Time to do some housekeeping again with my regular series of articles in which I pass brief comments on RPG supplements I have something to say about, but not enough to say to fill an entire article.
Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology (RuneQuest)
Last time I did one of these articles I covered the first clutch of volumes issued Cults of RuneQuest, the massive multi-volume collection of RuneQuest cult information for the current version of the game. Most of the volumes in this series concentrate on providing deep dives on the deities and cults of a specific pantheon, but there’s two exceptions. In the previous article I wrote about one of these – the Prosopaedia, a sort of system-free master index of gods and heroes.
This is the other “general” volume – a deep dive into the overarching mythologies of Glorantha, the monomyth which keeps cropping up in the different pantheons, and the deep history and ancient cosmology of the word. It opens with a Foreword by the late Greg Stafford himself (whose work underpins much of the Cults of RuneQuest series), and simply by reading those few pages I felt I understood Greg’s take on mythology and how it fits into Glorantha and how you can make an interesting RuneQuest story out of it much better than I did previously.
The rest of the book does not disappoint. Whilst some readers may prefer a “bottom up” approach – tackling the mass of Cults of RuneQuest by beginning with one pantheon or another and concentrating on the specifics of the cults – this offers a complementary “top down” look at the legends of the setting, and in doing so can both help you get the best out of the pantheon-specific volumes and get a better handle on the underlying ethos of Greg Stafford’s creation.
Some of the features here may seem idiosyncratic – in particular the set of mythic maps, showing the world of Glorantha at different stages of the God Time that preceded conventional time. However, part of the whole schtick of Heroquesting in the setting is embodying, re-enacting, and to a certain extent enacting mythic tales that took place in that time – and so knowing what the lie of the land was like at a particular phase of the God Time can be massively helpful when it comes to cooking up Heroquest-themed scenarios for high-level play.
Other features are just plain useful. There’s a generic breakdown of the template that all of the individual cult entries in Cults of RuneQuest use which is mighty useful, but at the same time too long to be sensibly reprinted in all the volumes. If I’m remembering correctly, at one point the plan was for Cults of RuneQuest to be a pair of two big, fat, super-chunky books – much like the Guide to Glorantha – but that was shelved in favour of the larger number of smaller volumes that the collection is now intended to span. My hunch is that had the “two big books” plan been gone with, this volume would have been the introductory material put front and centre, and I certainly think the rest of the Cults of RuneQuest volumes are significantly enhanced if you have this to hand.
Britannia & Beyond (Call of Cthulhu)
Chaosium licensees Golden Goblin Press follow up their update of Cthulhu Invictus for 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu with this detailed supplement. As the title implies, it’s about the northwest frontier of the Roman Empire, taking in Roman Britain and the unconquered realms of Caledonia and Hibernia (Scotland and Ireland). There’s good, compelling reasons to want to set a Cthulhu Invictus campaign here. Its status as a frontier realm allows for a loosening of social restrictions which might be tighter in Rome itself, for one thing; for another, there’s juicy hooks into all sorts of Mythos goodies, with Ramsey Campbell’s creations all having footholds in Britain and even Lovecraft himself writing about terrors in Roman and pre-Roman ruins in Britain in stories like The Rats In the Walls.
In addition to throwing in Mythos threats, the supplement also throws in some entities and ideas from Celtic folklore to spice things up. We really don’t know what the British druids believed before the Romans came, due having essentially no sources on the matter other than Roman writers hyping up how barbaric the Britons were before Rome showed up to civilise them, so there’s scope here for Golden Goblin Press to exercise a little poetic licence and posit that the druids, among their other beliefs, had an awareness of the dangers of the Mythos and had worked to counteract it – endeavours which, of course, were disrupted by the coming of the Romans (so there’s a little criticism of colonialist distaste for indigenous knowledge there, which can’t hurt).
There’s also dozens of pages here providing less supernatural matters, giving a detailed overview of life in Roman Britain – making the supplement potentially useful in any game set in the time period, Mythos or no Mythos. There’ve been plenty of Roman-themed RPGs before, of course – on here I’ve covered Maelstrom Rome, Basic Roleplaying Rome, and of course the original Cthulhu Invictus supplement and its 7th Edition update. However, many of these end up quite centred on Rome and its immediate environs, with only fairly terse discussion of the further-flung provinces of the Empire. This can tend to obscure how much variation there was across the Empire, and also passes up on interesting regions in which adventure and investigations can occur. Britannia & Beyond, to this extent, provides a helpful counterbalance to this.
