Sunrise Glorantha Report & Reflection 1 - The Emerald Sword Feud
In April 5th of this year, a Saturday, I posted the LFG for the Glorantha game I had been considering for at least 3 weeks until then. We have been playing on and off for 7 Saturdays since then and have had a handful of sessions.
I didn't feel like writing an individual session report for each of them at the time, so instead I'll do a retrospective for the first "story arc" that has wrapped up yesterday, the Emerald Sword Feud Arc.
The Game Pitch
The idea I had wanted to try out was that of a stationary adventure game. I had already tried that in Pendragon and it ended up becoming itinerary very very soon, as they moved around for battles and such. This time I wanted to take it slowly.
As for the characters, they were meant to be young adult members of the clan, just coming to the attention of the other adults as peers. In the LFG post I framed it as "What do you want to become in the end of the world?" so as to put everyone in mind of it being a game about being and becoming.
I made it very clear that the characters weren't meant to be gritty and cynically detached, as they weren't meant to be out for money but rather for love, adventure, or something else suitably big. As touchstones I mentioned Beowulf, War and Peace, Princess Mononoke, Avatar the Last Airbender, and comics by Mariko Tamaki.
For the backdrop of the campaign I took the Red Cow Clan for HeroQuest. Initially I had thought of setting the game in Heortland, far away from the "heart" of Glorantha so I wouldn't be tempted by excessive information, but instead I went with placing the game at the very heart of Sartar - the second most traditional setting-place in Glorantha after Prax - and daring myself not to be dragged into the insanity of hundreds and hundreds of pages through grit and rugged good looks. I read the Red Cow Clan books and took inspiration from the Guide to Glorantha, and limited myself like that.
In hindsight, I think I should have gone for a more specific campaign pitch. I was afraid that Glorantha would be too overwhelming for the players, and it sorta was, but once we crested that hill, we ended up with an extremely broad pitch. I had hoped the characters themselves and the first two scenarios would provide the gunpowder for the keg, but this ended up not being the case.
Another hindsight is, perhaps, a mismatch in my touchstones with the source material. The Red Cow Saga is good, but it's also very inspired by Sagas, specifically the Burnt Njál Saga, which I have read by now. While it's heroic, it's not as heroic as Hercules or even Princess Mononoke. The social complexity was a dimension I hadn't really considered, and didn't prepare the players for it either.
Session 1 - The Prologue (26/04)
The first session I ran was the initiation, which I framed as a heroquest of the players being introduced by their elders to their role in society, and then having a chance to witness the events that shaped the world they live in by themselves - or at least the version of those events that their people tell. I stole all of it from Six Seasons in Sartar and the other times I ran it.
My thought was that, by starting them off with a very clear and concise idea of what the world is to the Orlanthi and what the main thing that binds their life is - the fight against Chaos - it would help to ground them more in the world. In practice, I think it fell flat.
Part of it was that the initiation, by its very nature, isn't big on choices. I tried to inject some conflict and choices by making it more about the characters, their weaknesses, symbolic imagery of their inner world, but ultimately the players were still just saying "I keep on moving, then" repeatedly. I also botched the combat, rolling repeatedly for things that didn't need to be, and that made it very long and very boring.
Another issue with it was that no NPCs were really introduced; a big problem in a game that was at least partly about dealing with those people.
We detected the issue almost immediately and, after this session, I moved to fix it and made some adjustments, which I think have worked well. Matters of fine tuning are to be expected in a first session, but the scenario design really was beneath me - I knew it wouldn't be a homerun, but I still thought it was important enough that it warranted the dedicated session. The first few times I ran it by text, I always found moving the imagery of a field of battle clearing up from the shadows as the characters notice they weren't fighting alone and that they will always find brothers in arms in the fight against Chaos. I don't think this worked nearly as well by voice and what I had hoped to be an ok emotional moment was just a plot beat at the tail end of a session that was basically a lecture.
Session 2 - The Missing (03/05)
This one was the actually interesting one, and I consider it the true start of the campaign.
Between the past and current sessions the players got their starting magic, and some of them surprisingly got into Glorantha as a setting of their own. One played King of Dragon Pass and the other independently looked into the Lunar Empire. This player and a third one both joined the occupying Lunar religion, immediately driving a wedge at the centre of the group - and worrying the hell out of me with how I would keep them together, but I left that for them to figure out.
