#Runequest

[kleioscanvas]

Beware the Reaching Moon

[oldschoolfrp]

Preparing portions of potions and poisons (City of Lei Tabor, Judges Guild, 1980)

[aaronsrpgs]

"Ancient World Fantasy" Reading List

(A little context to start. If you just want book recs, scroll on down to the first image.)

As I’ve been getting into RuneQuest (Wikipedia link), one striking component of the culture and community surrounding the game is that they’re very into the lore of its fictional world, Glorantha. I’m saying this as a comparison to a game like D&D, where the game is spread across tons of settings with no real sense of obligation to keep things in line with earlier editions.

Glorantha’s canon and worldbuilding has been going on since it was published in 1978 without, as far as I can tell, any big reboots. Which means that, unlike D&D, where people are bringing in all kinds of influences and doing direct adaptions of Jane Austen books and whatever, the RuneQuest game remains pretty tightly tied to the original setting. (There have been some exceptions. But not many!)

But since I run games for people who have ADHD or aren’t interested in studying up, I’ve been looking at all kinds of inspiration to drop into the game. Here are 20 novels that are roughly “ancient world” or “Bronze Age” like RuneQuest and deal with people interacting with strange gods, tight communities, and a world without fast overland travel or transferal of information.

I’m presenting them alphabetically by author’s last name.

The Brazen Gambit, Cinnabar Shadows, The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King by Lynn Abbey

I'm sorry for starting this post off with licensed RPG novels, but these are good! And I don't mean "good for licensed RPG novels." I've read tons of them, and most are so bad! But these are actually fun. Good character development in a sword-and-sorcery world. It's also an ecological apocalypse world, with godlike beings oppressing common folks, leading to a lack of technological advancement and knowledge of the past.

The Long Ships by Frans G. Bentsson

Written in the 1940s as a series of novellas, these stories take you on a tour of the Viking-era world, from Europe to the Middle East and beyond. Like a bunch of books on this list, this places them post-Bronze Age, so they're not officially "ancient world." But it gives a big spread of cultures, from the more clan-based Vikings to the bustling metropolises of Turkey. And it doesn't place any of them on any kind of linear advancement scale or whatever other gross way people "rate" cultures.

Tales of Nevèrÿon and Neveryóna by Samuel R. Delany

The master of weird sci-fi and gay historical novels, Chip Delany also wrote a fantasy epic. And it rules! Set on pre-historical(ish) Earth, these books describe the stories that maybe inform the myths we tell today? Dragons and slave revolts! A sort of "What if Game of Thrones was good?" series. Lots of good stuff about how people learn and how understanding expands.

I'm not listing the third book only because it's also a historical look at New York during the AIDS epidemic. It's an amazing book! But it strays from the "ancient world" aesthetic.

Baudolino by Umberto Eco

Another novel expressly set after the Bronze Age (this one starts in the 12th century). BUT it's about Medieval people's interaction with the knowledge they inherited from the past, specifically the myth of Prester John and the works of Herodotus.

I think I keep putting books like this on the list because roleplaying in a fantastical ancient world is not too far off from how Medieval people might have worshipped and referenced works from ancient Rome and non-European places.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James

One of our best living writers! These are fantasy novels expressly set in a fantastical version of ancient/Medieval Africa. The books explore the same events from multiple points of view and are full of cool magic, awesome spirit combat, and a vast number of places and cultures that actively deconstructs most games's portrayal of fantasy Africa as a homogeneous place.

The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth

I think Kingsnorth has been outted as a sort of eco-fascist? I totally believe it, so feel free to skip this one. It's a historical novel set in England in 1066, as the Normans invade from France. It's written in a faux Middle English language and focuses on the lower classes and how they try to resist the invasion. A good reminder that "Medieval culture" (and especially the Renaissance as a time that "culture advanced") is often based on certain classes of society, such as rich people and/or men.

