Cheese and Quackers

Owing to the prejudices of some of the older gamers I met when I first entered the hobby, I was initially very leery of Chaosium's RuneQuest and its setting of Glorantha. Chief among these prejudices was a disdain for ducks. According to the RQ rulebook available at the time, ducks are

a race cursed by the gods during the Great Darkness for not joining them versus the forces of Chaos. It is unknown whether they were originally human and became feathered and web-footed, or originally ducks cursed with flightlessness and intelligence.

As a younger person, I found this more than a little ridiculous. I've always tended toward self-seriousness – a huge surprise, I know – and that tendency has long influenced my evaluation of fantasy games and settings. Consequently, it didn't take much to convince me that RQ and, by extension, Glorantha was fundamentally unworthy of my time, because it included intelligent, playable duck-men as a feature. In earlier times, I found the very idea not merely unacceptable to me but downright silly. What kind of fantasy setting took inspiration from Donald or Howard?

A very good one, I would later find out. Part of what makes Glorantha such a terrific fantasy setting is its quirkiness. It's not a paint-by-numbers setting whose contents are entirely predictable. Instead, Glorantha is filled with the unexpected, from trollball to morokanths and their herd men to, yes, ducks, and they all exist side by side with the more staid Bronze Age socio-anthropological feel of the place to give it a unique depth and texture. 

But it took me a long time to accept this. I used to be so hung up on a very narrow understanding of seriousness that I was unable to recognize the need for a little weirdness and levity. Ironically, it was Steve Gerber, creator of Howard the Duck, who summed it up quite well in a 1977 interview, in which he explained the origins of the character. According to Gerber, the whole point of the character and the comic in which he appeared is

that life's most serious moments and most incredibly dumb moments are often distinguishable only by a momentary point of view.

That's a useful corrective to people like myself, who generally don't want the peanut butter of silliness in the chocolate of our fantasy settings. Things like Glorantha's ducks fly in the face of my usual expectations (no pun intended) and that's a good thing. I wouldn't want an entire setting filled with ducks, but I think Glorantha and other fantasy settings are better for having oddities like ducks in them.

Mind you, when I played RuneQuest a couple of years ago, I had a traumatic experience with ducks. My character and his comrades were traveling through Sartar, on the way to New Pavis, when the party stumbled upon a group of ducks. Our interactions with them quickly head south and a fight ensued, one that resulted in the death of one of the player characters. My character and the others who fled the scene developed a suspicion  and hatred of ducks from that point on. Far from being a bad joke, they were, in fact, quite dangerous foes whom we dreaded encountering again. I will never again say that ducks aren't serious.