Some of the art in here is… odd. If I were forced to guess, I’d speculate that some of it might be AI art – it’s got that sort of thing going where the image looks superficially correct when you glance at it, but when you look closer you realise that the perspective seems odd and everything is kind of melting into each other and you can’t make out distinct faces. I can’t put hand on heart and be sure – if any genre is appropriate to go for “superficially fine, weird when you look closer” it’s cosmic horror – but there’s at least a few art pieces in here which go for that style (like what I think is meant to be Roman troops on the march on page 8) to depict subject matter which it would be unusual to select that approach for. I hate that AI art generation has put me in the position where I might be baselessly suggesting that this book uses AI art – if it genuinely wasn’t used, I would be glad to correct this article on this point – but that’s the world we’re in at the moment. (I will note that this was a Kickstarter project, and a much-delayed one at that, which could have created a situation where something was quickly needed to be knocked together to cover for an art shortfall – a situation when the temptation to resort to AI art would be strong.)
Between that and the prewritten scenarios not being especially appealing to me, I can’t give Britannia & Beyond full marks, but the bulk of the content is good enough to make me feel pleased I backed the Kickstarter, and to hope that Golden Goblin are able to push past the issues which had delayed it and get things back on track.
Threat Assessment: Xenos (Wrath & Glory)
This is essentially the xeno-focused monster book for Wrath & Glory (demons probably belong to a Chaos-focused book), full of stats for various aliens – you’ve got Eldar, Dark Eldar, Orcs, Genestealer cults, and T’au (including Kroot) all crammed into here, and in pretty generous doses at that. Each grouping’s chapter opens with a quick rundown of their culture (though outside of material specific to Gilead, the assumed setting of Wrath & Glory, you don’t get much here which you can’t get for free on a skim of the relevant Lexicanum pages) and then you get lots and lots of unit types with their stat blocks and their roles in combat.
And that kind of cuts to the heart of the issue here: this book has clearly been devised to let you roll out as many iconic units from the wargame in your Wrath & Glory combat encounters as you wish, and the combat focus is emphasised through the “battlezone” rules, which provide guidelines for adding complications and threats to battlefields appropriate to the terrain rather than fighting on the same old turf every time.
This is, of course, a perennial issue with books of adversaries in RPGs, dating back to the original AD&D Monster Manual – when monsters are broadly defined by their combat stats, it’s inherently harder to see how they can be used in contexts other than combat. Even then, though, that book had stuff like Mimics which at least suggested something other than a straight fight. Here the emphasis is very much on the latter. Lip service is paid to the idea of Genestealer cults working in the shadows, but even there the emphasis here is on taking troop types from the Codex, translating them into Wrath & Glory terms, and giving you a bit of fluff which doesn’t give much in the way of insight as to how you might use these in less combat-oriented scenarios.
This may in part be a by-product of the design process – you can almost see the designers going through the relevant army Codexes picking out troop types and adapting them to Wrath & Glory. But I suspect it is mostly down to Cubicle 7’s re-evaluation of what Wrath & Glory is good for. Whilst the original release by Ulisses North America had billed itself as the do-anything Warhammer 40,000 RPG, it was evident from Cubicle 7’s revision of the core rulebook that they’d had second thoughts about it, and this was all but confirmed by their creation of Imperium Maledictum, a system focusing on low-powered missions based around investigation and skullduggery which was a third edition of Dark Heresy in all but name.
In that context, the focus of Threat Assessment: Xenos makes sense – this is a book designed to support a game about high-powered characters frequently getting into fights with recognisable foes from the wargame. I’m probably more on board with the Imperium Maledictum approach these days, but for those who enjoy Wrath & Glory, this provides a nice set of tools for making combat encounters.
Archives of the Empire: Volume III (WFRP)
As with the first and second volumes of Archives of the Empire, this is a grab-bag of miscellaneous bits of WFRP lore and rules built around loose themes. This time around, the themes skew towards trade and agriculture – activities which form the underpinnings of the merchantile and peasant populations of the Empire.
You get details on some appropriate cults (including the lesser-known sects of the Empire like Khaine and the Old Faith), you get support for PCs starting up business of varying degrees of legitimacy in downtime (and making use of that to create adventure seeds), you get some interesting locales and NPCs. You also get a reprint of the revised Channeling rules from Winds of Magic – a sign that Cubicle 7 regard this as being an especially important patch – though to add value here you get rules for Cants, special small effects aligned with the different Lores of Magic you can activate via Channelling. As with all of the Archives series, none of this seems enormously essential, but it’s nice to have to hand.
Refereeing and Reflection 