RuneQuest - TV Tropes

RuneQuest 2nd edition cover

"Violence is always an option."
"There is always another way."

— Orlanth and Ernalda, patron gods of the Orlanthi

RuneQuest was published by Chaosium in June of 1978 ^note , making it one of the oldest tabletop Role-Playing Games. Among other things, it introduced an experience system that replaced levels (as in Dungeons & Dragons) with skills that increase when successfully used (Traveller replaced levels with skills first, but they didn't increase with use). It also introduced hit regions instead of general Hit Points and did not use Character Classes, which removed weapon and armor use restrictions.

The original RuneQuest was set in the Constructed World of Glorantha created by Chaosium co-founder Greg Stafford in 1966. Glorantha is a world of Bronze Age fantasy, ruled by a myriad gods embroiled in a complex theoogony, where mythic questing into the timeless God Time that both preceded and overlays the Mundane World plays a major role in magic, religion, and heroics, and where Chaos gnaws upon the edges of existence. The world is chiefly home to feuding tribes and clans; urban societies mostly exist in loose networks of city-states, and true empires are few. Bronze is the chief metal of tools and war, and iron is a rare and precious treasure rarely found outside dwarf hands. The default setting of the game is the region of Dragon Pass in the Third Age, a little over 1600 years after the beginning of Time. Dragon Pass is known to be a site of struggle between the Orlanthi kingdoms that worship the Storm gods and the mighty Lunar Empire, the latter of which proclaims itself as the true bastion of order and enlightenment, but is seen by its foes as deeply tainted by Chaos.

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Sandy Petersen held a funding campaign on Kickstarter in 2019 for Glorantha: The Gods War, an asymmetrical strategy game about gods battling it out.

Since 1980 Chaosium has used versions of the core RuneQuest rules for other games like Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and the ElfQuest RPG, and many, many more; these rule variants are now collectively known as the Basic Role-Playing System (BRP), which has in fact sometimes been available as a generic ruleset. The fantasy world of Glorantha is also the setting of the video games King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages, the webcomic Prince of Sartar, and the boardgame Khan of Khans. The sourcebook Citizens of the Lunar Empire has its own page. Although the RuneQuest title has occasionally been attached to games with other settings, it has always been and remains closely associated with Glorantha, and the vast majority of the tropes listed below actually relate to Glorantha rather than BRP; hence, they could in fact also be considered to relate to HeroQuest and any other games and fictions which use that setting.

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This role-playing game provides examples of:

• Adjective Animal Alehouse:
  • Champions of the Reaching Moon mentions the Tardy Newt inn in the city of Glamour.
  • 3rd Edition boxed set "Gamemaster Book". In the adventure "The Money Tree", the Player Characters All Meet In An Inn: specifically, the Bouncing Buffalo Inn.
• Alien Sky: Glorantha's Blue Moon is tiny and rarely visible save as a streak of light. The Red Moon is huge, half red and half black, hangs fixed in the sky over the Lunar Empire, and represents the Red Goddess (or rather, it actually is the Red Goddess). There are multiple planets in the sky, which are gods who move across the vault of heaven; Lightfore moves east to west exactly across the path of the sun, Tolat is a baleful red star of love and war, Entekos is a white planet associated with calm summer airs, yellow-gold Lokarnos takes 196 days to make a full circuit round the sky, blue Mastakos does the same trip in eight hours before immediately rising in the east again, red Artia is in the sky for eight weeks and vanishes for eight more, the Twinstars move close together over their three-day orbit, vanish for their three-day absence, and cycle between red and white in opposite sequence as the Red Moon goes through its phases, and the Boat Planet is a blue star that follows the course of the Celestial River. Other celestial phenomena include Orlanth's Ring, centered on a large green star, which appears close to the horizon and fades into view one star at a time as it rises into the sky and vanishes into the Pole Star.
• All Myths Are True: All Gloranthan myths are literally true, even utterly contradictory myths of different cultures. Changing a myth (by going on a Heroquest to the world of the gods) can retroactively change reality.
• Alternative Calendar: Glorantha's primary calendar, Solar Time, is marked Solara Tempor or ST and counts the days since the first dawn and the beginning of Time, 1627 years before the present setting. The Lunar Empire instead measures time using 54-year cycles called Wanes, which measure the ebb and flow of spiritual power in the relics of the Red Goddess. Individual wanes are marked by numbers or named after a notable event or person associated with them, beginning with the Zero Wane when the Goddess walked the world.
• All Trolls Are Different: Trolls (they call themselves the Uz) are large humanoids with grey, blue or purple skin, tusks and long-snouted faces. They're matriarchal, cannibalistic, and Extreme Omnivores that can eat literally anything (although they like dwarf and elf best), and can't tolerate bright light — they originated in the dark underworld, and only came to the "hurtplace" when the sun god Yelm died and went into their realm. They're barbaric in culture, with little interest in luxuries beyond food and basic shelter, and are generally pessimistic, callous and aggressive. They're also afflicted by a species-wide curse that causes most of their births to be degenerate, stunted and deformed. Trolls are divided into numerous breeds, and most troll settlements tend to include several.
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • Deconstructed with the broo; they were created as a warped parody of life meant only to destroy, and they know it. And they have never forgiven their creators.
  • Played straight with the Vadeli, the corrupt relatives of the sorcerous Brithini people. Like their nicer if xenophobic relatives, Vadeli are The Ageless so long as they follow the rules of their Fantastic Caste System. Unlike the Brithini, the caste systems of the Vadeli generally involve breaking the laws of Malkion, which is to say things like "Murder is bad", "Incest is abhorrent", "Don't lie"... About the only reason they're tolerated is that those same rules make them ideal, if untrustworthy businessmen — and because they cheerfully blackmail port cities into playing along.
• Ancestor Veneration: The Cults of Prax supplement includes the Cult of Daka Fal which worships the First Mortal from whom all other mortals were descended and is openly described as ancestor worship. The special spells granted by this cult allow interaction with deceased ancestors although finding the friendly and neutral ones while avoiding the hostile ones is entirely the job of the players who participate in this cult.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The degree to which the gods are this, as opposed to "just" being powerful immortal spirits who rule over some part of nature, is ambiguous and viewed differently by in-universe sources. As a general rule, the oldest and most powerful gods are the ones most closely coterminous with their associated runes and concepts — the difference between, for instance, Uleria, the Life rune, and the concept of fertility, or between Flamal, the Plant rune, and plant life as a whole, is more than a little ambiguous — while the younger, more recent deities are usually more conceptually distinct and tied more to places and cultures than to concepts. The dwarves explicitly consider their god, Mostal, to be a strictly cultural anthropomorphism of the concept of Stability and the broken World Machine, and depict him as a person because it makes it easier to understand it; the human scholars of Seshnela also consider the gods to be, very literally, the runes and their combinations, which are named and worshipped as deities by the foreign barbarians.
• Anti-Villain: The Lunar Coders from Strangers in Prax are extremely capable special agents from the Lunar Empire. Though the Lunars as a whole are generally portrayed as villainous (or at least antagonistic) the Coders present the more positive side of the Lunar way. They are genuinely heroic — brave, merciful, honourable, devoted to each other and civilized. In the adventures provided they come across as either Worthy Opponent types (showing that there are sincerely well intentioned people working for the Empire) or allies and possibly friends in an Enemy Mine situation.
• The Archmage: Zzabur. Notable for not even being human; he is the Erasanchula of Sorcery, and he says that all the gods are merely corrupted and diminished Erasanchula.
• Artists Are Attractive: Orlanth and Emperor Yelm decided to Compete for the Maiden's Hand through a test of music. Orlanth played on the bagpipes, a new and ungraceful instrument that disgusted the court's snooty judges, and lost. However, he made the "maiden" (Ernalda) and many of Yelm's servants laugh, which won them to his side later on.
• Assimilation Plot:
  • The Empire of Wyrms Friends wanted everybody (mortals, gods, you name it) to embrace their draconic nature, a form of hidden self that they believed existed in latency inside everything. It worked like an enormous pyramid scheme based on the goal of creating a messianic True Dragon.
  • In the present day, the Lunar Empire wants everybody to worship their Goddess, so that the world can be one in All again. And damn are they succeeding. According to King of Sartar the Red Moon will eventually be defeated, but even that could be a lie (there are "She is just hiding" theories In-Universe).
