The RPGnet Interview

SA: Let's start off with the world that you're best known for, Glorantha. In the last year you've announced that Mongoose has been licensed to publish RuneQuest and Moon Design has been licensed to publish HeroQuest. What can we expect for the future of Glorantha from these two companies?

GS: I'm really glad to have publication in the hands of two professional companies now.

Moon Design is going to continue to publish the HeroQuest series, concentrating on the Third Age, or Hero Wars, era. Rick Meints, the new publisher, is going to publish the line of books that Issaries had begun, and already has more lining up behind those. They will also publish some more of my Unfinished Works, starting with Middle Sea Empire , which is a compilation of Imperial Age and God Learner materials; and a series tentatively called the Jonstown Compendium, which will be less focused than the previous Unfinished Works.

Mongoose has a series of RuneQuest items lined up too. It's exciting in that they will be doing Second Age, or Imperial Age, which is an era largely unexplored so far.

Furthermore, both have some interesting non-Gloranthan materials lined up as well.

Here are the specific publication schedules that I have been given from the current publishers of Gloranthan data:

From Moon Design, for HeroQuest
Under the Red Moon, which is also called Imperial Lunar Handbook 2, in July
Champions of the Reaching Moon, August
Blood Over Gold, September
Guide to Glorantha, September
Distant Shores, October

From Mongoose, for RuneQuest
RuneQuest – Core Rulebook, August
Game Master’s Screen, August
Rune of Chaos, August
RuneQuest Companion, August
Glorantha, August
RuneQuest Monsters, September
Legendary Heroes, September
Cults of Glorantha, September
Magic of Glorantha, October
Arms & Equipment, November
Lankhmar, November
Player’s Guide to Glorantha, December

SA:How much influence will you generally have on the two Gloranthan lines, and how much will they reflect your view of Glorantha?

GS: Issaries has approval rights on everything that it has licensed, so I get everything that is going to be published to look at. However, I don't have the time or inclination to scrutinize everything, and it's been an interesting piece of introspection to see what I really care about. And the answer to that is that I really care about the facts of Glorantha, but the interpretation of those into the various game formats is of less interest.

I want to maintain consistancy, but the details of that are flexible. For instance, I looked at the new RQ rules and made some comments, but in general my thoughts were, "I wouldn't have done it that way," but in the end I'm not writing the rules and I have to leave some creative interpretation up to the designers, authors and publishers. Another example: I got a sample of art about the famous--or perhaps infamous--Gloranthan ducks. The Mongoose interpretation is quite different from the previous one. I warned the publisher that the grognards might complain about the change, but in the end I am happy to let visually-oriented artists "see" things as they do rather than dictating everything to them.

So when it comes to already-established Gloranthan history, or a list of cities of Slontos, then I care a lot. If it’s a method to portray magic, I care less. And finally, I am also willing to accede to authors' suggestions and desires and change things if the reasons are good enough. For instance, the Second Age has hardly been explored, so when Robin Laws suggested that Kralorela was not yet flooded with the Suam Chow Sea, and pointed out where there was a great earthquake at the end of the Second Age that could have made it, I agreed.

Also, I am pretty much entirely open on scenario creation. Scenarios are difficult to conceive and write, and I’m more than happy to pretty much allow almost anything to work there as long as the authors stick to the essential Gloranthan facts as portrayed in the canonical available writings, and the parameters of their rule set.

SA: Where does this all leave Issaries? Is the company no more, now that Moon Design is publishing HeroQuest?

GS: Issaries, Inc. continues as a holding company of sorts. It is the licensor of the HeroQuest and RuneQuest rights, and whatever else we can license out.

SA: Let me offer a brief aside, and step back to your comments on Kralorela. Why is it that so many lands sink in Glorantha? Genertela's seemed to have a particular bad time of it since the Dawn.

GS: There are two periods of great sinking. The first was in the Gods War. That was a result of the on-going end of the world. If the world had not been renewed by the Great Compromise (and the other Renewals for other cultures) then the sky would have fallen, the earth sunk into the sea, the sea emptied into the Underworld and the Underworld broken up into the void.

As for the historical sinkings, remember first that Seshnela, Jrustela, Slontos and Kralorela all sank at the same time, at the end of the Second Age, as a result of the God Learners' offences. It was a minor reflectionof the "end of the world," but localized to those places that had most offended the gods.

Oh yeah,and Brithos disappeared too, but that was because it was held in an artificial temporal stasis by Zzabur. When he finally got old and went away, to the God Time that he came from, so did his land, Brithos.

Or did you mean "what is it about sinking lands that fascinates Greg"?

SA: Yes, sort of a query into the psyche of the designer and creator.

GS: A lot of the Glorantha mythos is based on my curiosity as a kid, and also on my own psychology. I put a lot of those curious inquiries into the mythos.

I've always been fascinated by the the disappearance of lands, whether continental drift, the (near-)universal flood myth, or the Atlantis story. Furthermore, when something that seems disastrous strike me personally, the internal feeling that I get is one of sinking and submersion. In my gut if the sinking is a little thing; or for a major thing, of my entire psyche. Like when my father died, I felt like I was underwater--everything was thick and I felt slow, like immersed. So I have a deep association of being underwater with trouble and disaster.

