Be an Adventurer! 3Hex Issue 1, a quick look at a little game.

I love me a good ole' Old School hexcrawl.

This frequently throws people. I have made it fairly clear that Basic RolePlaying is my preferred rules system, a deeply simulationist game. By that, I mean that BRP attempts to model in math the genres it is applied to. Call of Cthulhu recreates the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, with a sanity system that models how people go nuts in his fiction, not in real life. RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha models the bronze age world of, no surprises here, Glorantha. It does not seek to accurately recreate the economics, sociopolitics, or brutality of the terrestrial bronze age. Pendragon is, frankly, Sir Thomas Malory summoned back from Avalon with dice. It has nothing to do with the middle ages. And Basic RolePlaying is a tool kit to model whatever genre you want. These are not games that depend on randomness. Randomness is an element, and has to be in any game reliant on dice, but they are very structured, intentional systems meant to control the type of play that emerges.

On top of that, I am known for story-oriented scenarios. The three Six Seasons books chronicle the fall of a clan, its time as a warband, and its return home. The Final Riddle is a one-way trip into madness. Again, randomness is present. Characters can fail. They can die. But there is a narrative in place. 

Old School gaming has no interest in simulation or stories. Crom LAUGHS at your narrative arcs! At Old School's core is emergent play. Roll the dice, see what happens. The results of the dice rolls, and the decisions you make, are the story. In the stricter Old School games, you don't know what character you will play until you roll stats for it. Adventures, locations, and encounters can all be determined randomly. Gygax had tons of random tables in the original Dungeon Master's Guide, and modern descendants like Old School Essentials or ShadowDark have followed suit. You can literally build the campaign, and the world, as you go. And unlike the more simulationist games mentioned above, the lighter dice systems of Old School games are little more than pass/fail mechanics. There are fewer skills (if any) to sculpt the expectations of the setting. Worlds are implied in the rules, but not explicitly modeled. You jump in, you play, and the game emerges.

Be an Adventurer! 3Hex Issue 1 (man that is a mouthful, let's call it 3Hex from here on) is a little solo-play game with decidedly Old School leanings. Author Mark Quire LAUGHS in the face of your simulations and narratives, by Crom! Yes, I promise to stop doing that. Weighing in at all of five pages, this PDF is essentially a three hex dungeon/wilderness crawl (which might have something to do with the name). One hex is The City, one is The Reach, and one is The Badlands. Each has its own random encounters generated when you enter the hex. The tongue-in-cheek conceit of the game is right there on the first page:

Be an Adventurer! THEY SAID. It’ll be fun and make You RICH! THEY SAID.

It’s not.

None of this is fun, none of this has made me rich. I’ve been stuck in this swamp for four days. There is something growing between my toes that I SWEAR occasionally giggles, I’m super hungry, AND I AM REALLY NOT HAPPY. NOT. HAPPY. AT ALL.

Your naive would-be Adventurer begins in The City, and sets out to win treasure and fame in this and other hexes (but is more likely to starve or die a hideous death). Each day of play, called a "loop," you either roll for an encounter in the hex you are in or more to the adjacent hex. At the end of each day, you gain a point of Hunger (Hunger also acts as damage in this game). At 6 points of Hunger, you are dead. But Hunger can be combatted with one of your three other stats. Groats are the coins in the game, and you start with D6. Vittles are rations, and you can spend one each day to prevent Hunger. Finally there are Upgrades, which are weapons, armor, magic items, and experience, making your little bugger (sorry, your brave hero) tougher and more resilient. Like Hunger, Vittles and Upgrades start at zero and are gained in play.

The core mechanic for tests in the game is to roll 2D6 + your total Upgrades and - your current Hunger. You will want to roll higher than your opponent's combat scores or the difficulty of whatever test you are facing.

Aside from the randomness of the game, what makes it Old School adjacent is the entire core concept. Old School games are notoriously brutal. They were survival horror games, not heroic fantasy. 3Hex leans hard into that spirit. Like Knave! or MÖRK BORG, there are no character classes here, however. You are defined by your gear. Presumably further issues will add more hexes to explore, and perhaps more complexity, but as is 3Hex is a lightning fast solo play with a sense of humor about itself. Like MÖRK BORG the fun is in your inevitable, horrible doom.

Or maybe you could get lucky?

        

Dungeons & Heroquests

RuneQuest is not the only game I play, despite all the time I have spent writing about it and for it. Call of Cthulhu has always been a favorite of mine, and I have a scenario for it in the upcoming campaign, The Sutra of the Pale Leaves. I've written here, here, and here about my love for Nephilim, and here about Pendragon. And those are just the Chaosium games. I've blogged about my campaigns for Numenera and The Dracula Dossier, and reviewed tons of other games, including Vampire, Old Gods of Appalachia, Spire, Kult Divinity Lost, Vurt, Nobilis, and so on. RuneQuest and I have just been a bit stapled together since Six Seasons in Sartar appeared, and I am good with that.

Like so many Gen X brats, I actually started playing RPGs with Dungeons & Dragons. I was in the 5th grade and drafted into my public school's GATE program, mainly because I was that mutant species of weird kid who spent all his time alone writing stories. The school psychologist, who ran the program, had read in a journal about a professor of neurology who had just revised and written a new edition of D&D, John Eric Holmes. Holmes asserted that the game taught communicative and critical thinking skills, and was a way for pre-adolescents to exercise social, math, and creative abilities. So she bought a set, and assigned me the task of reading it and being the Dungeon Master for the other kids in the program. Ironically, the same school district that introduced me to RPGs would ban them just a few years later as the political winds shifted and the Satanic Panic reared its shaggy head.

I ran D&D throughout the 5th and 6th grades, expanding into the Moldvay and Cook Basic and Expert sets, and then the eldritch dweomercraft of the High Gygaxian AD&D trilogy. It wasn't until I arrived in junior high school, and joined the "D&D club," that I was informed they were playing something called RuneQuest. That was the end of D&D for me. Sort of. I would later run a little of 2nd edition AD&D, and the same copy of the Rules Cycopedia that I bought in the college book store in 1991 still sits on my shelf now. But RuneQuest, Chaosium's other titles, and an ever-expanding circle of RPGs kept me occupied for decades.

