Jonstown Jottings #24: White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the  Jonstown Compendium is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford’s mythic universe of Glorantha. It enables creators to sell their own original content for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.

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What is it?
White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga presents a campaign starter for the much-maligned Malani clan for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

It is an eighty-eight-page, full colour, 21.69 MB PDF.

White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga is roughly presented and needs an edit.

Where is it set?

White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga is set amongst the lands of the Malani clan in Sartar in Dragon Pass.The illustrations are of variable quality.

Who do you play?

The Player Characters are members of the Namoldin Clan living along the Arfritha Vale. Six pre-generated Player Characters are provided, including a Humakti warrior, an Issaries trader, a Vinga warrior, an Orlanthi farmer, a Yinkini hunter, and an Odayla hunter.

What do you need?

White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga requires both RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and RuneQuest – Glorantha Bestiary. Much of White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga was created using Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, but is not absolutely necessary to run the campaign.

What do you get?

White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga is not broken, but a ‘fixer-upper’, the first part of a campaign set in Sartar which needs some work and a bit of some love and attention upon the part of the Game Master to be made into something which she can run for her group. This is not to say that it does not come with everything necessary to get the campaign started—it has both background and setting, it has both a guide to creating characters for the campaign and a set of pre-generated Player Characters, its own Prosopaedia—a quick glossary of the gods pertinent to the setting, plus new cults, Rune and Spirit magic, a scenario, and various secrets. So there is a lot to White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga, but that is lot is perhaps lots of bit and pieces that are in themselves interesting and likeable, but together feel scrappy and not immediately relevant to each other.

White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga begins by presenting a history of the Malani Tribe and its relationship to the neighbouring tribes, before its focus grows tighter and tighter. First, on the Namoldin Clan along with its history and clan relationships, then on its tula circa 1620st and on the settlements along the Arfritha Vale and the Boranini River which runs down it, notably Famous Bell and Red Deer. There are some fantastic locations here and about, such as Dark Water Pool, home to an ancient freshwater turtle with a penchant for winning beards in riddling contests. Second, on the steads and notable features around Red Deer, in particular, Heldar’s Stead. This is the setting for White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga, and is home to the clan's richest farmer and cattle herder. Heldar himself is described as arrogant—arrogant enough to commission Long Tooth, an enchanted bronze-cast lumber saw, which actually kills plants on touch and tears through timber with ease. All the members of his homestead and the nearby village are described with many given full stats also.

Full rules are given for creating Namoldin Player Characters for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, including Passions, cultural weapons and skills, and suggested cults. Both Orlanth and Ernalda are given as default, but many of these are also tied to a character’s Occupation. However, these are not necessarily to the gods, but rather to particular aspects of them. Thus, not Ernalda for a Healer, but Bevara, a healing goddess of Ernalda, and for a fisherman, not Orlanth All Father, but Poverri, an Orlanthi fisher deity. Most of these aspects are given some explanation in the following Cults section, but not all, which is slightly problematic. Not necessarily for veteran Gloranthophiles, who may appreciate the degree of detail, but anyone new to Glorantha and RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, may be mystified by the level of detail and in places, the lack of accompanying explanation. However, the Cults section does include write-ups of some other cults for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, including the local Boranini River cult, Gustbran the Redsmith cult, Minlister the Brewer, Igruz Hardfrost, and Queen Bee, and these are accompanied by their associated spirit and rune magic, such as Igruz Hardfrost’s Ice Blade and Harden Liquor.

In addition, White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga provides rules for The Smithy—the  workshop home of Gustbran the Red-smith. Using these rules enables a Red-smith—whether an NPC or a Player Character—to cast weapons, to work out the costs of doing so, and possible outcomes. Craftwise this nicely adds to the world of Glorantha and not only shows just how much work goes into making the Player Characters’ weapons, but when combined with the earlier Weapon Naming Ritual Rune spell gives options for them to make or have made named weapons with interesting effects. As good as this, it does not really have any impact on the campaign, and it feels slightly out of place here.

In terms of adventuring content, White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga presents the short scenario, ‘White Stone Ruins’. It begins with the report of undead horrors being seen in the vicinity of ancient ruins in the forest that almost surrounds Heldar’s Stead, which will lead to exploration of those ruins and perhaps exposure of a secret cult operating in the area. This is primarily a combat and exploration scenario, and perhaps ‘The Missing Scythe’, a hunt for a scythe the brother to Long Tooth that has disappeared, is more interesting. There are also several other encounters and threads which a Game Master can work into the start of the White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga. Rounding out White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga is a full set of stats for various ‘Friends and Foes’ not given earlier in the supplement, as well as the pre-generated Player Characters.