• Attack Reflector:
  • If a Reflection spell is in effect on a living being, it will attempt to reflect any other spell cast against the being or its equipment back upon the caster.
  • If a living person is protected by the Cast Back sorcery spell and an attacking spell doesn't overcome the target's magic points with its own, the incoming spell will boomerang back on its caster and affect them instead.
  • Cacodemon has the Chaotic Feature of being able to reflect all spells that cost 10 Magic Points or less back at the caster.
  • Supplement Trollpak, "Book of Uz" part 2. The Xiola Umbar cult has a spell called Turn Blow that reflects all damage that affects the recipient back upon the source.
• Axis Mundi: In the atemporal depths of divine prehistory, an immense mountain sat in the precise center of the world — all other mounts are simply tiny, imperfect copies of this first great peak. It was home to the court of the gods, until Wakboth the Devil destroyed it at the onset of the Great Darkness, leaving a ragged, gaping hole into the Void at the heart of the world. This threatened to consume everything, until the sea god Magasta led his kin into filling the hole up with the waters of the oceans.
• Backronym: In-universe, it's usually assumed that EWF is an acronym of some kind, and they were commonly called the Empire of Wyrms Friends or derisively as "Enemies Without Friends", but EWF is actually a Draconic word that doesn't translate to any humanly understandable concept.
• Bad Moon Rising: The Red Moon rose, and her Empire wants you to worship her.
• Barbarian Tribe: Some of the most widespread cultures in the world are barbarian tribes who live in clans and nomad bands, warring and questing for glory and honor, in contrast to older hunter-gatherer tribes and the relatively isolated urban cultures. The fractious Orlanthi or Heortlings are the most prominent example, but don't think of themselves as barbarians, of course. Now, Wenelians (think more primitive Orlanthi with stronger Iroquois influences and less of Heortling laws) are definitely barbarians, too quick to avenge slights and less likely to be hospitable or accept weregild. And Praxians? Savages — and the less said of the Tusk Riders, the better.
• Beast Man:
  • Beast Men are a collection of species unified by combining the features of animals with those of humans. There are multiple breeds, including centaurs, fauns, minotaurs and manticores. Not all human/animal chimeras are Beast Men, however — they seem to require some tie to natural forces, and true Beast Men always recognize each other as such and are natural allies.
  • Broos are not Beast Men, but tend to resemble them due to reproducing by impregnating whatever animals are common in an area to produce more broo. As such, most resemble humanoid versions of whatever creatures are common in their ranges, usually hardy herbivores such as antelope, deer or wild goats or livestock such as sheep or cattle. One based on larger herbivores such as bison or rhinoceri are rarer by not unheard of, and while carnivore-based broos are possible they're quite rare due to the rarity of large predators and the difficult of impregnating them.
• Bird People: The Durulz, divided into two major tribes: the Ducks and the Keets, with the latter being made up of various species (flamingos, pelicans, penguins, auks, herons, swordbills, peacocks, etc).
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction:
  • Green, brown and yellow elves mate like humans (or, at least, human scholars are reasonably sure they do). After this, however, the female elf gives birth to a coconut-sized seed, which is then planted and grows into a plant that bears a single fleshy fruit. After two years of maturation, the fruit is split open to reveal an elf child equivalent to a four-to-six-years-old human infant.
  • The Slorifings — also called red elves and goblins — are all male, and reproduce by worshipping a type of love spirits. After a successful worship session, the supplicant buries himself and goes into eternal sleep. Afterwards, a spore-bearing plant such as a fern sprouts over his grave and produces a crop of miniature Slorifings, which are called imps and treated as adults from birth.
  • Dwarves aren't born as such; in fact, they find sexual reproduction repulsive. Instead, they're essentially manufactured. The process requires a male-female pair to spend a few weeks using their respective "mortar" and "pestle" to create the blank template of a dwarf (the dwarves find this process horrific, and usually suppress their memories of the event). This is then placed in a caste-specific container to brew for a number of years, before being decanted as a young dwarf ready for labor.
• Bizarre Seasons: Glorantha has five eight-week seasons, corresponding to its five elements: a spring-like Sea Season (Water), a summer-like Fire Season, an autumn-like Earth Season, a winter-like Dark Season (Darkness), and a turbulent Storm Season (Air). There are also two weeks of Sacred Time between Storm and Sea, spent in performing death and rebirth rituals and seeking oracles of the year to come.
• Blow You Away: Air, or Storm, was the last element to emerge, bursting into violent life at the end of the Golden Age. It includes a combination of air, lightning, wind, and weather magic. Storm magic permits actions such as storing a wind or air elemental within a bag, walking on the air, using the wind to carry one's words to a distant location, calling up or quieting the wind, manipulating electricity, creating fog and clouds, and creating snow or hail. Combined with the Movement rune, it can be used to fly; combined with the Water rune, it can be used to predict weather and create rain.
• Born in the Saddle: Pentans and Praxians represent two different takes on this. The Pentans (and by extension, the Pure Horse People of Dragon Pass) are the steppe version; they're heavily Scythian-influenced in design, and produced the Gloranthan equivalent of Genghis Khan. The Praxians are more like North American Plains tribes, and ride everything but horses, including antelope, bison, and giant llamas.
• Butt-Monkey: The Durulz, or ducks, see themselves as the Butt-Monkey for the entirety of Glorantha. Even their own racial sourcebook agrees with this perspective, going to extensive lengths to point out how all the other races look down on and tend to ignore or bully ducks and keets.
• Canon Discontinuity: The entire Glorantha: The Second Age line of products by Mongoose Publishing has been declared non-canonical, mainly for being quickly-written to the point of being a bit slapdash.
• Casting a Shadow: Darkness is the oldest, and often most alien, element in the cosmos; it is broadly associated with literal darkness, cold, and spirits. Spells that make use of the Darkness rune can provide a variety of effects, such as shrouding an area in permanent gloom, making onself invisible and soundless while in shadow, seeing in the dark, suppressing Light, Fire, and Sky magic, creating cold or ice, making ice resist melting, summoning ice spirits, blinding foes, inducing incapacitating fear, casting weakening curses, exhaling poison, and attacking a target's soul. Combined with other runs, it can do things such inducing rot and fungal growths (mixed with the Plant rune), communicate with, summon, or transform into arthropods (with the Beast rune), and create spectral or physical undead servants from sacrificed creatures or raising revenant champions (with the Death rune). The trolls are born to it, and wield its powers expertly.
• Chariot Race:
  • Monster Coliseum has rules for chariot racing.
  • Chariots aren't really commonly used for warfare in most parts of Glorantha, but are a big deal among the Orlanthi in Ralios.
• The Chosen Many: It's implied, and outright confirmed in Sartar Rising, that there was no single Argrath and that several heroes were turned by later sources into one Composite Character. Ironically, Sheng Seleris, the closest parallel to the original Arkat from whose name the word "Argrath" derives (both of them were anti-heroes who became the rival empire's single greatest enemy until said empires defeated and imprisoned them; both were released by a Lightbringers Quest, and both ended up betraying their allies), is not one of them.
• Circles of Hell: There are seven hells, which formed early in the universe's history when the primordial Darkness began to refine and separate itself into distinct concepts. Some of these layers are home to deceased spirits, but others only to spirits, gods, or demons.
  • The Seventh Hell, the topmost, is where nocturnal deities go during the daytime. The darkness spirits most easily accessible to mortal summoners also live here.
  • The Sixth Hell is the layer of Styx, the great river of liquid darkness that the dead must cross to reach their afterlives.
  • The Fifth Hell is where the paradise of the trolls, darkness-loving beings who originated in deeper layers of Hell to begin with, is located; to them, it is called Wonderhome. Here also live most of the troll gods and many dark and terrible spirits.
  • The Fourth Hell is a dreary, monotonous place where deceased spirits linger in eternal grey stasis. Here live Ty Kora Tek, who rules over the dead, and Daka Fal, who judges them.
  • The Third Hell was the original home of the trolls. In the present, this is where Yelm, the Sun, passes through on his nightly journey. As such, the Bright Hell is the only spot that a human would call pleasant here, and is kept brightly lit and welcoming by the passage of the god's barge.
  • The Second Hell is the War Hell. War gods and damned warriors dwell here, alongside the broken remnants of Kargan Tor, the universe's first god of war, and battle forever against the tides of monsters that rise from the depths of creation.