When I did peek in on post-2000 D&D it was a game I no longer recognized. I am not saying it was bad or that earlier editions were better--I don't really have a dog in that fight--but the game increasingly had more to do with Star Wars, video games, Japanese anime, and the MCU than it did with the survival horror, Conan/Elric/Fafhrd-inspired sword and sorcery game I used to run. I was, however, intrigued by the rise of the retro-clones, games like OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, and Swords and Wizardry, which attempted to keep older editions of the game alive. As this bloomed into the OSR (another rabbit hole I don't want to meander down here), with games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess, MÖRK BORG, and ShadowDark, I found myself playing them, revisiting dungeons once again (more on the OSR and these games here).

I say all this because in my recent running of dungeon crawls once more, alongside my continuing RuneQuest campaigns, I have noticed something I hadn't noticed before. 

Dungeon crawls are heroquests, and heroquests are dungeon crawls.

Let Me Explain

Right now you are probably asking "what the deuce are you on about, Montgomery?" I'd wager the wording is a bit different, unless you actually are a 19th century upper class Brit, but that general sort of question.

As per Cults of RuneQuest, Mythology, a heroquest is "a direct interaction by mortals with the divine realm of myth and archetypes...participants enter the realm of legend and myth to interact with heroes and gods, gambling precious life force to gain miraculous powers and bring back magic" (p. 14). In other words, adventurers leave behind the world they know, enter a shadowy otherworld known only through stories and legends, to risk their lives and bring back wondrous treasures.

Sounds suspiciously like a dungeon crawl to me.

"The Shadowdark," Kelsey Dionne tells us, "is any place where danger and darkness hold sway. It clutches ancient secrets and dusty treasures...daring fortune seekers to tempt their fates...if you survive, you'll bring back untold riches plucked from the jaws of death itself" (ShadowDark, p. 7). In other words adventurers follow stories and legend into the unknown, into a lost world strange and dangerous, where they are tested. If they survive, they bring back wonders. If there is any real distinction between that a heroquest, it is one of degree and not of kind.

The line gets even blurrier when you stop and consider what a fantasy RPG dungeon is... it's the underworld, one of the oldest archetypes of the Other Side there is. Journeys by heroes into the underworld are so common we have a name for them, "katabasis." In classical mythology, the ability to enter the underworld and return is the very definition of a hero. Aeneas enters the underworld seeking knowledge of the future. Ovid describes Juno descending into underworld, reminding us of Inanna/Ishtar doing the same. Ovid also famously describes Orpheus entering the underworld to try and bring back his dead wife Eurydice, as did Indra to bring back the Dawn (also the goal of Orlanth and the Lightbringers). Heracles enters the underworld as his 12th labor, Pwyll entered in Welsh mythology, and so on. We can argue that the Shadowdark (my new favorite term for the fantasy dungeon) is not literally the world of the dead, but it is a lightless realm where death waits. Even the grandfather of all RPG megadungeons, Tolkien's mines of Moria, blur the line between mundane and myth. In those lost halls the fellowship encounters the Balrog, "a demon of the ancient world," a mythic divine being, and against it Gandalf falls only to return from the dead, much as Jesus did after his descent into hell.

Again, differences of degree, not of kind.

Old Tools, New Uses

As I started replaying old school dungeon crawls alongside RQ, it started to change the way I ran and constructed heroquests. In both Six Seasons in Sartar and The Company of the Dragon, I presented rules for heroquesting. But by the time I wrote a full heroquest chapter for The Seven Tailed Wolf, something had changed.

I had added a map.

I had gotten into the habit by then of making maps for my OSR games, something I have always found immensely stimulating to do. And doing this drives home the difference between a dungeon crawl and a story-oriented game. The latter is a linear thing, in which scene 1 is followed by scene 2, then scene 3, and so on. The characters are simply moved down the line through each. The pejorative term is "railroading." But in the former, each room of the dungeon is, in fact, a "scene." It has a setting, it has characters (NPCs and monsters), it has challenges and stakes. The crucial difference is that it isn't linear. Whether you turn right or left decides whether you walk into the goblin lair or down the hall with the pit trap. Both are scenes, but this time the adventurers have to make a choice and those choices have genuine consequences. Pick the southern passage and you stumble right into the lost shrine of the relic you were seeking. Just fight the final boss and it's yours. Go north or west, however, and you encounter a half a dozen other scenes, wearing you down, making the final boss encounter--if you even live to arrive at it--all the harder.

In The Seven Tailed Wolf I introduce the myth of the founding of the Haraborn vale. The Black Stag arrives at this mountain valley and falls in love with Running Doe. He proposes marriage, but she refused. The valley is the hunting ground of the Seven Tailed Wolf, and she will not marry and have children just for the Wolf to eat them. So the Stag vows to drive the Wolf off, and along the way (just as Dorothy Gale and Momotaro did) he meets others to aid him in his final battle.

This could be run as a story. Scene One, the characters meet Running Doe and vow to fight the Wolf off. Scene Two, they meet the Weaving Sister, and need to recruit her. Scene Three they meet the Night-Winged Bird. Scene Four, the strange hairless beast that walks upright. Scene Five they encounter the Hissing Wyrm, and so on.

Yet it is all much more interesting if you throw away the linear script, and spread the scenes out like rooms in a dungeon. After they make their vow to Running Deer, what next? Do they seek out the hole where the Weaving Sister lives? Do they scale the high cliffs to find the Night-Winged Bird? Do they follow the stream to the Field-Not-Yet-A-Hill? Or do they simply go straight to meet the Wolf head on, not bothering with allies? They have options now, and they have agency. Their choices shape the narrative.

And that is all fairly simple. Old school games had tons of dungeon building tools that can make heroquests more interesting. 

For example, think about the "secret door." The Weaving Sister lives in the Riddle, a sacred Earth temple which earlier in The Seven Tailed Wolf we learn was the place where Ernalda would come to speak with her aunt, Ty Kora Tek. Here they would talk and sing songs to each other, Ernalda just outside the Riddle, Ty Kora Tek just within. Imagine setting up this up as a hidden scene. When encountering the Weaving Sister, if one of them sings into the Riddle into opens a new path into the Ernalda/Ty Kora Tek myth. There they can meet Ernalda and perhaps get additional magic to fight the Wolf... but only if they answer Ty Kora Tek's riddles first. It is a separate myth, and has nothing to do with the Seven Tailed Wolf myth, but the Riddle links both. Maybe the adventurers never think to try singing into the Riddle and never find the other myth. That is fine too. It's a secret door.

