A cover that reads "Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology," with an assortment of deities, some human like and blue, some fiendish in aspect, one that looks like Death, and one with the head of a feline.
It’s hard to remember these days, but there was a time before 2020. In that age, time flowed more naturally, and years, days, and months were less likely to stretch into one another. During the Before Time, in 2018, I wrote a review for 13th Age Glorantha. I bring this up because in that review, I mentioned that while I was familiar with RuneQuest and Glorantha, in very broad strokes, 13th Age Glorantha was the first time I had really explored the setting.

This year, Chaosium launched a new series of books, the Cults of RuneQuest. Each book is meant to explore a different aspect of gods and their worshippers in the setting. The previous books in the series included The Lightbringers and The Earth Goddesses, highlighting specific pantheons within the world. The volume I’m looking at today, Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology, is a broader look at religion across the setting.

Disclaimer

I was provided with a review copy of Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology from Chaosium. I have previously received other review copies from Chaosium. My main foray into Glorantha has been what I researched for my 13th Age Glorantha review, with some very basic exploration into the more specific version of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying core system that powers the game. Given the more in-depth combat system and the importance of the runes and the rules that surround them, I’m not sure that familiarity with other BRP based systems Is quite as transferable as knowledge of other base game systems may be.

 Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology

Writers Greg Stafford & Jeff Richard
Artists
Loïc Muzy, Agathe Pitié & Katrin Dirim
Design & Layout
Simeon Cogswell
Cartography
Francesca Baerald & Matt Ryan
Additional Art
Hazem Ameen, Antonia Doncheva, Andrey Fetisov, Ossi Hiekkala & Roman Kisyov
Line Editor Jason Durall
Editing & Proofreading
Skylar Mannen
Marketing
Brian Holland
Additional Credits
Nick Brooke, David Dunham, Claudia Loroff, Rick Meints, Andrew Logan Montgomery, Michael O’Brien, Sandy Petersen, Steve Perrin, Ken Rolston, David Scott & Anders Swenson

The Good Book

This first impression is based on the PDF version of the product. The PDF is 170 pages long. This includes a title page, a credits page, a table of contents, and an 8-page index. The text is in two column layouts, with enough space to make reading the pages easy on the eyes.

Normally I would talk about headers and sidebars and call out boxes, and this book has those, but so much of the complementary explanations comes in visual form in this book. For example, when the book begins its discussion on time, there isn’t just a chart showing different month names or the number of days in the months. There is an illustrated Calendar Wheel of Glorantha, which looks like an artifact out of the world it is detailing, with various symbols and images denoting the different calendar and calendar aspects.

We live in a golden age of RPG artwork, and I still feel that this book is extremely noteworthy. The colors and the richness of the art are eye catching, but beyond that, this book doesn’t show you what Glorantha looks like. It shows you the images that people in Glorantha use to depict their gods and cosmological events. The artwork is a congenial riot of color and detail.

A sky full of dragons, many with humans upon their backs, flying across the sky and toward the sun.The First Rule 

You may notice that I’m writing this as a first impression rather than a standard review, and part of that is I haven’t had time to absorb the rules for the current edition of RuneQuest. However, that brings me to something I wanted to address. The first real rules information starts on page 138, which details how various cults are organized, and how the rules treat different religious institutions. The book splits these into:

  • Site
  • Shrine
  • Minor Temple
  • Major Temple
  • Great Temple

The book then defines what kind of worshiper a character is. This includes the following ranks within the cult:

  • Lay Member
  • Initiates
  • Rune Priests
  • God-Talkers
  • Rune Lords
  • Rune Lord-Priests
  • Chief and High Priests

The combination of these definitions helps to define what services the temple can provide and who has access to those services, including services that interact with the game rules. This includes the following potential benefits:

  • Access to Spells
  • Skill Training
  • Replenishing Rune Points
  • Increasing the POW Stat
  • Allying with Spirits
  • Divine Intervention
  • Use of Rune Metals
  • Improved Resistance to Magic

While all of this is game content, there are still some general roleplaying notes about the setting, including the responsibilities of people with the above titles to the cult at large, how much time and effort they need to spend at the temple, and what kind of sacrifices characters are expected to make.

There is also a section on Cult Distribution that mechanically breaks down the percentage chance of various populations to have worshipers of a given deity or pantheon of gods. While rolling dice to determine the temple affiliation of NPCs doesn’t deeply engage with rules that are specific to RuneQuest, it is a gamification, so I’m including it in this section. That said, if you are one of the people that managed to get, for example, 13th Age Glorantha, and want to use it with this product, a d100 chart of who worships what god is still a pretty useful chart.

The locations and people covered with these cult distribution charts include the following people:

  • Dragon Pass
  • The Holy Country
  • Lunar Heartland
  • Lunar Provinces
  • Maniria
  • Prax
  • Aldryami
  • Trolls

If you count the Universal Cult Format chapter and the Cult Distribution chapter as fully game content, that means you have about 24 pages of game content, with the rest being general setting information and a discussion of using and detailing mythologies in a campaign setting.

An image of clouds encircling the sun, and the sun has a face with closed eyes. The sun is also in the middle of a web spun by a large black widow spider that is about a third the size of the sun.In the Beginning

The introductory information frames most of the book as being an in-universe scholarly look at the mythology of Glorantha. Much of this is framed in contrast to the God Learners, a group of scholars that sought to unify disparate mythologies and similar deities into a universal format. The God Learners aren’t exactly portrayed in a positive light, as they are seen in the text to be scholars seeking to oversimplify and streamline regional mythology for their own purposes. However, since they provide a unified structure with which to examine the overall elements of Gloranthan mythology, that’s the structure the book follows.

