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Throughout Glorantha, this has been an alarm cry terrible enough to send even the strongest of warriors fleeing in terror. The Char-Un are a savage and brutal race of nomads from the frozen north, used as atrocity troops by the Lunar Empire to cow and punish the most recalcitrant of their foes. The Char-Un are a bloodthirsty, cruel, merciless, and violent people who delight in torture and painful killing.
And this is the sourcebook that allows you to play them as PCs.
This is a difficult project to pull off. The Char-Un have always been portrayed as sociopathic killers, without redeeming features. But to make them suitable for use as PCs, the authors have got to bring out the more human side to the Char-Un, to make them more sympathetic characters, while retaining their reputation as brutal sadists. This book manages that feat, and does it very well.
Physical layout
The book is a perfect bound softcover, A4 size, and 64 pages long. The cover is full colour and has an excellent map of Erigia (the Char-Un homeland) on the back. The interior is black and white. The text is clearly laid out, and there is about one illustration every other page. (In my copy, the illustrations have some noticeable aliasing artefacts; apparently, this was a printer error and corrected after the first batch was printed.)
The writing is uniformly clear and concise, though there is a typo every five pages or so. Font selection clearly identifies different levels of organisation and there are numerous text boxes that expand on various topics in the main text. I'm not really a visual aesthete, but the illustration quality varies from good to excellent, with no stinkers.
The book has a fairly detailed table of contents and a full index.
Content
The book covers just about everything that is needed to play a Char-Un hero (PC). It starts with an overview and history of the Char-Un and then describes how the current ur-Pan (high king) of the Char-Un retains his power over the unruly and violent people. The 'What the Elder told me' section gives an in-character description of how the Char-Un live, which also illustrates the Char-Un's values and morals by giving answers to questions like 'What is important?' and 'What makes a man great?' It then moves on to describe the Char-Un year, including the major rites, and a brief overview of their (rather Slavic and Turkic) language.
The next section is perhaps the most useful for those using the Char-Un in their traditional role of foes, as it describes the Char-Un way of war and details their major regiments and their distinctive features. There follows a description of the Char-Un funerary practices and a discussion of the great Skyburn ritual (when an entire elven forest was destroyed in an instant), including a few plot hooks.
Next comes a gazetteer of Erigia, the Char-Un homeland. It has nearly fifty entries, ranging from the town of Aldog (beside a magical ford made of water, which is sometimes sculpted by strange shamans) to Zaronger (a land of the fertile rolling hills, scattered with the bleached bones from many battles). In between are Hooked Hole (where young romantics hunt the Stinging Roses, which they present to their lovers' parents as flensing whips), Sigunta the Killing Tree (a surviving Elven wartree against which Char-Un heroes test their mettle), Cheka Tuvna (the Lunar gulag and quicksilver mine), and the Grey Mountains (haunt of the Thunder Herder and the holy horse-eating Griffins). Every place is richly described in the paragraph or two it is allotted, and each description should give you at least one or two ideas for adventures among the Char-Un.
The remainder of the book holds information for character generation and much of it provides inspiration for adventuring. The section starts by outlining the factions in Char-Un society and the tensions between them, followed by the Char-Un homeland keyword and descriptions of some brotherhoods and societies. But, this being HeroQuest, the bulk of this section is given over to the rich tapestry of the Char-Un's magical abilities. Many animist practices are described, including notes on the personalities of typical worshippers. This section is rounded off with a short introductory adventure, a overview of a typical clan (apparently, more will soon be released electronically), and some details on the Char-Un outside their homeland. Finally, there is a short bestiary.
The main text in the book mainly concentrates on packing the maximum amount of information in the pages, so it leaves little room for fluff. However, scattered through the book are text boxes that expand on the main text, some by giving more detail and some by describing scenario hooks. Many of the text boxes are written from an in-character perspective that gives more flavour of Char-Un ways. But the most evocative parts of the book are the little vignettes that are the figure captions. My favourite is on page 13. The figure shows a Char-Un man arriving back at his ger to his wife and happy little girl. The caption reads,
Bo'Orok of the Rutrigurs returns home to his first wife, Chirini, and daughter, Sirini Laughs-like-Bloodshed. Sirini has almost lost the scars left when she was exposed to the perils of a winter night to prove her fitness as one of the People, so Chirini intends to rub ash into them, lest she lose all traces of her fang-blessing by no less than an albino wolf.
To me, that figure and that little piece of text speaks volumes about just how the Char-Un view themselves as being proud of the constant struggle that is their life.
Discussion
As with many of the Unspoken Word's output, this book is characterised by two main features. One is the depth of research and thinking that has gone into its production. The other is the distillation of all this material into a product that is immediately gameable.
The authors of this book have obviously read widely and deeply about horse nomads, both in Glorantha and the real world, and this knowledge has been used to create a society that is rich, detailed, and eminently believable. For instance, the description of the Char-Un way of life gels with what I've read of Asian nomadic peoples. The way the sophisticated Lunar religions have influenced the Char-Un's animism is reminiscent of how Buddhism influenced shamanic practices in Central Asia. Finally, I suspect that personal experience informed some of the more evocative descriptions of the Siberia-like Erigia. This depth of reading means that it is very easy for those interested in further developing the Char-Un to draw from, and incorporate, real-world sources.
However, prospective buyers should not be intimidated by this level of detail. Virtually everything in the book has been written from the point of view of giving something for a player or narrator to pick up and thrust into a game. There are sites for dungeon bashes, vital rituals to enact (or disrupt), strange peoples to raid, bribe, bargain with, or flee from. There are opportunities to show bravery and fearlessness, and times for romance and persuasion. In short, almost every page has a plot hook and opportunities for PCs to act and interact to achieve heroic goals.
High points
There are many good things about this book. For me, I think the best points are the flavour text scattered throughout, in boxes and captions, that lift the book above a mere recitation of facts and breathe much life into what could have been a dry exposition. The other high points are the way the places of Erigia are written to provide opportunities for adventure, and the way the description of the religions illuminates and amplifies the cultural values of the Char-Un.
Low points
It's actually quite difficult to find some low points in this book. The short adventure presented is nothing special and any decent narrator could produce something similar quite easily; perhaps an outline of something more epic would have been better. Some space given to the many and detailed religious practices could have been instead used to expand the description of the default home clan. There are quite a few typos.
Conclusions
As I'm sure you'll have worked out by now, I'm quite a fan of this book. It is, I think, one of the better supplements to have been released for HeroQuest. It provides a fairly detailed look at a good old-fashioned baddy that we all love to hate, and in so doing it makes them sympathetic and playable without detracting from their central brutality.
If you want a Gloranthan game set somewhere different from the deserts of Prax or the mountains of Sartar, you could do worse than to try the tundra of the Char-Un. And if you want to keep the Char-Un as enemies, this book will provide more than enough to make them a challenging and memorable foe.