Iceland's Bell by Halldór Laxness

Speaking of how class intersects with technological advancement, this book is set in the 18th century, but it focuses on Iceland at a time when it was ruled by Denmark, and the lower classes there were under an enforced poverty. It's a book about how a rich Icelander was trying to recover the stories of his people in order to create a sense of national identity and resistance. But it's also a story about how a destitute man acts like a total weirdo when he's not allowed to fish in his own waters and is cut off from understanding his place in history.

The Raven Tower by Anne Leckie

A big part of RuneQuest is people interacting with and enacting their gods. That's what this book is about! And it's about the strange vertigo that comes to people when they try to interact with the impossible timelines that gods exist on. Very good stuff.

Night's Master and Death's Master by Tanith Lee

Ostensibly set on Earth back when it was flat and demons roamed the world, which is basically RuneQuest. Sort of like a series of hornier, gay bibles? With lots of gender fuckery, fun sex, and cool monsters.

Circe by Madeline Miller

The story of the witch from The Odyssey, told from her point of view. Beautiful prose, tragic and beautiful characters, and a great share of mythical strangeness. Perfect if you want to learn how to run NPCs that are adversaries without being shallowly evil.

Ronia, the Robber's Daughter by Astrid Lindgren

Semi-Medieval again, but low class and vague enough that it could exist throughout ancient history. The daughter of a robber grows up in a tower full of robbers and generally has a wonderful time. Lots of weird monsters live in the woods, and there's a great starcrossed romance with someone from a rival robber gang. Perfect inspiration if you're running some cattle-raiding runs in RuneQuest; this is how to make robbers fun and sympathetic.

Read the book, watch the 1984 Swedish movie (which includes a great comedic scene of full-frontal dudity), and then watch the Studio Ghibli series.

A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar

Set in a world of pepper farmers and religious fanatics who worship a mysterious inscribed stone, these books do a great job of showing how people might interact with religion, rival cults, and mystery rites. It also portrays literacy and learning to read in places where it's gated behind social gatekeeping. And once again, the prose is beautiful.

The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

The first African novel published in English outside of Africa, The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a funny, hallucinogenic story about getting drunk, stumbling through weird landscapes, and encountering fantastical spirits and people.

Tutuola also wrote My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the inspiration for the famous(?) David Byrne/Brian Eno album. I haven't read it yet, but I'm keeping an eye out!

The Green Pearl by Jack Vance

This is a sequel to Lyonesse, which I haven't read because I love staring in the middle of things. Set around a mythical British Isles when Atlantis was still above the sea and part of the group of islands. Some great wizard shit, warring clans, romance, and a wizard whose name is fucking Shimrod (in case you need more convincing).

Those are my 20 novel recommendations! I'm gonna come back to add some nonfiction, comics, and myth resources for running games in fantastical ancient worlds. You can read SpeedRune, my ancient fantasy game, here.

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played RUNEQUEST ?

By Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson, and Warren James

The grand daddy of d% based RPGs, RuneQuest is a fantasy role-playing set in Greg Stafford's original fantasy setting of Glorantha and the game that would serve as the basis for Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying system that powers games such as Call of Cthulhu and King Arthur Pendragon.

Glorantha is a bronze age setting that operates on mythic logic: the world is still young, since time only began relatively recently as a result of a cataclysmic theomachy, and many of the founding myths that shape the world are not just myths but the literal truth. The Hero Wars time period of at least the first and second editions of the game was centered largely on the region of Dragon Pass, which also appeared in the cool as hell video game King of Dragon Pass.

As a game RuneQuest is clearly a reaction to early Dungeons & Dragons in many ways: characters advance organically by training or learning skills through use, magic isn't arbitrarily restricted by "class," and combat is notably less abstract and more blow-by-blow than in D&D. There is also an attempt to integrate the setting very strongly with the mechanics, aptly demonstrated by the various organizations and cults characters can join to unlock new avenues of advancement.

[scribblingsorsomething]

Runequest duck doodles.