  • The First Hell, also called the Deepest Hell, Ratslaf Rocks, Disorder Deep, or the Uncertain Realm, is a shifting realm of darkness and confusion. The only stable points here are fortresses manned by deceased fire spirits, who stand guard against intrusions from the Fount of Chaos at the bottom of this layer.
• Cold Iron: Iron is poison to elves and trolls, because the dwarves who invented it — not "found", not "refined", they invented a metal — designed it as a weapon against them. The most ancient dwarves claim that they'd have made it work against humans, too, if they'd known how much trouble they'd become as well.
• Colour Coded Armies: The Vadeli in the West, much like the Brithini they broke away from and warred with, are divided into castes. Brown Vadeli are commoners, and until recently, the only ones that seemed to survive into historical times; they're slimy and evil, but not actually that great at military planning or any grandiose long-term schemes. More recently, Red Vadeli warriors came back onto the scenes — and quickly rallied the Brown Vadeli for a campaign of maritime terror. Everyone dreads the possibility of the return of the Blue Vadeli, the leaders and archmages, who could actually put the bad old Vadeli Empire together again.
• Combat Tentacles: Supplement Dorastor: Land of Doom.
  • One encounter with Jack O'Bears includes Jack O'Bear #2. It has four tentacles in place of its arms, each of which can inflict 4-24 Hit Points of damage, in a game where most player characters will be lucky to have 16 hit points.
  • The Howler has a single tentacle in the middle of its chest that can do up to 12 Hit Points of physical damage plus up to 10 Hit Points of acid damage.
• Creepy Centipedes:
  • Heroes magazine Volume I #3 article "Creepy Critters: Insects for RuneQuest". Centipedes can grow up to 20 meters long and their bite can inject a lethal poison.
  • Trollpak boxed set, "Book of Uz" Book 2. Centipedes can grow up to 40 paces (33 yards) long and weigh up to 3,800 lbs.
• Creepy Crosses: A symbol almost identical with the Christian cross is the Rune of Death in Glorantha, and it represents the sword of Humakt, the god of death. Thus, you can use a cross to repel undead in the setting without any kind of connection to Christianity, or even Crystal Dragon Jesus.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: You may think so given the Invisible God, but no; about the only commonality between his church and Catholicism is some sects having saints. Otherwise, they're more like Zoroastrians and Hindis. Although Hrestol is pretty much a Jesus-like figure, martyrdom and all.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The Dragonkill War describes what the dragons did. They exterminated a powerful army and then killed every human in the Dragon Pass region.
• Curse: The Durulz race in all its variants suffers one; it cannot fly anymore. As in, not only will spells that grant flight fail to work on them, flying machines will spontaneously break down if a duck or a keet tries to board it.
• Cutting Off the Branches: As described in King of Sartar, written somewhere between 600 and 1000 years after the Hero Wars (the big story for the setting), the Red Moon is no longer in the sky, Argrath is apotheosised, the Red Emperor is no more, and the Lunar Empire collapses. Of course, this is only the 'canonical' campaign—in your own games, the Hero Wars is likely going to be resolved differently. The Illiteracy Era, a general civilisational collapse a few centuries after the Hero Wars, is a plot device that explains how the actual history might be distorted into the legend told by King of Sartar.
• Dark Is Not Evil:
  • For humans, sure it is, but trolls are subterranean creatures; troll Hell is located in human Heaven and vice versa.
  • Even though Zorak Zoran and his worshippers are complete man-eating, necromancy-edged, brawl-loving berserks, other Troll gods are actually quite benevolent, if only a bit brutal. Well, they may still eat you, but only because they're hungry, nothing personal to it.
  • The Carmanians follow a dualistic religion. While they believe in Idovanus and Ganesatarus as the main good and main evil gods, respectively, with the latter being definitely not okay, their philosophy states that it is actually sensible for a man to combine "light" and "dark" aspects in his life, following a balanced path; for instance, being good and kind to his friends, but remorseless and cruel to his enemies, or tempering the dark action of revenge with the light idea of justice. What this means is that a Carmanian may well come across as a cruel and evil bastard, while actually just acting that way towards his enemies to better protect his family. Of course, they are as often just classical Lawful Evil feudal overlords.
  • Also, the users of the Death Rune are highly respected and well-liked, due to their ability to confer with the ancestors and their anti-undead powers... in some cultures, anyway. In other cultures, the Death worshipers are exactly as creepy as you'd expect.
• Dark Messiah: Nysalor/Gbaji, depending on the interpretation.
• Death of the Old Gods: Deep in the cosmogony of Glorantha, the oldest gods were the primal Powers and Elements of the Celestial Court. In the Gods War, these gods were displaced by more specialized ones, chiefly their descendants, and eventually perished when Chaos destroyed Axis Mundi where they lived.
• Deity of Human Origin: Zistor and Nysalor, who was to be the perfect deity and turned out to be the incarnation of a previous one.
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: Dinosaurs are mutated descendants of dragonewts, themselves a species of neotenic dragons, who have let emotional imperfections drive them away from the path towards full dragonhood and trapped them permanently in flesh.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Earth was the middle element to emerge, following Darkness and Water but preceding Light and Storm. Spells involving the Earth rune mostly revolve around literal earth and stone effects or the concept of protection, such as strengthening stonecutting tools and stone weapons, causing localized earthquakes, summoning earth nymphs and spirits, creating protective fields, and drawing strength from the earth in desperate times. When combined with the Fertility rune, with which it has conceptual synergy, it produces effects such as boosting plant growth and protecting crops, fertilizing and cleansing soil, preserving food and goods, and vitalizing allies.
• Earth Is Young: According to mythic histories, the world has existed for around 100,000 years. However, this isn't a strongly reliable figure due to the majority of the world's existence having been in the mythic God Time, where Time did not actually yet exist. As a result, most of those events happened nonlinearly, trying to accurately date things is a doomed exercise, and most of it can still be accessed in myth-quests because by virtue of not being time-bound they never "stopped" happening anyway. Insofar as measurable history goes, it's only been a touch over 1,600 years since the beginning of Time.
• Elemental Powers: Glorantha uses five basic elements: Darkness (the primal element), Earth, Sky (which includes fire), Water, and Storm (the air between Earth and Sky). The Lunar Empire regards "Moon" as a sixth element, and most other cultures hate and fear them.
• Eternal Recurrence:
  • The Sacred Time, a concept pretty much inspired by mythologist Mircea Eliade's eternal return.
  • The Devil is said to appear once every 600 years.
• Extinct Sapient Species: In the Gods Time, many strange and exotic species and cultures existed that perished in the great wars and cataclysms of the Storm Age and the Great Darkness. Most of these are long lost to history, with a few exceptions. The Gold Wheel Dancers were peculiar beings that resembled spinning golden disks; they were part of the First Council of civilized species, but died out early in the Dawn Age.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: How the all-male broo reproduce, which is why Thed, the Goddess of Rape, is worshiped as their mother. Thankfully, only with nonsentient animals.
• Fantastic Race Weapon Affinity:
  • The straight-bladed sword is the traditional weapon of the Air gods, and as such is strongly associated with the Orlanthi people.
  • The Lunar empire traditionally makes use of curved-edge swords, such as khopeshes and scimitars; collectively, these are referred to as "Lunar swords" or "Lunar blades" in-universe as a result. According to legend, this custom began when Yanafal Tarnils, the Lunar war deity, was still a mortal, he was cursed by his former god Humakt to be unable to use the sword that was Humakt's sacred weapon; in response, he bent his blade to form a new weapon that he could still use.
  • Dwarves are usually seen wielding axes and hammers... because they are so possessive of their crafts and technology that they refuse to even show their best work to other races, and thus almost always go into the surface world using only the barest necessary tools and gear that they can. Their most advanced weapons are crossbows, invented as a reply to elven archers and troll slingers, and firearms, created as upgrades to crossbows when humans started copying their designs.
• Fantastic Racism: The Durulz are subject to this as part of their ongoing curses from the gods. In return, ducks hate trolls (the Uz regard Durul flesh as particularly delicious), whilst keets hate each other, with the flamingo and heron keets in particular loathing each other to the extent it's written into their creation mythology.
• Fantasy Gun Control: The dwarves have rifles. There is even a renegade Dwarf Cult of the Cannon in the Dragon Pass.
