Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Retrospective: Borderlands

My love is boxed sets is well known. I strongly believe that the shift away from them had a negative effect on the hobby's self-identity, leading to the publication and purchasing of more and more "game" products that were, in fact, never used at the table at all but instead simply read. I understand why, for pragmatic reasons, boxed sets largely died out, but that doesn't change the fact that I wish there were more of them available today, as they were in my younger days.

In that bygone era, Chaosium produced some of the best boxed sets ever made. I owned a few of them, mostly for Call of Cthulhu, but I admired many more from a distance, particularly those produced for RuneQuest. Though Pavis and its companion set, Big Rubble, not unreasonably tend to get more attention, 1982's Borderlands is another good example of what Chaosium did well: present a large area of Glorantha in an approachable fashion and never forgetting to make it gameable. That's very important to me. However interesting and evocative a game's setting may be, one must never lose sight of its purpose: to foster adventure in the game itself. Setting for setting's sake seems to me to miss the point and I say that as someone who is a dedicated fan of Tékumel, a setting that could, in fairness, be accused of this very sin. 

Borderlands is guilty of no such offense. Set in the frontier region of Prax, the boxed set is geared toward adventuring within the region as mercenaries in the employ of the Duke of Rone. The duke is an exiled Lunar soldier sent here to establish an imperial presence, with the goal of "civilizing" its indigenous peoples. The duke's background is mysterious, as are the reasons for his exile far from the Empire, details that contribute to the seven scenarios Borderlands includes. Each of these scenarios is bound separately as a little booklet to be used by the referee, in conjunction with two other volumes that provide detailed information on the region, from history to prominent features and NPCs. A fold-out map and handouts complete the boxed set's contents.

Borderlands distinguishes itself by the way that its presentation of background details inform the adventures. For example, the first scenario is intended as an introduction, with the characters charged with scouting the land for the duke. In doing so, they not only learn about the major sites and settlements of the area but also its various factions and inhabitants. Later scenarios build on what they have learned, as they take on bandits, creatures of Chaos, kidnappers, and other enemies, as well as explore ruins and locales of interest. Combined with the many unique random encounters presented in a separate booklet, Borderlands presents a coherent picture of Prax and its peoples. 

What most impresses me about Borderlands from the vantage point of the 21st century is the way that it marshals all its resources – background information, NPC stats, encounter tables, bestiary, map – to aid the referee in running adventures, both the seven included in the set and others of his own creation. Borderlands is a very practical product, a hands-on supplement for the referee whose contents support long-term play in the region of Glorantha it presents. To my mind, it's a great model for presenting a setting through adventures rather than through pages upon pages of background information, a "show, don't tell" approach that I find very congenial and wished I'd discovered sooner.

27 comments:

  1. Very nostalgic. This was one of the first RQ supplements I played through back in the day, with some stuff from Pavis and Big Rubble thrown in along with the expected homebrew additions of the GM's invention. We wound up getting involved with some Sartar freedom fighters and eventually betrayed Duke Raus and his household to a coalition of Praxians and dodgy mercenary scum from Pavis, all as part of "proving ourselves" as proper anti-Lunar sorts. Spent the rest of the campaign desperately trying to avoid, ah, Imperial entanglements as a consequence.

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  2. IMO Chaosium's RQ supplements from the early 80s - this, Griffin Mountain, Trollpak, and Pavis/Big Rubble - are still the unsurpassed gold standard of rpg supplements. Each one does something different from the others and all of them are great in terms of content, gameability, and production values.

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  3. Glad to see this post today. Along with P & The Big R, Borderlands set my standard for setting/campaign adventure materials. As you say, learning the setting through the adventure, not walls of history text ala D&D. Today's writers of the Adventure Path by PAIZO/WOTC would do well to re-visit old products like this to see how one can provide a non railroad, campaign length game experience.

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    1. The "adventure path" format really doesn't lend itself to the relatively sandbox-style gaming of the Chaosium boxed sets, though. AP stuff tends to be very linear, in part because they want you to wind up at the starting point of the next release in the series so you'll buy it to continue. It makes them a bad value IMO, and particularly so when held up to Chaosium's work.

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  4. Worth noting that this available again as a POD softcover, along with the other boxsets/supplements of the RQ 2 era rebranded as RuneQuest Classic on via the Chaosium webstore https://www.chaosium.com/runequest-classic/

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  5. I literally had no idea this item existed. Maybe it was a distribution variable (I grew up outside of Washington DC) or perhaps it was simply that our initial D&D gear came from older brothers who had been decommissioned from the Army during the Carter Administration and other than the occasional mall-store we didn't have many retail outlets.

