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.

Consider the Tiefling: Storm King's Thunder Part II

Previously: Part I

II. Nightstone

The first section of the adventure, which takes place in a village called Nightstone, is meant to be unnecessary to the larger narrative. The authors intend that other books could be "swapped" into the place occupied by this chapter; as long as the protagonists all end up at the fifth level of power, any adventures could work. The usefulness of this section, from the perspective of what comes later, is that the protagonists see that rogue giants are attacking the outposts of civilization, and that they are then steered toward the proper beginning of the narrative. Since the connections to the larger story are so tenuous, your humble critic hopes that he will be forgiven for focusing this section of the essay on a detail that seems, at first, a mere crumb, but that upon close investigation turns out to be a delectable morsel of satire. The detail is as follows:

Destiny Agganor (age 42) is Nightstone's tiefling midwife. [...] Destiny worships Asmodeus but doesn't impose her beliefs on anyone else.

- Storm King's Thunder, p. 31 

A "tiefling" is not a generic fantasy type such as a dwarf or an elf; it originated in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons. The tiefling is a human with some of the features of a cartoon devil: the horns, the tail, the sharp teeth. It is said that this appearance is due to a pact made between a powerful devil and the ancestors of the tieflings. Although this might appear to be a straightforward allegorical representation of the Christian notion of original sin, the allegory is rather more modern: although the tiefling's outward appearance is redolent of hell, the tiefling has no extraordinary predisposition to sin. If tieflings are overrepresented in the ranks of criminals and assassins, this is due entirely to the warping effects of general social prejudice.

To be greeted with stares and whispers, to suffer violence and insult on the street, to see mistrust and fear in every eye: this is the lot of the tiefling. And to twist the knife, tieflings know that this is because a pact generations ago infused the essence of Asmodeus—overlord of the Nine Hells—into their bloodline. 

- Player's Handbook, p. 42

In short, the tiefling is the designated subaltern in the typical Dungeons and Dragons setting. The tiefling is, in a sense, the way that Dungeons and Dragons examines the effects of the 1980s "Satanic Panic," during which the wider culture suspected that the role-playing game was an occult dissociative initiation ritual. For the players and readers too young to remember Tom Hanks's Mazes and Monsters, the tiefling might be also be thought of as either "goth" or "intersectional."

What is odd about Destiny Agganor, the tiefling midwife of Nightstone, is her tolerant mode of Asmodeus-worship. In this setting, Asmodeus is the overlord of all devils, and a living symbol of aggression and dominion: 

Devils personify tyranny, with a totalitarian society dedicated to the domination of mortal life. [...] Asmodeus, the dark lord of Nessus, strives to subjugate the cosmos to satisfy his thirst for power.

- Monster Manual, p. 66

The Dungeon Master's Guide describes Asmodeus's dominon as "the ultimate plane of law and evil and the epitome of premeditated cruelty." It is self-contradictory to attempt a liberal worship of totalitarianism's essence. It is akin to a being a teetotaling devotee of Dionysus. Real-world historical Satanism is sometimes explained as the only available resistance to hegemonic Christendom; no such explanation is possible here, given the surfeit of deities in this fantasy's cosmology. Nor is ignorance an excuse, in a world where sufficiently motivated adventurers may visit Asmodeus's realm and determine its character for themselves.

Destiny Agganor, therefore, profoundly misunderstands the nature of that which she worships. In a few brief sentences, we find a devastating satire of liberal religion. If one can trace out the throne of European monarchism in the story of the giants and their "ordning," here one finds the altar of pre-modern religion, subtly complicating the apparent "multiculturalism" of the fantasy setting.

The Ghost of Tragedy: Storm King's Thunder Part I

 Storm King's Thunder
by Christopher Perkins, et al.
Wizards of the Coast, 256 pages, $50 (hardcover)

The literary critic of RPG texts must take a primary interest in the narrative forms that are commonly referred to "adventures" and "campaigns," and which were formerly called "modules." The rules for a system are useful for understanding the assumptions of a narrative, but in themselves the rules are a mode of rhetoric, or, arguably, ethics. It is in the adventure book or campaign book that we may study the tantalizing interplay of particularity and indeterminacy.