Another interesting notion is the "wandering monster." When traveling from one scene to the next, they might encounter beings that have nothing to do with the myth they are exploring. Maybe they find a party of other heroquesters, and now either have to ally with them or compete. Maybe they come across beings from other stories, Broo from the Devil's legion, the dead who are wandering lost an aimless, etc. Setting up a random encounters table appropriate to the Age the adventurers are exploring is a fun way to liven up the game.

Finally, don't be squeamish about letting them get lost. The adventurers find a path up the mountain side, but it forks. Go right, and they eventually come to the Night-Winged Bird and are on the right track. Go left and they arrive at the Dragonewt nest of High Wyrm, and enter a draconic myth. Getting lost was a big part of old school dungeon crawls.

Mythology is a terrific resource for all of this, especially the Mythic Maps. Imagine the adventurers are in the Golden Age, pp. 86-90. They are seeking Aldrya's Tree. While crossing the Yellow Forest their choices might take them to Oslira who has already been tamed and redeemed, or face-to-snout with Sshorg the Blue River, itching for a fight. These are neighboring locations on the map, and two very different scenes. 

So the next time you are running a heroquest, trying drawing an old school map of it first. Be devious. Give it lots of choices and directions, dead ends and wrong turns. Detail each scene like you would stock the room of a dungeon, then let the dice roll and the games begin. 

Trial and Tribulation: A look at Kalayde Waters

Over the years I kept a binder full of what I would eventually call "episodes," reusable mini-adventures and encounters for RuneQuest that could be used to fill in gaps between adventures or add color and texture to campaigns. Many of these made it into Six Seasons in Sartar, and others into The Company of the Dragon. "A Battle," "A Birth," "A Cattle Raid," "A Funeral," "A Marriage," "A Raid," "A Rescue," etc. One of the episodes that never made it into print was called "A Trial," and was meant to show the Orlanthi system of justice. I am pleased now that this particular episode fell through the cracks, because Sean Fitzgerald just published an entire scenario about an Orlanthi trial, and it blows my episode out of the water. 

Kalayde Waters is a new scenario for the Jonstown Compendium that digs deep into the subject. An 81-page PDF, it is organized into six episodes, three of which are an Orlanthi trial in which the adventurers represent the defendant. Two lovers, engaged to be married, have vanished and are believed by their kin to be dead. The problem is that these are Orlanthi we are talking about here, so of course the families of the two lovers have been engaged in a long and volatile rivalry, and now blame each other for these deaths. Demands for compensation are high, and could spiral out of control into an open feud and kinstrife.

Kalayde showcases what I enjoy about both Glorantha and the Jonstown Compendium. It takes advantage of the rich "anthropological" aspects of the setting, using the quirks of Orlanthi culture as a spring board for adventure, but while offering plenty of opportunities for traditional whacking things with weapons also lets you play the equivalent of Law & Order: Sartar. To that end, Kalayde offers complete rules on running and participating in an Orlanthi trial, rules that will have great replay value beyond just this adventure. I can easily imagine a legal drama campaign with players in the role of Lhankor Mhy lawspeakers, for example. More pragmatically, these rules will be valuable in any Orlanthi campaign where the adventures get into trouble, or clans have disputes...so basically any Orlanthi campaign. There is also an expanded section on Orlanthi hospitality and greetings drawn from Stafford's writings but not yet included in any Chaosium RuneQuest publications.

My general policy on reviewing scenarios is to avoid all spoilers, so if you want to know what "Kalayde" is buy the book. But what I can talk about is the writing, the layout, and the art.

Sean Fitzgerald wrote the text and laid out the entire book (Joshua Wright and Brian Duguid supplied the editing and proofreading). This is impressive enough, but the art credits go to Fitzgerald and Hunter Fitzgerald, and there is a lot or art in this book, and it is good. Add to this that they also produced a VTT edition and you can see how much work went into this. It is a fairly long adventure (I had the chance to run it, and it took a half dozen sessions), but meticulously explained and detailed, full of all the player handouts you would need. Even beginning GMs could run Kalayde with the amount of support given. I spoke about this in a recent interview, but compared to a lot of community content out there, so many Compendium offerings look, read, and play like professional efforts. Kalayde is one of them. 

In the end Kalayde Waters is a scenario with a memorable twist, and the kind of "fairy tale" elements that I am partial to in my own work. The trial portions were my favorites, and great fun to play out. This is yet another Jonstown offering that you are going to want in your collection.

   

The Return of "Sun County" The Re-Release of a Classic

The Obligatory Introduction

Over the many years, around gaming tables, in Internet chat rooms, here on this blog, and anywhere else one might find me flapping my gums, RuneQuest 3 has endured an unwarranted amount of abuse from me. 

Understand: I met RQ2 the year before RQ3 replaced it. I had fallen in love with Glorantha, with the mechanics, and suddenly here was this new edition that committed all sorts of unspeakable sins. The mechanics were different--the calculation of skills and hit points, and what in the world was fatigue--but the unpardonable sin was that the default setting was...ugh...Earth. The gods were generic. Prices were listed in pennies. Rurik was replaced with some idiot Pict called Cormac. And my gaming group decided they hated it. Twelve year old me did too.

(Bonus rant: the Runes are the integral building blocks of Glorantha and the source of all magic...why in the name of Sheng Seleris are you calling the game RuneQuest when in Fantasy Earth there are no longer Runes to quest for? Drew shakes his fist in indignation, frothing at the jaws.)

Insult was added to injury when Earth-based products like Vikings and Land of Ninja began to appear. We had been spoiled in those halcyon RQ2 days with products like Cults of Prax, Trollpak, Cults of Terror, Griffin Mountain, Borderlands, Big Rubble, and Pavis. Now we were getting vikings and samurai? Weren't there already other games doing that? Yes, I am conveniently ignoring Gods of Glorantha and Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars, two boxed sets that were Glorantha-based and pushed the setting forward, but this is my rant so I am allowed. Generally speaking, there was throughout the 80s, a real fear that Glorantha had been abandoned.

There is more to the story, a lot more, but when you buy your copy of Sun County you can read Shannon Appelcline tell it. Trust me, he tells it better than I do. The point is that for nearly a decade I associated RQ3 with the neglect of Glorantha.

And then, out of nowhere, salvation came.

