#jonstown compendium

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.

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.