• Fantasy Metals: Glorantha is not Earth, and the metals called bronze, iron, gold, and so forth, are analogs, not duplicates, of Earthly metals.
• Fantasy Pantheon: Many. The Orlanthi pantheon—centered on the storm god Orlanth and his wife, the Earth goddess Ernalda, worshipped by barbarian hill people—is probably the most developed. But aside from a couple oddball monotheistic societies and the animistic Hsunchen, nearly every culture in Glorantha has their own pantheon.
• Fantastic Caste System:
  • The Brithini are divided into five castes, the four castes of men founded by the legitimate son of Malkion (Dromal, Horal, Talar and Zzabur) and his wife's caste Menema (the caste of women). Dromali are commoners, Horal are warriors, Talar are diplomats and coordinators (there is no leader, even though people often make derivatives), and Zzabur are wizards and intellectuals (spiritual power, like the Brahmins of India).
  • The dwarves are divided into ten castes. These are the Rock dwarves (miners, builders and masons; they're the most rocklike and least humanoid), Lead dwarves (plumbers and glassblowers), Quicksilver dwarves (chemists and alchemists who create potions, poisons, chemical weapons, medicine and dwarf food), Copper dwarves (creators of tools, coinage and magic-conducting parts), Tin dwarves (summoners of earth spirits, creators of golem-like constructs, and makers of prosthetics), Brass dwarves (metallurgists and forge-tenders), Silver dwarves (enchanters and sorcerers, goblin-like and flat-nosed), Gold dwarves (teachers, guides, lore-keepers and diplomats, the most humanoid and the closest to their creator god's mind), Iron dwarves (warriors and weaponsmiths, always clad in armor) and Diamond dwarves (exemplars of the other castes). Only the first eight were created by Mostal, the dwarves' creator god; the other two were created later to adapt to the rigors of life during and after the Gods War.
• Fauns and Satyrs:
  • Satyrs are a kind of Beast Men with the features of humans but the legs and horns of goats.
  • The Broos often look like this, since they impregnate goats, sheep, and cattle most often.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Subverted. Anybody called an "atheist" in Glorantha doesn't worship the gods... because they worship the Invisible God instead, who doesn't really intervene like the pantheon does. The "gods" are held to be lesser figures not worthy of devotion except maybe as saints of the Invisible God.
• Food-Based Superpowers: The troll spell Stones to Kill Chaos imbues rocks with magical effects for use against Chaos monsters, activated when the rock is thrown. Several types of rocks exist, each created by ritually consuming specific beings.
  • Black stones negate a Chaotic power or trait for a few hours. They are created by eating the heart of a troll; the goddess Kyger Lytor forbids killing trolls just to make them, but using the heart of a troll who died for some other reason is fine.
  • Blue stones drain magic. Their creation requires the consumption of a being of high intelligence.
  • Green stones heal allies injured by Chaotic attacks. They are made by eating the priestesses or god-speakers of Earth deities; the greater the victim's spirit power, the stronger the healing.
  • Yellow stones deal damage that bypasses all defenses. They are made by eating fire elementals, which takes a lot of doing. Trolls cannot use these themselves — as Darkness creatures, Light magic doesn't agree with them — so they usually force humans to do it for them.
  • Brown stones cause Chaos creatures to explode. They're made by eating creatures that were struck dead by lightning.
• Formerly Sapient Species: One of the Praxian tribes, the Morokanth, consists of humanoid tapirs who herd non-sapient humans as pack beasts and food. In ages past, the human tribes and their totem animals were presumably both sapient, until the chief Praxian god decided to hold a series of lotteries between each tribe and its totem to determine who would be the eater (sapient herders responsible for the well-being of their herds) and eaten (able to forage for sustenance in the Praxian wastes, but stripped of sapience). Humans won four out of the five lotteries, but the tribe with the Morokanth as its totem wasn't as lucky. The modern Morokanth can also turn captive normal humans into nonsapient herd-humans, but don't expect a last-minute rescue by The Cavalry if they try to do this to you — the Morokanth are Praxians, and the surrounding human Praxian tribes feel a stronger cultural kinship towards them than a species one towards any poor schlubs who got themselves in that particular pickle.
• Foul Waterfowl: Ducks and keets are sapient (and playable) Bird People, apparently included in the setting in a fit of authorial whimsy. They were seemingly at least partly inspired by Daffy and Donald Duck of cartoon fame, and are variously depicted as setting Butt Monkeys, suffering under some kind of racial curse, or being something of a Proud Warrior Race; they both suffer from and engage in Fantastic Racism. Hence, while not evil, they certainly tend to be played as having quite an attitude.
• Fungus Humongous: Sporewood is a region around Dagori Inkarth, the oldest known troll settlement and the largest stronghold of Darkness in the surface world, covered by forests of giant fungi.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Supplement Trollpak, Book of Uz part 2. The crabs tamed and used by trolls can weigh more than 2,000 lbs.
• Giant Spider:
  • Into the Troll Realms, adventure "Skyfall Lake". Crab City has spiders that are as large as a mammoth.
  • Dorastor: Land of Doom. Of the Spider Folk who live in the Spider Woods, the largest type are the Great Mother Spiders. They can reach a Size of 54, which means they weigh just less than 7,000 lb.
  • Supplement Trollpak, "Book of Uz" part 2. The trolls have domesticated several types of giant spiders. The largest ones weigh more than 6,000 lbs.
• Glacial Apocalypse: The Late Storm Age and much of the Great Darkness were dominated by plunging temperatures and worsening climates due to the rise in power of the ice god Valind and his covering vast portions of the northern lands beneath a massive glacier, the vanishing of celestial bodies, and the eventual breaking of the world by Chaos. The Later Storm Age itself saw the world plunge into an endless winter of cold storms and barren lands, where only monsters and hardy creatures survived and most nations and empires crumbled one by one. The Great Darkness saw the near-total extinction of conventional plants and animals, while the land was completely frozen over and scoured by killing winds and toxic gases and sapient races clung on only in scattered, desperate holdouts — except for the darkness-loving trolls, who swarmed everywhere and preyed on everything. By the time the Sun rose again in the Dawn, almost everything in Glorantha had died.
• God Couple: Given the elaborate nature of the setting's myths, it's not surprising that several of these are prominent. Some, like Yelm and Dendara, Orlanth and Ernalda, enshrine the nature of marriage for their worshippers. Others serve to bind a "foreign" god into a pantheon, as with Esrola and the Darkness god Argan Argar, or Redalda and the sun god Elmal.
• God-Emperor: The Red Emperor is this for the Lunar Empire, periodically-reincarnating and fantastically powerful son of the Red Goddess, to whom she turned over worldly power when she finally completely apotheosized.
• God Is Dead:
  • Orlanth killed Yelm and it ended badly. Luckily he got better, thanks to Orlanth's Redemption Quest.
  • There is a supplement called Orlanth is Dead. He isn't, because the act that would symbolically kill him was rigged by the Orlanthi, but it sure as hell feels like he was.
• God of Chaos: Glorantha has a whole pantheon of Chaos gods. In the Great Darknes, they came very close to destroying the world. The most notable of their number are Ragnaglar, Thed, and Mallia, who brought Chaos into the world to begin with, and their child Wakboth, the Devil, who championed its destruction and had to be killed to save the world. Other important Chaos deities include Vivamort, the creator of the vampires, and Thanatar, the Severed God, who lived despite having his head struck from his shoulders.
• God of Evil:
  • Wakboth the Devil, a god of Chaos.
  • The Unholy Trio, a subset of the Chaos gods, are even more so — even Chaos worshipers hate them.
  • The Vadeli believe the Invisible God is trying to kill Himself and destroy the entire world in the process (as they are coterminous to some extent), which explains the Darkness et cetera. They want in on the action, and believe everyone else is cowardly and impious for not letting God die. Of course, everyone else that even believes in the Invisible God (i.e. Westerners, mostly) disagrees with their assessment.
• God of Light: Light and celestial phenomena are the province of the Fire gods:
  • Yelm is the god and mover of the sun, the most prominent of the gods of fire, and was once the ruler of the universe. He was the first king of the gods, a role that he has contested with Orlanth since the Storm Age. His sons include the living embodiments of Glorantha's planets, and Elmal, the primary solar deity of the Orlanthi tribes.