The First (and Second) Coming of Sun County

Again, buy the book and let Shannon tell you the story, but the gist is that in the early 90s publisher Avalon Hill seemed to realize that RQ was on life support and something needed to be done. The solution was, as it always should have been, "focus on Glorantha." Ken Rolston was brought in as line editor (yes, that Ken Rolston) and saddled with the task of bringing the game back from the brink. No easy task. It was going to take a game-changing product, something absolutely phenomenal, to pull this off.

Well, miracles do happen.

Michael O'Brien and Trevor Ackerly's Sun County (1992) hit Glorantha fans like sunstroke, just in a good way. I was a senior in college, and had been playing RuneQuest for a decade (though sticking with RQ2). At this point I was now GMing rather than playing, and the first version of Six Seasons in Sartar was being formulated. When I saw a copy of Sun County in my local game store, my jaw literally dropped. For the most part, Avalon Hill had served Glorantha to us in boxed sets, and there is simply no polite way to discuss the art. But here was Sun County, a thick softcover book, and it had that Roger Raupp cover. People lie when they say you can't judge a book by its cover. You can. And in that painting we had the most realized image of Glorantha we had ever seen. You could feel the hot sun on the back of your neck. You felt you could almost just step through the cover like a doorway and be there.

The cover that launched a thousand campaigns

Poor struggling student that I was I bought it on the spot (heck, I could skip a few meals). And as soon as my group finished proto-Six Seasons I was looking for ways to lure them to Prax's Sun County.

It feels a bit ridiculous to sit here in 2024 and have to say nice things about Sun County. Telling you Sun County stands shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the greatest RQ game books (or heck, game books in general) feels like explaining that water is wet and chocolate is really good. It feels like something we just all know. Yet RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha has initiated a lot of new members into the Glorantha Tribe, and they need to know how good this book was (and now "is"). So let me talk first about the book in general, and then about this bright, shiny new release of it.

For starters, Sun County threw open the doors on a culture that we had all heard of, but never really explored. RQ had long lingered in New Pavis, but Sun County took us south into the lands of the Praxian Sun Dome. These were the followers of Yelmalio, Son of the Sun. We had met him much earlier in Cults of Prax, but this was a deep dive into the culture of the Sun Domers, how they lived, their customs and laws, their outlook and beliefs. Up until that point, Avalon Hill had largely been content to recycle what we had seen before, Sun County was proof that the setting was alive and still growing. In fact, alongside Griffin Mountain, it was early proof that Glorantha had more cultures to explore than the one around Pavis.

The book starts with general information, describing the land, its key figures, and its people. We are given an overview of the history of the region, its laws, customs, and governance, trade and currency, and the military. Attention is given to the "contraband euphoric herb" hazia, and how it is illicitly grown, smuggled, and sold in the region. Statistics are provided for the movers and shakers of the area.

In the tradition of Biturian Varosh and Paulis Longvale, "Jaxarte's Journal" is next, giving us a first-hand look at the region through the eyes of a young Lunar official. Unlike the "flavor text" that haunted so many game products in the late 80s and 90s, these are in-world documents, with their own provenance and history. They take on the task of not only adding verisimilitude, but introducing us the culture of Sun County through the eyes of someone new to it.

There is a write-up of the cult of Yelmalio, which in the original edition mainly served the function of updating the RQ2 cult to RQ3, but as the religion is to integral to the culture of Sun County it needs to be here. In the current 2024 re-release, it should easily hold fans over until the official RQG version of the cult appears. But more on that in a bit.

Next we have detailed maps and descriptions of the Sun Dome, the central temple and seat of governance. These are accompanied by selections from another in-world text, Hector's Yellow Book, working to flesh out and bring the setting to life. This is followed by a detailed chapter on Sun Dome Templars and their militia, much needed and appreciated given the long tradition of the Sun Domers as being famed mercenaries. 

It is then that we get into the real "meat" of the book (were the initial chapters not meal enough!), Sun County encounters and scenarios. This is where I have to get vague, so as not to spoil anything. But the adventurers in Sun County are legendary in the RQ community. "The Garhound Contest" is a terrific bit of culture building, detailing an annual competition held at the Harvest Festival the adventurers can participate in. "Melisande's Hand" expands and builds on this with a full scenario.

"Rabbit Hat Farm" brings the taint of Chaos to the sun-drenched lands of the region, and has long been a fan favorite. It sets the stage for two more chilling scenarios, "The Old Sun Dome" and "Solinthor's Tower," both of which dig deep into the history of the region. Both of these are "gothic" in the finest sense of the tradition, the power of a shadowy past to haunt the "enlightened" present. I have written about both of these before, particularly "The Old Sun Dome," which stands out in my mind as a contender for one of the finest RQ scenarios written. The curious can scour my blog if they want spoilers. But I am going to assume that a lot of you reading this are new players, so I won't ruin the thrills or chills. What I can say is that they are both models for RQ scenario building. They tell stories without being railroady. They show that the setting can stretch into more genres than just epic fantasy. And they are unforgivingly brutal, which the best RQ adventures tend to be.

The New Remaster

The new release is not just some simple scan of the original text, but remastered from the ground up to be clear, crisp, and up to modern industry standards. As of this writing I only have the PDF, but comparing it to my battered original copy you can see how necessary the remastering was. The text and art "pops." Text sections are hyperlinked. It is easy to read.

As I mentioned previously, the book includes a history of Sun County, and the role in played in the "RuneQuest Renaissance" of the early 90s, by renowned game historian and author Shannon Appelcline. This introduction puts the book into the greater context of RuneQuest publications and the relationship between original publisher Chaosium and RQ3 publisher Avalon Hill.

But new players and GMs need to be aware this is a classic product written for the 3rd edition. This is not an updated text for RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha. Given the tremendous backward compatibility of RQ products, and with the "Conversion Guide" provided in the core rules, this should not be too much of an issue.

Available now as a PDF from DriveThru.RPG, with print on demand copies imminent, Sun County is a must for Glorantha fans, particularly those who enjoy its spiritual successors like the Sandheart series or Life and Traditions under the Sun Dome. With any luck, this might open the door for the eventually re-release of other classic titles as well

   

 

Fire From the Sky: Thoughts on the Pantheon of Yelm

The Rigveda, the oldest extant Indo-European scripture, begins with a hymn to Agni.

Agnimīḷe purohitam yajñasya devamṛtvijam, hotāram ratnadhātamam.

