Arkat's PlaygroundI’m not doing RPGADay this year, but this is the Greatest GM’s Screen EVAR!!!
It’s for RuneQuest, and the front shows the Gods Wall in Dara Happa, which shows all their deities. It makes you feel mighty to sit behind its sturdy thick cardstock. It’s a stunning visual aid that screams, “This is Glorantha!” 😍
This is a deeper delve into my RuneQuest 3rd Edition home campaign, which I mentioned in my list of campaigns.
This campaign was authored by me and played out during the salad days of my student and post-student years when time was on my side in the 1990s. I dived in head first, picked an area to set a campaign that wasn’t the established Satar or Prax settings (presented as separate settings back in the olden days), and just made stuff up from the RQ 3 Gloranthan boxsets that I had spent a good part of my student grant in my first year from a very young Travelling Man in Leeds (who are just celebrating their birthday). The box sets were Glorantha: Genertela Crucible of the HeroWars, Gods of Glorantha, and, to a lesser extent, Elder Secrets.
Ralios, the region where Karia is, is a good place if you want a bit of everything. It’s isolated from all the Dragonpass action by the Rockwood mountains. There’s a big Elder Races presence. Western Malkioni have invaded in the past and left their mark and survivor cultures in the region. The Barbarian belt flows through it, so Orlanthi is there, with enough twists to make them different from their Sartarite cousins.
Karia itself is a borderland setting on acid. One-third is lightly settled after the ruling heroes of the neighbouring lands tell their followers to go there because it’s strategically important, in Glorantha’s weird mythological sense. The remaining two-thirds is a haunted wilderness, filled with the ruins of a great civilisation stomped into the dirt by Arkat during the Gbaji War. Oh yeah, and the “Arkat vs Nysalor” theme runs right through it as the defining conflict of the land.
Does that sound like fun? Yes, it was, and the game was my gaming life alongside Cyberpunk 2020 for the whole of the 90s. It faded when my home group and I moved on to the serious twenties world of work. RQ 3, which the game was set in, also got superseded in my “we must follow and support the publisher” mindset by HeroWars/HeroQuest/Now Questworlds and Karia never quite made it over (despite heroic efforts on my part). The house system that RQ3 was house-ruled into became the inspiration for OpenQuest.
In the late 90s, I dreamed of publishing it, so I’ve ended up with about a 100-page Word document, plus copious notes about our games. The publisher in me says I should get out via the Jonstown Compendium, but the creative in me goes, are you crazy? It still needs so much work 😀
Here’s the setting’s map, done in Campaign Cartographer 1 in the early 00s. It should be updated easly using Wonderdraft (part of the “still needs so much work” :D). But I present it here as a historical document, that I may or may not revisit 🙂
