Glorantha

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One of the first settings for roleplaying games. It began in 1966 when Greg Stafford was trying to pull some wiccan chicks into his wargaming group. Glorantha is based off of themes found in myth rather than from Tolkien's works, and given the fact that Greg was a practicing shaman with a degree in Comparative Religion it's completely batshit.

The "world" is a cube floating in an endless sea topped with a dome of stars that is really the underside of a land of gods and myths. As for other planets there are the various moons which seem to do little more than fuck everything up which is fortunately not often (unless other civilizations or cults get in the way). Everything that occurs in Glorantha generally has some sentient being or magical force responsible for it. For example, all rivers flow in any particular direction because a god had decided, been forced, or been bribed to be there (as the god and the river are one in the same). The people/elements/plants/ducks/lizardmen that inhabit Glorantha are generally religious zealots or ingrates that are more than willing to be extorted by any local gods that they have the poor fortune to witness. Aside from these Neanderthals there are a number of civilizations that seem to get by okay when they pool their efforts and trade off with the stronger gods. That is, except for the Lunar Empire, which seems to fuck everyone's shit up by using a mysterious magic known as logical reasoning. Aside from the Lunars, there is also the Orlanthi who follow Orlanth (very original guys) and fought the Lunar Empire in order to get their own videogame and spotlight status. Besides these major players, Glorantha contains more individual peoples and places than can be covered in a singular paragraph.

Recently a new, gigantic lore book titled "Guide to Glorantha" was released (12 lbs of lore) and covers everything (generally speaking). Sadly it is only available in pdf format and unlikely to be reprinted, but it did make enough money to keep the setting going with new lore.

For more reading pirate the book on /tg/ or support Greg's retirement fund ... (not anymore, he died in 2018 :().

Updating this page because we deserve something more than those random powerpoint bulletpoints at the glorantha wiki

Premise: Every truth in this world is true and every falsehood is false aka the world is genuinely formed out of skub. Anyone in-fluff who tried to treat the world like a PhD dissertation for their own ends or otherwise got cursed, burnt, exterminated, or had their souls ripped apart into oblivion never to be recovered (More on this later).

Creation myth There are multiple, some are complementary and some are completely mutually exclusive. Best I can do that is that there was a ouroboric dragon/pantheistic being/Glorantha herself/primordial gods/creation rune/world machine who came out of the ether and spat out/shat out/snorted out/breathed out/puked out/willed into being/built everything else. For a while elves were ascendant because everything was just algae, forest, and prokaryotes then the sun came out and gave elves flowers so now he rules because they loved flowers so much.

Yelm, the sun, was set up to rule a golden age of peace, prosperity, and stasis. A few years/millennia/million years/next tuesday later, a god named Umath got mad at the stasis so he made war with Yelm and got badly beaten. Before this he managed to fuck a mountain and who knows what else that he begets Orlanth and the Storm Tribe. Someone discovered what death is and some trickster tested it on the Adam and/or Eve of all humans that they all became mortal. Orlanth, now king of the storm tribe, stole/borrowed/forcefully acquired death and used it on Yelm sending the world into darkness.

Orlanth, now technically ruler of the world in this new Storm Age, still has to fight threats to his domain ranging from mild ones such as whoever's left of Yelm's ilk to horrible shit he's directly responsible for such as Chaos (Yelm's death left tears in the world for them to dig through) and trolls (when Yelm was sent to the underworld his soul and corpse was so bright and warm they had to get out). This all comes to a head when Orlanth's brother Ragnaglar invented the concept of rape on his wife Malia and his mistress Thed to create the literal Devil who darkened the world, sent millions into extinction, and killed a fuckton of gods.

During this Darkness Age, darkness and chaos was rampant (but they fight and hate each other), and only ended when Orlanth decided to man up and accept some responsibility for once in his life. He and his retinue, Issaries, Lhankor Mhy, Chalana Arroy, Eurmal the Trickster, Flesh Man, and Ginna Jar went through a highly difficult and convoluted quest to resurrect Yelm and have him light the world. While trying to make peace with Yelm, the Devil/Devil's brother who recently got killed just so he can waylay the Lightbringers Quest attacked everyone until the Glorantha herself/Ginna Jar/Universe Itself decided they've had enough and caught Devil/Devil's brother in a web and used him as material for the legally-binding document: Time.

Yelm was returned to light the world (but only during the day as he had to include the underworld in his daily rotation), and every god of every culture was made to sign the Great Compromise so as they can live eternally in a separate, ever-repeating, but constricting Godsplane while their mortal constituents live in a free middle plane protected from the clutches of chaos by time/an actual dating system and history starts from here.

Will update when im bothered to do so

Links

• The wikipedia page