White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga is rough around the edges and will need more effort upon the part of the Game Master to prepare and run than perhaps a more polished product would. It includes a lot of background material—which although interesting and good—which will be hard to bring into play, especially if the Game Master is new to Glorantha. The pre-generated Player Characters could have benefited from suggested ties and relationships to the community and inhabitants of Heldar’s Stead to better bring them into the campaign and perhaps the Game Master might want to create these prior to running the ‘White Stone Ruins’. Lastly, there are elements in White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga that a Game Master can extract and include in her own campaign—the rules for red-smithing, the new cults and spirit and rune magic, and more, could be used elsewhere.

Is it worth your time?

Yes. White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga is a decent, if scrappily presented campaign set-up in another part of Sartar which needs a bit of effort to work effectively, but which comes with background material and extras aplenty.

No. White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga is more background than campaign and its rough presentation and organisation make it challenging to prepare and run.

Maybe. White Stone Ruin: Part 1 of Red Deer Saga is more background than campaign and its rough presentation and organisation make it challenging to prepare and run. The background and extra rules are excellent and potentially worth adding to a campaign.

The Other OSR: Bastion Ein Sof

Although perhaps initially opaque in terms of what it is, Into the Odd turns out to be a terrifically simple, stripped back, player-facing post-apocalyptic near fantasy, steampunk, roleplaying game. Published by Lost Pages, it is surprising that in the years since its publication, that there has been very little support published for it. Bastion Ein Sof, meaning “Bastion ‘unending’ or bastion ‘infinite’”, is one of the very few examples, building on the previous supplement Electric Bastionland. Running to just twenty-eight pages—and small pages at that—Bastion Ein Sof describes a setting that stands and falls before the monstrous.

Bastion has fallen. The Angels destroyed Bastion. In turn the Giants defeated the Angels. In the wake of this calamitous conflict stand ten cities, humanity’s final sanctuary, each one lying within a Giant’s shadow. Each of the ten cities stands in the shadow of one the giants, each no more than a be-halo’d wraith of its former self. Yet their vigil leaves them vulnerable to the Angels and it is up to bravest of the survivors to venture out into the ravaged wastes beyond the cities where they can ensure that none of the Angels are made whole again. Such stalwart men and women are known as Hunters and it is their task to defeat the Angels and return the secrets of Bastion to humanity’s last refuge. At the heart of Bastion Ein Sof are four questions—All is lost, but what has been found? Bastionland is a void, but what fills it now? The Giants keep Humanity safe, but what is their price? The Angels must be contained and what happens when the containment fails?

As Hunters, the player characters venture forth from the city to take the blood of the Angels and scavenge the relics of the past. Each Angel has a lair. Each is a dangerous place, the reality of which, as well as the lands around, is twisted by the nature of the Angel. The blood is required to pay a tithe per Hunter to the Giants for their service upon the return of the Hunters to the city, though the payment can take other forms, including the flesh of the Hunters. There is one other thing that can be taken from the Angels. Once they are reduced to a benign form they leave behind—Dæmons! Loathed by the Giants, for they see Dæmons as a corruption of nature, they are desired by Hunters for the powers and great abilities they grant. In times past, they were known as Arcanum. Yet should a Dæmon be destroyed, it turns back into an Angel, so any Dæmon wielded by a Hunter is a holy time bomb waiting to go off…! Not paying the price of returning home or being found wielding Dæmons risks the danger of angering the Giants and should their ire be raised, it threatens not only the Hunters, but also the safety of the city… Relics from beyond the Giants’ shadow are needed if the city is to survive and Dæmons may well be the only way in which Hunters can survive beyond the Giants’ shadow.

Bastion Ein Sof includes a stripped down version of the character generation rules from Into the Odd to reflect the desperate nature of post-Bastion world. No character begins play with any Arcanum as in Into the Odd, as after all, their true nature is revealed here. Our sample Hunter is the scrawny, scabrous Tipp Potterworth, a former sexton turned grave scourer to survive and to feed a terrible Ether habit. He has become a Hunter to find more goods and so feed his addiction. 