    Either way it looks wonderful and engaging. Practicality has been my favorite word for 30 years. You learn that lesson when you turn a Marshall JCM-800 up to 6/6 and break three windows in your friends' garage.

    Borderlands: the safer alternative to Heavy Metal.

    Presumably the inner-art is as cultivated as the cover?

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    1. All of the inner art was pen-and-ink drawings by Lisa A Free -

      https://vintagerpg.tumblr.com/post/163935154169/when-i-post-about-runequest-and-glorantha

      and there's not a great deal of it.

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  6. There are still quite a few boxed sets produced, but nowadays they're used almost purely as introductory products; right I stock two D&D boxed sets (starter set and "essentials" kit), plus boxed sets of Shadowrun, Pathfinder, and 40k Wrath & Glory. The only non-intro boxed set to cross my shelves in many a day was the Curse of Strahd box Wizards put out last Halloween, which shipped in a giant, ridiculous coffin-shaped box. Impractical as anything, but fun!

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    1. Yes, boxed sets are very fashionable again, and not just for introductory sets. Free League games like Forbidden Lands and Alien come in boxed sets, as does the Alien campaign Destroyer of Worlds. Dungeon Crawl Classics uses them for campaign settings like Lankhmar. The new edition of Traveller uses them for the larger campaign settings as well.

      Kickstarter has made them economically viable again.

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  7. I've always been proud to have been a (small) part of that project. I started playing RQ back in 1978 and played many other systems as well, but I never saw any supplement for any game system that was better at getting people to role play their characters than Chaosium’s Borderlands. As you point out, everything in that box was there to help the referee run adventures and it did a heck of a job.

    I was one of many contributors and I’ll always be grateful to Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin for letting me be a part of that team.

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    1. That is awesome! Care to fill us in on which bits you were involved in? And what it was like working with the Chaosium crew?

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    2. My contribution to RQ Borderlands was the write-up for the Men & a Half (the Agimori) in the Referee’s Book and the description of the three named Agimori NPCs in the Encounter Book. The write-up was basically a reprint of my article on the Men & a Half from Wyrm’s Footnotes magazine #12. (WF was the Chaosium in-house magazine devoted mostly to RQ and Glorantha).

      I don’t have any stories about what happened behind the scenes; Chaosium was a West Coast operation at that time and I live in Philadelphia. Not to mention that it was 38 years ago (yikes), well before the beginning of the digital age we live in now. It was always a pleasure working with those guys though.

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  8. Borderlands was one of the last supplements Chaosium published before the move over to Avalon Hill, (perhaps Trollpak was the last? I got both at almost the same time) a move which effectively killed RuneQuest at the time. Borderlands marked that stage in RQ2 Glorantha where it had moved a fair distance from its d&d roots as far as adventures went, and upped production values compared to Griffin Mountain, but it still had enough of a murder-hobo quality that showed the Chaosium writers still had not worked out how to reconcile the setting material with what the nature of an adventure was. There's a fascinating contrast between Borderlands, written in 1982 and River of Cradles, written in 1992 which revisits some of the same territory. The way characters, the setting, NPCs, magic and religion is treated is strikingly different.

    When I read people today, new to Glorantha & RuneQuest talk about how they are intimidated by running anything in Glorantha it seems so odd, as in the 80s it was all up for grabs, and even Chaosium thought they were playing d&d with better rules in an interesting setting. By the 90s this had shifted because by that time the writers realised this was not d&d, and that's when leading strongly with culture and religion distinguish the 'second golden age' of RQ, short-lived but nevertheless set the tone for RQ in Glorantha ever since.

    Although I have never had any interest in d&d it seems a shame that contemporary RQ (at least in the way new material for it is published and discussed) has lost its sense of fun because it clings so tightly to being true to the setting.

    Looking back on Borderlands what surprises me is how thin the setting material is, when it comes to things that would be immediately useful the GM is given so little. In the first scenario you have to act the negotiator for several different Praxian tribes, and you have virtually nothing to go on for the leasers of the various groups.

    Borderlands *is* an adventure path incidentally - it's a series of adventures which are difficult to play out of sequence. It does not have a sandbox structure (unlike the earlier Griffin Mountain) but I suspect this was a design decision to make it easier to run a Glorantha campaign, which it absolutely did.

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    1. I never got to play RQ back in the '80s. A friend of mine owned, and as kids we tended to buy different games to maximize our options. He never got around to running it though.