  • Dayzatar is Yelm's elder brother and the lord of the untouched, perfect light of the Sky World, from which he almost never descends. His children — really lesser aspects of himself, shed in self-purification — include Arraz, the god of the stars, and Pole Star.
  • Lodril, the youngest of the three brothers, loved the physical world and descended to it, invading the underworld to become the god of volcanoes and the fire beneath the earth.
• God of Order: In addition to his role as the sun god, Yelm is the god of chieftains and rulers, and brings a divine social order; those that do not accept it bring their own condemnation. He founded many of the great empires of the God Time whose descendants still rule much of the world today, and his higher aspects can only be attained by the ruling nobility in any culture. Aspects of this role are also taken by his children, such as Murharzarm, the first emperor of Dara Happa and original ruler of the Surface World, and Antirius, the god of justice, contracts, and hospitality.
• God of Thunder: Weather, wind, and air-based natural disasters are the province of the Storm gods, the fractious and bellicose clan descended from Umath, the Storm, who rent the Sky and Earth apart in the Gods Age. Among their number they include Orlanth Thunderous, Orlanth's aspect as the weather god and Lord of the Middle Air; Heler, a benevolent deity of rain; Ygg, a destructive and terrifying Storm god that sends raging winds and icebergs to test his worshippers and destroy his enemies; and Gagarth the destroyer, who rides upon storm winds in search of prey.
• Green Thumb: Plant life and its manipulation are the purview of either the Plant rune or combinations of the Earth and Fertility runes. As a general rule, Plant spells mostly interact with wild plants and can be used to do things like animate trees, cause the growth of impassable thickets, create huge bursts of algal growth, or see and hear through distant plants; combined with the Darkness rune, Plant magic can be used to create and spread fungal life and infestations. The elves are born to this power, and use it skillfully and expertly. Earth-Fertility spells are mostly useful for passively boosting plant health and growth and are the most useful for protecting crops.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: A main staple of the setting, though Wakboth and the Unholy Trio are pitch black.
• Grim Up North: In the northern regions of Genertela, civilization slowly fades out to be replaced by cold wildernesses. To the west, Fronela is bordered by vast boreal forests home to elven kingdoms who are often hostile to the tree-cutting southern nations; north of that is Valid's Glacier, ancient home of the god of winter and roamed by tribes of ice trolls. Heading east, past the icy Kenyrian Sea's southern arm, are the vast, windswept steppes of Pent, ruled by horse nomads who pose a persistent danger to the urban civilizations of the Lunar Empire and Kralorela. Throught all of these lands, with the exception of the high glacier proper, are found kingdoms of dark trolls and wandering tribes of Hsunchen barbarians.
• The Hecate Sisters: The major Earth goddesses of the Orlanthi pantheon work like this, being at once three generations of a family and different faces of the same goddess. There are in fact two such triads: the fertile and giving benign earth, and the death-dealing malign earth.
  • The Benign Earth triad is fairly conventional:
    • Asrelia, who retired and passed on most of her power to her daughters, but remains the goddess of treasures and the special patron of old women.
    • Ernalda, the Earth Queen in her glory, is the goddess of marriage, family, and the symbolic Earth, and the primary goddess worshipped by almost all Orlanthi women. While she rarely rules in her own right, she's often the power behind the throne. (Some Orlanthi add her sister Esrola—goddess of the earth's bounty and the physical land of Esrolia—while others might consider her an aspect of Ernalda.)
    • Voria, Spring's Handmaiden, innocent goddess of girls before their initiation as adults.
  • The Malign Earth goddesses are sisters to the Benign:
    • Ty Kora Tek, keeper of the halls of the dead, is Asrelia's twin and worshipped alongside her.
    • Maran Gor, goddess of earthquakes, dinosaurs, and the destructive power of the earth.
    • Babeester Gor, born from Ernalda's dead body to avenge wrongs done to her and to the other deities of earth and forest.
• The Hero's Journey: HeroQuests work like this, with the HeroQuester deliberately playing the role of the hero.
• Hit Points: Averted. Hit points generally do not increase with experience. No matter how bad ass an adventurer is, an axe to their head will ruin their whole day.
• Horn Attack: The following Gloranthan creatures have horn/butt attacks: bison, broo, broobats, rhino, sable (antelope), sky bull, unicorn.
• An Ice Person: Ice and chill are a manifestation of primordial Darkness. As such, ice-based spells — such as summoning ice spirits or demons, chilling foes, strengthening ice, and the like — are cast using the Darkness rune.
• I Know Your True Name:
  • Third Edition boxed set, Book 2: Magic. A magician can only summon a creature he has summoned before if he knows the creature's True Name.
  • Gygax magazine #4 article "Djinn: Spirits between Heaven and Hell". All jinn (imps, djinn, foliots, ifrits and marids) can only be summoned if the magician knows their true name.
  • White Dwarf (1977) magazine #92 article "Demons! Dealing with the Otherworld". When summoning a demon, the caster must speak the True Name of the demon during the invocation. If the demon agrees to a bargain with the summoner, it must swear by its True Name to carry out its end of the bargain.
• King of the Gods: This title was originally held by Yelm, the Lord of Day and the Enthroned One, who ruled all of the primordial world from the Spike. He was usurped when Orlanth the Storm killed him and claimed his place, setting off the Gods War. Yelm returned to life at the beginning of Time, and he and Orlanth have contested the rulership of gods and mortals ever since.
• Layered World: The world has a distinctly layered character, with the Middle World where people, animals, and plants live lying at its center. Above it are the Lower Air, where birds fly; then the Middle Air, above the mountain peaks, where the Storm gods live, and the Central Air, a realm of constant winds; above that is the Sky Bowl, which marks the path of the Sun and separates the Heavens from the realm of air, and the celestial waters that tint the daytime sky blue. Heaven proper is divided between the Sky World, a realm of peace and happiness where celestial beings live in gladness and pleasure untouched by the woes of the lower realms, and Dayzatar's Heaven at the very top, where the god meditates alone. Below the surface world are the depths of the earth proper, where the Earth goddesses live; then the various layered depths of the cosmic ocean on which the world floats, where unknowable leviathans and sea gods dwell; this eventually gives way to the realm of Darkness, in which are seven layered Hells, and at the very bottom of existence the Fount of Chaos vomits out monsters into being.
• Light 'em Up: Light, also called Fire and Sky, was the last element to emerge during the initial formation of the universe — Air or Storm, the last, was a latecomer at the end of the Golden Age; light, fire, and star magic all fall under its purview, as do mental focus, purity, and perception. Spells involving the Light rune include things such as the casting of bolts or arrows of light, causing the caster to glow, illuminating set areas with star- or sunlight, demoralizing or weakening Darkness creatures, calling spirits from the Heavens of light, creating or strengthening flames, strengthening the acuity and focus of allies, communicating telepathically, and perceiving magic. When combined with other runes, it can permit the caster to transform into birds (when combined with the Animal rune) or to see through invisibility and illusions (when combined with Truth).
• Light Is Not Good:
  • The Sun God Yelm is consided evil by the followers of Orlanthi Storm Pantheon, but good to the followers of the Sun pantheon. The Durulz hate Yelm, as he was the god who stripped them of their ability to fly and cursed them to their current state, and aren't too fond of other Sky gods, who goaded him into giving them a racial Fate Worse than Death instead of exterminating them, even though they admit that these gods did so to save the Durulz from extinction.
  • Trolls are subterranean creatures, and hurt by the light; troll Hell is located in human Heaven and vice versa.
• Liquid Darkness: At the beginning of the Gloranthan cosmogony, Darkness was the first element to emerge from the unformed mass of Chaos. This primal Darkness went through several periods of self-reflection and devolution, which caused it to birth or break apart into numerous lesser and more defined deities and locations. One of these coalesced into and birthed a new thing, a form of Darkness that was still Darkness, but even so was a liquid that flowed to form a river. This new deity was Styx, and drew from the still seething potential of Chaos a new element — Zaramaka, the primordial entity of Water.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Exposure to Primal Chaos can give you "Chaos Features", neat powers that often come with horrific physical manifestations. But you can also be Blessed with Suck and end up with "Chaos Flaws".
• Love Goddess: Uleria, the Cosmic Court's goddess of love in all its forms, as well as (according to one myth, at least) the ultimate ancestor of humans.