When I was writing Glorantha myths, especially in the original days, I was writing right from my gut. Often I exercised my creativity as a way of rescing myself from emotional difficulties. Thus it's not surprising, to me anyway, that the disasters of Glorantha are often associated with flooding or, put another way, immersion of the lands beneath the sea.

At least that's what I think nowadays, decades after writing it and having plenty of time to analyze it.

SA: Ah. For me disaster feels like being in a pit, with the light getting further and further away, so I guess I my disasters should be exploding volcanos and mountains falling down upon the land.

In any case, moving back to the present, with HeroQuest production out of your hands, I expect you've got time for other tasks. What things are on your desk right now, Gloranthan or otherwise?

GS: My most important project is a fantasy novel, about young Harmast. It's a regular novel, written for total newcomers to Glorantha, and I hope to sell it to a non-game fantasy publisher. The working title is "Ten Women Well Loved", and I am 8/10 of the way through it, at about 98000 words. It is a pleasure to work on at last.

Next have been my Unfinished Works. The first one is called "The Middle Sea Empire." I mentioned it, about the God Learners. Then there is a larger collection of information about the Hendriki peoples, but also other Orlanthi, like the EWF and so on. Both of these are about Glorantha's Imperial Age. Mongoose is setting their RuneQuest in the Second Age, and the authors of projects have written to me asking for information. This work is a compilation of the notes and background that I began to gather for them, and which rather took on a life of its own. Jeff Richard is also contributing to this.

Next after these I want to finish my book on Legends of Oaxaca. My wife and I went around learning the stories of the many ruins, if there were any. I've got them written down along with some of our adventures.

Rick Meints at Moon Design wants me to write "Prince Argrath, Boy King," which would be a supplement for HeroQuest. It would have a year-to-year format like The Boy King, for Pendragon. Theoretically it will be the Argrath campaign, all the way to the destruction of the moon. I'm still considering how to do this and still leave a lot of flexability and to maintain some of the ambiguity of these events.

I also have a book about mythology that I am itching to write, and a couple more of the Harmast novels, but those are far enough in the future to just leave vague for now.

SA: I presume the Oaxaca work comes from the year or two you spent in Central America recently.

GS: Yes. We lived in Oaxaca and spent all our spare time going out to the mountains and exploring the ruins there. The local culture is fascinating.

SA: Has that cultural immersion influenced your work on Gloranthan any? Should we expect to see any Mesoamerican-influenced cultures? More broadly, has it changed your view of mythology at all?

GS: No, it hasn'’t changed things. It really secures my understanding of mythology in another cultural context.

SA: Are you doing anything else for White Wolf?

GS: Well, The Great Pendragon Campaign is going to be released at GenCon. If it sells enough, and Pendragon 5 sells some more, then there is a good chance that I'll get hired to do another Pendragon item, probably the Grail Quest. I'm also working with Wayne Coburn, one of my players, to revise the extended character generation for Pendragon 5. It will probably be a free download when it's done.

SA: It sounds like you've got a lot going on right now. You've been working in the industry for quite some time now, since practically before there was a gaming industry ...

GS: No "practicallty" there. In fact, before there was a gaming industry. White Bear & Red Moon was the first real fantasy board game, and it was released the same time as D&D.

SA: What's allowed you to stay fresh and keep producing new gaming material 30 years later?

GS: Vivid imagination, an urge to "leave my mark," a compulsion to create artistic expression, the ability to live cheaply, and wives who have had decent-playing jobs and the patience to live with an artist.

SA: And how do you feel like the industry has changed since you got started?

GS: Well, first it became an industry. I remember a meeting at a hobby show, since hobby stores were the only places that the games were sold at first, where everyone was discussing what to label our collective division. This was before there was a GAMA. Were we the Adventure Gaming Hobby, or the Hobby Gaming Market, or what?

It has metamorphisized completely. Quality, business sense, and ease of sale are all changed, and of course it’s much larger now.

I made my first couple of games in my basement with a mimeo machine. They were actually hand-made games. Sure, I used tools to do it (that is, the mimeo machine and, for the board, an actual printer). But we assembled the pages by hand, the books by hand, and put them in their envelopes or zip lock bags by hand.

I was no businessman. Never was--look at Chaosium's business record to prove that. I was, however, an artist with a drive to publish this "do it yourself novel" that I had made--White Bear & Red Moon. Not just a novel, but a fantasy epic.

Most other people in the biz in the 70's were like me: more artistic types than business. There were not many of us--at every game conventions everyone regularly handed over/swapped latest products with each other. Everyone knew each other. So we were a small industry.

But here's what was most fantastic about the first-generation games: every year Chaosium's income just about doubled. Tadashi Ehara was maintaining the business end, I was overseeing the creative end. And we made good money every year. We lived as relative paupers, of course, but Chaosium made enough money to keep going.

In those days many of us knew we were at the start of something new, and had our heads full of what it could grow to become. I remember raving about it being "a new art form," others envisioned a new product for Middle America, and some as a new way to scam people.

