Pavis: Gateway to Adventure - Review

By now, Moon Design has a tradition of producing expensive, but hefty, sourcebooks for Glorantha. The latest offering, Pavis: Gateway to Adventure is no exception. At $60, it's two to three times the price of urban sourcebooks such as the Zobeck Gazetteer or Pirate's Guide to Freeport. But there's clearly a reason for that: those books are 116 and 256 pages, respectively, whereas this one is over 416. And, for that matter, the price compares well with the monumental Ptolus: City by the Spire, which weighs in at 808 pages and $150. (I'm ignoring PDF versions here).

Pavis is billed as the third part of the Sartar line, with the other two parts being Kingdom of Heroes and the Sartar Companion. Like those two books, it is divided between source material and adventures, with about two thirds of the book being taken up by the former. As the third in a line, it isn't intended to be stand-alone, and the nature of Glorantha would probably make it harder to port into other settings than, say, Freeport would be. As such, it's probably fair to say that this is aimed at existing fans, rather than the casual RPG purchaser.

Indeed, that's probably more true with this volume than the previous two, since, it is, of course, an update of the RQ2 supplements Pavis: Threshold to Danger and Big Rubble: the Deadly City from the early 1980s, and has obvious old-timer appeal. The new version is written for HeroQuest 2, although, frankly, that's such a rules-lite system (and most of the setting-specific rules are in Kingdom of Heroes, anyway) that, assuming you're willing to put the work in, the book is almost equally useful to someone playing some version of RuneQuest. Or whatever else your system of choice might be, come to that. (Well, okay, so something like Pathfinder might be a lot of work, but you get the idea).

Continuum 2012

It's been several months since my last post here, and it will probably be at least as long, if not more, before I do so again. (Although, on the other hand, I've got to review the new Pavis book at some point, so who knows?) Anyway, having just returned from Continuum 2012, it's time to post a review of that. Or, if not so much of the con as an entity, of the games I played, and what I thought of them.

To briefly look at the con itself, not only was it enjoyable, but, from my perspective, everything went without a hitch. I have not one complaint about the con, or its organisation. (I know some people moaned about the food, but I had no problems with it... one doesn't expect top notch catering in a student hall, and it was perfectly adequate for my needs. I'm there to game, not eat). So full kudos to everyone for pulling it off. The only negative points you're going to see in this post concern my reactions to individual game systems, and the like.

So, slot by slot through the con, here we go:

Kingdom of the Flamesword

Some of you may recall that, in addition to the Book of Glorious Joy, I was also commissioned by Issaries to write a similar book on Seshnela and the Rokari. That fell through, as ideas of what Seshnela should be changed. In the none-to-distant future, Issaries/Moon Design will be publishing the Guide to Glorantha which will include the new, canonical view of Seshnela, and we both agree that it's important for any release of my material not to clash with that.

There was a hope that it might be published in some dead-tree format, but that's all stalled, and I've had no reply to e-mails. So, since I do have permission from Issaries to post the material free-of-charge to my website (so long as certain legal disclaimers are included), and in the interests of not clashing with the release of official publications, that's what I've done.

If you liked the Book of Glorious Joy, and wondered what I made of Seshnela, you can find my thoughts in Kingdom of the Flamesword. As always, the non-canonical nature of the work must be stressed, and no challenges to copyrights or trademarks are intended - this is just fan material, nothing more and nothing less. It will certainly be contradicted in official works, and, if that matters to you, this won't be of much use. It's also worth noting that at least some of it was written for HQ1, which was the current edition at the time, and may put some people off.

But otherwise - well, hopefully it will be useful to someone.

Update: Kingdom of the Flamesword, updated to the current version of what is now QuestWorlds, is now available for purchase at DriveThru RPG, along with Forged in Blood and Snow, which does the same for the Kingdom of Jonatela.

Loskalmi Canonicity

One of the questions I have seen more than once with regard to the Book of Glorious Joy (well, all right, the only question I've seen more than once) concerns its canonical status. As one questioner put it:

what is the relationship between the Book of Glorious Joy and mainstream Glorantha? Are they letting you define Malkionism in Loskalm?

