From: Rob Mace (mace@lum.asd.sgi.com)
Date: Sun 02 May 1993 - 22:32:42 EEST
Ken Rolston writes:
> "STAFFORD (AND OTHER PROFESSIONALS) HAVE TO GET THE STUFF I NEED INTO PRINT.
> THIS IS HIS WORLD. IT'S HIS RESPONSIBILITY TO MAKE IT WORK."
> I am only slightly ironic here. Greg and the rest of us has created the
> problem of a complex, detailed fantasy setting, and in many ways we bear the
> responsibility for keeping campaigns going in Glorantha fandom.
> However, I have great respect for people like Steve Maurer and Steve Marsh
> who have taken responsibility for their visions of Glorantha, and who have
> developed them themselves for their own campaigns. Our local variant RQII
> campaign set in 1580 in Sartar is the best FRP gaming I've done in years --
> and all our GM had to start it on was the map in TotRM 6 and assorted
> fragments from ancient supplements. Glorantha's greatest fault is its tragic
> capacity to strangle creative thought. I'd like to see discussions of the
> various ways that folks have managed to get the Gloranthan Dogma monkey off
> their backs.
I have been playing in Steve Maurer's campaign for 11 years so I will give this a shot. First however I think it is useful to talk a bit about why people have found it desirable to not be 'Gregged'. Here are some reasons I know of.
Even if you say "Well that is not how it is in my campaign." you will end up making a potentially sizable portion of some product you just bought useless.
Saying "Well that is not how it is in my campaign." means that the way it is in my campaign is not the way it is in anyone elses campaign. Lots of RQ GM's would like to see their stuff published and having it contradict what Greg comes out with means that it probably never will be.
Having basically one Glorantha has been great for cross campaign fertilization. The San Francisco Bay Area where I live is probably one of the few areas left in the US with a good concentration of RQ gamers. I guess this is because Chaosium is here. A lot of Glorantha campaigns started separately here and over the years a number of them have developed into a sort of Glorantha meta-campaign. Five of the players in Steve's current group also GM Glorantha and both the events and characters from their campaigns have moved back and forth to create this meta-campaign. What made it possible for all these campaigns to come together years after they were started, was the strong consistent Gloranthan base.
However, in the end all one can do when 'Gregged' is say "Well that is not how it is in my campaign." or make the events/facts merge as best as possible.
I think people here at least stopped worrying about being 'Gregged' when they realized that it was inevitable. This is because even if nothing that you add to Glorantha gets contradicted old published things will get contradicted by new things. This has happened for a few reasons I know of. Sometimes Greg has changed his mind. Other times he has forgotten what was published before. I know this was the case with the new origin of Wyverns in Elder Secrets.
So we try our best to stay consistent, at least in flavor, with what has been published and what we know. And we don't swet it to much when something changes. By this point we have had to go through it many times already.
Rob Mace
P.S. RQ3 was a huge blow to cross campaign fertilization. Before RQ3 one could go to a con, ask for a characters in the say 75%-90% range, and know what you were going to get. Because RQ3 got rid of things like stacking limits, and because of all the ways people patched things like sorcery, you could not tell what you were going to get. This made it much harder to run con games. I think that since a lot of people get interested in new games by seeing them run at cons, that this was one of the contributors to the downfall of RQ.
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