Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Retrospective: Cults of Terror

If there's an area where I think most roleplaying game settings – and, let's be honest, most other forms of popular media – consistently fail, it's religion. By "fail," I simply mean that most RPGs do a very poor job of presenting one of the foundations on which nearly every human culture has been built. If religion is treated at all, it's either presented very cursorily or, worse yet, reduced to mere game mechanics with little or no consideration of society or culture. 

There are probably many reasons why this is so, but I'd guess a big reason is that most roleplaying game writers were born and live in secularized, or at least secularizing, countries where religion as it's been known for untold thousands of years holds comparatively little sway. This makes it far less likely that they understand religion of the sort that makes sense in more traditional societies, like those of the ancient and medieval eras in which so many fantasy RPGs are set. By my lights, there are two main exceptions to this, one of which is Tékumel. The other is RuneQuest's Glorantha.

Years ago, I wrote about Cults of Prax, a RQ supplement that detailed more a dozen religions – called cults in Glorantha – with information about their myths and history, nature, organization, membership, and relationships with other cults. Cults of Terror is a 1981 companion book, detailing nine more cults from Glorantha. In terms of its format, this supplement is quite similar to its predecessor. Where it differs is in its specific content. Whereas Cults of Prax detailed religions suitable for membership by player characters, those in Cults of Terror are, in the words of its introduction, those of "the bad guys of Glorantha, the enemies of creation, the foes against whom every fight must be fought." So awful are the cults presented here that the book includes the following warning in bold type:

IMPORTANT: contributors, editors, and publisher categorically intend that these cults be used for Non-Player Enemy religions. Player Characters should not join these cults. We recommend that Player Characters who join these religions quickly be put to sacrifice by Non-Player-Character priests, to get them out of play.

From the vantage point of the present day, this warning seems mildly absurd, but one must remember that, in the aftermath of the James Dallas Egbert III disappearance just a couple of years prior, roleplaying games were receiving increased – if facile – scrutiny and I suspect that Chaosium, much like TSR, was worried about the possibility of bad publicity. In the case of Cults of Terror, I can understand this, as many of the cults are quite abhorrent, such as that of Thed the Mother of Broos or Vivamort, Lord of the Undead.

Each of the cults in this book get very detailed write-ups, providing plenty of insight not just into the beliefs and activities, but also their place within the setting of Glorantha. It's in this area where Cults of Terror excels. In some ways, it's even superior to Cults of Prax, because much more is revealed about the myths, history, and cosmology of Glorantha. A RuneQuest referee would therefore find this volume quite useful, even if he weren't directly using any of the cults described herein. That said, the cults all make terrific enemies and general antagonists for any campaign set in Glorantha. 

At the beginning of this retrospective, I noted that far too many roleplaying games treat religion too lightly or reduce it solely to game mechanics, mistakes that RuneQuest did make. I should make it clear, though, that neither Cults of Terror or its predecessor make the opposite mistake: indulging in fantastical anthropology for its own sake. Cults of Terror contains many details about the titular cults, details that situate them well within the overall setting of Glorantha. Yet, most of these details are also practical, giving the referee what he needs to use them appropriately within his RQ campaign. Cults of Terror is emphatically not an "academic" work whose contents serve no purpose for gaming. To my mind, it strikes just the right balance between being too game-focused and too esoteric – which is why it remains a favorite of mine, even though I have played RuneQuest only infrequently over the years.

31 comments:

  1. Typo alert - I assume you mean "two main" rather than "two many".

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  2. Good post. I think there are, like you suggest, other factors at play that are more important than secularized society.

    It's also kind of telling that once people get to play a game in Glorantha or Tekumel, they find it's quite easy to "get it".

    I should maybe get my copy of Cults of Terror out again.

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    1. While I have been gaming since the early '80s, I only got around to looking at Glorantha and Forgotten Realms within the last 15 years. Forgotten Realms is supposedly the accessible one, but I couldn't get any kind of handle on how religion worked aside from being a list of domains that clerics could choose from. It was all too boring to really stick with me. It was like they made a chart with domains along one axis and races on another access, then just filled every space on the chart with an obligatory god to fill out character creation options.