The simple answer to this question is "no".

But it may deserve a slightly more detailed explanation than that.

Book of Glorious Joy

In case you haven't heard (and its hard to believe that many people reading this haven't), after nine long years, The Book of Glorious Joy has finally been published. Seeing it in print at last is, indeed, both glorious and joyful.

You can buy it, in paperback, hardback, or just as a PDF, here. I don't get royalties, but, obviously, I'd like to encourage you all to do so nonetheless!

This is the book that would have been Lords of the West 3, and the first three chapters of Lords of the West 1: Heroes of Malkion added at the beginning for good measure, and in order to set the scene. It primarily serves as an overview of the magical and idealistic Kingdom of Loskalm, one of whose valiant wizard-knights you can see riding through perilous lands in the superb cover by Jon Hodgson.

I'm not sure there's much more to say here about the book that I haven't said already, so I'll gloss over that. I will say that I actually don't know what has happened to Lords of the West 2: Kingdom of the Flamesword, which would have covered Seshnela and the Rokari in the same way as BoGJ covers Loskalm, and would have also included the full write-ups for the more widespread saints and wizardry schools from LotW1. The last I heard it was still due to be published - but not in a single standalone volume - but more recent attempts at communicating with the publishers have not been successful, so that may no longer be the case.

Commoner Cults of Jonatela

So, in my last post I discussed the reasoning behind the rule mechanics I used for Jonating commoner caste magic in the recent piece at my home page. As I said then, I can think of two other questions the piece might have raised in the minds of readers, and I'll discuss them now.

To begin with, if the Elmoi are supposed to represent a denuded form of Ernalda worship, and they really are theistic, which gods are we talking about here? I see no reason to stay being mysterious about that, and people might wonder, so that's something I can quickly deal with. It should be said, though, that I think it's more important that the cults are distinct, than whether or not the beings behind them are, so I don't think it really matters much. Which means that anyone else's interpretation is as good as mine - if I thought it was important, and made a meaningful difference, I'd have put it in the article, not here.

At any rate, Frona is, I think, fairly clearly some sort of aspect of Ernalda the Great Goddess. She's mentioned as a grain goddess in RQ3, and Thunder Rebels reinforces that the grain goddess cults are different ways of worshipping the great earth mother. Frona, clearly, is the mother goddess and land goddess for Fronela as a whole, and will have her own, regular, theistic cult elsewhere.

Uryana and Vilecha are also aspects of Ernalda, and remember, we're told in Genertela: CotHW that the Jonating commoners worship Ernalda as their main goddess, so it makes sense that she gets the key roles. I don't think of Vilecha as a Chalana Arroy, incidentally, because she's just not powerful enough.

The Magic of Malkioni Commoners

Yes, it's been several months since I've posted here. Not that I haven't been busy writing in the meantime, of course. For one, I have managed to write weekly posts at my mammalogical blog, Synapsida - and those do require quite a lot of preparation. There have been many other bits of writing besides, some of which may eventually appear somewhere for public perusal. But, on the Gloranthan front, I have also continued to write some fan material on Jonatela - what would have been LotW4, had the series not been cancelled.

The latest instalment has taken a while to appear, because its quite a big one - ten new cults, in fact. The next will focus on the wizardry schools and that, too, may take a while because of its complexity (I predict early September). But I think the latest one will likely raise a few questions that I think its worth answering here, rather than in the more formal outlet of the web page itself. The questions are:

1. Why did I treat the commoner caste cults as I did?
2. What, if anything, is their relationship to the Orlanth cults?
3. Why did I even bother?

Taking the first question first, we have to go all the way back to the days of RuneQuest 3. That was the first rules edition to address Malkioni magic in general, or Jonating magic in particular. The RQ3 publication Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars says, in the Players Book, that about 75% of Jonatings follow the Orlanth pantheon and gain "the benefits of a barbarian initiate", while the remainder follow the Malkioni religion and receive, unless they are professional wizardry adepts, some limited sorcery magic. There is no indication that - priests and adepts aside - this is anything other than random. That is, parts of Jonatela are Orlanthi, with all the magic that implies, and parts are Malkioni, with all the implications of that.