Guide to Glorantha & a signature stone

When Jonathan and I directly address the reader in 13th Age, we mark our comments with signature tiles. Jonathan's tile is in the style of the Archmage. My tile, created by Lee Moyer, is a black stone, the style used by the High Druid. If you are not familiar with the world of Glorantha created by Greg Stafford, you'll miss the fact that this signature stone uses four Gloranthan runes. Here's the stone where it first appears, on our signature page at the start of 13th Age.*

Reading left to right, that's Magic, Moon, and Fertility above Communication. And the god I'm thanking along with Greg Stafford is Orlanth, Glorantha's god of the rushing air.

Glorantha has been one of the constants in my gaming and intellectual world since the day I read about the White Bear & Red Moon boardgame in the pages of the Space Gamer. Reading Greg's bibliography in the original RuneQuest introduced me to anthropology, comparative religion, and the study of mythology. Later I got to work with Greg at Chaosium and on the King of Dragon Pass game.

You can see me talk about Glorantha in a three minute video* towards the bottom of the Kickstarter page for the magnificent Guide to Glorantha book that is running for another ten days. It's going to be a gloriously illustrated system-neutral introduction to the world that hasn't been surpassed as a feat of ongoing mythological creation. A later piece of the video should be about why gamers and fantasy lovers who have never been involved with Glorantha should be interested in this Kickstarter.

Promise yourself this: even if you don't have it in you to help fund the current Guide to Glorantha,, keep it somewhere in the back of your mind. Watch Greg's video on the Kickstarter page when you have the time. Track down a copy of the Guide later on, enter its pages, and keep track of many Gloranthan experiments and creations I expect the Guide to inspire.

*The website referenced in the signature page? Under construction. It will be up by the time 13th Age releases. 

*So, about the music that accompanies my interview's opening and ending titles... Jeff Richard started the filming afternoon by giving me stick about the Christmas sweater I was wearing. Then I gave him crap about the Wagner music he'd used to frame Greg's video. I managed to get the Christmas wreath that half-haloed me on the wall behind my head taken down before we filmed, but singing may have been involved. The moral: don't screw with people who are about to add musical accompaniment to your video.