French-Language RuneQuest Podcast

I believe I havenʼt mentioned it yet, but myself and fellow Gloranthaphile Dasfynx have started a French-language podcast about RuneQuest and the world of Glorantha, called Runecast.

There are quite a few episodes online already, with a significant variety in the topics weʼve addressed.

RPG A Day 16–17

Day 16 — Quick To Learn

In my opinion, a role-playing game that is quick to learn is one in which there aren’t many different subsets of rules. Or maybe there are, but there is a single, overlying engine that lets you start playing, and then you needn’t refer to the rest of the rules until you have reached the particular situation that requires looking up said rules. In this way of looking at things, all BRP-based TTRPGs are ‘quick to learn’.

If we want to move further towards simplicity on the simple vs complex axis, however, there are many TTRPGs that are even quicker to learn.

Tunnels & Trolls has been my favourite go-to system for one-shots or to introduce newbies to TTRPGs for a long time. My only complaint is that it has two different unrelated engines, one for combat, one for non-combat actions, which I find inelegant.

Maléfices is even simpler: you have to roll 1D20 under a given characteristic (of which there are only five) to succeed in an action. Except perhaps for diceless systems, I don’t think there is anything quicker to learn.

Day 17 — an Engaging RPG Community

With the demise of Google+ and the decline of the OSR community, I would say that currently the online British RPG community is the most engaging. There are many cordial Discord servers (GROGPOD, The Mitchester Arms...), several excellent podcasts (Blasphemous Tomes, Frankenstein’s RPG, The Grognard Files, Orlanth Rex’s Gaming Vexes, What Would the Smart Party Do?), each with its own little idiosyncratic community, and now that Twitter has become a haven for fаѕсіѕtѕ and spreaders of fake news, we have all migrated to Bluesky where everybody is super friendly.

There also many online conventions, the most notable of which is the virtual GROGMEET.

Arkat Podcast

Arkat is one of my favourite figures from the Gloranthan legendarium... probably even my favourite one, as he epitomises everything that sets Glorantha apart from all the other vanilla fantasy worlds: there is no ‘good’, no ‘evil’, but an ‘us versus them’ attitude, and player characters have access to heroquesting, i.e., the capacity to explore past myths in order to modify them or to gain personal power from that kind of deep spiritual/religious interaction.

Well, the God Learners podcast have just made available their latest podcast and it is a whopping 67 minutes devoted to our beloved bad-tempered hero.

5-Year RuneQuest Campaign Podcast

I have played an online RuneQuest campaign game set in Sartar for five years (I reckon it must be the second-longest I’ve ever played). We played approximately every fortnight; you can imagine the sheer number of episodes the campaign entailed!

The game started with RQ2 on Roll20, then moved on to the RQG rules (and Foundry) as soon as they were made available, and ended up with a hybrid RQG-OpenQuest ruleset, with the occasional “Runes in the Dark” homebrew for our (many) heists. 

Despite the many dangers, our party of five remained the same during the duration of the campaign... I was the only one to transition from a first character, killed in a single blow, er sting, by a Chaos wasp who rolled a crit in his head, to a second one, so we all ended up with Rune-level characters. The whole zero-to-hero shebang.

Our GM extraordinaire, Steve, has devoted an episode of his Orlanth Rex’s Gaming Vexes podcast to reminiscing about salient events, favourite rules changes, character arc vs story arc, and whatnot, from these five glorious years of gaming. Oh, and did I mention Chaos wasps?

Play

Culbrea after the Dragonrise

The following piece of news is from the latest episode of the God Learners podcast.

A new official supplement, Culbrea after the Dragonrise, is in the works! The tribe and its territory will be presented in Starter Set-style simplicity as a setting for a Sartarite campaign The authors have described it as a kind of sandbox with a few scenarios that open up to wider adventures.

A New Gaming Podcast

Steve's profile picture on twitter...

My online RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha gamemaster, Steve aka Orlanth Rex, has taken advantage of the lockdown period to start a role-playing games podcast. His main idea is to capture the thoughts and the afterthoughts that occur to him during or after our fortnightly online games; as he explains in his introduction, online sessions are much shorter than face-to-face ones and usually get to the point (i.e., gaming) so there’s no time left to discuss meta-gaming stuff.

Note that we do tend to discuss what happened during the adventures on Twitter with Steve and the other players, both publicly and via private messages, but I reckon the aim of the podcast is really to take a back seat of sorts and mull over this little obsessive hobby of ours.

The first episode is available here, anyways, if you are interested in such matters (and you probably are, if you’re reading this).

Games featured in Episode One:

• RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha
• D&D 5th edition
• Liminal
• Würm - The Ice Age Roleplaying Game
• Swords & Wizardry
• The Fall of Delta Green
• Old-School Essentials

[podcast] Gaming as Mythic Exploration

This podcast about 'Gaming as Mythic Exploration' is from a session at Gen Con (2014, I do not know why it has only resurfaced now) that had assembled an incredible panel: Greg Stafford, Ken Hite, and Lillian Cohen-Moore. These are all great panellists, great game designers, but oh my God is Greg good. I would say this podcast reminds us yet again why we are such big fans of his :-)

The panellists talk about myth, legend, their place in society, in our collective psyche, and how to translate that at the gaming table and/or through game design. It's pure gold.

For those who do not like to listen to podcasts, there is also a full transcript; both podcast and transcript are available here.

Interview with Rob Heinsoo & Jonathan Tweet

I do not mention podcasts very often on this blog, but the latest Tableplay Podcast with Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet gives a lot of insight into the creation process behind their 13th Age in Glorantha role-playing game, and so it is almost compulsory listening for all Gloranthan fans out there.