(Agni I worship, the first before the Lord, he who illuminates Truth, the warrior who defeats darkness, and is the giver of Light.)

Why Agni? Why is he given pre-eminence? Agni is the god of fire, but more importantly, he is the sacrificial fire, the central element of ancient Vedic worship. The ancient priests offered their prayers before Agni, and cast their sacrifices into his flames, and Agni carried these up to the other gods. Without Agni there could be neither worship nor sacrifice. he is the bridge between Earth and Heaven.

The Heavens of Glorantha, p. 12, Mythology

This is on my mind for two reasons. The next book being released in the Cults of RuneQuest series is devoted to the Fire/Sky deities of Glorantha, and I look forward to it immensely. The second, I attended a fire sacrifice ritual last week at a Buddhist temple here in Japan, a ritual that can be traced directly back to the Vedic sacrifices of three millennia ago. This was at Enoshima Daishi, a temple devoted to an esoteric Buddhist sect, the central figure of which is Fudō Myō-ō, a terrifying red-skinned demonic looking figure armed with a noose and a sword. The interior of the temple is blackened and always smells of wood smoke. On nights when they perform the fire ritual, a massive bonfire blazes in the center of the temple, surrounded by chanting monks. To participate, you write your prayer or a situation or sin you would like to be rid of, on a piece of wood. The monks cast these into the fire as the grim visage of the towering Fudō Myō-ō statue is illuminated by the firelight. It is a powerful experience.

So lets circle back to Agni, and then Glorantha. 

Fudō Myō-ō is essentially the Japanese incarnation of the Hindu Acala. Without going too far into the weeds here, the Vedic religion and modern Hinduism are not the same, and don’t focus on the same deities, but the vedas remain central to Hinduism. At the risk of oversimplifying, a very rough analogy would be the connection between Christianity and the ancient Hebrew scriptures. Acala is a fiery warrior god who first appears around 700 CE, but he clearly embodies one of the aspects of the Vedic Agni, “the warrior who defeats darkness.” This “darkness” is both physical (the night) and spiritual (sin, evil). Once again we get a glimpse of Agni’s deeper significance, the bridge between Earth and Heaven. The physical darkness he banishes is earthly, the spiritual darkness is celestial.

One of the things that makes RuneQuest and its setting Glorantha extraordinary is the way they reflect the themes of mythology without (in most cases) simply copying real world myths. Greg Stafford’s decision to name the Rune Fire/Sky is a perfect example of this. Once again, we see the duality. Fire is down here, on Earth. Heaven is in the Sky.

Imagine, for just a moment, you are one of the nomadic Indo-Aryans of four thousand years ago, when the Vedic hymns were being chanted and passed down orally. Imagine being on a wide plain at night. There were likely dozens, if not hundreds, of camps clustered together, each around a fire. These fires flicker and twinkle, just like the stars above you. They are earthly campfires, could not the stars be the campfires of the gods?

Fire rises, while the Sky descends. The heat they felt beating down on their backs from the sun was the same as the heat they felt on their faces around the fire. So clearly the fire and the sky are one. Fire, then, becomes the link to heaven. It rises back up to it. 

“The Lord” mentioned in the hymn I quoted above is Yajna, the Master of the Universe. Agni is an emanation of him. In Glorantha, the most direct analogy is Enverinus, god of fire and sacrifices (Prosopaedia, pp. 34-35), who is himself a portion of Yelm, the Master of the Universe. Like Agni Enverinus is present at all sacrifices, and has to be. This remains true in the Lunar religion, which itself is a development of the religion of Yelm in a similar manner as Hinduism and the Vedic religion. Enverinus’ priests oversee all sacrifices performed by other Lunar cults. 

When I wrote the “The Elements of Heortling Ritual” section of Six Seasons in Sartar, I leaned into this as well. The Heortlings burn their sacrifices, or at least portions of them, to offer them to the gods. This time the sacrificial fire is Oakfed (Prosopaedia, p. 90), who “was tamed in Prax by Waha, and in other regions by their ruling deities. Oakfed now sleeps, but he can be awakened by priests who need his help.” Oakfed is one of the Lowfires, along with Mahome (the hearth fire), and Gustbran (the forge and kiln fire). The Prosopaedia describes Oakfed as the wildfire, but notice the difference between that description and the one given in The Lighbringers (pp. 10-11):

The Lowfires—Mahome the Hearthfire, Gustbran the Workfire, and Oakfed Wildfire—serve men. They are the fires that cook our food, work metal, bake clay, and send our offerings to the gods.

This is not a change so much as The Lightbringers being more explicit about Oakfed’s function. It is already implied in The Prosopaedia when Oakfed is associated with Enverinus. This means that in the Orlanth and Prax pantheons, the sacrificial fire is as central as in the religions of Yelm and the Red Goddess. Of course, this was true in our world as well. The ancient Vedic peoples were not the only ones make fire sacrifices. The ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans all did as well. Note however that for the cultures following Orlanth and Waha, the fire was essentially tamed and stolen from Yelm. There is a bit of Prometheus to this twist, which only makes sense given the Orlanthi and Praxians are raiding cultures. Yet fire remains as the bridge which carries sacrifices to the gods (though I strongly suspect the Earth Goddesses received buried offerings rather than burnt).

We’ve talked a great deal about sacrifice, and the role of fire as a bridge between worlds, but the attributes given to Agni in the hymn are relevant to other Fire/Sky deities as well.

As the “warrior who defeats darkness” we see a number of deities. Let’s pick out four.

Preeminent I think is Polaris (Prosopaedia, p. 100), who commanded the armies of the Upper World during the Gods War. When the Spike was shattered, Polaris built a fortress around the hole keeping back the dark.  A point to consider here. We are talking here about the “spiritual” darkness we mentioned above. This would be the entropy and moral evil of Chaos. Gloranthan mythology speaks of the time of Chaos as the Lesser and Greater Darkness, but this is not physical darkness, which is the Darkness Rune. There is a relationship between the two—notably the Chaos Rune looks like the Darkness Rune but with the addition of horns—but I think that deserves its own discussion. Still, the Fire/Sky pantheon is also at odds with the Darkness gods, again showing that duality between fire’s physical and spiritual aspects. 

Shargash—the most Acala/Fudō Myō-ō of these Glorantha deities—is another prime example. His  entry in the Prosopaedia (p. 110) talks about his creation by Yelm to keep order (disorder being another type of moral or social darkness). Yet it also talks about his “purification” of the world by fire. This occurs after Orlanth has killed Yelm, making the world “impure” by cutting it off from heaven. 