The pitch was simple: people are mysteriously getting sick and all the children of a household have disappeared, find them. They looked into it and found out the local river spirit had been spurned by a man, who was seeing a woman from the clan they were feuding with, and the spirit had abducted the children (they were playing around underwater, the spirit would never harm a kid). They made the guy apologise and, as compensation, one of the players married the river spirit.
This one felt much more alive. The players were interested in the mystery, they had things to do, they went around and met a lot of the NPCs who would become important, and were introduced to the blood feud that would centre next session. I really have no notes on this session, I think it was a high point.
What I take as learning from it is that I just really like mysteries.
This whole thing ended up working against me however: this session was very good, but also entirely self-contained. No threads were left open, the characters didn't get any new connections besides the marriage to the river spirit, their motivations remained unchanged, and overall they were still reactive at this point.
Oh yeah, did I mention the spirit looks like a dragon? I think the player might be a furry.
Session 3 - The Burning of Lhankpentos the Blind and Yarstak's Raid (10/05)
The players then participated in a cattle raid in the feuding clan, though they tried to avoid the brunt of the violence. Last session, one of the players had killed a man from the feuding clan in a duel, and his son came in the night and burned down the house he was in, killing the grandfather of one of the players - Lhankpentos the Blind - and shifting the power balance of the clan. Then they went in a retaliatory raid and got their butts kicked.
I tried making the burning an emotional moment for said player as they did try to scramble to keep him alive, but if the jokes being made during and after the event say anything, I don't think it hit very hard if at all. In fact, I'm 70% sure the players weren't remembering most of the NPCs introduced at this point, which indicates I'm having trouble differentiating between them and making them stand out by voice - something I never struggled with by text.
I did provide them with a list of the key people of the clan, and one or two were clearly remembered, but it was also a lot of NPCs to keep track.
Around this session I came upon the other challenge, which is that the players are still quite reactive. One of them had organised the cattle raid with his friend, but the others were basically just going along with the plot. Again, I can't really blame them as I both didn't prime them for it nor did I provide interesting enough plots going around the clan, I sorta had hoped they would attach themselves to other characters and go from there, but they haven't.
Another issue was that the players were having trouble gauging what was difficult to do and what wasn't. This was both an issue of myself not providing adequate foreshadowing based on their aptitude (for instance, a warrior deemed very powerful by regular men was dealt with relatively easily by the initiate of the god of war and death with a massively powerful starting rune, something I allowed him to have so that he could begin the game closer to a hero) and of the system itself being flaky with difficulty.
I haven't mentioned it yet, but I've been using HeroQuest - Glorantha for all of it, and around this point I start missing the cold simplicity of Hârn and Mythras, which I still do. Last campaign I changed the systems way too much, however, so this time around I decide to just focus and not let these thoughts get the better of me.
Session 4 - Peace Weaving (24/05)
This was the most recent session as of writing, happening yesterday. It was shorter than the others, 2 hours rather than 3, and with just three players rather than the regular five, which made quite a difference.
The leader of the players' clan decides they can't win the feud - a feud he didn't want in the first place - and send the women to negotiate peace. The players come along to help. They cannot manage it and negotiations fall through in large part due to sabotage; some of the women sent as emissaries didn't want the negotiations to succeed, they want the feud to continue. The players couldn't manage to outdo them in silver-tongueness and tensions flared.
This one was my attempt to make a more purely social scenario. There was no plotline to follow like in session 1, no big mystery to be solved like in session 2, and no fighting like in session 3, and I felt like it demanded way more from the players than they could handle - or perhaps than they were expecting.
The negotiations relied on cultural and game context built up over the past month of gaming, as the players were expected to hold their own against the viciousness of Orlanthi passions, and they just couldn't do it. At the start of the session I gave some context that could have been helpful - that the tribe that the clan they're feuding with belongs used to be their allies in living memory, part of their confederation - but this wasn't brought up later, which I suspect the players forgot due to the onslaught of context required for Glorantha.
