Olranthi Crunch Landscape for Solar System

As discussed earlier, I started a Gloranthan Solar System campaign recently, which obviously means that I needed to put together at least a preliminary crunch landscape for the thing. This is actually massively indimidating job – Glorantha is a deep setting, and better minds have spent a lot of time figuring out how to represent it in a roleplaying game. It’s not really very likely that I’ll be happy with whatever we cobble together initially, but luckily SS as a game system is very retcon-friendly; we’ll just put together enough at a time to play the game, and then expand and revise as necessary, thus hopefully approaching something good.

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What My Father Taught Me #2

We played a second session of the new Gloranthan Solar System campaign last Saturday with Sipi, Tero and Esa. The place was “Living Room” in Iisalmi once more; a nice restaurant, although I’m detecting a hint of newness there – time will tell how their atmosphere starts developing as the mainstream crowd finds the place. The actual session was relatively laid back in terms of drama, but the style and atmosphere were fine, and I would expect the events to gain in speed later on.

My new Solar System campaign

Last weekend we started a new roleplaying game campaign with some friends from Iisalmi (a nearby town from where I live, that). The idea for me was pretty much to get out of the house and play something with low stakes and no immediate game design concerns; bonus points if the game would endure a bit, at least half a dozen sessions. My roleplaying gaming has been pretty shallow and sparse for the last six months or so due to people moving about and me being too harassed by other stuff to work for it; luckily we’ll get a chance now, the next session has already been scheduled for this weekend and the intent is to play weekly or at least regularly for as long as the campaign takes.

About the pdf version of the World of Near

People have been asking about this, so I might as well inform everybody at once.

Glorantha in Solar System

Related to the reading I’ve been doing, here are some notes on a Solar System implementation for Gloranthan gaming. I’m mostly going by the 2nd edition Heroquest book here, particularly its tripartite cosmology and emphasis on the social role of heroes. The idea is to give some mechanical backbone to the whole idea of three separate Otherworlds, as outlined in my earlier post on the cosmology.

Starting to sell World of Near

Today I updated our English website a bit. You can now order the new book there, for instance. I probably should do some more updating as well this weekend, before leaving for Gencon – for instance, I still don’t have a proper resources section in the Solar System / TSoY pages.

Finally finished!

I haven’t been blogging this summer, as I’ve been writing my new TSoY book. It’s the largest book I’ve ever written (though not the largest I’ve designed), although I did have some help in the form of prior art by Clinton and Josh and other TSoY enthusiasts who allowed me to use their work. Very, very much work, I haven’t pushed this hard since -05.

I deliberated on the name of the book for quite a while, and ultimately ended up calling it The World of Near. The issue here was that I didn’t want to use the same name Clinton had used for his own book, but I wanted to make it clear that this was a TSoY sourcebook. “TSoY” is still on the cover as a sort of brand logo, but the actual name of the book is different. I never cared much about the rpg (and textbook) industry practice of publishing new editions of the same book even where the creators, intent and structure of the work were completely reworked.

Writing of War

I’ve managed to get some work done on the new TSoY book I’m supposed to be creating. Difficult to make time for uninterrupted writing, but perhaps I’ll manage now that the holidays went away. Aside from planning the book and writing some chapters, I’ve been planning more campaign frames for playtest. Specifically, I’m figuring out how to run the War in Khale, which is something that is featured pretty prominently in the original TSoY text. Despite being laid out, however, I don’t think the text much concerns itself with the specifics of how to run a campaign around the war – especially resolving mass combats is something people seem to have problems with, if forum threads wondering about it are any indication.

Solar System in PDF

It’s amazing how long it can take to fiddle and tiddle a simple pdf file together and put it up for sale. I must have spent something like 2-3 whole workdays doing it, but now Solar System is available in PDF. It’ll be interesting seeing whether it was worth my while to do this – not that it wasn’t interesting to try to create a screen-optimized layout again after quite a while, but I do have other things I should be doing, too.

Solar System in print

I’ve been told that a human being shrivels up and starts hallucinating after 100 hours of no sleep, after which death soon follows. Last night I got to 40 hours before getting finally going to sleep. That’s how #!%?”! busy I was getting the Solar System finished.