In the present day, the best-selling adventure and campaign books, far and away, are the official Dungeons and Dragons campaigns published by Wizards of the Coast. Alongside the Dungeons and Dragons rules and setting books, these are the RPG texts that are stocked in ordinary bookstores. Presumably, these books find an audience beyond players. One such adventure text is Storm King's Thunder, published in 2016. It is a book that draws on treasured text of a previous generation,¹ most notably Jennell Jaquays's The Savage Frontier and Gary Gygax's Against the Giants trilogy.

How does it work? What are the mechanics of its narrative?

I: Introductory Material

The book begins with a dramatis personae. Since the list is not grouped by faction or ranked by importance, it is more properly an index of characters. Its placement is the first clue of the Shakespearian ambitions of the text.

Very early on, we are introduced to the notion of the "ordning," a divinely ordained social structure which each one of this fantasy world's giants intuitively understands. There are different types of giants: thunderous "storm giants" rule over all of the other types, while lowly "hill giants" find themselves last in the ranking. At the outset of the adventure, the "ordning" has somehow ceased to function, and the various types of giants have become disruptive and violent in their efforts to seize power. This notion is openly aristocratic, even monarchist: the ordning is directly analogous to the "estates of the realm" in medieval Christendom. It is interesting to see a supposedly "woke" publishing group like Wizards of the Coast attempting to induce in its readers a fondness for the ancien régime.

The change in the ordning is due to a sort of ersatz King Lear situation, featuring an aging king and his three daughters, two of whom are self-interested and amoral. But King Hekaton has much better prospects than Lear: for example, rather than disinheriting his virtuous daughter, he favors her. Nor has he retired form the throne; he has merely been kidnapped, and should he be rescued, all tragedy will likely be averted. This is Lear as comedy. The sensitive reader, however, will intuit that the ghost of tragedy has not been exorcised, and that the story's most fitting ending is not the glorious action-movie finale of the text, but the Bard's original bloodbath of poisoning, execution, and suicide.

The introduction presents the factions at play in the narrative, but, disappointingly, describes them as mostly waiting to be either aid the protagonists, or to be thwarted by them. This leaves the situation much less dynamic than it might have been. For example, the groups of giants are all pursuing unrelated quests, leaving them unlikely to collide with each other. The protagonists are not meant to come upon an earth-shaking battle between fire giants and frost giants, and neither will the thieves' guild, under cover of chaos, act decisively to eliminate its rivals. It was not so in Qelong: there, the rival factions are set to collide in some way no matter what the protagonists do.

The protagonists' view of all this is much more restricted. At the outset, they will only know that the giants have been accelerating their attacks on settlements and travelers. In the course of their journey, they will piece together the larger story with which the reader begins the book. A book like this one must present the solution before the mystery is fully posed: in any actualization of the possible narratives, the clues will come in dribs and drabs, in a way that will become clear when we consider the wilderness-map section. When we enter the sequential part of the narrative, we will know that our protagonists find the path that will eventually lead them to rescue the king; we play the agents of providence as we close off the paths that would fail to converge.