[geekynerfherder]

Showcasing art from some of my favourite artists, and those that have attracted my attention, in the field of visual arts, including vintage; pulp; pop culture; books and comics; concert posters; fantastical and imaginative realism; classical; contemporary; new contemporary; pop surrealism; conceptual and illustration.

The art of Ossi Hiekkala.

[vintagerpg]

The cover and the title of this book — The Red Book of Magic (2020) — is perhaps a bit misleading, implying to my eye that it focuses entirely on the magic of the red moon and the Lunar Empire. The name actually refers to an in-universe work that predates the Red Goddess (Glorantha is a confusing place sometimes). So instead of a collection of Lunar magic, this book is actually, like the Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic for Call of Cthulhu, a collection of all the spells ever published for RuneQuest. That’s actually a good deal handier than a handbook dedicated Lunar magic!

This is not so simple an undertaking as you might expect. There are…well, RuneQuest’s magic has changed a lot across its editions. Low practical, practical magic, called Battle Magic in RQ2 is called Spirit Magic here — everyone has some potential access to it and it mostly resembles the buff and debuff spells from D&D. The modern RQ system basically uses the RQ3 version of Spirit Magic.

Rune Magic is more complicated (and far more powerful)! This used to be tied to the cults and gods and was a real pain in the butt (which made a certain sense, considering its potential power level) but for this edition, the system has been completely reworked, tying Rune Magic to a character’s personal (percentile) alignment to given Runes. This is simpler, more flexible and, for this book, I imagine required quite a lot of conversion work.

There is magic stuff that isn’t in here (Shamanism lacks spells, while Sorcery’s spells are open ended acts of improvisation — and it’s absence is slightly ironic, because I think in the lore, the Red Book was written by a sorcerer), and I would like a book or two on them, for as the game’s definitive book on Rune and Spirit Magic, it is, well, definitive! Lots of very nice art, too.

[petterwass]

Runequest really said that Trans women are women and can join exclusively female priesthoods as long as they are bred first

(Priestesses of Ernalda must have born a healthy child to assume office)

So you know what to do...

[skunts-own-truth]

King of Dragon Pass is one of those games where I’m like “yeah, I know what I’m doing! I can run a clan of Orlanthi just fine,” and then comes the raging Stormbull cultist who cuts down 3 of my thanes to get at the guy I let join my clan… then come the dragonnewts that everyone wants me to chase away, but I leave alone because I wanna see what they get up to, and then come the fucking horse people and now my cattle are all gone and the farmers are pissed at me for trying to raid too much to get my cattle back, and ooooh boy. It’s all down hill from here, but at least the ducks of Dragon Pass all love me.

[commander-ledi]

how i won runequest, aka the saga of the penis tomes

like decade ago (both in real life, and in-game), our team was exploring tunnels underneath Pavis. we happened to stumble into a small library. my character found 20 blank books, and as a mature adult man, he filled every single of them with drawings of penises at various states of arousal, and hid the books among real books.

later it turned out that this library belonged to the local lunar leaders who were pulling strings behind the curtains. couple years later our team kicked lunars out of the city, and it turns out that they had taken all the books from the secret library as they left.

fast forward to our last two sessions. we are in all out war against lunars, and behind the scenes Jar-Eel reached out to us to inform that Red Emperor has got little too enthusiastic with dabbling with chaos magic to put it lightly, and she, and every lunar who is not busy committing atrocities to further the grips of chaos gods on the heart of the empire wants him off the throne. Nobody can really do anything, but outsiders with no ties to the religions could. in other words, we have to kill him.

we discussed the terms of this agreement, and the only demand my character made, is that Jar-Eel had to tell me the fate of the penis books.

the next time we met, she told what happened to the books. she was able to tell only the fate of 6 of the books, but honestly... it was better than anything i could have ever hoped for.

they ended up in the emperor's palace, and one of his closest advisors had mistakenly grabbed a penis book off shelf, and brought it with him into an important meeting, and he opened it it, and everyone saw the penises. this caused a massive scandal, which resulted all the elite lunar guard to have to look through every single book in the palace to ensure that this will happen never again. this also naturally caused security concerns, because nobody could figure out how 6 books filled with penis drawings had ended up in the palace.