Tipp Potterworth
Profession: Ex-Grave Scourer
Strength 4
Dexterity 10
Willpower 12
Hit Points: 8
Equipment: Rifle, Flask of Ether


The three major elements of the setting—the Giants, the Angels, and the Dæmons—are covered in broad detail, essentially pointers for the Game Master to develop the post-apocalypse herself. Rounding it out is a short scenario, ‘Illustrious Hod’, which takes the Hunters in search of lost ship and into the lair of an unknown Angel. It should provide a session or two’s worth of play, including character generation.

Physically, Bastion Ein Sof is simply and cleanly presented, and is illustrated with some excellent public domain artwork. It comes with some pointed advice for running a game set in this post-apocalypse, essentially that every roll should have a point. 

Bastion Ein Sof takes the baroque world of Bastion and Into the Odd and casts it into an unknown future of humanity clutching literally to shadows, forced to make a pact that levels a great price. It presents an unreal setting, a sliver of something more begging to be developed into a richer, deeper world. There is enough to get started in the slim pages of Bastion Ein Sof, but please give us more. In the meantime, Bastion Ein Sof possesses huge scope for the Game Master to develop its weird, desperate future, one that seems without hope, even if only providing a taster of that future.

The Other OSR: Into the Odd

From the outset, it is difficult to tell what Into the Odd actually is. Any other roleplaying game would give you a blurb or an explanation or a setting or some inspiration—or two, three, or all of these. Published by Lost Pages, its starting point is character generation followed by an explanation of the core rules. The former is done in two pages, whilst the later is done in one. So literally everything a player needs to know to get playing is done within three pages. All a player does is roll three six-sided dice for three Ability scores—Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower, a six-sided die for Hit Points, and three six-sided dice to determine a character’s Starter Package. This can be equipment, weapons, armour, weird powers, an appearance, or an Arcanum, the latter a magical and highly sought after device like Pain Sign, Heat Ray, or Phase Key. Rolling for type of Arcana is a separate roll. A character can rolled up in minutes.

Reginald Cremson
Strength 10
Dexterity 13
Willpower 16
Hit Points: 4
Equipment: Pistol (d6), Knife (d6), Unarmed (d4)
Ability: Telepathy if target fails Will save

Mechanically, if a character wants to undertake an action, his player rolls a twenty-sided die against the appropriate Ability, aiming to equal to or under to pass. For initiative in combat is handled with a Dexterity save. Combat is equally as simple. A player rolls the die for the weapon used to determine how much might damage be inflicted. The target’s armour is subtracted from this and the remainder is subtracted from first his Hit Points and then his Strength. Should a character lose all of his Strength, he dies. It takes only a Short Rest to recover lost Hit Points, but a Long Rest lasting a week to recover lost Ability points. Saves against Willpower are used for several things, maintaining morale of course, but also in a pinch, maintaining civil discourse with others, and more interestingly, to manipulate the powers of Arcana. Each Arcanum does one specific thing and does it well. Binding Strands for example, creates strands spreading between two surfaces twenty feet apart. A Dexterity save is required to move through them. To use a Binding Strands Arcanum in this way is automatic, but if a character wants to do something different, for example, to tie up and gag a recent captive using Binding Strands, then a Willpower save is required. Arcana come in three types of increasing magnitude—‘Powers You Cannot Understand’, ‘Powers You Can Barely Control’, and ‘Powers You You Shouldn’t Control’.

It is at this point that we begin to see what the point of Into the Odd is—to go on an Expedition, perhaps to explore a mysterious environment, to confront or escape a powerful threat, or to find ever more powerful Arcanum. The aim being at least to be successful, return to civilisation at least with a great story, if not an amazing artifact or a dangerous secret. By going on expeditions and surviving a character gains Experience Levels and thus more Hit Points, a reputation, and possibly increases to his Abilities. A character needs to survive an ever increasing number of expeditions as he rises in Levels. In between expeditions, a character might set up and run a business or establish a mercenary company. Quick and easy rules are provided for handling these, both of which can generate income for the character as well as create story and scenario ideas for the Game Master.

All of which is covered in barely a third of Into the Odd and that also includes a good example of play. The other two thirds of the book are for the Game Master. The main rule for the Game Master is the Luck roll for when a degree of randomness is required. This is a roll of a six-sided die with higher results favouring the player characters. Beyond this there are discussions of monsters to be encountered, treasure to be found—including some new Arcana, and traps and obstacles to be overcome. What is interesting about traps and obstacles in Into the Odd is that unless a character is in a rush, then he will always spot them. This is because the challenge for the character is not spotting them, but overcoming or avoiding them. So for example, a pit trap is easy to spot and with a bit of effort and time, easy to work around without the danger of falling in, having got past the pit, the characters later have to return past in a hurry. Now their players need to make Dexterity saves in order to get past safely in a hurry.

