What's Glorantha?

The Guide to Glorantha
by Greg Stafford and Jeff Richard
Chaosium, 800 pages, $50 (pdf)

Glorantha is a made-up world, like Tolkien's Middle-Earth. It was initially devised by Greg Stafford, who then used it as a board game setting in the 1970s, and then again as a role-playing game setting after Dungeons and Dragons swept through the nerd world. In the following decades, Stafford colllaborated with his players and other friends to fill out the world of Glorantha, mostly in published ssourcebooks for various iterations of the Runequest RPG, but also in a novel, and in the computer game King of Dragon Pass. Contributors to Glorantha have included Sandy Peterson, creator of Call of Cthulhu, and Robin D. Laws. As a sort of capstone of world-building, Glorantha got its own massive two-volume encyclopedia in the 2010s, the Guide to Glorantha.

To return to the Middle-Earth comparison, there are two things that make Glorantha rather different. First, at a high level, it's built on an obsession with comparative mythology in the same way that Middle-Earth is built on an obsession with constructed languages and a Christian view of old English mythology. Glorantha literalizes the thinking of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, such that the mythic is not just psychologically real, but a source of physical and political power. There's even in-world commentary on Campbell's idea of the Monomyth: the culture that studies world mythology and devises a synthesis then uses their synthesis as a means of imperial power. The second thing that makes Glorantha different from Middle-Earth is that it's stuffed full of low-level goofy things that clearly started out as in-game jokes and were then worked into the lore more or less seriously. For example, there's a wide and arid land inhabited by nomadic tribes of herdsman: a group that rides and herds bison, one that manages herds of impalas, another one for llamas, and one for antelope, but also a tribe of intelligent humanoid tapirs that drive herds of humans possessing only bovine intelligence, which seems to me like a classic Where's Waldo gag.

What I like most about Glorantha is that it's fundamentally, structurally tragic. The world is elemental, in the classic sense, not atomistic. But there are are more elements than just earth, fire, water, and air. There's also darkness, and concepts like law, truth, and illusion. These elements are the famous "runes" from which the RPG takes its title, and the fact that they can't be scientifically reconciled colors the world. The surface-level conflict is that the sun god, representing hierarchical order, and the storm god, representing restless freedom, are intrinsically conflicting and can at best exist in a condition of unsteady compromise. In Glorantha, attempts to synthesize these metaphysical distinctions threaten to break the world by introducing Chaos, the anti-order that will, if unchecked, dissolve the world. So nature pushes back, in one case making it impossible to travel the oceans for centuries in order to thwart an overreaching maritime empire, and in another case having giant dragons appear and eat an entire nation. There's an emphasis on the cultural violence of imperial expansion: there's no absorption without loss, and that's one reason these attempts to transcend opposites are dangerous. But mortals won't stop trying to move forward. To put it pretentiously, Glorantha is a world where Hegelian synthesis simply doesn't work. Progress has a brutal price, and The Guide to Glorantha tells us that the default starting year for the RPG is about twenty-five years away from total apocalypse and a new dark age.

I feel that I've barely scratched the surface of Glorantha. I have certainly only skimmed its encyclopedia. Beyond this, there are many volumes of mythology, and about 1600 years of linear history, with the Dragon Pass area detailed almost down to the square mile. But, of course, it's the distant and bizarre areas of the map that capture my imagination: the Kingdom of War, the Jrusteli Isles, Doraster, Slon.