Now things are different:

Everything is professional quality. I was glad to be part of that change in the market. It didn't take long before bright shelf colors, actual internal layout, and quality cover art were the norm.

I know that there are still many people in the industry whose intentions are artistic in nature. Now, however, even the best among us are at the control of the publishers and manufacturers. The business guys hold the reins of power and the bottom line often determines the viability of a game. The artist/author generally makes less off a printed game than anyone along the production chain, though all of them depend upon the initial created product. I do not disparage business for this change. It was inevitable because it's how things are now.

The cash flow in the industry is now a trickle of what it used to be, as least for small companies like Chaosium or Issaries. Maybe the whole market has gotten bigger with the collectable card games and Hasbro distribution. But most of that goes to the big guys, and there are so many companies now that the slices of the pie are pretty small for minor companies.

There is just much morfe competition. Computer games devoured much of the paper RPG market, collectible card games nearly destroyed the remnants, MMORPGs take up more. Paper games are archaic in the market where everyone owns a personal computer. Pete's sake, you have to read our books and rules, and that activity is just not hip these days.

Before I sound entirely like an old fart, though, I'll note an apparent rekindling of free artistic expression: the online PDF products. These are done by individuals (not quite by hand, since it's all on a computer) who express their own artistic visions, are not reliant upon external finances (next to none), and are on a computer to boot (no fussy boxes!).

I certainly hope it works for the artists trying it. The danger is that it's so easy to self-publish drek that the available materials are quickly swamped with crap.

Sigh. Invoke Barbie voice: “Being a artist is hard.”

SA: We started off with some of the exciting new Gloranthan stuff coming out, so perhaps we should come full circle to that. How has the world of Glorantha changed in the last thirty years? Particularly, how has it changed in ways that you didn't expect?

GS: Hmm, difficult question.

First of all, I don't feel like it has changed particularly, though it has certainly grown broader and deeper. A lot of new information has been added to my knowledge of the world.

Glorantha is one of my essential creative outlets. To me, creativity is a matter of growth and development.

For instance, I don't consider my "discovery" of Elmal to be a change. It was new data, to be sure, but a natural growth as I learned more about one of Glorantha’s essential pantheons. The change from the "universal myth" to the many regional mythologies was an interesting development for me. Likewise, probably the biggest single surprise, was to discover that the three Otherworlds were distinct and separate rather than the apparent connections and "blending together" that existed at, say, the RQ stage of things. Again, it was not so much a change as a discovery of new data as a result of my own deepening understanding of the world.

SA: So if I have it right, if Glorantha weren't growing and developing, it wouldn't be creative to you anymore?

GS: My creativity requires change, renewal, growth. I'd be a spectator to it, and I generally find spectating to be unsatisfactory. Participating is where I find my creative expression.

SA: So have there been any exciting new growths, developments, or discoveries in the new works on the Imperial Age and Harmast?

GS: Yes. I'd largely ignored the Second Age details for years, but after the Mongoose authors began asking questions I discovered that I wanted to write information down to develop things in the right directions.

For instance, I discovered more about Zistor, the Machine God that the God Learners constructed. It is far more than just the gigantic robotic thing that I had visualized earlier. There is also a vast underground machine that powers it. The machine cavern is much larger than the island of Locsil where it began. And Locsil is in a bay on Kostern Island, in the Leftarm Isles. I learned that Kostern Island is one of the places where a large amount of Sorcerous energy is concentrated, rather than being an "even mix" of the Everything World. And that the Orlanthi Saga of the Iron War against the Zistorites has several famous heroes.

Those things will be explained in a new unfinished Work that will be released in a couple of months through Moon Design.

As for Harmast, writing a novel has been really exciting to me. I realized that I use the "headlight vison" method. I know the map of the book, about where it is going and how to get there, but really only have visualized that much before writing. When I sit down at the keyboard I can see only what the headlights of my vision see, as far as I need to see to write what I know. But writing itself is the discovery of details as I navigate the larger map.

So I only learned, when writing, that Harmast is a Niskis devotee in his earliest life. And how messed up he was by being a loner, without clan or family. And who his friends were. And since he's wandering around the Savage Forest--the later Hendriki Plateau--I learned much, much more about the reign of said Kig Hendrik. I have learned that the Esrolians paint their buildings to be very colorful, that they enslave men but not women, and that they have dogs. And more of course.

SA: That all sounds like fun new ground!

Anything else you're interested in saying before we close up here?

GS: Just to give thanks to all the fans who have supported my work for the last three decades. The rewards of a creative lifestyle come from the satisfaction of doing the work, and also from the feedback that one gets. For the first, I've been fortunate to be able to express myself through Glorantha for thirty years. For the second, the fans have been generous, so "Many thanks!" I would especially like to thank my many patrons who have gone the extra mile, beyond purchasing product, to support the Gloranthan Trading Association and the Friends of Glorantha.

And thank you, too, Shannon.

SA: Thanks, Greg!

A good, though probably not yet complete, listing of Greg's work can be found in The RPGnet Index. And join us back here in a few weeks when we'll have an exclusive interview with Matthew Sprange, designer of Mongoose's new edition of RuneQuest.