Next: Part II

~~~~~

¹ It's also a book that I bought years ago. Having twice failed to gather enough friends to use it for a campaign, I am hell-bent on getting some kind of creative use out of it. Hence this series of posts.

Hell Upriver: Hite's Qelong

Qelong

by Kenneth Hite

Lamentations of the Flame Princess, 48 pages, $8 (pdf)

Qelong is Kenneth Hite's recipe for Apocalypse Now in a fantasy world. It is written in the "sandbox" style, which means that indeterminacy goes far beyond the protagonists. The objectives of the protagonists, the characters they encounter, and their final destination are possibilities. The possible worlds diverge. They do, however, share a nature that is unusual for the role-playing genre: the upriver journey from civilization to hell. The aforementioned Coppola film is the most tonally vivid model, but Hite helpfully offers Valhalla Rising and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly as inspirations, which helps the reader understand that the mythological resonance of this sort of journey is not tied to the jungle setting, nor even to the river. Dante's Inferno is a spiritual iteration of the journey; Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a historical instance also involving river and jungle.

There is, of course, a nonfictional model for Qelong as a setting: Cambodia in the late 1970s. Like Cambodia, Qelong has been ruined, polluted, and destabilized simply because it is right next to a Great Power war, except instead of the war being a proxy conflict between the United States and communists, it's between rapacious wizards who are so unthinkably powerful that the side effects and errant spells of their combat have distorted and poisoned the very soil and weather of the Qelong river valley. Two of the antagonistic factions are motivated by cruel and totalizing atavisms: distorted fictional reflections of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In all of this, and in the incidental details, Hite displays his particular genius¹ for gathering obscure facts from history and mythology, then spinning them into intricate structures of choice and alternative. The toxic environment is analogous to the poisonous herbicide Agent Orange. Your humble reviewer is certain that, were he to read about that era of Cambodian history, he would discover many more historical sources for Qelong's fictional elements.

Speaking of the toxic contaminant, it is called aakom, and the book introduces it early, and on a first read it is hard to imagine characters who would risk this sort of thing.

The most important effects of aakom are its effect on the human mind and soul. It twists both, exerting a dark magnetic force pulling them toward ultimate chaos and corrosion. Even Chaotic characters recoil from the laughing, grotesque specters somehow revealed in the corner of their vision as innately part of the very angles and helices of existence. Those poisoned by aakom become nihilistic or self- destructive, or both; even the meaning that the human ego assigns itself is peeled away in the boiling illumination of aakom.

However, a bit of calculation² indicates that even weaker protagonists likely have at least a few days before the poison might start to set in, and even then its effects can be mitigated or suppressed for the week or two of journeying to any one of the upriver sites. Unpleasant as the poisoned environment may be, it tells us that our possible narratives will converge on missions, motivated by a strong goal. The text provides examples. The protagonists might be selfless heroes, risking death to destroy the source of the region's contamination. They might be searchers, desperately following rumors of a lost friend or family member. Or they might be a band of outlaws, scheming to find a fortune and haul it through the chaos of war.

Whatever the protagonists' goal, they will likely begin their journey in the relatively intact coastal city of Qampong. They come from somewhere else; Qampong is a foreign city to them. Negotiating local markets, they supply themselves and start heading up the river. In a few days, and perhaps after a few harrowing encounters, they will find a mercenary company that has made a base in the mostly ruined inland city of Sajra Amvoel. The protagonists are tempted to be at ease around familiar accents and clothing, but perhaps it is best to be wary of rogue mercenaries in a war zone. Perhaps the protagonists continue; from here, their journeys will branch to various destinations. Or perhaps they have chosen an overland route and avoided Sajra Amvoel altogether. In most of the possible stories, they will meet murderous enemy factions, each with their own agendas for the river valley. The countryside becomes stranger, more hostile: monsoons, evil mists, or the mind-melting aftermath of wizard-war magic. The poison sets in. The protagonists limp toward their goal and whatever final confrontation stands in their way...

It should be noted that some of the protagonists' potential obstacles are truly terrifying, which makes sense given the author's extensive work in the horror genre. Your humble reviewer has found himself rather grossed out by the details of how certain ants in Qelong can take over people's brains. The horror elements generally suit the genre of the journey upriver to hell, although in one case there is an unseemly and probably unnecessary detail that a violent cult rapes its victims, as if simple massacre wasn't bad enough for the genre. Qelong is not for the sensitive reader, and certainly not for children.

But for a reader who can stomach the disturbing sections, Qelong raises interesting questions. What sort of people could make these journey? Surrounded by so much suffering, would they change their goals? Are the potential protagonists strong enough to make any kind of difference? It is an open critical question whether a form that declines to actualize itself in a particular fiction can wrest enduring significance from its inherent indeterminacy. Put another way, is there some higher aesthetic purpose in the arrangement of possibility structures? Qelong is a particularly effective structure for many stories, which are all, mythically, the same story, and as such it is a good clue for the inquisitive critic.

~~~~~

¹ A genius Hite also demonstrates, weekly, on the podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff.

² The book's back cover, though not the text itself, describes the protagonists as between levels four and six in the Lamentations of the Flame Princess character system. With this source at hand, it is not difficult to estimate likely character hardiness. A protagonist classed as a miracle-working cleric will likely be able to his or her divinity for a measure of protection against aakom.