Overall I don't think either this or the past session were bad, but I also feel a bit lukewarm towards them. This one was certainly experimental, but I'm starting to feel like the experiment is either falling apart or that I didn't set the expectations right. The players are basically still where they were 4 sessions ago: young adults proving themselves to the clan, with basically no solid contacts or interests among them, and still forced back in a reactive position. This is particularly telling in my prep for the rest of the year.
Conclusion and Reflection
All of the sessions until now happened over the span of around a season, starting in early spring and finishing up around the second week of summer, all of the year 1618. As summer goes away, however, there is nothing else for them to do or that they want to do, so I might just skip the entire rest of the year outright. This should keep the pace of the campaign moving (I have, after all, planned this to span in-game years), but it won't do anything for the reactiveness of the players.
Now, I know that comparison is the thief of joy, but by session 4 in the campaign I'm playing in (whose DM and 2 players are also players in this campaign, and also reading this right now, hello), we were killing a dragon after having made enemies for life. Iconic NPCs had been introduced of mighty legend, and in the following session we, the players, defeated the first big boss which we had been working for that entire time.
That is a different sort of game with different sorts of players, and it will always move faster as we're not lingering as much on the little human moments. But the problem is... neither are we in Sunrise Quest, not really.
At the same time, the objectives we had in that game were thrown at us by the DM, we decided where to go physically and found adventure by getting involved in that way, which isn't very different from what I have been doing; am I dragging the players along, or did I just provide hooks and planned well enough around them that they simply didn't exceed the bounds of what I had prepared? Is their reactivity actually bad in the long run?
Some other questions start to bubble up at points like these. For instance, I mentioned Beowulf and Mononoke-Hime earlier, lofty aspirations, but the most that they've done until now is steal cows and fight other men - and we didn't even hone in the fights as much because they were dealt with a single roll, something I liked as it kept up the pace, but that I sorta wish hadn't gone so fast now. The most mythological thing to have happened until now was the marriage of that one player to the river spirit, which I do intend to bring back up, but it's also just one player. So was that false advertisement? Am I not cut for running that sort of heroic game, or did I just rely on material that ended up not being as heroic and lofty as I had expected? Hell, is Glorantha even the correct setting for what I want to do? Wouldn't a sandbox itinerant adventure game with a tighter premise a la Dragon Quest hew closer to the marble in this one? Perhaps I did fumble the bag with the setting of choice, enamoured by Glorantha and wanting to share it with others.
And speaking of the pitch that keeps haunting me: the party simply doesn't have strong enough ties. If one player has an issue, there is little motivation for the others to get involved. Something I noticed from my older games is that the players talked a lot and roleplayed among themselves, but this hasn't happened much except adversarial, as two players are rivals. This makes the game harder to plan, as this isn't a dungeon game where the characters can simply spawn next to one another (something which happened in today's session I played), or it shouldn't be at any rate. Unlike a dungeon game, there is also no unified task expected from all players to participate in, they are simply regular people living in each other's vicinity and sharing blood relations.
I won't be able to DM next weekend (31/05), which means that by the time we play again, it will have been 2 months of playing and having the game in the background of my mind, yet I feel like I don't have much to show for it outside of that session 2. More importantly, the next time we play (07/06) will be close to the anniversary of the first time I ran a game by voice ever, which was on June 15th of last year, yet it feels like after an entire year of running and playing basically every Saturday and Sunday, I still am not fully used to playing by voice; yet when I play by text, it feels like something is missing. It's a strange place to be in.
The worst part, I think, is that despite all of that playing and all of that running, I don't feel like I'm an appreciably better DM now than I was a year ago. Not only that, but it feels as if I keep playing against my own strengths and picking the kinds of games I either don't enjoy or that aren't where I excel at; but I don't know what those strengths are anymore. Every so often I'll run a session or come across a scene where, afterwards, I think "Man that was really good, the players enjoyed it and I felt at home doing it", but it feels almost impossible to replicate. It's as if I keep making enemies out of situations that I should know better. I have been playing these games for 12 years dammit, if not now, when will I know better?
Anyway these have been my thoughts on the campaign. I don't have a satisfactory conclusion to this post, much like I don't have a satisfactory conclusion for myself. I guess I'll just hope Future Havoc figures this one out.