Jar-Eel said that on hindsight it should have been obvious where the books came from (every time important lunars are targeted by "attack" that is annoying, childish, but completely harmless, our team is always behind it. our favorite hobby is to annoy important people without actually doing something that breaks any rules, or can be considered as attack)

[zigmenthotep]

I hope all the people requesting that I cover RuneQuest understand that if I do I will be focusing almost entirely on the fact that anthropomorphic ducks are a canonical part of the setting.

[kleioscanvas]

"Nor will we overlook Eserela, that sweet woman who was hard where Teelo Estara was soft, cruel where She was kind, and, most importantly, kind where She was cruel."

-From Greg Stafford's "Lives of Sedenya", describing the lovers of the Red Goddess before her ascension into the Middle Air.

[oldschoolfrp]

Froduck of the Shire (Jennell Jaquays, The Space Gamer 21, Metagaming, Jan/Feb 1979)

[aaronsrpgs]

The SpeedRune Master Post

Click here for the base game!

It's free.

Make a character in minutes. The rules are simple and fast.

Use strange and powerful runes in a fantastical ancient world.

Go adventure, then return to support your community in downtime.

Amazing art by A. Degen.

Click here for the first supplement, The Ironheart Wars!

A full campaign and new character options.

Meet furry ironmongers and talking ducks.

Expanded rules for mass battles.

New downtime options for marrying your frenemy and getting drunk on fermented fruits dredged up from the swamp by duck bog mummies.

Maybe become a god?

Inspired by Morrowind.

Click here for the latest supplement, The Night Queen's Nuptials!

Another full campaign! More character options!

Meet elfs that grow on trees and dwarfs that hatch from geodes.

Stop a queen of the underworld from marrying a human! ...or marry her yourself?

Go on a demon parade, sneak into hell, find human essence stored in urns.

Amazing art by Charlotte Laskowski!

Inspired by Tanith Lee's Tales of the Flat Earth series.

Wait, there's more.

A free lifepath system previewed from the next supplement.

A big list of recommended reading for ancient world fantasy.

[silver-leaf-girl]

A commission I did for a Glorantha book, part of the Jonstown Compendium of fan work.

For those not familiar with Glorantha (you might know it as the setting for King of Dragon Pass), it's a bronze-age fantasy setting written by Greg Stafford, an anthropologist. There's some bits that are a bit 'hmmm', but overall - it's a fresh and enthralling take on the fantasy genre, driven by a genuine interest in how ritual works in Bronze Age societies (I've heard it described as 'as Tolkien was to linguistics, Stafford was to mythology).

The paintings here intend to showcase one of the rituals in question, with a hero being anointed and girded to assume a mythic role (specifically Humakt, deity of swords and truth and death!)- around her, her masked clan-members prepare her for her transit into the mythic realm, while above her, Humakt himself wields/blesses the blade that she takes up. The second painting was for the back cover - it shows a devotee of Eurmal, trickster and storyteller, entertaining a couple of children and inducting them into the clan's mythic cycle, while their hunting cat (an alynx - Gloranthan cultures tend to favour cats where Earth ones would dogs) looks on.

Both paintings were done in gouache, early in the pandemic. I wanted to capture a sense of genuine mystery and weird spiritual power, and also to present a female Humakti in a role that many character artists have usually shown a traditional male warriors. It's also one of my (too rare! I should get back to this!) experiments with light and darkness in a painting.

[leeoconnor]

This is Red-Quill, former swamp bandit turned freedom fighter against the nefarious Lunar Empire, who is aided by his devotion to the god of thunder!

So I got to draw some duck-men. It was hilarious. It was a blast. They're from the fantasy world of Glorantha and you can play as them (or alongside them) in the RuneQuest TT RPG.

