Smithers, who is that Horse God from the Dawn Age?

And the truth about the Ennies

This Week’s post reflects looks at one of those big scary published settings and how to approach them.

Glorantha is a famously deep but daunting setting. I won’t try to summarise it here, but open up any of the books and you’re sure to be swarmed by proper nouns you’ve never seen before.

The Glorantha-set King of Dragon Pass has one simple trick, continued in its spiritual sequel series Six Ages.

On most screens of the game you have a bunch of familiar faces. These are your circle, important people assigned to leadership roles, and the best thing about them is that you can click on each of them to see what they think at the given moment.

Often they’ll straight up tell you what they think you should do.

Sometimes it’s thinly-veiled gameplay tutorial stuff or a mini lore dump. Things that are annoying on a popup menu, but it’s better coming from a person.

And it’s always dripping with that bronze age Glorantha sauce that helps put you in the right mindset.

Yeah, why aren’t we selling slaves??

This is great for a setting like Glorantha, where you won’t always know what sort of things are accepted norms in this weird world, but I think it would be handy for a lot of TTRPG settings.

Still, I don’t expect the players to cart around a team of seven advisors to handle every situation.

I think a single NPC following the group around spouting exposition is fine, but having two is much more fun, as you can have them disagree on things, or even give conflicting information on the setting. Use that latter one sparingly, though.

Now remember the trick with the Dragon Pass advisors is that they mostly give advice when asked, so avoid having the NPCs butt in with their suggestions before the players have even begun thinking about what to do. They can be proactive at times, but players are much more likely to be interested in what NPCs say when it’s a question they’ve asked, rather than information they’re being fed.

For Mythic Bastionland there are lots of ways to end up with NPC hangers-on, but squires are the most obvious. If your knights are new to the realm then have their squires be from here, with a smattering of local knowledge and their own conflicting opinions on what would be best for their realm.

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Elsewhere

• Explorers Design reflects on the experience of being an Ennies judge, in a multi-post series continuing through the week.

• The Foot of Blue Mountain has an excellent set of magic items for their hex crawl project, At the Base of Blue Mountain.

• The Smiling Fox Podcast returns with another excellent episode of Mythic Bastionland talk, this time focusing on… time! I’m in awe of how fantastic this podcast is turning out, and I hope it continues for another Age or two.

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Coming Soon

Over on Patreon I talk about strange varieties of knight.

You’ve probably met knights from other realms, but these are different. While they resemble familiar knights in many ways, they have a different oath and a different set of feats.

Expect the full post here and on the blog next week.

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