      When I read about Glorantha, it felt like I was reading about real mythology and religion, something that actual human beings would practice. It made it so much easier for me to learn, as well as easier to explain to players.

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  3. Excellent review of a great book; along with Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror tells the GM and the players WHY their characters are in the campaign. I noticed that one of the commenters on Cults of Prax suggested that all one really needs to run a RQ campaign in Dragon Pass/Prax is the core rule book, CoP and CoT. I've been running RQ since the fall of 78 and I agree.

    I'm not saying that the other RQ supplements aren't any good, most are and some are fantastic, but these three are all you really need as long as the GM is willing to do the grunt work of .

    **Interesting that you put your finger on "more is revealed about the myths, history and cosmology of Glorantha" aspect of CoT. That was the first time that all of that information had ever been published together in the same place and the impact on the Glorantha community was immense.

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  4. I always thought the "NPCs only" warning was less about Satanic Panic concerns and more about leaving some things to the Bad Guys in a campaign, preserving not only the sheer horror of Chaos but also the mystery around it. Not one of those cults is anything less than nightmarish, and some are ongoing existential threats in the literal sense of endangering reality itself. They aren't PC material.

    It's much like playing a non-human species in Glorantha is generally discouraged because having a PC Dwarf or elf is not only exceedingly tricky to get right (because they're truly alien, not just short or pointy-eared humans as in most of D&D) but opens too many windows to see behind the curtain on why those races do what they do. The uz got by far the most PC-friendly background material and are arguably the most relatable species in the game but even they aren't encouraged in mixed groups - although Trollpak gives you enough meat to do an all-uz campaign, with perhaps one or two human adventurers who are in over their heads in an alien culture.

    As for Tekumel - I think it does a great job of showing religion's integration into human society, but the gods themselves are closer to Mythos deities than anything else. All of them are so inhuman by nature that the human priesthoods worshipping them have to bend over backward to interpret their goals, desires, and motivations in a way humans can understand. Where Gloranthan deities feel like part of the world and their mythologies grow organically from the cultures that follow them, the gods of Tekumel feel like (and are) outsiders, alien things impinging on the parts of spacetime humans can occupy and playing with mortals for largely inscrutable reasons. It's a huge difference in tone and god/worshipper relations - and to me it feels a lot like the way some non-Chaotic Gloranthans worship the Chaos deities, either in an attempt to propitiate them or to grab power being dangled like bait on a hook.

    Gloranthan mythology allows for apotheosis, as seen with the Goddess of the Red Moon. Nothing like that could happen in Tekumel's cosmology. No mortal is joining the club in EPT.

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    1. You could well be right about why these cults are NPC-only.

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    2. The backstory of Tékumel is presented as science fiction, especially in the S&G Sourcebook, while Glorantha derives from Joseph Campbell-style comparative mythology. I think that explains a lot of the difference and makes it much easier for me to suspend disbelief in Tékumel.

      As for growing organically, that might be a matter of taste. Though I find much of Glorantha fascinating, it feels to me more like a laboratory, with things thrown in just because they want to play with them. A Deistic monotheism? Check (Malkioni). A pseudo Far East? Check (Kralolera). Even older RQ has stuff that really seems more of a reference to contemporary culture (e.g., the pumpkins of Hungry Jack and Jack-O-Bears) or is just odd (e.g., the Block, essentially a big six-sided die in the desert). And the non-human races have their own religions; I can’t think of an Earthly analogue - e.g., centaurs in Greek mythology didn’t have a separate cosmology and belief system as far as I’m aware. To me that doesn’t square with having the mythologies arising from human cultures, i.e., the aliens must have been there a priori. And what’s up with the “it’s a Bronze age culture with a metal called ‘bronze’, only it’s not really bronze”?

      Caveat all that with the fact that I never had the chance to actually play RQ, just collect a bunch on the shelf and play a very little of Dragon Pass. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had.

      It’s interesting how both RQ and Tékumel ended up with magic largely being learned from the cults/temples, with differentiation in which spells can be learned where. That isn’t anywhere in EPT as I recall; did later Tékumel take this from RQ?

