though we were miles apart, at that
always loved and been loved in Red Fish City. moment I feared that I, too, would be swallow-
Our founder, Hon-eel’s Half-Sister, knew the ed up – that some monster would rise from the
importance of her three gateways: for loving, earth to devour me. I couldn’t think – couldn’t
living and life-giving. She built the city as a move – the world spun around. And I fled from
shrine to Uleria, to build a strong community, her house in Boldhome, and came here.
a different way of living. Her mysteries bound
“Did you know this is the oldest house in Apple
us together. I lived in Senthera’s House, 29 and
Lane, built by King Sartar himself? Forget the
learned how to tend and feed the secret fires of
old Tin Inn, that was built years afterwards, to
love and lust. And I was good at it – I must have
serve those who came to our Temple. King
been very good, or surely I would never have
Sartar knew the Mysteries, he knew how to
been taken on by the Mistress for her
build a new kind of community, just like Hon-
household? I can’t tell you of my duties there –
eel’s Half-Sister did. I think that might be why
my tongue is bound to secrecy, I swore an oath
I love this country, these people. It’s a special
to the Blue Goddess30 that I would keep the
place: it’s making something new. Boldhome
secrets of my clients, and I would fear to break
has the same beauty as Jillaro. I wouldn’t have
it. But maybe I can show you some things I
thought it possible, but there it is. No glamour
learned from her, if you’d be interested?
needed: true beauty shines from within.
“I have never Sevened, though I knew a great
“The apple is one of the oldest symbols of love,
occluding fear the night the Dragon rose and
of fertility, of the Goddess in all her perfect
carried away my Mistress and all her court. I
beauty. Here, take this one; taste its flesh. And
couldn’t be there – she said there would be too
on the next Full Moon night, if I show you how
many golden lords at the New Moon Temple,
to look, you can see red fishes swimming
the kind who can’t look on the likes of me and
through the silvery moonlight between the
stay pure for their ceremonies. I know their
apple trees. This is a sacred place.
sort from the council chambers of Red Fish
City: they think they run the place, though they “Tell me about yourself, [name]. I want to
haven’t the faintest idea how things really know your truths.”

/ x /
29 Senthera is a Lunar immortal, the patroness of courtesans, and a minor heroine of Uleria’s cult.

30The Blue Goddess Thrilla swore her oath to may be another name for Uleria, and the oath may simply have
been a courtesan’s professional obligation, but the Mistress was a lady of great power and influence and it’s
possible there was more going on, more even than Thrilla can remember: Annilla is another Blue Goddess, one
who knows about secrets, and memories, and murder.
Now, I’m not saying that Thrilla was trained as a Blue Moon cult assassin by the High Priestess of the
Red Goddess herself, but I’m not saying she wasn’t. If you see what I mean, and I think you do. She knows that
she loves the land of Sartar, though, and the Royal House of Sartar, and their city of Boldhome. They remind
her so much of home: she really loves them. If anyone could take her to Boldhome, say, and introduce her to
King Sartar’s heir -- wow, that would be amazing! Eye-opening. Mind-expanding. The possibilities are endless...

113
Endnotes
Thrilla is one of the Uleria initiates from Apple
Lane. This story was prompted by a question
from LeRoy Robert Brown on the RuneQuest
Facebook group: “In the Apple Lane section of
the GM book it says Thrilla is a citizen of Red
Fish city. Where is it?” The comments thread
kinda took off, and this is where I ended up.
Special thanks to Keith Nellist, for saying “One
fish, two fish” at just the right time to akindle
my awareness. And to Diana Probst, for the
Siren Song. Stupid bird costume.
I hope it’s obvious that while accompanying
her Mistress, Thrilla visited or lived in Mirin’s
Cross (the base of the Lunar Provincial Govern-
ment), the Acropolis of Jillaro (the beautiful
capital city of Sylila Sultanate) and Boldhome
(the capital city of Sartar). She’s pretty
goddamn cosmopolitan! I wanted to find a way
of mentioning that she’d come south on a
Moonboat, but couldn’t work out how to fit that
in. (It happened, though)
But she still genuinely loves Red Fish City –
“we do things better, there.” And she honestly
has no idea that she was Sevened by the Blue
Moon, a few years back.
114
Postscript
It didn’t cross my mind when I was writing this
fragment that Thrilla might be High Priestess
Enerian Scarlet’s “Get Out Of Dragon Free”
card, but the facts seem to fit...
Enerian, of all people, knows her Lunar myths.
And she’s chosen to adopt an unremarkable
Young Life from the streets of a minor city,
overlooked by everyone but with signs – for
those with eyes to see – of being somehow
haunted by a Moon To Come.
She brings her into her entourage, trains her,
raises her... and then makes sure Thrilla is left
behind when Enerian goes to her death at the
New Moon Temple Dragonrise.
Nothing suspicious there, no siree, move along
quietly now please and pay no attention to the
Things in the moonlight...
“The very idea that a Priestess of the Red
Goddess might organise some kind of
barbarian-assisted suicide-by-Dragon mass-
sacrificial ritual in order to attain her own
transcendent resurrection as some sort of New
Moon Goddess is... madness. That’s the only
word for it. It’s utter lunacy.”