Here, a duck shaman is sending out her spirit to go and met her mentors’ spirits in the spirit world. Shaman business. Her look is actually based on a real duck breed. (I was thrilled endlessly that all of these fantasy ducks are based on real-world duck breeds.) The big one with the snout is a troll shaman. Also pictured: her pet bullfrog and the sculptures of it that she’s made, because she loves it so much.

So these aren’t furries or anything, they’re more realistic versions of whimsical, hissing cartoon ducks like Marvel’s Howard the Duck or Disney’s Donald Duck. They’re sword and sorcery duck people! More precisely, they’re part of the accepted and generally very well-loved fantasy setting called Glorantha. You will know about Glorantha in a roundabout way I suspect… The Elder Scrolls game Morrowind lovingly ripped off a bunch of it and it was the setting for the indie game legend King of Dragon Pass and its successors. The most popular way for people to experience Glorantha over the years though has probably been the table-top role-playing game RuneQuest.

Here, a healer initiate of the goddess of mercy Chalana Arroy, tending to some fellow ducks. (The seated guy in the middle with the shoulder bandage is supposed to look like a mandarin duck, I had to tone him down though, otherwise his bright colours would have stolen the show.) 

So Runequest has a very lovely new edition that came out a while ago. It has a unique appeal in that it’s an RPG that lets you play out mythology. Well, kinda. Being a mythology nerd (I have an in-progress Fionn Mac Cumhaill graphic novel as proof) I was powerless to resist. RuneQuest’s storied publisher Chaosium (they of the Call of Cthulhu RPG) run a community content programme for RuneQuest called the Jonstown Compendium (named after a big library in the setting of Glorantha) where people can publish their own adventures and sourcebooks as PDFs via DriveThruRPG and popular titles then become Print-on-Demand books.

A put-upon member of duck nobility here, she’s a big deal for the duck people, but sadly the humans nearby don’t take her seriously.  The crosses aren’t crucifixes, they’re the rune of death, which is supposed to look like a simplified sword. The runes that look like Ys are the truth rune. These are the runes of her god, Humakt, GOD OF DEATH. And sword fights. The duck people love the god of death. *Falls off chair*

You can buy the book with these guys in as either a PDF or a hardcopy, it’s called ‘Duckpac’ and is from Drew Baker, Neil Gibson and friends at Legion Games. (The title of the book is a bit of a pun on an old RuneQuest book about trolls, which was called ‘Trollpak‘.) This book is for you if you want to play as a fully-realised duck person, with duck-person things to think about, based on a history, genealogy and mythology of duck-people. Yes, really! It’s pretty incredible.

Runequest has a reputation online for being ‘the game with silly duck people in’, which is entirely justified, they’re like the cute mascots of the whole deal. The story goes that back in the late seventies, one of the gang of friends who help make the game world was a Carl Barks Donald Duck comic strip fan, resulting in a town called Duck Point existing on the map. There’s another story that someone involved was making lead miniatures of Carl Barks style Conan the Barbian gag ducks and he needed a game to attach them to so it didn’t look like a straight Disney rip-off. Stories real and apocryphal abound. There’s never been an official book about ducks (or the ‘durulz’ as they call themselves) for the RuneQuest game so this one’s here for you and has background, characters, locations, adventures and more.

A scarred duck boatman (boatduck?) and diver, initiate of a river god, on his barge, wondering what the heck you’re doing paddling about in his river.

The bit of decorated driftwood in the background above is his effigy of his god. I made him look like a Bronze Age version of a swimming athlete, like Duncan Goodhew with rustic trunks and a swimming hat. I was passed a reference photo of an upright duck (who looked amazing), so this was an upright composition, in a tall portrait frame.

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Here’s a little vid of me flipping through the lovely hardback print version of the book. This is the first print volume and then there’ll be another volume of solo and group adventures.

That old love of the UK comics scene Mr. John Freeman even saw this madness and featured it on his Down The Tubes site here, Which Was Nice.

Oh and as if you above verbiage wasn’t enough proof, you can check my RuneQuest nerd chops by looking at my very own RuneQuest campaign log page and wiki here, if you fancy. It’s got more drawings on there!