This is a major theme of the Fire/Sky mythology of Glorantha. Heaven is “pure.” Earth is “impure.” As the Sky deities descend into the world they gradually become less pure. Dayzatar, who sits in the highest heaven and is furthest from the Earth, is the “Master of Purity.” Lodril, who dwells in the Earth, is the most indulgent, sensual, and impure. This has to do of course with “light.” The light of the stars and sun is a pure light, a clean light. A wood fire produces smoke and burns. It blackens things around it and leaves ash. Yet conversely, dual-natured fire is also light. Purification is a vital function of it, and this is why it is central to sacrifice. Whatever offering you make to the fire, it is purified and made fit for the gods. The smoke rises towards heaven. Flames leap up.

Shargash then might conceivably be seen as burning the world to return it to the gods. It is what my old mentor Alf Hiltebeitel called “the ritual of battle,” comparing the war in the Mahabharata to a Vedic sacrifice to restore the befouled world. 

The god who best embodies the concept of light keeping away physical darkness is Yelmalio (Prosopaedia p. 139). Polaris is defending the heavens against spiritual darkness, Shargash is redeeming the world by fire, but Yelmalio is the pure light of heaven down here, at least in the mythologies of the Orlanthi. With Yelmalio, things get complicated.

Yelmalio is one of the deities associated with the planet Lightfore, which is the same color as the sun and follows the same path as the sun, rising as the sun sets and setting as the sun rises. The key difference is that Lightfore is smaller than the sun, and thus does not give as much light. We see this in the name, I think. “Yelmalio” clearly evokes “Little Yelm.” During the Gods War, when Yelm was absent from the sky, Lightfore continued to illuminate the world, though dimly. In Glorantha, before the ascension of the Red Moon, we can imagine the soft golden light of this planet illuminating the night almost like a full moon. 

We see this association with Lightfore reflected in two of Yelmalio’s titles, the “Cold Sun” and the “Preserver of Light,” and his counterpart in the Yelm pantheon is Antirius. Their respective mythologies depict both as “carrying on” for Yelm after he was killed, but in notably different ways. Yelmalio preserves physical light in the world, making him beloved by the Elves and accepted by the Orlanthi, while Antirius rules in Yelm’s place. Both suffer a successive series of setbacks (try saying THAT three times fast) that robs them of their fire powers and leaves them only with light. Both suffer a loss at the Hill of Gold (Antirius is killed, Yelmalio struggles on). BOTH of these mythologies parallel that of yet another version of Yelmalio, the Orlanthi Dawn Age deity Elmal. Elmal—whose name is so clearly a mistranslation or mishearing of Yelmalio—is a son of Yelm who becomes steward to Orlanth. Orlanth puts him in charge of the world when he descended into Hell for the Lightbringers’ Quest (as Yelm leaves Antirius in charge). He too suffers a series of injuries and losses that weaken him, but like Yelmalio he endures, keeping a last spark of light alive in the dark. 

If we went looking for Earth mythological parallels to Yelmalio, the one that jumps out to me is the Indo-Iranian deity Mitra, and his eventual Roman incarnation Mithras. Both the Vedic Mitra and the Iranian Mitra were gods of light. They were both associated with the sun but not worshipped as the sun. This was also true of the Roman Mithras. One of the deity’s most common epithets was “sol invictus,” the unconquered sun, but his worship was distinct and separate from the Roman Sol Invictus, the actual sun god. Regardless, both Mithras and Sol Invictus were associated with the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, but also the turning point when nights start to get shorter, the very Yelmalio notion of “the last light before the return of the Sun.” All three of these deities were associated with honor, promises, endurance and duty. In both Avestan and Sanskrit, mitra meant “promise,” “covenant,” and “brother” (as in band of brothers and not blood relation). The Iranian Mitra was associated with soldiers. Interestingly, the Roman Mithras was a secret fraternal order, a brotherhood, and called themselves syndexioi, those "united by the handshake.” This is very evocative of the name’s Avestan and Sanskrit meanings, though it is very unlikely the Romans were aware of that. The worship of Mithras was very popular among the Roman legions, to the point he was called “the soldier’s god.” All of these qualities remind us of the cult of Yelmalio and the Sun Domes.

The last “warrior who defeats the darkness” has to be, of course, Yelm himself. 

Yelm (Prosopaedia, p. 138-139) is the middle brother between aloof Dayzatar and worldly Lodril, and as such embodies the quality of duality we have talked about several times. He is the bridge between Heaven and Earth. As the brightest object in the sky, he is also “the giver of light.” As the Celestial Emperor he “illuminates the truth” by revealing what is good and naming all things. Also as Emperor he defeats spiritual darkness by giving order and purpose to the cosmos. As the god who died and returned from Hell, resurrected, he defeated that ultimate of physical darknesses…death. He so perfectly embodies all the aspects we started with in the hymn to Agni that it only makes sense to finish our discussion with him.

And yet clearly Yelm is not a parallel of Agni, but instead of “the Lord” mentioned in the hymn. That Lord, Yajna, is like Yelm “Master of the Universe.” While Yelm embodies so many of the traits possessed by other gods in his pantheon, the one no one else possesses is his centrality, authority, or rule. He is the Emperor, a title not even Orlanth usurped and that the Red Goddess—who is not afraid to challenge Orlanth for the Middle Air—does not contest. In this he is the ultimate embodiment of a Rune that depicts a single center to the sky. 

In the end, all of Gloranthan mythology is about him. His death triggers the Gods War. He is the Light the Lightbringers quest to bring back. Time begins with his return, etc.

It is hard to find quite anything like Yelm in terrestrial mythologies. There are no solar deities that are, really. The Indo-Europeans preferred their tribal/chieftain storm gods. The Egyptians had several successive solar deities, but none of them with emperor of heaven status. The late Roman Sol Invictus became strongly linked with Empire, but this was a case more of monotheism than imperialism. The closest we come, I think, is China. Here we find the Emperor of Heaven, or Jade Emperor, who is the center of a celestial order mirrored by the one on Earth. The imagery here however equates authority more with heaven than the actual sun…heaven is “above” us all.

CHAOSIUM CON AUSTRALIA 2024 - SEE YOU THERE!

 Chaosium Con Australia 2024 is right around the corner, and I will be there next week. 

