Supplement Supplemental! (A WFRP Grimoire, a Cthulhu Railroad On Ice, and a RuneQuest Encyclopedia)

It’s time for another Supplement Supplemental article – part of my ongoing series where I put reviews of supplements where my thoughts aren’t sufficient for a standalone article, but where I do have something to say about the books in question. This time around I have a significant rules update and magic resource for WFRP, a chunky Call of Cthulhu campaign, and the first volumes in a major new series of RuneQuest resources.

Winds of Magic (WFRP)

Winds of Magic is Cubicle 7’s magic-themed supplement for WFRP 4th Edition. There’s a tweaked magic system in here, adjusted to address longstanding complaints like the issues with Channelling in the baseline rules, much as the combat-focused Up In Arms supplement provided a revised combat system; one suspects that if Cubicle 7 get around to doing a WFRP 5th Edition/4.5 Edition/whatever, we will eventually see those tweaked systems folded into the core rules.

However, just as Up In Arms offered a host of additional material based on combat and combat-adjacent matters, Winds of Magic also offers a wealth of additional stuff under the broad umbrella of magic. Unlike Up In Arms, it has some significant previous supplements to model itself on – because a good chunk of this is dedicated to providing detailed breakdowns of the eight Winds of Magic, and their associated Colleges within the Empire that study them, much as was provided in 1st and 2nd Edition with the Realms of Sorcery supplements.

An approach, this cleaves somewhat closer to the 2nd edition Realms of Sorcery than 1st Edition, in terms of focusing on how magic is practiced in the Empire, rather than trying to cover a large range of non-Imperial magics above and beyond that. The arrangement of material differs somewhat – after providing general overviews of the history of magic and the colleges, the writeups of the individual colleges are provided along with the broader discussion of the Wind they are associated with (including the additional spells offered here), so each Wind-specific section covers everything specific to that Wind.

Between this and a wealth of NPCs, details on item creation, additional spells, magical locales, and other fun details, this is likely to be useful to most referees. As a result of excloring well-trod territory, there’s a fair amount here you’ll have seen in some variant before, but having versions system-adjusted to the new edition is handy, and the thought given to how the information is arranged means that this may be the best-organised version of “tentpole WFRP magic supplement” yet.

---

Beyond the Mountains of Madness (Call of Cthulhu)

Published in 1999, this is a mammoth campaign supplement for Call of Cthulhu. As the title implies, it’s a sequel to the Lovecraft story At the Mountains of Madness, which tells the saga of an Antarctic expedition which goes terribly wrong (in ways not unreminiscent of John Carpenter’s version of The Thing). Cleverly, it plays on a concept for a sequel which Lovecraft himself sowed in the story: the original tale is presented as an account written by someone who’d been on the ill-fated Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition who wants to use it as a warning to the proposed “Starkweather-Moore Expedition” – urging them to give up on their plans to send a follow-up voyage.

The idea here is that the PCs end up attached to the selfsame Starkweather-Moore Expedition – Starkweather and Moore being devised as NPC expedition leaders of strikingly different temperament – and might end up coming across a copy of the original story in the process of playing through the scenario. As with the similarly epic-length Horror On the Orient Express, this campaign is a bit of a railroad – the PCs are going from A to B along a route which is largely planned out, and incidents happen on a schedule along the way.

However, in principle a railroad is absolutely fine if that’s what you as a playing group have signed up for – the real problem with railroads in RPGs is whether either a) you didn’t sign up for the ride or b) the ride itself is boring and takes you through dull scenery to a place which is a let-down. If you are signing up to play a Call of Cthulhu campaign based around a trip to Antarctica, you’re going to be fine with going to Antarctica – and the campaign is absolutely stuffed both with interesting incidents along the way and a hideous discovery at the climax.

Indeed, it’s that terrible discovery which allows for the railroad to stop being so constraining. Once the PCs have arrived at that final destination, having seen all they have seen and done all they have done along the way, they’ll be in a place where they have plenty of context to make judgement calls as to what is to be done about it; many features of the end of the campaign will hang on those decisions, and whilst a particular course of action is assumed by the campaign, you get more than enough here to support alternate decisions (and their consequences).

