Cults of RuneQuest: The Gods of Fire and Sky is the player’s guide to the deities of the high heavens and the flames beneath the earth. Each cult of the solar pantheon provides new visions of Glorantha, and for creating your RuneQuest adventurer.

• 13 brand new cults, including Shargash, the god of war and destruction, Lodril, the god of peasants, and the mightiest sun god, Yelm.
• Rules to create brand-new RuneQuest adventurers belonging to these cults, detailing the skills, passions, spirit magic, and Rune magic each cult offers.
• Details of the unique organization, history, and nature of each cult.
• Rules for how your adventurer can grow into a God-talker, Rune Priestess, or even a mighty Sun Lord.
• The history and genealogy of the solar pantheon, and an encyclopedia of Gloranthan celestiology.

Gdańsk, Poland from Friday October 31st to Sunday November 2nd 2025

The next Runequest Cults book will be the Solar Pantheon, coming in early 2025.

This post is not about the mythical origins of Glorantha but about how Greg Stafford began writing about it back in 1966.

This is from a Wayback Machine snapshot taken on )ctober 14th, 2018.

How I Discovered Glorantha

I HAVE BEEN FASCINATED with mythology for most of my life.

My first mythology book that I recall reading is Manual of Mythology, by Alexander S. Murray (published 1935). I still have that old book. It is a thick tome full of the euhemerized versions of Greek myth, with many pictures of marble statues and renaissance paintings.

Like most people, I was interested in the strange and interesting stories. I began reading other versions, like Bullfinch, which was not much different, really. And then other mythologies too — well, other mythologies readily available to a pre-teen with a library card. I was lucky in that by the time I was in sixth grade I had access to the adult li

Glorantha was first introduced to the wider world than Greg Stafford's circle of friends with the publication of the board game White Bear and Red Moon in 1975. The game featured a war between the Sartorites and the Lunar Empire in a region of Glorantha known as Dragon Pass.

Now Chasosium has taken us back to Dragon Pass (some of us never left) with the publication of the first book in the Lands of Runequest series. No doubt others will follow, and I'd guess Prax will be next.

The book has a history of the region and provides a gazeteer of Dragon Pass and some neighbouring regions including Tarsh and The Grazelands. There are regional maps and streetplans of some of the larger settlements, some sample 'typical' NPCs, details of some local cults, rules for creating additional types of PCs (newtlings anyone?), and additional bestiary entries providing details of creatures and other encounterable beings.

Different people would want different things from a book like this, but for me

The RuneQuest Starter Set contains everything you need to play RuneQuest, the world’s best roleplaying game of gods, cults, magic, family, and fantasy!

All of Chaosium's Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is currently available in PDF from Humble Bundle for £14.21.

That's everything. Which is insane value for money. You'd be mad not to.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/runequest-chaosium-inc-books

We've had to wait for it, especially in the UK since the initial shipment of hard copies seemed to go missing, but it's well worth that wait.

This is the counterpoint, the rebuttal, the answer to questions posed by the Lightbringers and Earth Goddesses cult books. The Lunars are not just baddies, they're the flip side of the coin, the pragmatists, the side with the winning perspective. I believe in the Red Goddess, Mistress of Life and Death.

Presented here are cults including the Seven Mothers, Teelo Norri, Honeel, the Crimson Bat, the Red Emperor and the Red Goddess. Also included is Nysalor/Gbaji and an introduction to Lunar illumination.

This is a must have volume if you want to run anything connected to the Hero Wars in Glorantha.

Plus, also, once again the art is breathtaking.

Martin Helsdon, the man who brought us the magisterial Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass has done it again with an even larger, even more ambitious addition to the Jonstown Compendium collection of community content for Runequest.

Focused, as the name suggests, on sea-faring it is hugely detailed and comprehensive, and blessed with some of the finest artwork ever produced for a Gloranthan book.

While it covers everything to do with ships and seaborne trade (ship-building, shiphandling and seafaring, cargo and harbours, naval warfare, nautical terminology, etc) and documents a whole flotilla of different types of vessel, in many ways the stand out is the ‘Periplus’, a first-person account of the voyages of an Issaries trader interspersed with the meat of the book, which brings the material to life.

Thoroughly recommended!

Available from the Jonstown Compendium on Drivethru, here. Note: this isn't

This is a tough one for me.

I already have the 2018 edition of the Sourcebook. This new edition has - apart from the utterly glorious cover art - an updated layout, updated visuals for dynastic genealogies, and updated maps of the Underworld and previous ages.

If you haven't got the Sourcebook, and want to understand Glorantha, then this is a must-have purchase. But if, like me, you have the previous edition then this is a purely luxury purchase. And with the Lunar cults book coming out sometime in the next couple of months, and so much great content on the Jonstown Compendium it's hard to justify the price for those updates. I make no promises though.

The long-awaited print-on-demand edition of “New Pavis: City on the Edge of Forever,” volume one of Ian Thomson’s Pavis & Big Rubble Companion Director’s Cut, is now available to order from DriveThruRPG: just $35.95 for a massive 224-page colour hardcover tome.

The PDF has been available for a while, but this is for old gippers like me who don't entirely trust PDFs and is a very welcome release.

And it's just first volume in a hugely expanded re-release of the original Companion series.

This is 'old school' stuff, all updated to the new rules system (RQG), but written in the classic style of gameplay (RQ2).

Focused around independent adventurers in search of wealth and glory, who slowly but surely become more and more connected with the Cult of Pavis and its allies, and end up being Champion

Probably the most important publications in Runequest / Glorantha in years are the new Cults of Runequest books.

There will be 11 books in total, listed here in no particular order: Prosopaedia, Lightbringers, Earth, Mythology, Darkness, Water, Solar, Lords of Terror, Horned God, Invisible God, Lunar Way. Those in bold are already available. The Mythology book is coming in October.

The first one was the Prosopaedia, published first simply, I think, because it was ready first. On its own it's not that great a resource for players - though may be for GMs because it's effectively a summary of what was to follow in the individual pantheon books.

The Lightbringers and Earth pantheon books are a different kettle of fish. Containing, between them, 35 cults, including those most commonly used by players of Sartarite and Praxian focused games, and adding the same kind of detail as the ground-breaking Cults of Prax from all the way back in 1979.

One of the great things about