James Nicoll Reviews

Golden Geek RPG of the Year 2012! Combining high-action dungeon crawling with cutting-edge rules, Dungeon World is a roleplaying game of fantasy adventure. You and your friends will explore a land of magic and danger in the roles of adventurers searching for fame, gold, and glory. 

Dungeon World’s rules are easy to learn and always drive the action forward in unexpected ways. A missed roll is never a dead end- failure introduces new complexities and complications. Life as an adventurer is hard and dangerous but it’s never boring! Designed to be ready for you to hack, remix, and build new content, Dungeon World includes systems for changing everything to suit your group including creating new races, classes, and monsters. To play, you’ll need this rulebook, 3 – 5 players, some polyhedral dice, and 2 – 4 hours. Explore fantasy adventure roleplaying in a whole new way with Dungeon World!

We’re making the RuneQuest Glorantha Bestiary ​‘Pay-What-You-Want’ on for the next seven days (to 12 Jan). If you download it, instead of paying us, we encourage you to make a donation to the Australian fire-fighting and recovery effort. 

We think Gloranthan beasts are special, but Australian animals are unique and precious — and real. But it is estimated up to half a billion of them have perished so far in the devasting wildfires still raging across the continent. That number is expected to rise dramatically, as vast swathes of habitat have been consumed by flame. 

Some places where you can donate:

• WIRES is a wildlife rescue nonprofit rescuing and caring for thousands of sick, injured and orphaned Australian native animals: https://www.wires.org.au/blog/… Wildlife Fund Australia is directing its efforts towards koala conservation. Thousands have perished so far: https://www.wwf.org.au/get-inv… Port Macquarie Koala Hospital is raising funds to distribute automatic drinking stations in the burnt areas to help in koala and wildlife survival, and sharing the funds with other wildlife organisations in the fire affected regions: https://www.gofundme.com/f/hel… places to support: 
• Australian Red Cross: https://www.redcross.org.au/ca… South Wales Rural Fire Service: https://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/vol… Fire Authority Victoria: https://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/abo… Myriad of Foes, Rivals and Allies to challenge your RuneQuest Heroes

  The RuneQuest: Glorantha Bestiary contains almost 200 creatures native to the world of Glorantha or in the spirit worlds adjacent to it. These creatures range from weak to apocalyptically powerful, allowing a RuneQuest gamemaster to choose the right creature to suit any encounter or need.

  Entries are divided into Elder Races, creatures of Chaos, monsters, natural animals, dinosaurs, giant or unusual insects, spirit entities, summoned magical beings, and noteworthy plant types. Another chapter, Terrors, describes the most horrific and powerful entities walking the world of Glorantha, such as the enormous Crimson Bat, the three-bodied Chaos horror Cwim, the Chaos gaggle, and the Fiend of Cacodemon.

  Each entry is presented in the same format as player adventurers, including attributes, hit locations and armor, weapons and special attacks, skills, languages, magic, and more. Sections in each entry include Myths and History, Subtypes, Description, Culture, Government, Religion, Region of Origin, and more, with adventuring races expanded in considerable detail.

  Let your players be Trolls, Centaurs, or a different Intelligent Races!

  Non-human species detailed for use as player character adventurers, ranging from multiple types of elves, dwarfs, centaurs, dark trolls and great trolls, all the way to unique Gloranthan species such as intelligent baboons and ducks, dragonewts, Men-and-a-half, trollkin, and Wolfbrothers, complete with their professions, cults, and magic.

  

A Guide to the Mythic Fantasy World of Glorantha

The Glorantha Sourcebook is an essential resource for Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha, one of the most extensively developed and renowned fantasy settings of all time. A world of mythology, gods, and heroes, Glorantha has inspired roleplaying games, board games, computer games, comics, fiction, and more, a setting beloved and revered worldwide.

An invaluable resource for gamemasters, players, and readers of fantasy worlds, this sourcebook is gorgeously illustrated and filled with informative maps and diagrams. Drawn from a variety of out-of-print and rare sources, this material has been dramatically revised, updated, and expanded. Alongside this foundational material are new essays, insights, and extrapolations on the world and its incredible denizens.

Inside this sourcebook, you’ll learn about the creation of the world; the main ages of its past; the history of Dragon Pass and its people; the pantheons of the gods, including the Lightbringer and Lunar pantheons; the Coming of Argrath; Elder Races such as the Elves, Dragonewts, Dwarves, and Trolls; genealogies of the major royal dynasties; legends and lore of the various tribes and peoples inhabiting Glorantha; the fundaments of Gloranthan magic and the Runes that shape the world; the history and gods of the mighty Lunar Empire; and finally, the Hero Wars!

This systemless sourcebook can be used to enhance and support any fantasy roleplaying game of your choosing, including RuneQuest, HeroQuest, and 13^th Age Glorantha, and others.

The Ninth Rain has fallen, the Jure’lia have returned, and with Ebora a shadow of its former self, the old enemy are closer to conquering Sarn than ever.

Tormalin the Oathless and the Fell-Witch Noon have their hands full dealing with the first war-beasts to be born in Ebora for nearly three hundred years. But these are not the great mythological warriors of old; hatched too early and with no link to their past lives, the war-beasts have no memory of the many battles they have fought and won, and no concept of how they can possibly do it again. The key to uniting them, according to the scholar Vintage, may lie in a part of Sarn no one really believes exists, but finding it will mean a dangerous journey at a time of war…

Meanwhile, Hestillion is trapped on board the corpse moon, forced into a strange and uneasy alliance with the Jure’lia queen. Something terrifying is growing up there, in the heart of the Behemoth, and the people of Sarn will have no defence against these new monsters.

All is chaos. All is confusion. The Jure’lia are weak, but the war is far from over. 

Ebora was once a glorious city, defended by legendary warriors and celebrated in song. Now refugees from every corner of Sarn seek shelter within its crumbling walls, and the enemy that has poisoned their land won’t lie dormant for long. 

The deep-rooted connection that Tormalin, Noon and the scholar Vintage share with their Eboran war-beasts has kept them alive so far. But with Tor distracted, and his sister Hestillion hell-bent on bringing ruthless order to the next Jure’lia attack, the people of Sarn need all the help they can get. 

Noon is no stranger to playing with fire and knows just where to recruit a new — and powerful — army. But even she underestimates the epic quest that is to come. It is a journey wrought with pain and sacrifice — a reckoning that will change the face of Sarn forever. 

Join forces with the heroes of the WINNOWING FLAME TRILOGY as they strive to silence the Jure’lia’s poison song once and for all.