      Finally, does the possibility of apotheosis have any non-flavor role to play before Heroquesting? I don’t see how in older RQ any character would approach Harrek or JarEel levels, let alone Arkat or Sedenya.

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  5. Thanatar was quite popular for power gaming PCs in the day. My copy is signed by ... Gary Gygax.

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  6. There was a similar note about “this is for NPCs only” in Dragon Magazine 76, from Lenard Lakofka’s “The Death Master” NPC class.

    “The death master is meant as a non-player character one the player characters and their party have to defeat. Please use the character that way only. If I ever run into a player-character death master at a convention, I may turn evil myself…”

    It always struck me as an odd thing to say, on multiple levels.

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  7. I could sarcastically suggest that call of cthulhu also got religions right...

    in my games, everyone has to pick a deity. or at least a saint. because there is not way your toon saw a priest raise a guy from the dead, and put his head back on, and not BELIEVE.

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    1. Huge difference between believing in a supernatural entity and worshipping it. Me, I liked the take on deities in the obscure RPG Nexus: the Infinite City. The successful gods there were strictly into transactional worship, with set rates for miraculous benefits.

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    2. I can square with that, but faced with the possibility of greek-style gods running around, messing with your life, you are going to want a patron

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    3. Actual Greek deities would be best avoided as much as possible. Arbitrary, immoral, often cruel, and insanely jealous of each other and of any mortal that stands out enough to draw their attention. There's a reason they're part of the "pre-ethical religion" category.

      But I get your point. At least Nexus' Stleb the Vampire Maggot God has a good exchange rate on blood donations (strictly voluntary, mind you) for divine boons. :)

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  8. There was of course that one deity in COT which crossed over to PCs bigtime: Nysalor.

    I enjoyed RQ and Glorantha, including COT, quite a bit back in the day but I'm more ambivalent to the modern versions.

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    1. I'm ambivalent about modern RQ as well. It's very nicely made and has lots of lovely, evocative illustrations but rules-wise, it's much too complex for my tastes. Likewise, it's presentation of Glorantha somehow seems off, but that probably says more about my own skewed perceptions of the setting than anything Chaosium is doing.

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    2. How does it seem off (if you can explain it)? I might be able to shed some light on whether it's you or Chaosium (or Reaching Moon Megacorp).

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    3. Bear in mind that I'm not a true Glorantha-phile. My point of reference for Glorantha is the RQ2 era, with things like Big Rubble and Griffin Mountain.

      What that said, my feeling about the new RQ and its presentation of Glorantha is that it's much less freewheeling and open-ended. There's a lot more detail and much of that detail (e.g. the way the Orlanthi have been fleshed out) seems to run counter to the older material. Everything seems deliberately weirder than it was before. But, as I say, I'm not a serious Glorantha-phile and it may simply be I never noticed certain things before.

      Is that any clearer?

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    4. I concur with your position James. I also don't want to pour salt on lovers of the modern game, but I remember as a teenager, when I first met the group that got me into RQ, it was so accessible on that level. Orlanth was the Storm God, and I learned what that meant in a Glorantha context, which was already light-years more gritty and real than anything in AD&D, so I loved it. When our GM lent me Cults of Prax so that I could setup my first proper PC, I gobbled that book up, cover to cover and all the hints and meanings in the cult write-ups (and the stories of Biturian Varosh were great). The modern stuff has become a little too "dense" in a way, and yes, "weirder" seems the goal (instead of just "Orlanthi are kind of somewhere around Celtic/Viking Berserkers" or "the Lunar Empire is sort of like the Roman Empire" or "Yelmalians are sort of like Greek Hoplites that hire out as mercenary armies from their Sun Dome Temples", that was all airy and fresh - the requirements to actually play these cults as PCs today is so much more complex. The new stuff looks great, don't get me wrong, but if I was a 15 year old, the accessibility of each cult is somewhat more complex and rigid, and might put me off a bit. However, saying that, if I was to seriously play an RPG today, I would probably try to use the new RQ, no RPG setting ever invented comes close to Glorantha imho. 🙂

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    5. James, it's just true that Glorantha is a lot more specified in the new RQ than it was in RQ2. A lot more of Greg Stafford's writing about Glorantha has made it into the rulebooks, and there is (I think) some new material as well. Some of the weirder Orlanthi stuff is at least twenty years old, though, and probably older than that (though not particularly easily available). The RQ2 materials leave a lot for individuals to fill in, which allows one to develop the game one wants; on the other hand, it can be a bit paralyzing to feel that you have to build important entities (like the Lunar Empire) from scratch. The newer materials fill in those important entities, but not necessarily the way one would expect or like. Your Glorantha May Vary, but not as much as it used to.