This is, that said, a very particular flavour of railroad: it’s a mixture of Mythos horror and a simulaton of the process of helping out with an expedition beset by bad luck and foul play. If your playing group really likes to dig into the logistics and specifics and immerse themselves in that, there’s ample material here to keep them pleased – including an extensive appendix about the logistics of exploring Antarctica in the early 1930s, which could be useful for any follow-up scenario (or, for that matter, any Basic Roleplaying-based scenario based in a suitable cold place with suitable technology to hand). If, of course, they’d find that tedious, you could fast-forward through a lot of it – but the sheer depth of material offered here to allow players to go deep on aspects of the practical logistics of exploring Antarctica is very nice.

On top of that, the different incidents along the way are all presented with an eye to the overall structure, which has been carefully worked out. It’s a stark contrast to Horror On the Orient Express, which ended up being a shaky collection of episodes that tied together only loosely and required some major suspension of disbelief when it came to the behaviour of some NPCs. By comparison, this campaign does a wonderful job of making sure every designer’s contribution is worked into a cohesive whole.

The one major criticism I would have of it is that some of the bits can default to NPCs interacting to NPCs whilst the PCs watch – but it’s easy to avoid that by simply being open to PCs being able to take on some of the decisions in question should they choose to intervene. As it is, the writeup provides a good rundown of what happens if the PCs don’t intervene – which is always useful to have to fall back on if your players decide to not intervene in a particular situation.

The book has recently been reprinted, with a revised layout for extra clarity but otherwise matching the original release (so the system bits have not been updated from 5th Edition, but you can multiply all the attributes by 5 and your conversion to 7th Edition is more or less done). Although it is not as open and multifaceted as Masks of Nyarlathotep, it’s far more consistent and focused; indeed, as far as I am concerned it’s the best “big campaign” ever published for the game. I tend to think that globe-trotting Call of Cthulhu campaigns miss a trick, and that the best scenarios have a more local focus; arguably, that’s true here, except what counts as “local” here is “Antarctica”, forcing a fairly epic journey to get there. Highly recommended.

Cults of Glorantha: The Prosopaedia/The Lightbringers/The Earth Goddesses (RuneQuest)

Cults of Glorantha, when it is done, is going to be an absolutely massive encyclopedia of cult information for the current edition of RuneQuest. The importance of cultic worship of the deities of Glorantha has been part of RuneQuest since the beginning, but it was the excellent Cults of Prax supplement which really made that click with people. What Cults of Prax did by giving us a small glimpse into Greg Stafford’s massive, sprawling mythology, Cults of Glorantha is trying to do again by providing a big, sprawling exploration of it, stuffed with support for playing members of these cults and creating NPCs associated with the cults, as well as also describing how these cults operate, what their social and cultural role is where they are active, what their mythology is, and some insights into related subjects as well.

Though much of the material here was developed before his death by Greg Stafford, the job of finishing the project has fallen to Jeff Richard, who has made it a labour of love, along with a wealth of collaborators, including artists who’ve made some of the nicest and most flavourful-looking art I’ve ever seen in a RuneQuest book. In this day and age, RuneQuest‘s best bet is in emphasising the distinct and unique flavour of Glorantha – the world is lousy with more generic fantasy RPGs and you’re not going to knock D&D out of that niche in the Anglosphere – and these books do a wonderful job with it.

The first part of the series is a system-free brief overview of the gods, cultural heroes, and associated concepts and organisations of Glorantha. On the one hand, precisely because it’s system-free it would need a little legwork to take what’s in here and implement it in a RuneQuest game if you wanted a fully fleshed-out cult for any of the groups in here – but on the other hand, that’s what the rest of this series is for. (And to be fair, you could probably use the Red Book of Magic and the RuneQuest core rules to cobble together something good enough for government work using the rune associations and whatnot listed here.)

What the Prosopaedia is good at is for getting a high-level overview of the pantheons, and for inspiration: you can pretty much open it to any page and find something inspirational here. If you badly want to know more, that can help nudge you towards picking up one of the later supplements in the series (or to dig up stuff from past editions), and the stuff in here is so flavourful that you’ll probably find plenty you want to know more about – or come to the conclusion that Glorantha just ain’t for you.

If you are enough of a mega fan that you’ve already decided you are going to get all the subsequent books in Cults of RuneQuest, then you might find you don’t have much use for this – and it’s perhaps a shame it doesn’t include page references for the rest of the volumes in the series to aid in rapid lookup. Nonetheless, I suspect even hardcore Glorantha-heads will find this a useful reference to get quick answers on who a particular obscure figure or other is.

