#sartar

Wind Lords

After completing Pegasus Plateau, our Glorantha group may have spun off the whole Lochaim successor issue and now we're setting up a whole Much Ado About Nothing between the Windlords Lonela, Daughter of Kalleva and Elmal, Son of Saronil, leaders from rival clans within the Lochaim who absolutely hate each other.

Hiya there, I moved to aspiring-awesomeness (https://aspiring-awesomeness.tumblr.com/) :D

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Today is world beard day!

When I first started digging into RuneQuest a couple years ago, I learned that the reputation of the Pavis: Threshold to Danger box set (and its companion, The Big Rubble – more on that tomorrow) verges on the legendary.

Pavis is the major city in the region of Prax. Its history starts centuries ago, when the God Learners founded the city of Robcradle on the site. Giants living in the Rockwood Mountains far to the north would send their infants down the Zora Fel river in cradles filled with powerful magic, which the God Learners waylaid and plundered at Catchcradle Island. The giants naturally took exception to this and laid waste to Robcradle, founding their own massive city on the site. It was later re-conquered by Pavis, who renamed it in his own honor. The original city changed hands through war many times over the ensuing years, until it was left a ruin, now known as the Big Rubble. Eventually, Dorasar, an exile from the kingdom of Sartar, founded New Pavis outside the walls of the original city. When the Lunar Empire conquered Prax, they also seized Pavis and now use the city as the center of their civilizing influence.

This rich history, and the mix of competing cultures and religions left in its wake, is the backdrop for the majority of RuneQuest’s second edition and has, in some form, been included in most subsequent editions of the game. The box features a detailed, building-by-building guide, numerous important political figures and the classic scenario The Cradle, in which PCs must defend the first giant cradle sent downriver in 700 years. The adventure became so big it wound up crowding out two other scenarios listed on the back of the box. That necessitated Chaosium’s release of Big Rubble later in 1983.

Cults of Prax, by Steve Perrin and Greg Stafford, is a book of deities and, since the RuneQuest system and the world of Glorantha are both intimately connected to the many religions contained within, it is one of the game’s most important books. Prax is both a melting pot and the site of a clash of cultures on an epic scale, so the gods detailed in the book are a cross-section of deities found throughout Glorantha. Several pantheons – those of the native nomad tribes, the invading Lunar Empire, the neighboring Kingdom of Sartar, the city of Pavis and more – all compete for influence in the region. If you play RuneQuest, you will know the names of gods like Orlanth, Humakt, Storm Bull, the Seven Mothers, Lhankor Mhy and Yelmalio very, very well.

Unlike D&D, which features endless deities but few doctrines that matter in terms of the game’s mechanics, the cults are RuneQuest’s foundation. Membership in one of more cults determines not just a character’s culture and beliefs, but many also function as a more organic sort of character class.

In D&D, a book like this would only be of use to Clerics and Paladins, and probably only in expanding the available spells. In RuneQuest, religion IS roleplaying – Cults of Prax is a handbook for how all characters (player and non-player) act, both with members of their own cults and outsiders. Learning these customs and how to navigate them is the soul of the game.