• Low Literacy Setting: In general most characters are illiterate, given that the setting is a Bronze Age world. Usually priests of deities of knowledge and sorcerers are the only ones capable of reading and writing. There are at times however where a few merchants, nobles, and heroes can read and write and the PC literacy rate can be assumed to be high given their heroic/adventurer status, but that is not always the case and it varies greatly.
• Lunacy: In addition to the standard Earth, Air, Fire and Water elementals, Glorantha also has Darkness and Moon elementals. Moon Elementals cause temporary insanity by touch.
• Mad God: Ragnaglar of the Unholy Trio, who lost his mind when he failed his initiation in the Sex Pit.
• Making a Splash: Water was the second element to form, emerging from the depths of Darkness when the universe was still in its earliest period of emergence. Spells that use the Water rune do things such as permitting air-breathers to breathe water or the reverse, protecting against fire-based damage and spells, calming turbulent or storm-tossed waters, removing impurities from water, calling aquatic steeds, fish, or friendly dolphins or nereids, creating floods, tidal waves, waterspouts or whirlpools, and summoning sea monsters. Combined with the Storm rune, it can be used to predict weather and create rain.
• Mama Bear: In Durulz mythology, after Yelm invaded their ancestral home of Ganderland and drove the ducks away, Canarda, their goddess of motherhood and literal mother of their species, stayed behind. Once she was alone, she walked right up to Yelm, ignoring the way his fiery aura burned her, and slapped him. He was so impressed that he allowed her to limp away after her children unharmed and called off his war.
• Merchant City: The second-largest city in Sartar, Alda-Chur, is a bustling, crowded, wealthy trade centre which dominates a key part of the main trade route linking the Lunar Empire with Sartar, Prax, and the cities and seaports of the Holy Country.
• Microts: Gloranthan weeks consist of seven days, the first five named after the elements that are strongest during them — Freezeday, Waterday, Clayday, Windsday and Fireday — followed by the magically unpredictable Wildday and the holy time of Godsday. Each season further consists of eight weeks, named after the powers of the Celestial Court — Disorder, Harmony, Death, Fertility, Stasis, Movement, Illusion, and Truth.
• Mind Screw: There are lots of mutually exclusive mythologies, and all of them are true because reality before Time started was fluid. And sometimes (the Sunstop, which temporarily broke Time, being the main example) it can still be. And traveling to the reality before Time started, which still exists as a separate plane, can potentially change reality after Time started. That's without taking into account the Unreliable Narrators or the out-of-universe Retcons. Needless to say, all of this can be just a little confusing.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous:
  • The giant Grotarons (a.k.a. Trimanes and Maidstone Archers) have a third arm where their head would be (and eyes on the backs of their hands and a mouth in their solar plexus...) They use massive bows, held in their left and right arms and drawn with their top arms.
  • Supplement Dorastor: Land of Doom. The Chaos creature Yeachi has four arms. It uses them to fire arrows from two bows at once in ranged combat or hit opponents with the bows (attacking with them as if they were staffs) in melee combat.
• Mythopoeia: The setting has an extensive mythic history built up over its run, detailing hundreds of gods, countless mythic events, and a long timeline of history from the beginning of existence to the present.
• Never Mess with Granny:
  • Esrolia is matriarchal. Glorantha creator Greg Stafford has pointed out that this does not mean "rule by women" — it means "rule by mothers" and specifically by grandmothers, the heads of extensive matriarchal patrician (matrician?) clans (and their clients). Some of them are genuinely well-meaning and benign; others are ruthless, controlling, manipulative tyrants. All of them are iron-willed, powerful Earth priestesses with decades of positively Byzantine political experience, and so none of them are to be messed with.
  • Older troll leaders tend to fall under this too. Female trolls don't tend to venture out of the dark or fight with weapons much — they have expendable males for that. If threatened or provoked, however, troll "grannies" usually have a vast arsenal of dark magic and demons to throw at an enemy.
• Never My Fault:
  • In the mythical history of the Durulz, Yelm demanded three times that the Durulz fly down and save him from being trapped in Hell after Orlanth killed him. They refused him each time. When Orlanth was finally forced to rescue Yelm to end the Darkness, Yelm was determined to destroy the Durulz utterly for refusing him, changing his mind only when the rest of the Sky Gods persuaded him that a Fate Worse than Death would be more fitting. This ignored the fact that he earned their enmity by invading their ancestral homeland, burning it into a lifeless desert and slaughtering them until they were forced to flee, an invasion he launched only because their pantheon had made friends with Orlanth.
  • The keets hold a bitter resentment for all non-keet races, blaming them for ingratitude in the face of the keets saving Vithela from being completely destroyed by the demon Zmalak. Completely ignoring that Zmalak's plan to shatter the continent only succeeded because the keets were too busy bickering and fighting with each other and everyone else to stop it — to the point the demon himself gave the keets a "The Reason You Suck" Speech calling them out on their petty squabbling before casting his continent-shattering spell.
• The Night That Never Ends: Before Time, Orlanth killed his enemy Yelm, the god of the Sun. Predictably, this happened. And then it gets worse. That age was called the Great Darkness, and it ended only with Yelm's resurrection.
• North Is Cold, South Is Hot: Glorantha is a magical world, not a planet floating in space. The northern continent ends with huge glaciers, the southern continent with deserts of fire.
• Only Flesh Is Safe: The spell Animate (Substance) is restricted to inanimate matter with the caveat that it works on organics if they are already dead.
• Order Versus Chaos: The Lunar Empire versus the Orlanthi, although it is kind of a weird case — the Lunar Empire promotes (cosmic) Chaos but is very organized, whereas the Orlanthi are Chaos-hating barbarian berserkers.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Dragons are incredibly ancient and powerful beings, and an important part of the cosmology and backstory. Human beings can become dragons if they follow Draconic Mysticism. The Empire of Wyrmfriends wanted to assimilate everybody into being dragons. Or at least part of the messianic Great Dragon to Come. True Dragons are beings of unfathomable power and age and are large enough for their sleeping forms to make up large sections of the landscape, but spend most of their time asleep; mortals mostly interact with the much smaller and weaker Dream Dragons spawned from the True Dragons' dreams, which can still kill armies on their own.
• Our Dwarves Are Different: Dwarves were created by Mostal the Maker in Gods Time, and are essentially living tools dedicated to repairing the once-perfect World Machine and ending the unnaturally imposed age of linear time. They're short, stocky humanoids, often but not always bearded; they're usually gnarled, hunchbacked or otherwise deformed, and to human eyes tend to look crude and grotesque. They are divided into numerous castes based on different materials. They also invented iron — not discovered, nor refined; invented — specifically to be a weapon against elves and trolls, which is why iron is poisonous to both species. They live in great underground cities and only eat foods artificially synthesized from mined minerals; they loathe grown food and only eat it as a despised last resort. Culturally, they're extremely industrious, rigid, and utterly collectivist — individual dwarves only exist as a part of the greater society. They spend the entirety of their neverending lives either working at the task assigned to them by their overseers or working on whatever hobby projects they've picked up
• Our Elves Are Different: Elves are Plant People, descended from the plant goddess Aldrya, and are physical embodiments of the forests they inhabit. They can vary very widely in appearance, although each resembles their specific type of bonded tree; the most humanoid largely resemble fantasy elves with hair and clothes made out of plants, but others are humanoid figures made out of wood and foliage and others still are simply walking trees with gaping knotholes for eyes and mouths and twisting, knotty branches for limbs. They are one of the Elder Races and were once a powerful and widespread people, but have been pushed back into a number of small enclaves by a series of civil wars, conflicts with humans, dwarves and trolls, and blights of insect pests. They are collectively referred to as the Aldryami, a broad group that includes multiple other types of sapient plants descended from Aldrya.
• Our Gods Are Different: The gods gave up their free will as part of the peace treaty that ended the Gods' War (the war that nearly destroyed them, and the world). Now the gods are locked into their roles, unable to choose to change — though it's possible that their worshipers can change the gods, by changing the myths or by going on mystical quests into the God Time.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Merfolk are descended from ancient water deities, and are divided into two main groups, the friendly, mammalian Cetoi and the hostile, piscine Piscoi, based on which side of a divine conflict their ancestors took part in. Most need to breathe air, but only once every hour or so.
• Our Monsters Are Different: Glorantha has many, many odd creatures, and was one of the earliest settings in which playing as a monster was encouraged. You can even play intelligent ducks, called Durulz in RuneQuest.