It’s also worth noting that a big concept in Glorantha is HeroQuesting, a magical means of entering the Hero Plane and participating in a myth and communing with the gods and immortals beyond the living world. Because the gods are locked away from the mortal world and live in the God Time, HeroQuesting can change the realities of the past if enough people that HeroQuest in a particular myth start to drift the outcome. This is important to bring up, because there is some indication that the God Learners didn’t just seek to unify mythology in a scholarly sense, but they may have taken actions that caused similar gods from different regions to essentially become the same deity, because the myths now say that they are.

This is a fascinating concept to me, and I loved it when I first encountered it in my review of 13th Age Glorantha. It’s also a really interesting literalization of what happens due to migration and colonization over time regarding local religions. If you don’t participate in the HeroQuests important to your people, the newly arrived colonizers may literally change your history and your beliefs.

The first section of the book lays out the version of mythological history detailed by the God Learners, noting that time didn’t really exist, so people or lands that weren’t created until later in the narrative might appear before they are created, because they are figuratively important to the events that transpired. There is no spoon.

Another fascinating element of this is that while the general syncretized stories are presented, in red text between sections other aspects of the myths that the God Learners couldn’t reconcile with one another appear and explain what different cults believe happened at that time. This could have come across as confusing, but the way the red texts jumps into the story at a particular point helps to keep straight when we’re looking at the syncretized overview and where we’re getting a local or specific myth.

In this section we also get generally agreed upon setting material, including the following:

  • Calendars
  • The Ages of Glorantha
  • The Nature of Magic
  • Cosmology
  • A History of HeroQuesting
  • An Explanation of the Runes

If you have ever seen the name RuneQuest and wondered why the runes get top billing, it’s because they are definitions of cosmic forces that are the building blocks of everything metaphysical. The gods have names, but they are also expressed by showing what runes denote the forces they have sway over. Mortal beings learning how to use various runes give them the ability to master an aspect of the metaphysical.

I won’t begin to do the ancient history of Glorantha justice by summarizing too much here, but the mythology explores the creation of the world, the Gods War, the first death and the beginning of dying, the Devil’s role in opposing the gods and spreading Chaos, the last battle against Chaos, and the Great Compromise, where the mortal realm was divided from the God Time by Arachne Solara, who created time as mortals understand it now.

The various ages of mortals are also touch upon, showing where mortal species allied and split apart, the founding of different long standing cultures, the Red Goddess’ arrival, a goddess not bound by the Great Compromise, and the nebulous beginning of “now” in the setting, The Hero Wars, where mortals fight to keep what has been made permanent from unraveling.

A council of beings holding hands in a circle, with the circle comprised of a dragon, a dwarf, an elf, a troll, a human, and a golden being.But Wait, There’s More

In addition to the chapters detailing all of the events from the beginning of time to the current age, there is a section of the book called Mythic Maps. These present maps of the pre-Compromise world, showing all the important locations of a given age. There are maps for the following ages:

  • The Golden Age
  • The Early Lesser Darkness
  • The Middle Lesser Darkness
  • The Late Lesser Darkness
  • The Greater Darkness
  • The Grey Age

These work well as a tool to remind you of what major events transpired in each of the ages. If you are just reading through the book and not using this section as a reference, however, the maps do get very repetitive, since the difference between some ages involves only a few locations undergoing a major change, so the map definitions will be extremely similar to the previous section.

Family Reunions

There is a fairly large section of the book dedicated to the Catalogue of The Gods, which breaks the existing gods into their current pantheons, gives their titles, who they are, and the runes that define them. For each pantheon, there is a page of artwork showing the genealogy of that pantheon. The following pantheons get this treatment:

  • The Lightbringers
  • The Earth Deities
  • The Sky Deities
  • The Portions of Yelm
  • The Lunar Deities
  • The Darkness Deities
  • The Water Deities
  • The Beasts
  • The Lords of Terror

This chapter is another strong example of how the atmospheric artwork supplements the text, with the genealogies showing what looks like intricate symbolic artwork that you would find in the temples to these deities.

A Philosophy of Philosophies

There is an eight-page section of the book that I wasn’t expecting. This section discusses the importance of mythology, from a real world, human perspective. It explains what would make a cult vibrant and ongoing, and the kind of elements you should add to a cult if you want to portray it as an active interest, versus a fading institution.

I’m not sure I would follow exactly this advice for any setting in which I created my own detailed mythology. For example, using this example you are going to get a lot of gods and a lot of subdivided pantheons. But it’s a solid read for its exploration of the topic and it’s reflections on how to use anthropological logic to a game setting to add depth.

Final Thoughts

I knew I had only scratched the surface of Glorantha when I was looking at the setting for my 13th Age Glorantha review, but I’m not sure I understood the depth of what existed that I didn’t know. Despite 170 page of information on the mythology of the setting, I can still understand why there are other books in this series that only look at specific pantheons, and I can understand why the history of mortals and their endeavors, while probably a huge amount of information on its own, gets largely elided in this book.

I do think that if you enjoy intricate mythologies or deep settings, this is presented in a very engaging manner, and it’s a visual feast.

I’ll be honest, I am both fascinated by extremely detailed settings, and also intimidated. My curiosity makes me want to dive deeper, but my intimidation makes me wonder if I would ever feel comfortable getting the setting to the table for fear of not using all those elements in a satisfying manner. But there is a definite difference between being hesitant to run a game, and being hesitant to do more exploring of the setting itself.

I don’t know that this is a must read if you aren’t already running a game set in Glorantha, or looking to do so, but I do think that if you enjoy intricate mythologies or deep settings, this is presented in a very engaging manner, and it’s a visual feast. I may not be putting any Glorantha games on my personal gaming schedule just yet, but my desire to revisit The Glorantha Sourcebook, which I picked after my 13th Age Glorantha review, has intensified.