So far, with inclusion of pistols and muskets and strange powers and Arcanum, Into the Odd implies a strange Science Fantasy version of the early modern age—the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The latter half of Into the Odd introduces a setting, that of the Odd World, of which ‘Bastion’, ‘Hub of Mankind’ is the self-proclaimed capital of civilisation. It is a fog-palled city of huge factories, mobs crying out for vengeance, star cults vying for secrets and power, and an underground riddled with tunnels, vaults, and more. There are lands and cities beyond Bastion, even a Polar Ocean, but they are not Bastion. (It should be noted that the illustrations suggest Bastion and thus Odd World is more Dickensian then Georgian or Stuart-era London.)

In terms of specific playing areas, Into the Odd provides three locations. These are the scum-encrusted fishing town of Hopesend Port, the Last Port of the North; a dungeon, The Iron Coral, which lies off the coast off Hopesend Port; and the hexcrawl, The Fallen Marsh, the soggy stretch of coast which lies between them. Now these are presented in the order of The Iron Coral, The Fallen Marsh, and Hopesend Port, which feels counter-intuitive if the trio is run as a campaign, with the player characters starting out from Hopesend and then travelling through The Fallen Marsh to The Iron Coral. That said, the inclusion of The Iron Coral first essentially means that it is good for getting straight into play as it can be run with very little preparation upon the part of the Game Master. All three locations pack a lot of content into as a few words as possible with short descriptions and concisely written details. The designer here impresses with the amount of flavour he brings to these locations with such an economy of words. Both The Iron Coral and The Fallen Marsh are supported by random encounter tables that will help drive the action, whilst Hopesend is supported by table of events. Overall though, the trio form an excellent introductory mini-setting.

The ten or so pages are devoted to the ‘Oddpendium’, set of tables drawn from the designer’s website. They include tables for name generation, occupations, abilities, manner, connections, and important little life events, all for quick NPC generation. Others create the feel and atmosphere of a city street, its sample businesses, links to the Underworld that runs under Bastion, and more. Perhaps the pair of tables that get across the nature of the city the best are the ‘Insane Council Decisions’ and ‘General Public Reaction’ to them tables, which give a sense of governmental chaos, of desperate powers-that-be, and of mob rule.

Physically, Into the Odd is cleanly laid and in general, well written. The art is a good mix of new and public domain, serving to suggest both the weirdness and the banality of Bastion and its surrounds. The content could have been better organised, primarily to reorder the the three scenarios/locations in the book and if there was a second edition, perhaps a guide as to where to start and what to do next would be useful for player and Game Master alike. (In fact, a boxed set for the Into the Odd would be great.) Another issue is that an index would have been useful for finding particular elements of the book, although the book is short enough that it is not too much of a problem.

Into the Odd is quick and easy to play, players able to create characters in minutes and be ready to play. A little extra effort is required by the Game Master, but again she could read through the rule book in about half an hour and be ready to run The Iron Coral straight out of the book. Both the rules and the setting of Bastion are very light and very much open to interpretation by both players and the Game Master. This gives both a lot of freedom in deciding how elements of the setting and the rules work, and the Game Master a lot of freedom in building the elements of her Bastion. The tables of the ‘Oddpendium’ help in this, whether in preparing before a game session or during a game session.

How much play can be got out of Into the Odd is another matter. Certainly, the trio of the town, the hexcrawl, and the dungeon provide material for several sessions’ worth of play. Likewise, the tables will provide details and elements that a Game Master happy to improvise can develop into something more, but that will only go so far. Certainly support in terms of encounters and adventures which can be run with little preparation would be welcome, since that is the type of play that Into the Odd is designed to engender.

Mechanically though, Into the Odd is not necessarily a forgiving system. Combat in particular, is deadly as every attack succeeds and what matters is the amount of damage rolled. So hirelings or playing with multiple characters might be an option if a group wants to avoid a total party kill. In this, Into the Odd may initially have the feel of a Character Funnel as in Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, with its set-up of multiple Zero Level characters per player.

The simplicity of Into the Odd will attract some groups and put off others, the issue being  it not being really suitable for the Game Master who prefers to prepare her game rather than improvise in play. Yet this element of improvisation which provides ready scope for interpretation and judgement by the Game Master along with the unforgiving, often deadly, rules echo the play style of the Old School Renaissance. A brilliant combination of concision and flavour, Into the Odd is impressively easy to pick up and play with minimum preparation.