      By the '90s, it already had that intimidating reputation online, and I was wary of picking it up, not so much because I was intimidated, but because it seemed like something hard to get to the table.

      When Moon Design started reprinting the early books, I broke down and picked them up. It was amazing to me how accessible and table-ready they were. It just shows how fans of a game are often its biggest enemies.

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    2. My experience with Borderlands differs radically from yours. As I said elsewhere, our characters wound up getting involved in the Sartarite resistance movement amd eventually betrayed Duke Raus and his entire holding to angry Praxians and some Pavis mercenaries rather than running through the box in a linear path. So while it could be played like a modern adventure path railroad, it also worked fine as a fairly freeform sandbox, at least with a creative DM and a little help from Cults of Prax and Pavis.

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    3. Yea, Glorantha is very approachable if you stick with or at least start with the RQ2 era material. Then either roll your own Glorantha from that, or pick and choose.

      Since I've been running on and off since RQ1 came out, my Glorantha is most decidedly mine. In the 2000s, I got on a bandwagon of buying lots of the fan stuff. In the end, I abandoned most of it. And now I'm back to running MY Glorantha. And if I want to use something from a newer product, I do, and if I need to ignore something in it, I ignore it.

      Of course my Glorantha looks more like "generic D&D fantasy," but hey, that's approachable, and if you don't want to play "Cultural Anthropology the Role Playing Game", more power to you. Gaming should be fun. Pick YOUR fun, don't be tied to someone else's fun...

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    4. I tend to agree with you, Frank. My sense of Glorantha is very much informed by the RQ2 era and, while there are bits and pieces of later material I like, most of it is just too much for my tastes, which is why, as well done as it is, I don't ultimately find RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha a game I can really get into.

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    5. As a young teenager at the time when I ran Borderlands, I would not have a hope in hell of running it as a sandbox. I had not played in anyone else's game, my only clue as to how other people ran games, or how rpgs (frps) were supposed to be played was from White Dwarf and what I read in the few rpg books I bought - mostly from Chaosium.

      Although my players went along with the scenario plots and stayed working for the duke, they immediately called him "Raus the Louse" because he was a Lunar, and the nickname stuck for the campaign.

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  9. This definitely is a great product, but it does have one downside. It isn't exactly a sandbox. It's not quite a railroad, but definitely they way it's presented it isn't quite a sandbox. It could easily be run as such though.

    Interestingly, despite the amount of content for RQ, I have mostly run my own adventures or converted D&D adventures. Back in college I did start a Borderlands game, but never made it beyond a session or two. I HAVE run Apple Lane (mostly Rainbow Mounds, but I have run Gringles once), Snake Pipe Hollow, and Lair of the White Wyrm (non-Chaosium module from White Dwarf Magazine).

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    1. These days with an experienced GM Borderlands would be fun taking it in any direction the players wanted. My guess is the intention with the campaign was that the GM would cook up adventures in-between the set scenario booklets. When Borderlands was reviewed on the Grognard files (https://thegrognardfiles.com/2017/02/15/episode-part2-more-runequest-rpg-with-rick-meints/) the role of the PCs was described pretty accurately and amusingly as an "imperialist death squad".

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  10. FYI, the "Hoffman" listed on the front cover is Reid Hoffman, billionaire founder of Linked-In and PayPal. This was his first paid gig, as a 12 year old. He's shared his foundational experience at Chaosium in profile articles and interviews overt he years, as a small but important part of his successful journey.
    https://geekandsundry.com/can-playing-rpgs-make-you-a-billionaire

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    1. Nifty. had not seen that, although I dimly knew he'd worked for Chaosium at one point.

      Man, 12 years old. That's a kicker.

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    2. I was 15 years old when Borderlands came out and loved it. I would have been intensely jealous if I'd known the "Hoffman" on the cover was a kid younger than me, his name up there with those famous designers like Greg Stafford, Sandy Petersen, Steve Perrin & co.

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  11. I have not yet picked up the Borderlands classic reprint, but I can say the Griffin Mountain reprint book is excellent. The only thing they cannot do with POD is decently priced large scale maps.

    That I feel is a major failure of the POD industry, it should not be that difficult to reach a good price point on those, after all, look at the miracles of 3D printing...

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    1. You can get all the RQ2 maps - including the map of Raus Domain from Borderlands - at Chaosium's Redbubble store: https://www.redbubble.com/i/photographic-print/The-Domain-Map-from-RQ-Classic-Borderlands-by-Chaosium/39720654.Y8UA9

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