Hero Wars Part IV: Make up what you want, but here’s all of Gloranthan myth and customs!

The core book of Hero Wars has a lot of encouragement to make cool things up, like I pointed to in Kallai’s character description. The writers of the books know that Glorantha is a huge world with nearly 35 years (at the time the book as published in 2000) of imaginative construction. There is constant reassurance that you don’t need to know anything more than you do, that you can safely make up whatever you want and still follow along in the published campaigns.

I was initially quite jazzed by this encouragement to play fast and loose with Glorantha and Dragon Pass. But the more I read in the supplementary material the more that encouragement seemed like a lie. I mean, I know that it was genuine, but how are you supposed to make stuff up when so much of the world and culture has been defined?

The game focuses on the Orlanthi barbarians of Dragon Pass. Most of the supplementary books focus on that one specific area and that one specific culture. The campaign material (as presented in the Sartar Rising books) assume that your players will all be Orlanthi barbarians. The one player’s book that was published in the first 3 years of the game’s release was about Orlanthi barbarians. And that’s cool! With a world as big as Glorantha, sticking to one particular area is helpful, especially to new players, yeah? The problem comes in when you start reading the first Sartar Rising book at the player’s book, Rebel Thunder. The society is not some loosey-goosey bunch of anarchists; this is a heavily structured and traditional society with strict gender norms, a class structure, and a convoluted religious mythology with a strict schedule of holy days. The seasons and calendar are unique, as are the crops grown and the attitudes toward certain ways of life. Holy shit, people! There is so little room to breathe once you get into the details of the society that I found myself quite claustrophobic.

I realize you can punch holes in the fictional world and tear down whole walls, but everything is so entangled that it’s hard to anticipate what will be affected if you start dismantling things. The result is an uncomfortable tension between the language of freedom in the texts and the reality of the details of Glorantha.

As a side note, focusing from the start on an oppressively patriarchal culture within Glorantha seems like a poor decision. A female character is either going to be a culture anomaly or a housewife with fighting skills. The authors assume that you will be playing a male character throughout all the texts, and the use of the he pronoun for the players feels like it goes beyond any conventional use. Not a single sample PC in all the examples within the book is a woman. It made me uncomfortable. If my wife tried to read the core book, it would have ended up thrown across the room before the third chapter. I know a lot of women who are fans of Glorantha, and I can’t imagine them loving these books.