On my end I will be doing three seminars:

“Bringing RQ to Life” focuses on the small details and ‘daily life’ elements you can sprinkle into games to make them feel more organic to players. 

“Writing for the Jonstown Compendium” is pretty much what it sounds like. My (hard won) experience turned into short cuts, tips, and advice…but also WHY you should consider doing it.

“Scoping Out Long Form Campaigns” is about choosing and running long campaigns. It’s hard enough running a couple of scenarios, but campaigns come with challenges. Over the last 40 years I’ve run The Great Pendragon campaign twice, Masks of Nyarlathotep three times, and my own “Six Seasons” campaign is pretty darn long. I will be talking about all of them and how to make running them easier. 

On top of that I will be doing a book signing and running two games! “The Turning” is the final chapter of “Six Seasons in Sartar” and “The Hanging Tree” is the penultimate episode of the (yet unpublished) “Final Riddle.”

I will be writing blog posts about the three seminars after the fact for those who can't back it down there. Keep your eyes here.

https://www.chaosium.com/blogchaosium-con-australia-announces-bestselling-runequest-creator-andrew-logan-montgomery-as-international-guest-of-honour-89-june-2024/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1ZeSQWltWSZjjKS7QOzWpCcNks6JpjMgLtu56j9BVdLQuSixXe84bmjQs_aem_AVjMb1BywjwngzXLjB4NSWxQkW5VHaxPaw5B06YniGI5FQvLdpCneReA9uEyk3tx-Yv9fcwp3AOky1Fop-_kehC8

THE LUNAR WAY: A REVIEW

THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE about The Cults of RuneQuest series, "An Encyclopedia of the Deities of RuneQuest," is how the titles give subtle hints about the nature of the pantheons described within. The Lightbringers was not about just the Air pantheon or "storm tribe," but about the myth that is the core of their civilization and identity, the redemptive Lightbringers' Quest. The title tells us not only what the god Orlanth and his companions did during the mythical Darkness to redeem the world, but what their mortal followers did after the Dawn to spread the "good news." Likewise The Earth Goddesses may contain several masculine deities too, but it is rooted in the matriarchal culture of Esrolia, which places primacy on the divine feminine. One imagines in Esrolia "goddess" as a blanket term for all deities. 

Yet nowhere is the significance of the title more evident than in the newest offering, The Lunar Way. This is not "Gods of the Lunar Empire" or "The Lunar Pantheon." Neither would have been accurately descriptive of what the Lunar religion is. Because ultimately, that religion is a "path," forged by the Red Goddess, that all the deities and heroes and humble followers of the Red Moon follow. She is leading them somewhere. It is not about worshipping and maintaining the status quo. It is a religion about going. The teachings of the Red Goddess are less scripture and more like the Tao.

The Red Goddess and her empire have suffered a bit of abuse the last four decades or so. Binary thinking is deeply ingrained in some schools of fantasy literature, so if Sartar is the "good guys" the Lunar Empire must be villains. But neither of these were ever true. Greg Stafford and those who followed wrote Glorantha more in the tradition of swords and sorcery fiction than high fantasy. Decades before George R. R. Martin would revive the style, Glorantha presented a very believable world of civilizations at cross purposes, of cultures in conflict. There were no white hats or black, just different points of view. It is difficult for same gamers to embrace that. Indeed, in today's climate of extreme polarization, side-picking, and demonizing the other, it is difficult for people to embrace that. 

On the other hand, the Lunar Way is indeed a radical point of view. Glorantha is a world that was nearly destroyed by Chaos. Most pantheons--despite extreme differences--therefore oppose it. It is perhaps the ultimate, undeniable "evil." Yet the Red Goddess embraces Chaos, believes it is part of the world order. She incorporates the teachings of the First Age deity Nysalor, a god created by mortal races--in violation of divine accordance known as the Great Compromise--inside the mortal world of Time. Nysalor too embraced Chaos, and taught a discipline called Illumination that freed the individual from cult restrictions, personal passions and loyalties, and even to a degree from the Runes. In a world as conservative as Glorantha, where restrictions are in place to keep Chaos from ever happening again, this ultimate liberation is threatening. From the reactionary point of view of most anti-Chaos cults, Illumination is akin to Lovecraft:

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

Indeed. This was the same criticism leveled against the teachings of the Buddha in ancient India by the established priesthoods. In a highly hierarchal world view, where gods speak through priests and cults, personal liberation--being told one does not need a god--is a threat.

But ultimately the best thing about Glorantha is that both points of view--Illumination is Lovecraftian madness or misunderstood mysticism--are accurate. I portrayed it as a sort of cosmic evil in The Final Riddle, despite the fact that my first RuneQuest character back in the 80s was a devoted Seven Mothers priestess. One of the reasons I have always found online arguments about Gloranthan "facts" tedious is that ultimately there are none. You go where the campaign takes you. I am perfectly happy to portray the Lunars as monsters in one campaign and then as heroes in the next. Because they are both, a point The Lunar Way very finely makes.

So let's take a look, shall we?

The Cults

The Lunar Way covers 15 distinct cults. Well...14 distinct cults and 1 overlapping one...well 1 cult that overlaps 6 others, 7 distinct cults...and 1 that overlaps all of them...

Did I mention Lunar religion is complicated?

We have the cult of the Seven Mothers. These were seven "occult conspirators" who undertook a perilous series of quests to revive a dead goddess inside the mortal world of Time. Moon goddesses had existed before Time, in the mythic Gods Age, but had a habit of being killed and reborn. The Red Goddess is the latest of these, and if you believe the Lunars she is their ultimate form. The Seven Mothers are those who brought her back to life.

While the Seven Mothers are worshipped collectively, and are the primary "missionary" cult spreading the Lunar Way outside the Empire's borders, each also has their own distinct cult. Of these The Lunar Way details the cults of Danfive Xaron, Deezola, Irrippi Ontor, Jakaleel the Witch, Teelo Norri, and Yanafal Tarnils. Only the mysterious "She Who Waits" is left undescribed. 

Outside of the Seven Mothers, we get the cults of the Red Emperor, Etyries, Yara Aranis, Hon-eel the Artess, Hwarin Dalthippa, the Crimson Bat, and Nysalor/Gbaji. 

Above all of these is the supreme Lunar cult, that of the Red Goddess herself. To become an initiate of this, you must first be a Rune master of one of the other cults and Illuminated.

