Episode 19: Jackals and Ancient Worldbuilding

The God Learners

In this episode Joerg is still taking a break, but Ludovic is here to welcome Evan Franke and JM DeFoggi (not to be confused with JM DeMatteis!)

Exploring Glorantha

Evan and JM are probably best known to listeners and readers of the God Learners as the hosts of Exploring Glorantha, the YouTube series that presents Glorantha in an accessible manner to the general public. But they are also part of Iconic Production, which does a lot more stuff! It started as a 13th Age actual play, but they now cover many other games.

Ludovic mentions that subscribing to Iconic Production’s Patreon gives you access to the Exploring Glorantha show notes, which are quite useful as a Gloranthan index when you need to look something up.

Jackals

For the main topic, we discuss JM’s bronze age fantasy game Jackals (available from Osprey Publishing), its worldbuilding, campaign framework, system, and what we can learn and apply to Glorantha gaming!

During the discusion, we talk about:

• The Guide to Glorantha
• Ludovic’s Glorantha Initiation episode
• Jackals and its supplements Fall of the Children of Bronze and Travellers on the War Road
• The Sea People and some memes about the Bronze Age Collapse
• Putting the themes of the game and setting into the system (by the way, you can find Chaos corruption rules in Ludovic’s RuneQuest scenario in “A Short Detour“)
• Pendragon
• John Wick (the designer, not the assassin) and his games 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings
• Robin Laws
• The One Ring
• The Jonstown Compendium
• Improving “onboarding” into a fantasy setting by making it look familiar to Earth
• GURPS Greece and GURPS Imperial Rome
• Mythic Earth series for Mythras
• Hellenistika
• Harn
• Approaches to building a fantasy setting: linguistics, mythology, history, cultures
• Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the Dwarf names taken from the Poetic Edda
• The Lord of Spirits podcast
• Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God
• Carl Yung
• James Frazer’s The Golden Bough
• The Stafford House Campaign
• Don’t read complicated books just to play game… find out by playing
• Adapting Jackals’ campaign framework to Glorantha:
  • Resettlement of Dragon Pass and PenDragon Pass
  • Griffin Mountain
  • The Tournament of the Masters of Luck and Death
  • Theyalans at the Dawn
  • Resettlement of Pavis
• Using Jackals’ Clash System in Glorantha
• Call of Cthulhu’s 7th edition
• John Wick’s “Stafford did it first” rule

Where to Find Evan and JM

• Strange Owls games
• Space 1889: After Kickstarter
• Amboria
• Darkly Bright Press and Akboritha
• Escalation! Magazine and the upcoming Red Moon & Warring Kingdoms issue
• 13th Age Glorantha
• Rising Moon Rescue actual play

Credits

The intro music is “The Warbird” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “Cinder and Smoke” and “Skyspeak“, along with audio from the FreeSound library.