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: They're a Chaotic subrace of humans who look like handsome, tall people with sharp teeth. And yes, they're cannibals. Cannibals who can look like normal humans.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Most commonly associated with the Chaos god Vivamort, the vampires are immortal and possess some frightening abilities, but are also severely handicapped by the various elemental curses placed on them by the gods due to their treachery (being fervently hated both by Humakt as undead and by Urox as Chaos isn't a good place to be either). Sunlight doesn't destroy them, but does take away their powers; to sleep, they require special soil, as regular earth had rejected them. Their mist form is scattered by winds, but their greatest weakness is probably running water (a fact eagerly exploited by duck undead-fighters, of course...). A drop from the river Styx would destroy a vampire in an instant. And notably, in some versions, they're also extra vulnerable to swords — as they are the image of the Death rune, that they seek to escape from.
• Our Wyverns Are Different: Wyverns are two-legged, dragon-like creatures. They come into being when True Dragons dream lustful dreams, which manifest as lustful Dream Dragons which thereafter mate and produce wyverns. The resulting creatures can breed true and often establish independent populations afterwards. Different populations of wyverns can be very different in behavior, as each tends to inherit the behavioral quirks of their True Dragon progenitor.
• Place Beyond Time: The somewhat inaccurately named God Time, also called the Not-Time, the God World, and the Magic Place, is both the prehistory of the setting and the presently existing spirit world. It is a place without linear time, because Time was the product of the Cosmic Compromise that created the current physical world. To mortal perception, it seems to have a historic nature and to be dividable into eras, but this is as much as anything a mortal attempt to impose order on a disordered context as anything else. Several myths describes gods, places and things that should have ceased to exist in an "earlier" period interacting with a "later" one, and heroes on spirit quests into the otherworld can move between its eras by physical travel between places related in nature or context.
• Plant Person: The elves of Glorantha (also called Aldryami after their primary goddess) are varyingly humanoid plants. Being plants, they're among the most alien of Glorantha's Elder Races—they care about the things plants care about, after all.
• Playing with Fire: Fire spells are part of the Light element, also called Fire or Sky. Fire-based Light spells include actions such as increasing the potency of fire and of fire elementals, cremating the dead to prevent them from rising again, wreathing weapons in flame, launching bursts of flame or molten rock, and protecting against fire, heat, or magma. Combined with the Earth rune, Light/Fire can produce effects such as heating soil or protecting the caster against any source of natural heat, up to immersion in lava.
• Poison Is Corrosive
  • The claws of the powerful, evil Chaos being Cacodemon inject a potent corrosive venom that can inflict up to 114 Hit Points of damage. The claws of his Fiend minions inject a similar poison that can do up to 20 Hit Points of damage. (A typical human has 11–12 Hit Points, for reference.)
  • Supplement Trollpak, "Book of Uz" part 2. Trolls control a type of giant whip-scorpion called a vinegaroon. It can spray a liquid poison that is highly acidic.
  • White Dwarf (1977) #45 article "Dealing With Demons". A sraim demon can spit acidic venom up to 10 meters away with a 50% chance of hitting.
• Pride: The God Learners thought that they could do whatever they wanted with those ridiculous pagan deities. Boy were they wrong.
• Projectile Webbing: The Webbing spell, cast using the Shadow and Animal runes in the manner of most spells involving arthropods in some manner, allows its caster to throw a mass of sticky, silvery strands at a chosen area to entangle and immobilize targets.
• Pumpkin Person: The Jack O'Bear is a hairy bear-like monster with an orange head that looks like a pumpkin.
• Puppet State: The Kingdom of Tarsh is tributary to the Lunar Empire, paying money, goods, slaves and obedience to the Lunar Empire in the person of the Provincial Governor.
• Rainbow Motif: The rainbow gorp can change from one color to another. Each color gives it a different Chaos Feature: red (increase Size by 11), orange (Regenerating Health of 1 Hit Point per round), yellow (12 points of skin armor), green (Regenerating Health of six Hit Points per round), blue (turn into a harmless appearing pile of dust) and purple (absorb spells that cost up to two magic points).
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: In RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, rape is one of the two most dishonourable deeds in the game (the other is killing of a kin) -0 both of these would cause a loss of 50 honour points. In contrast, killing a guest is only a loss of 35 points.
• Redemption Quest: Orlanth goes To Hell and Back in order to resurrect his own victim.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: White Dwarf (1977):
  • Issue #45, article "Dealing With Demons". Demon wolves are large wolves with red eyes. They can inflict a curse that can strike the victim dumb or blind, paralyze their arms or wither their legs, or cause them to be disfigured or turned into a rat. They are summoned by the sacrifice of sapient beings to them.
  • Issue #92, article "Demons! Dealing with the Otherworld". The demon Tagrikas the Devourer slaughters human beings in the world of Glorantha at the command of the demon Megaera. He has red Glowing Eyes.
• Retcon: Several.
  • The Gloranthan West was a Medieval European Fantasy type of setting before the Guide to Glorantha changed it.
  • In Mongoose Runequest, Zistorites wore cyborg-esque mechamagical implants. In Mongoose Runequest II, they wear magical tattoos instead.
• Scary Scorpions: Giant scorpions used by the trolls can weigh as much as 480 lbs.
• Science Is Bad: Almost everyone outside Zistorwal hated the scientific method-based Zistor project of the God Learners. With good reason: the Zistorites were creating an artificial, mechanical god, a violation of the Cosmic Compromise that underlays Time itself. With that broken, the gods—already angry at the God Learners' meddling with their plane—were free to wipe them off the map.
• Sdrawkcab Name: Into the Troll Realms, adventure "The Flying Trollkin". Nesretep is the leader of the title criminals. Sandy Petersen co-wrote the supplement.
• Silver Bullet: Refined silver allows a weapon to wound creatures that can only be harmed by magic.
• Soul Jar: Avalon Hill's Heroes magazine article "New Spells for RuneQuest 3". The Invulnerability spell allows the caster to remove his own heart without dying and hide it away somewhere. As long as the heart is undamaged the rest of the caster's body is immune to physical damage. If the heart is destroyed the caster will turn to dust.
• Stock Medieval Meal: The supplement RuneQuest Cities. A chart for determining the quality of food at inns and taverns mentioned stew, bread, cheese, soup and fish.
• Subsystem Damage: Under the hit-location system, physical damage (and some types of spell damage) are applied to specific body locations.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: Chaos entities know that they are foul, wretched, and unnatural, and hate themselves for it almost as much as they hate everyone else for not sharing their nature. Their destructiveness is driven partly out of jealous spite and partly by a desire to destroy the world so that they won't have to exist anymore.
• Supernatural Martial Arts:
  • Mostly gained through Kralorelan mysticism, by monastic adepts who give in to temptations of power while ostensibly trying to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence (most of the students, frankly, are just there to try to reach the really good temptations).
  • Battle magic is something in between this and Full-Contact Magic.
• Super Spit:
  • Supplement Dorastor: Land of Doom:
    • The Gnarl, one of the Slime Broos gang, can spit acid up to twenty meters away that does twelve Hit Points of damage to a hit location of his choice.
    • The Spit Snake is one type of Chaos Snake. Each Spit Snake can spit a different liquid substance, such as potent acid, a skunk spray-like oil, glue, contact poison, dyes, and one that gives off a smell that attracts Chaos creatures.
    • The Howler can spit acid 9 times per day that does up to twenty Hit Points of damage.
    • The three-headed Chaos creature Yeachi can spit acid from its central head (that does up to 32 Hit Points of damage) five times per day.
  • White Dwarf (1977) #45 article "Dealing With Demons". A sraim demon can spit acidic venom up to 10 meters away with a 50% chance of hitting.
• Synchronization: Supplement Trollpak, "Book of Uz" part 2. The Aranea cult has a special type of Divine Intervention. The supplicant can link themselves to another person so that if the supplicant dies, the other will as well. This is an excellent way to persuade another person not to kill you.
• The Theocracy: Like in the Bronze Age cultures on which it is based, theocratic governments are the norm in most of Glorantha. Direct rule by priest-kings — or by shamans, in tribal societies — is common, as are kings and chieftains who base their authority on being the priests, chosen, descendants, or direct avatars of gods. This is rarely an idle boast, and often goes well beyond simply representing a divine authority; there is no doubt that the immortal Red Emperor, who has ruled the Lunar Empire for all the long centuries of its existence, is the son of the Red Goddess and a divine being himself.
