Imperial Lunar Handbook Volume 1: The Lunar Empire

Summary: The first volume in the Imperial Lunar Handbook series offers a wonderful starting point for games within the Gloranthan Lunar empire. It is well produced, and very useful. Highly recommended.

72 pages, saddle stitched with medium cardstock cover "blue spine", with two pages of front matter, and six [sic] pages of indices. No-one at this point should ever accuse Issaries of not providing a thorough index. That leaves 64 pages of content.

One of the things that's immediately noticeable is the prominent appearence of Steve Jackson's logo on the front and back covers. Also, the back inside cover is full with an advert for Steve Jackson Games' web site and for Pyramid (SJG's online hobby magazine). This is in accordance with Issaries Inc's recent agreement with Steve Jackson to act as the distributor for their games. Greg Stafford also suggested at GloranthaCon VIII that SJG's Pyramid magazine would now become the official "magazine" for articles and the like on HeroQuest and Glorantha.

The inside front cover is blank, which prompts me to muse that something could have been put there. Don't know what, precisely. A map of the Lunar Empire maybe (though page 8 is a better logical place for the political map)? A collection of illos that show you what some average Lunar citizens look like (like the kind often found in books displaying fashion and costume)? Layout is the same as Barbarian Adventures, and Orlanth is Dead, and I say Hoorah! for that (8.5x11 format, instead of the small digest books Issaries was doing before). The book design is clean, elegant, pleasing to read and look at. One minor quibble about the book design: putting the book's title in the "header" (actually, the traditional header is slung along the edges of each page, a clever notion) is probably redundant and chews up space that could have been used for better contextual information -- "chapter title" on the left and "section title" on the right would have been my preference.

Nice use of illustrations throughout, and really useful diagrams (maps) and tables.

ILH-1, as it's being called, is the first book to use the new "two page spread" for Homeland layouts: a very very useful idea that's been common in technical writing circles for some time and shows up here to very good effect in this hobby. The "two page spread" amounts to "everything you must know to start playing" about a homeland on two facing pages.

This represents a different approach (and much much better in my opinion) to the way "keywords" have been presented in the past; I'm very interested to see the proliferation of this philosophy in the HeroQuest rules (I saw a final draft copy of the rules at the convention: Greg Stafford says that they will see print in late May or early June), and further supplements.

Just from a glance at the homeland spreads in this book, I can see that by picking this book up, I should be able to offer a new group of players the chance to play a character from: Dara Happa, Rinliddi, Sylila, Darjiin, Pelanda, Carmania, and "The Lunar Provinces".

There's also an interesting mechanic for aglomerating groups of characters: the "League", which seems to be something halfway between a clan and a guild, a group of individuals of have some professional interest in common.

After the first, preface page, there's twelve pages of content on "Living in the Lunar Empire", including a good "What Everyone Knows" section, followed by more in depth material.

After this, are the roughly 40 pages of regional descriptions, including the 'homeland' pages. At first glance, I found this part of the book to be slightly confusing, but once I got the notion of the "two page spread" for Homeland keywords, it got more comprehensible. I think it might have been slightly less confusing if the "two page spread" had been the first information presented for each region, followed up by more detailed information in the following pages. Of course, this reveals one of the huge weaknesses of the Weissian two-page-spread construction: it must occupy facing pages to be really useful, and that means putting a blow torch to the well-worn neural pathways most western readers have that a section begins on a recto page, not a verso page.

Finally, after the meat of the book, comes nine or ten pages on Hero Bands and Associations, which provide useful ways to immediately hook players into the gameworld by providing them with small- to medium-scale organizations they can either participate in, or fight against. The sample Association is well thought out and described, and provides a goodly number of adventure hooks.

I would perhaps have liked this book to forsake two pages of index in favour of a two page "starting adventure" that would provide for one evening's worth of play for a group that just picked up this book. I suppose that the "Lunar line" of products will include a "Lunar Adventures" analog to Barbarian Adventures, but that book won't be out for some time. It might be helpful if Issaries asked themselves these three questions when preparing any supplement: "What can the reader do with this book in the evening of the day or day after purchase/light-reading?", "What can the reader do with this book in the month after purchase/thorough-reading?", "What can the reader do with this book in the year after purchase/reading?".

Too many rolegame supplements partially or completely ignore one of these questions, and for small-press operations, I think that's a mistake. One could also expect that the "starting one-shot adventure" I mention might show up on the Issaries website to support this book. But it still would have been nice to pop it in the book in favour of two index pages (four pages of dense index is still good coverage for 64 pages of material; 6 pages, as is actually done here is thorough coverage).

Stafford mentioned at the convention was he wanted to present the game material in layers: clearly identifying what a group needed to know to start playing, and then clearly offering chances and ways to "know more", but only if one chose to. This is a wonderful idea, and the organisation and presentation in ILH-1 is this idea made manifest. Strict adherence and good application of this principal could finally get over one of Glorantha's traditional knocks: "I'd love to play in the world, but there's so much material, I don't know where to start, and there's too much to know to begin". Greg's overridding wish seems to be "start small, and don't worry about the mounds of material; come to it as you want to."

I've never actually played in Glorantha (till this recent convention), and my knowledge about the world isn't more than a casual one, but after just skim-reading this book, I had at least a handful of ideas popping up in my head about where to start, who I could play, what kinds of (mis)adventures I could foist on players, etc. Comparitively, Thunder Rebels, although it seems a good solid reference for Orlanthi life, did not give me this immediately accessible feeling (nor perhaps should it have?, but as far as I could tell it was still "the place to start" with Orlanthi; similarly, neither Barbarian Adventures nor Olranth is Dead, the first two books in the Sartar is Rising adventure sequence, are this accessible, either).

With the last three books published (and I fully expect by the new HeroQuest game to appear by early summer), Issaries Inc is clearly demonstrating that (a) they've listened to their customers (and even some potential customers) about what they want to see, and (b) that the glory of early eighties RuneQuest might once again be achieved.

Even if you're not a Gloranthan diehard, I would strongly recommend the last four or five publications from Issaries for those who want a glimpse into a fantasy rolegame world that is rich, and inviting, and is not Tolkeinesque, nor particularly "western medieval" in flavour. The promise shown in this first volume of the Imperial Lunar Handbook series indicates that HeroQuest could develop a strong following and bring more and more people to the wonders of the Gloranthan game world.