You can find it here.

Return of the Great Old Ones (cont'd)

Now another podcast sheds more light on the whole Chaosium affair.

Apparently, the change in management was slightly less rosy than the fairy tale that has circulated on social media...
Sandy, quite candidly, tells it all in the podcast: after Lynn Willis (the majority shareholder of Chaosium) passed away, his shares were divided amongst the surviving members of the board of directors: Charlie, Greg, and Sandy. All of a sudden, Charlie and Greg ended up having exactly the same share, and Sandy became the kingmaker, so he sort of organised a coup to oust Charlie because he considered that the latest CoC-related Kickstarters had not been well managed. As a result, Charlie and his relatives have all left (his shares will be bought by Greg and Sandy); all the other employees have remained on board.

Future Chaosium plans as revealed by Sandy:
 - Manage the CoC Kickstarter failings
 - more Basic Role-Playing books (woot!)
 - Keep the Chaosium fiction line strong

Gloranthan Podcasts Galore

I usually do not blog about podcasts. Not that I don't like them; on the contrary; when the recording has been done properly and the sound is nice, I really enjoy them. It's also nice to discover the real voice of the authors of our industry/hobby. It's simply that I usually don't have the time to listen to a whole podcast episode in a single session, and I hate it when I have to find at what exact point I had interrupted it. However, since I am on holidays, I have the luxury to listen to podcasts — and to blog about them.

1) The Iconic Podcast is a podcast that is normally 100% devoted to 13th Age. Now, because of the upcoming 13th Age in Glorantha product, they have recently made available a 'Gloranthan special' podcast. At almost 50 minutes, it is longer than usual and just chock-full of interesting information for us Gloranthan fans, especially since there haven't been any Gloranthan panels at cons for a long time (but fear not, the con season is about to start, and your faithful sleuth will be investigating about the next releases).

Anyway, episode B17 of The Iconic Podcast has all the latest information about Moon Design's projects, upcoming Gloranthan products by other publishers, and even insight about future episodes of the Prince of Sartar web-comic.

2) Moon Design have started their very own podcast. It's called Tales of Mythic Adventure, and it is available for free on iTunes. Episode 1 is already available. Here are the topics tackled:

 - Presentation of MOB and of what he's done in the past (most famously Sun County, and also the 'MGF' (Maximum Game Fun) fast-play rules, which had been published in a fanzine, and which are apparently going to be re-released later this year)
 - Killing eastern grey kangaroos in the state of Victoria
 - Presentation of Jeff and of Moon Design
 - Reminiscences about Tales of the Reaching Moon and Herschell Gordon Lewis' films
 - Upcoming projects/products:
    - Apparently the White Bear Red Moon board game will see a reprint
    - The Gods' War (Sandy's new board game, which yours truly playtested last year) should be Kickstarted this year
 - 'Crunch' getting in the way of GM'ing

All in all, this podcast is, er, quite erratic in its conduction and a good glimpse into what convention panels feel like :-)

13th Age in Glorantha Interview Podcast

Idle Red Hands is a blog that features podcasts on various gaming-related issues.

Episode 171 is titled ‘Interview: 13th Age in Glorantha’; the Idle Red Hands team interview Rob Heinsoo & Jeff Richard, who are currently managing a Kickstarter project called 13th Age in Glorantha [but you already know this if you read my blog...]

The podcast of the interview is available here.
Its duration is 1hr 33min 24s, which is quite long, so read on if you don't have the time to listen to it.

Highlights of the interview
As we already know, 13th Age in Glorantha (13G) is going to be set in 1627-28, during the Hero Wars. The player characters will be heroes embarking on heroquests (called "mythcrawls") to save the world from Chaos. Apparently, at the core of 13G will be the fact that PCs from various conflicting backgrounds need to co-operate, with the common goal of defeating Chaos and/or the Lunar Empire†, whilst having to overcome their differences at the same time.

Since the 'Uz' stretch goal has been reached, there will be Uz character classes, and since heroquests will strongly feature in the game, all-new myths centred on Uz and Wonderhome will be added to 13G.

One way the Uz might be played (this is still being playtested) is that a troll character starts as a trollkin, then at around 4th level it gets eaten by a dark troll, and then you play the dark troll who's eaten your trollkin...

Interesting part @ 37min 30s: “What's in for us [hardcore Gloranthan fans]?”

☞ Chiefly, “play a D20 system game and like it”

☞ The “One Unique Thing” mechanism of 13th Age will basically enable players to tell the GM in what direction they want the campaign to go

Icons
Rob says that Gloranthan icons will be implemented differently to the Dragon Empire, without giving much further detail, except that there will be clearer explanations for the various results of the icon relationship die roll.

Magic
That was an interesting question from the hosts, who stressed the huge difference between D&D- and RQ-type magic. Unfortunately, Rob flatly said that 13G Magic would be 13th Age magic, period, and that they wouldn't try and implement Glorantha-style magic, except for the fact that your magic will be a combination of who you worship and what your class is. Essentially, the system remains 13th Age.
Anyway, since 13G will focus on Dragon Pass and the Holy Country, and not the West, there won't be many wizards. On the other hand, sorcerers will probably feature prominently.

Future Books?
At the moment Jeff & Rob have two adventure packs in mind:

☞ The Upland Marsh, ruled by Delecti the Necromancer

☞ Snakepipe Hollow, a dungeon crawl with mythic elements


PS
† Can someone please tell Rob that the Red Goddess is not a Chaos goddess, it's more complex than that...