• Time Crash: The Sunstop was an event caused when the Second Council tried to creat a new god. This either required them to stop the Sun's motion or caused it as a side effect; either way, this also caused Time to grind to a halt. Time remained still for... well, for no amount of time, the universe nearly broke, and people who lived through the event claim that time before it and time after are different in some way that is difficult to define.
• The Time of Myths: The God Time was the mythic prehistory of the world, a Dreamtime-like state before the establishment of linear time when gods and spirits walked freely, warred, and shaped the world. Most of the setting's defining myths happened then, and heroes and shamans can still dip into the God Time to reenact myths in order to gain spiritual power or perform important rituals.
• To Hell and Back: The Lightbringers, to rescue Yelm and end the Greater Darkness.
• Top God: Many pantheons have one, but Sedenya, Yelm and Orlanth are the most important. Arachne Solara, and Glorantha before her, can be seen as Goddesses of Gods.
• The Underworld: The Underworld, also called Hell, is the primordial realm of the deities of Darkness, although it became home to several other gods during the God Time, and is the ancestral home of the trolls. Grandfather Mortal went there when he became the first being to be slain by Death, creating the hidden paths that all dead beings would follow; when the sun god Yelm came down those roads after his own murder, his light forced most of the cold- and darkness-loving natives of the Underworld to flee to the Middle World. As one of the most remote ancient parts of the universe, and the most ancient as well, it is largely beyond the understanding of the living; only its upper reaches can reliably be plumbed by wizards or hero-questers, and its deeper parts are shrouded in a pall of darkness and unknowable mystery.
• Underworld River: The Styx is a great river of liquid darkness, which formed when the primordial Darkness began diving itself into distinct concepts and presaged the formation of the second element, Water. It flows around the Underworld and must be crossed by souls or hero-questers trying to enter, either using the Ferryman's boat or braving bridges as thin as razors or paved with fragile good intentions.
• Unobtainium: Iron is a rare metal created by the alchemy of the dwarves to kill elves and trolls. Properly refined, iron is stronger than any non-iron weapon. Dwarves are the only beings with easy access to iron; once out of dwarf hands, iron changes owners frequently, for almost everyone desires it.
• Unreliable Narrator: Lots. Many texts are written from an In-Universe point of view, and even if All Myths Are True in Glorantha falsehoods and inaccuracies still exist and creep in.
• Vampiric Draining:
  • Supplement Dorastor: Land of Doom:
    • A lamia drains Strength from a victim by biting them and Power by kissing them.
    • When a succubus in female form has sex with a male she drains one point of Constitution from him.
    • When a vampire bites its victim it doesn't just drain blood, it drains Fatigue as well.
  • Gygax magazine #4 article "Djinn: Spirits between Heaven and Hell". All jinn can replenish lost magic points by draining the Life Energy of a living creature. Each point of Power in the victim yields two magic points.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: Are you familiar with the work of comparative mythologists like Joseph Campbell or Mircea Eliade? What about concepts like "mytheme" or "euhemerism"? Yeah, good luck trying to wrap your head around Gloranthan deep lore if you answered "no".
• War God: Glorantha, as a world of bellicose Bronze Age tribes and spreading empires, sees a great deal of conflict, and has many war gods as a result.
  • Kargan Tor was the original god of war and conflict for the Celestial Court. He is long dead, having become increasingly inactive alongside the rest of the Court as newer deities superseded their roles, and perished with the rest when the Spike was destroyed. In the present, his broken remnants lie in the depths of the War Hell.
  • Zorak Zoran is the primary war god for trolls and worshipped in this aspect by several human groups as well. He is the mindless explosion of fear and frenzy against both Order and Chaos, which finds its only justification and satisfaction in unlimited violence. In troll areas, all war leaders likely belong to his cult. Even elsewhere, some war leaders are likely to be at least initiates.
  • Babeester Gor has been the main war goddess of the Earth deities since Time began, so Earth cultists seek her out when battle seems imminent. Faithful members of the cult are expected to die in combat; any other death stinks of dishonour. She wears nothing save for garlands of bloody trophies taken from her foes.
  • Ygg is a Storm god who represents the physical and untamed part of war: overwhelming, insatiable in battle and destructive.
  • Humakt is the god of mercenaries and soldiers, and can be found on all sides in any conflict. His worshippers are holy killers, ordained to carry out their sacred tasks within a circumscribed role. In peaceful regions, Humakt's cult is relatively minor. In areas of constant conflict, Humakt is well-respected. Humakt severed all ties with the Storm gods so that kinship wouldn't stain them with the bloody deeds he had to perform, and his worshippers cut off all ties with their families and clans for the same reason.
  • Polaris led the armies of the Upper World in the Gods War. He is worshipped as the General of Heaven, and commanding officers of many armies sacrifice to him for aid in battle.
  • Yelorna is a goddess of female warriors, providing them with a place in a predominantly male field.
  • Wachaza is the sea god of death and war. He is the war god for the majority of Gloranthan mermen and for a few seafaring human cultures.
  • Yanafal Tarnils and serves as the major war god in the Lunar Empire, and his cult members are career soldiers and officers in the Lunar Army. Rank within the cult is almost always coterminous with one's military rank.
• Weakened by the Light:
  • The following creatures are demoralized in daylight: ghouls, some orcs, cave trolls, trollkin and vampires.
  • Cave trolls: damage they take while in sunlight is not healed by their regeneration ability.
  • The shade takes Hit Points of damage each round that it remains in sunlight.
  • Ghouls lose one Magic Point for each hour they spend in direct sunlight, and it isn't easy for them to regain lost Magic Points.
  • White Dwarf (1977) magazine
    • Issue #45, article "Dealing With Demons". Demon wolves must be summoned at night because they are demoralized by daylight. Nightmares are black demon horses that dissolve into mist if sunlight falls upon them.
    • Issue #57 article "For the Blood Is the Life". When exposed to sunlight, vampyrs lose their ability to charm opponents and their immunity to attack by bronze weapons. They also lose two points of CON each round they remain in the sunlight. If their CON reaches zero, they will become inanimate. If a vampyr is in its coffin when the sunlight hits it, it is trapped in the coffin until nightfall.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: The troll spell Stones to Kill Chaos imbues rocks with a variety of magical powers — the specifics vary depending on the creature ritually devoured to power the spell — that are discharged when the rock is thrown at a Chaos monster. If this is done, the stone is destroyed and the Chaos creature will suffer unblockable damage, lose access to a random power, lose some of its magic, or explode. The exceptions are green rocks, which instead heal allies of Chaos-inflicted damage. Otherwise, they do nothing.
• Weather Manipulation: Storm magic, especially when combined with Water magic, can be used to call upon and dismiss the wind, call down lightning and thunder, create and move about fog and clouds, and cause hail, rain, and snow.
• Weird Moon: Glorantha has never had a conventional Earthlike moon. The Blue Moon is tiny and rarely visible save as a streak of light, whereas the Red Moon is of recent vintage, ripped from the middle of Dara Happa, and hovers in place over the Lunar Empire, revolving to show a red side and a black side. It is said that a White Moon may rise someday.
• World Shapes: The world of Glorantha is shaped like an enormous stone cube floating in the ocean. On its upper surface, patterned, weathered and scarred by ages of cataclysms and divine events, are the continents and oceans of the world. At its edges, the ocean drops off into a fathomless abyss and continues until the absolute edges of the universe, ending in the Sky Dome that forms the edge of the universe. A few islands float on the waters just past the edges of the world proper, while the Underworld lies beneath Earth and Water at the bottom of everything.
• A Year and a Day: In Avalon Hill's Sun County supplement, a village was renamed Repentance for this period for failing to pay its annual cult remittances.
• You All Meet in an Inn: 3rd Edition boxed set, "Gamemaster Book". The last part of the book is an introductory adventure in which the Player Characters start off by meeting at the Bouncing Buffalo Inn. A man then approaches them and offers them their first mission/adventure.
• Zombify the Living: Dragon magazine #172 article "Into the Spirit of Things": The spell Transform to Undead will change the caster into a zombie, ghoul, vampire or mummy.

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"We are all us."

— The Red Goddess, patron goddess of the Lunars

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