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    6. As I said, I'm far from knowledgeable about the intricacies of Glorantha, so I'm not at all surprised to discover that much of the "new" material is actually quite old. That said, I'm not fond of it and prefer the earlier presentations. I know someone who feels similarly about the subsequent development of Tékumel post-EPT, a perpsective I don't share, so I'm actually quite sympathetic to those who prefer the weirder, more detailed material, even if it's not to my own tastes.

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    7. Interesting POV on teh subject. As a fairly devout fan of both Tekumel and Glorantha I'd never really thought about whether I prefer "new" or "old" flavors of them. Modern RQ feels a bit more playable than earlier editions to me, but not enough so to make me refuse to (say) play second if someone ran it. Tekumel's had so many rule sets it's hard to choose any one as a favorite. Perhaps EPT out of familiarity bred from long acquaintance, or the Guardians of Order effort simply because it was quite self-contained and pretty easy to adapt other material to.

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    8. Good thoughts on "new" Glorantha...

      That's why I run RuneQuest 1st ed. and my Glorantha is MY Glorantha. I'm not opposed to using more recent stuff, but my Glorantha started developing in 1978 with Apple Lane and Balastor's Baracks. I don't buy into all the cultural anthropology of "new" Glorantha.

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  9. Glorantha is all about the mythology. I mean, the World is a lozenge, not a planet. It's not pretending to be some other era of Earth, past or present. Nowadays it seems to me that cults are central to the whole thing, and Hero Questing, though ordinary adventures are still a thing as well. re. the disclaimer. I think that was to head the Murder-hobo, Power gamers off at the pass. Or at least an attempt to do so.

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    1. The increased setting detail probably is meant (at least in part) to discourage murder hobo activity. Greg Stafford apparently had issues with this kind of play in his games fairly early on, and his response to it was to run a session where the players took on the roles of members of the Sartar Council and had to figure out how to deal with the mess the PCs had made. The idea is that the more you know about the setting, the more you understand why cutting a bloody swathe through it is a Really Bad Idea.

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    2. And that's perfectly legitimate! I want to stress I don't object to any of this, only that I nevertheless feel as if the "texture" of Glorantha (as I understood it anyway) has changed and I'm not keen on the new one. That's not a criticism at all, simply an acknowledgement that Glorantha as it has evolved holds less appeal to me than its earlier presentation.

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    3. I certainly never thought you were objecting; in fact, I feel much the same way. I think this happens fairly often with invented worlds. When they're first introduced, they are necessarily vague, which leaves room for many individual interpretations; as more detail is presented, those individual interpretations agree less and less well with the official version. None of like to lose our creations, even if they are collaborations with another creator.

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    4. There has been a noticeable (albeit gradual) creep towards integrating more and more Heroquesting and direct interactions with the myths over the years, which has changed the feel some. Very easy for a GM to simply ignore or downplay that aspect if they prefer more "mundane" adventures - where you're fighting a poison spewing octopus man alongside a humanoid duck death worshipper and a nomad tribesman riding a bison. :)

      Stafford always seems to have seen Heroquesting as sort of "endgame content" for RQ, although getting his ideas about it to gel into practical gameplay has taken a long time and (for me) hasn't quite been achieved yet.

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    5. You're not the only one who feels that Heroquesting isn't there yet. I see how it fits into the course of events in Glorantha, I can even figure out some reasonable Heroquests...but there's no clear way to actually play them at the table.

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    6. The capital-H Heroquest rules from Issaries came close to being really viable for running small-H heroquests me, but the mechanics are so different to Runequest that I never had much luck getting players to learn them. Maybe that will change with the Questworlds SRD coming out last year, but I kind of doubt it.

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