Marvel Feature: Red Sonja 6
So this issue touches on a pretty sensitive topic for me: book vandalism. Working in libraries, on and off, for most of my adult life, I’ve had to deal with this problem over and over. Some people just swipe whatever reference page they want, rather than using a photocopier. After all, why pay a dime for your own copy when you can steal the information from generations to come for free? Some people just don’t like the fact that certain information is freely available to the public and take it upon themselves to censor library materials. For instance, every single copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves had pages ripped out (and if you guessed they were in the chapter on women’s sexuality, you understand the mind of a censor). Some people just want to write down a phone number or a grocery list and rip out the page of a book that they don’t see any value in. Honestly, write it on the back of a receipt.
Anyway … Red Sonja spends the first four pages of Marvel Feature 6 beheading a pair of jackal-men, which is not much different than any other typical afternoon for her. But when she runs across Karanthes, a priest of Ibis, he explains that those weren’t just two run-of-the-mill half-man/half-jackal bandits, but special agents sent by a priest of Set to kill Sonja before she could meet Karanthes. It seems that Set and Ibis are two gods locked in an endless struggle with one another (Edith Hamilton says different, but that’s neither here nor there) and the priests essentially carry out their struggle on the earthly plane. Karanthes wants to hire Red Sonja to retrieve a document that he believes will help tip the struggle in his god’s favor.
So our mystic doodad of the month is a page torn from the Book of Skelos. We’re told that the Book of Skelos “contains the most fearsome magic-lore on Earth,” although frankly that gets said about a lot of books (including Our Bodies, Ourselves, apparently). While the book is closely guarded, apparently someone managed to tear out one of its pages and make off with it. Now, we never find out what’s on this page, if it contains a spell or a table of contents or just a dedication. (“To my wife, Sheb Niggurath, my most ruthless critic, my most tireless supporter, my everything. I love you, forever.”) And Red Sonja doesn’t really care either, as long as she gets paid.
Once upon a time, I had the crazy idea that if a book was good, it would stay in print. I also figured that a “best-of” volume would probably have all the good stories from an author, and I was actually naive enough to think that if a work by a favorite author was out of print, it probably wasn’t as good as the work that was still on shelves.
There’s an amazing Kickstarter running at the moment. If you’re a fan of world-building, if you want to check out a world that’s been built over more than 40 years of group endeavour, with deep myths, histories, and cultures, one of the most compelling worlds in fantasy and certainly in fantasy roleplaying, you may want to 
Glorantha owes a lot to Joseph Campbell, too. The “hero path” is an integral part of the world – how its inhabitants relate to the very real (and often mercurial) gods which surround them, and how heroes can penetrate the timeless realms of the gods and return with treasures physical and mystical. If, like me, you’re interested in the transcendent aspects of the stories we tell one another, Glorantha is a compelling world.
Over the past few years, Jeff Richard has been working on a book which looks like it will set a new standard in RPG supplements – a guide to the whole world of Glorantha itself. It’s a massive undertaking – an encyclopaedic opus detailing the places and cultures of a whole fantasy world, in exquisite detail. It’s been attempted twice before – once in the 1980s and once a decade ago – but in relatively abbreviated form. The new Guide to Glorantha is anything but abbreviated: it comes in at a whopping 400 pages of 10″ x 12″ book, detailing the geography, history, and cosmology of Glorantha, its cultures and races, as well as two continents, two subcontinents, and multiple archipelagos, plus a massive atlas filled with highly detailed and gorgeous maps – over 64 pages worth at the last count. The Guide to Glorantha is system agnostic – it doesn’t contain any games mechanics content, it’s pure setting detail, so you can use it with any game ruleset, or just read it for the pure pleasure of it. The Kickstarter has been running for a little over a week, and already has blown through its initial target. As a result, the initial scope of the project has expanded hugely, so that we’re now getting more regions detailed, more maps added, and an entire new “Companion” to the guide detailing things like the geography of the mythic regions of Glorantha, plus monographs by key industry writers. For those of us who’ve been playing quests into the realms of myth, this is nothing short of breathtaking in its ambition.
