Episode 9: Nomad Gods (Part 1)

We apologize for the tardiness on this episode: we are not used to Earth’s weird calendar where one month is surprisingly shorter than the others. Plus, Ludovic was busy with work and with writing two convention scenarios for ChaosiumCon. It also didn’t help that this episode was a lot heavier on the editing than usual.

Without further excuses, this month we welcomed Chaosium’s David Scott again. This time he was present wearing his “Prax expert” hat in order to chat about Nomad Gods, the 1977 board game designed by Greg Stafford.

News

Art by Ludovic Chabant © 2022 BOLT80 & Chaosium Inc.

In news, Ludovic mentions that his first Jonstown Compendium item it out. A Short Detour is a RuneQuest adventure with a complex moral dilemma, and a (hopefully) insightful appendix on everybody’s favourite Gloranthan power.

As always we also mention the Journal of Runic Studies, our weekly newsletter of Gloranthan news. If you’re not subscribed by email or RSS, do it now!

Joerg gives a shout out to other podcasts and streams:

The Exploring Glorantha videos from Evan and JM (which Joerg incorrectly credits as “JD”… sorry JM!), including this interview of Rick Meints. The Vintage RPG podcast’s episode on RuneQuest. Chaosium’s official RuneQuest Starter Stream, which is up to its third episode at the time of writing.

Ludo mentions that his French edition of RuneQuest has arrived (you can read and see more about it here). After fumbling around to remember the name of the artist who did the French slipcase art (it’s Joann Sfar), David takes us in a tangent about foreign RuneQuest editions’ art, starting with Oriflam’s cover for Dorastor:

Once again, we have difficulty to remember the name of the artist (it’s Hubert de Lartigue). There’s more information on the Well of Daliath.

Joerg also mentions the German art for Apple Lane:

Speaking of the Well of Daliath, our tangent takes us to another tangent to celebrate this very useful resource for Gloranthaphiles. David Scott is the principal maintainer, but receives help from volunteers. We discuss how the timeline of Dragon Pass and the Prosopaedia are Ludovic’s most frequently visited pages.

Main Topic: Nomad Gods

We start talking about Nomad Gods, as promised. To follow along, listeners who aren’t rich or old enough to own the game can purchase the PDF of the rules booklet from Chaosium for a bit less that $9.

Many pictures (including pictures of the board and the counters) are available on the BoardGameGeek page for Nomad Gods.

Assuming you have the rules (or make them up), you can also play Nomad Gods on Vassal, using the appropriate module. There’s also a module for Dragon Pass.

Image by Runeblogger

David runs us through the process of extracting the map and counters art from the module file, which is a simple ZIP file with a different extension.

Here’s the map of Nomad Gods:

Nomad Gods map from Vassal

Then we start looking at the art on the counters. David shares some photos of early prototype counters:

And then we look at some pre-production chits of the alchemical transformer (left) and Jar-eel (right).

We can’t show the assembly boards with chits on grid paper, or lunar units with the red filter sheet taped over them, but you can probably imagine how, errr, “crafty” it looks like. The result can be seen below in the finished product, and it looks similar to how most other wargames of the time looked like, as far as I can tell:

Photo by BoardGameGeek

Next, David talks how Greg was still “exploring” Glorantha at the time, with many names just thrown on the map as nods to his friends (refer to the map above). These locations were only further developed when there was a roleplaying game to do that, and this of course happened with RuneQuest and Cults of Prax. The sound you hear at this point is David unfolding and re-folding his Nomad Gods map!

Where did names like Orlanth came from? Where did the many places in Prax come from? We don’t know. The creative process is a myst