Before we talk about Illumination--and we need to talk about Illumination--it should be noted that none of these deities, not even the Red Goddess, existed before Time in the Gods Age. This is yet another aspect of the Lunar Way that makes the Empire a sort of boogeyman to so many other cultures. As a general rule, Glorantha was shaped by the actions of the deities before the beginning of Time. Glorantha "facts" derive from these myths. The sun rises and sets because he was killed and resurrected in the Gods Age. The presence of new gods, new gods born inside of Time, by necessity reshapes reality. Orlanth is the master of the Middle Air and king of the gods. This is "fact." But the presence of the Red Goddess threatens to alter those "facts," and if one imagines our own laws of physics being altered the unease that would ensue. For the Lunars, these gods are not being created so much as revealed, and the world is not being changed as much as maturing into what it was always meant to be. Evidence of this might indeed be the mysterious Spider Woman, who seems to have defended the Red Goddess' right to exist at every turn. She can be none other than Arachne Solara, the anima mundi and mother of Time. But this rewriting the DNA of the setting is another cause for conflict.

Illumination

The Lunar Way brings Illumination into the latest edition of RuneQuest. I was very pleased to see it does so mostly in accordance with how I did the same in The Final Riddle.

Back in Cults of Terror (1981), Illumination was gained by hearing, and understanding, Nysalorean Riddles. These Riddles are akin to zen koans, but linked to certain skills in the game. For example, a Riddler might ask "in what sound is Truth revealed?" The character would then make a Listen roll. If successful, 1% of Illumination is gained and added to any previous percentiles, and the characters answers the question ("In silence is Truth revealed"). Each year at Sacred Time, the character would roll against their cumulative Illumination total and if successful, BAM! The character is Illuminated.

Illumination came with benefits. First, the Illuminate could sense Illumination in others. They could now tell others Nysalorean Riddles to spread Illumination. They were immune to Detect Law/Chaos abilities. They possessed the "secret knowledge" that Chaos was not an inimical force. And finally, the one that really got the power gamers salivating, the ability to break cult restrictions and not be chased by spirits of reprisal.

In his updating, Jeff Richard has stuck to most of this but amended it to better suit the new edition. First of all, Illumination is now a Magic skill, and comes with a base percentage equal 1/5 your Moon Rune affinity (+ your Magic skill modifier). This takes advantage of the new editions use of Rune affinities and makes perfect sense. The cult of Nysalor is largely extinct, and from the Lunar point of view superseded by the Lunar Way. Further, in addition to this change, Illumination can now be trained, like any skill, by proper Lunar cults. This will have the effect of making Illumination a great deal more common in RQ campaigns (appropriate as the timeline moves into the Hero Wars).

The benefits of Illumination have also expanded. The ability to sense Illumination, avoid Law/Chaos detection, learn Nysalorean Riddles, immunity to spirits of reprisal, and "secret knowledge" about the nature of Chaos all remain intact. Now however the Illuminate can ignore cult restrictions (using gifts without geases, learning spells forbidden to your cult, joining enemy cults, etc). They may use their Illumination to overcome Rune affinities and Passions. And paired Rune opposites (Fertility and Death, Harmony and Disorder, etc) no longer need to total 100% and can be raised at will.

And you thought the power gamers were salivating before...

But there are warnings in here as well.

Becoming Illuminated in Glorantha is shocking and madness-inducing. Once you are Illuminated, there is no turning back. Mass murderers, mad prophets, hysterics, atavists, catatonics, and all sorts of raving loonies are common products of the profound dislocation that results from Illumination...(on)ly the strongest of most grounded minds and wills can retain the mask of normality after this shattering epiphany...

The Lunar Way, p. 99

In short, Illumination erases everything that made the character the character. Passions (Love, Loyalty, Devotion) no longer bind the character. Rune affinities are brushed away. Your cult and deity no longer have a hold on you. All the things that define an RQ character are shattered. "An Illuminated individual views ethics, morals, mythology, deity, magic, and the world in a solipsistic manner." The Lunar Empire is aware of this, and watches Illuminates for signs of Occlusion (going off the rails). Most other civilizations would murder an Illuminate instantly. The Lunar Way leaves policing Illumination to the GM. In some campaigns, it can be portrayed as pure liberation, but in others there is plenty of room for horror (Illuminates cannot be instantly sense, but INT rolls could be required to see if the Illuminate is able to maintain the "mask of normality." Failed rolls could have dire consequences.

The Rest

Like other cult books, The Lunar Way begins with an overview of the religion and how it views the rest of the world. It emphasizes the primacy of the Solar religion (the Lunar cults see themselves as extensions of the Celestial pantheon) and the Lunar Way as a path or process. There is a wonderful discussion of how the Lunars view life (Righthand Incarnation) and death (Lefthand Incarnation) as equal phases of existence and enlightenment, and an overview of the Lunar Empire as a political entity (with descriptions of the prominent noble families). Finally the geography of the physical Red Moon is discussed, useful for those who don't have The Guide to Glorantha.

Closing Thoughts

Both the Crimson Bat and Nyslaor/Gbaji have "migrated" from Cults of Terror into this Lunar book, making you wonder what might replace them in the future Chaos cults book. Also I was mildly disappointed to not find Annilla here (the Blue Moon was one of the first cult write-ups I ever tried my hand at back in college) but perhaps she might appear in the Darkness cults book. There is less on the White Moon cult than might be desired as well, but that might be something better developed as the timeline progresses.

What we do have here is the definitive take on the Lunar Empire. I think it is harder, reading these pages, to reduce the Lunars to previous long-standing tropes (they are fantasy Romans, they are bad guys, etc). It is tremendously useful book for those who wish to portray the Lunars as human beings, whether running a pro-Sartar campaign or a pro-Lunar one. Clearly understanding an antagonist's motivations makes them a richer antagonist. There is a clear sense in these pages of why the Lunar Way is different from other religions, and why that generates conflict. The definitive RQG take on Illumination is likewise game-changing (I am relieved it is close enough to my guesses that I will not have to completely rewrite The Final Riddle!). Most importantly, perhaps, this is the first of the cults books to really broaden the base of game play. No longer confined to Dragon Pass, Prax, or Esrolia, campaigns could now be comfortably set in Lunar Tarsh or Peloria. Unfortunately for those hoping to save their pennies, The Lunar Way is ultimately another "must-buy."