The Lightbringers and The Earth Goddesses are the first two of what will be a fairly extensive set of deeper dives, each providing a close look at one particular pantheon of closely-related deities. The Lightbringers represent some of the best-developed material, because their legend has been a key part of the mythology of Glorantha since the start: back before Time was a thing, the sword Death found its way from the hands of Humakt, who used it on Grandfather Mortal; since then Humakt has been the lord of death, and all the descendants of Grandfather Mortal have found their way into the underworld after their alloted span is done.

Then the trickster Eurmal stole the sword and gave it to Orlanth, the Storm God, who had a long rivalry with the Sun God, Yelm. Orlanth slew Yelm with it, sending Yelm into the underworld – further exacerbating the unravelling of creation that Chaos was attempting, and disrupting the world of the living and the underworld alike (for Yelm was just as bright and powerful down there as he was ruling over the Sky). Eventually a party of adventurers, including Orlanth and Eurmal and several other deities, went down to the underworld, where Orlanth and Yelm agreed that to be best frenemies and never let their rivalry go this far again and the Great Compromise was formed – a new order of the universe, which gave the Storm Gods an acknowledged place in the pantheon (having been newcomers who found most of the universe already apportioned when they arrived), restored Yelm, and began Time.

The Lightbringers, therefore, is a volume that details the cults of Orlanth, the other Lightbringers, and most of the deities allied to them or important to their story – so you get Orlanth’s Storm Pantheon, and you get Humakt, and so on. The Earth Goddesses, likewise, cover Ernalda – Orlanth’s wife and the main Earth/harvest/fertility goddess of the Dragon Pass area, and a range of other deities related to her and fulfilling a comparable role (and it’s not all goddesses either). This latter volume is particularly useful for drawing out the culture of Glorantha’s elves (who are all plant people) and dwarves (rock folk), who are both formed of the powers of earth in their own way.

Since Greg Stafford understood that most cultures do not develop their mythologies in perfect isolation, but instead influence each other, the pantheons in Glorantha overlap a lot; for instance, Yelmalio, a son/aspect of Yelm who was closely allied to the Lightbringers and who won Orlanth’s respect because of his efforts defending the overworld as the Lightbringers quested in the underworld, isn’t described here because presumably he along with Yelm will get discussed in the appropriate volume. Likewise, Orlanth and Ernalda are married and their cults, whilst distinct, are best friends, and Issaries is descrbed here but shows up all over the place because as a patron of communication and trade he’s actively encouraged his follows to go out and see the world. Orlanth is also not Ernalda’s only husband – she has a bunch of them, befitting a goddess of her status.

(Similarly, Stafford also understood that deities have inconsistencies and variations in their depiction, and so we get some interesting variant versions of the gods. Orlanth is a woman sometimes, and she kicks ass when she is.)

These two books were picked to come out first after the Prosopaedia in the series in part because the Orlanthi and Ernalda pantheons are those which are most prominent in Dragon Pass – the suggested default heartland of most RuneQuest campaigns if you aren’t otherwise sure where in Glorantha to tell your tale. They are therefore the books of most immediate use to campaigns set there – which will include anything that kicked off with the Starter Set. The eventual size of the Cults of Glorantha line is impressive – Chaosium expect it will take until beyond 2024 to get them all out – so I would say that gamers on a budget may wish to consider prioritising volumes relating to subjects they fine especially interesting or significant to their RuneQuest campaigns. Any individual volume is absolutely stuffed with legends, lore, cult organisations, and other details, all of which can add flavour and inspiration to a campaign, and so even a small investment in the line will likely pay off in the hands of a referee who vibes with the distinctive style of Glorantha (and if you’ve looked over the Starter Set or the RuneQuest core rules you probably have a good idea whether you do or not).

The sheer number of deities covered in these books may ultimately cause problems when people are trying to remember which cult is in which book – we’ll see how that pans out in the long run. I think a missed opportunity in the Prosopaedia was not including in it a master index of all the books, though I suppose with the other books in the line still in the pipeline that may not have been possible and such a thing might be made available as a free PDF or something eventually. As it stands, I would suggest newcomers to the setting to look to the core rules and to the Glorantha Sourcebook as first ports of call, and then dip into Cults of Glorantha when they want the maximum strength Greg Stafford goodness updated by diverse other hands.