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The box cover art, of a spell-casting dragon in flight, is quite acceptable. The interior art, by the notorious Dave Dobyski, is at incredibly low standards, although to be fair, apparently the story is that AH pushed Dobyski (who normally does maps) into doing artwork. In any case the artwork of Elder Secrets is so bad, one gazes at it in wonderment and shock. The two-column, justified text with serif font, with clearly marked chapters and subheadings, good use of white-space and an inviting style (thank you Greg and Sandy) is an extraordinary juxtaposition. The books have a modest table of contents, but no index.
The first book starts with the "Mysteries of Glorantha", beginning with the inaccessible regions of the norther continent (Genertela and Vormain), the southern continent (Pamaltela and the islands) and some unique geographical features. In most cases these are a merely a paragraph or two for the regions, but significantly more for the unique locations. The most interesting are Wongarissi, a region of Pamaltela inhabited by sentient saurians, Harajallenburg the Walking Fort, the Iron Forts and the Three Dragon Mountains. This is followed up with the "Secrets of Dragonkind", which describes dragon mythology, dragon types (True, Dream, Dragonewts, Dinosaurs, Magisaurs, Wyverns, Wyrms and Stoorworms), and specialised dragon knowledge.
The bulk of the first book is taken up with "Mosters and Terrors", which expands on the material provided in The Gloranthan Bestiary for those special, rare and extremely dangerous creatures. Favourites will include the upgraded version of the Crimson Bat, Cwim (Spawn of Thed and the Devil), the Mother of Monsters, and the Chaos Gaggle. All of these are the sort of beasts you'd expect to take a force of hundreds to fight and with the expectation of losing.
The final chapters are "The Magical Geology of Glorantha", "The Sky" and "Gloranthan Weather" and finally an appendix on HeroQuesting. These three chapters are very effective at describing the integration of magic and mythology into the Gloranthan reality, with metals described as the bones of the Gods, crystals as their congealed blood, stars as pricks in the skydome from which light leaks through, and the control of the Gods on the weather, especially Yelm the Sun God, Orlanth of the storms, and the mysterious Brastalos, Goddess of the Doldrums. The appendix on heroquesting is an excellent summary on how powerful individuals leave the material plane and gamble their lives to enter the realm of myth and gain new, miraculous, powers.
The second book has lengthy chapters on the the major non-human species of Glorantha, namely the Dwarven Mostali, the Elven Aldryami and the Troll Uz along with a chapter dedicated to the "lesser elder races" (read species) such as the baboons, the broos, ducks, the newtlings, waertagi and wind children, and concludes with a number of scenario outlines for Dragonewts, Elves, Dwarves and others, but thankfully not Trolls who have had a pretty good run in preceding AH RuneQuest products.
The Mostal, Aldryami and Uz chapters are excellent. Each goes into some detail describing their mythos and history, physical description, culture, life and governance, interspecies relations, warfare, regions and character generation and the main religious cult (Mostal, Aldrya, Kyger Litor). Highlights include the summaries for dwarf weapons (muskets, pistols etc), their various heresies, and the details of the troubled relationship between elves and humans, Understandably, much of the troll information has appeared in previous publications.
Surprisingly, the information on the lesser species is just as broad as the major one's, but without the detail. Thus is is quite plausible to generate characters for oddities such as the Grotarons, Jelmere, the ever-charming Newtlings and the bloody-thirsty Tusk Riders. This chapter is further supplemented by significant detail on the Tusk Rider's "Cult of the Bloody Tusk", the ogre's cult of Cacademon and the aforementioned scenarios. The latter are more "adventure seeds" than fully-fleshed scenarios, but they certainly provide opportunities for human PCs to mix with a variety of the sentient species.
"Elder Secrets" is a necessary part of any serious RunQuest/Glorantha game. The material is too good, too comprehensive and too interesting to ignore - but of course, this should be expected given the authors in question. However, the textual substance of the product is strongly contrasted by the production qualities, including the release date - this should have been one of the earliest boxed sets released, not the last. Whilst the layout is acceptable, albeit bland, and the writing style usually precise, the flimsy booklets, lack of index and awful art rate among the worst available.
