New Treasures: The Haunted Land of Carcosa
I’ve been enjoying the recent renaissance in retro-D&D gaming. For one thing, it’s brought back great memories of the adrenalin-filled dungeon crawls of my youth, without all the trouble and expense of getting a bunch of middle-aged gamers scattered across two countries back together around a table.
The first role-playing adventures, from Blackmoor to Descent Into the Depths of the Earth, were many and varied, but in large part they followed a similar theme: you crawled into a hole in the ground and killed stuff.
Sure, there were thrills and surprises aplenty — strange subterranean civilizations, weird magic and weirder creatures, and magical treasures of all kinds — but in general the concept wasn’t much different from the piñata. You hit things, and goodies fell out. To get a sense of those early dungeons, imagine wandering through an underground J.C. Penny’s where every cashmere sweater, discount steak knife, and toaster is enchanted and the floor staff have spears and a surly attitude, and you pretty much get the idea.
We thrilled to those early adventures, and at the same time we yearned for something closer to the fantasy novels we were reading. Gradually, the industry responded by producing more sophisticated products with cohesive storylines, real characters, and dungeons that made some kind of functional sense, and the old adventures — with their frog temples, endless magical fountains, and chatty vorpal blades — went the way of the dinosaur.
Of course, no sooner did that happen than we started yearning for the simple games of our youth. Go figure.
That in a nutshell is the story of the resurgence of OE (Original Edition) Dungeons and Dragons games like Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, and even the recent first edition AD&D reprints. And now that they have arrived — and the marketplace has embraced them — compatible adventure modules have started to pop up as well. I’ve rarely seen any as ambitious and as well thought-out as Geoffrey McKinney’s Carcosa.
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.