REVIEW: The Lightbringers

They’re here.

Last month Chaosium released the first volume of their new Cults of RuneQuest series, the Prosopaedia. And as promised, last week they simultaneously released the next TWO volumes in the series: The Lightbringers and The Earth Goddesses. This week I’m reviewing The Lightbringers, and next week will be The Earth Goddesses. Finally, I’m going to set aside a third week for these books taking the time to reflect on how I can see myself working with or against the grain of these pieces as a Jonstown Compendium creator.

First off I want to position my perspective as I began reading these books. As you probably know I’m one of the more prolific creators writing in Chaosium’s community content program, the Jonstown Compendium. I’d played RuneQuest prior to the current edition’s 2018 release, but I hadn’t really engaged in Glorantha as a setting. On the one hand I’m very well read on Glorantha, but on the other hand… I’ve never actually read Cults of Prax or Cults of Terror! I’m familiar with the cult presentation from online sources and from The Rough Guide to Glamour‘s cults of the Red Emperor and Glamour herself—that was my format for Hrunda’s cult in To Hunt a God—but reading these books was my first time actually reading official cult descriptions for Glorantha.

So while I have some facility with older material courtesy of the King of Dragon Pass videogame and the Guide to Glorantha, I’m not here to bean-count and compare. My focus is going to be on how the Cults books provide material for players and gamemasters who have the RuneQuest core rules, or the RuneQuest Starter Set. Other critics have broader knowledge and deeper desire to do that academic work.

That said, let’s dive in!

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What’s Inside?

The Lightbringers is a 170-page book describing nineteen different cults. Each cult describes the human religion which worships the cult’s deity including social and magical requirements, game rules for membership and for attaining Rune Master status, and benefits (typically spells) associated with worshiping the deity and their associated divinities. The book assumes the reader has access to the spells included in the RuneQuest core rules, but not the Red Book of Magic. Most of the new material in the book is connected to “setting” rather than “rules.” To the best of my knowledge all of the spells described in The Lightbringers were published in the Red Book of Magic. This volume does include some new skills (such as Cartography or Understand Dog), and items (such as Lanbril’s thieving tools). Importantly, each of these cults has a section providing the cult’s bonuses as described in Step 6 of the core rules. This is particularly relevant for the new cults, encouraging players to roll up characters engaged with the new content.

Now, this distinction between “rules” content and “setting” content was intentional, but it does not indicate that the Cults setting-oriented content is “fluff.” The weight of The Lightbringers rests on these descriptions of how worshipers—including the players!—are expected to behave. This presents playable content in a way focused on roleplay rather than rules engagement.

Personally, I love it. Some of my favorite details are that a Storm Voice of Orlanth must eat at least one egg per week to stick it to Yelm, the Sun God (who is associated with birds), or that worshipers of Lhankor Mhy the Knowledge God are required to only write columns of 48 to 60 lines using correctly-prepared ink. I don’t expect these sorts of details to emerge in every single adventure, but they’re an absolutely beautiful way to show the player what their cult believes, rather than telling them. In particular the five focal cults—the titular Lightbringers—are lusciously detailed using a variety of subcults, cult Heroes, associated cults, and so on.

This stuff is also useful for the gamemaster. For example, the academic politics of Lhankor Mhy or Issaries’s duty to quest into the Wastelands offer great seeds for adventure. The description of temples and the role of cult leaders in society encourages adventures to build those temples, explore old temples, and support or overthrow established leaders. Maybe a Trickster has decided to hide eggs from the local Storm Voice? Maybe a rival temple is delivering bad ink to the adventurers’ Lhankor Mhy temple? The material in this core section of the book is really well done—engagingly playable stuff.

Another point of interest is that each deity has an “Otherworld Home” listed which describes to where adventurers might heroquest. Something on my to-do list is putting these homes together to start forming a rough map of the Hero World—one step closer to heroquesting.

The setting-oriented highlight is almost certainly the cult of Orlanth. It includes a great wealth of details about Orlanthi life and social structure. I especially appreciated that it describes how players can participate in the religious leadership of Sartar through Orlanth Rex, and the requirements to become a clan chieftain. It’s the fantastic work with Orlanth Rex which left me a bit disappointed that Orlanth Lightbringer—the heroquesting aspect—just gets a paragraph without describing how an adventurer can engage with it.

The level of detail in the other fourteen cults is more varied. Now, a number of these cults really are quite minor. So while in many cases I would have enjoyed further details, in most of the shorter cults I understand the brevity. As an example of one which stuck out, I would have liked more context about how Odayla provides social structure in rural regions of the Lunar Provinces, or how his Bearwalkers can acquire sufficient magic to spend much of their time shapeshifted into a bear. In contrast, I really loved how the Waha (Praxian culture god) and Lanbril (god of thieves) cults detailed their social organization. You get a sense of how the worshipers live, and what the adventurer’s day-by-day must feel like as a member of those societies.

Viewing these minor cults as gameplay options, they add a mountain of choices for player adventurers. Some of my favorites include the pirate god Ygg, the thief god Lanbril, and the movement god Mastakos. Between the two books, I think Mastakos may be my new favorite cult—speaking as someone who is very drawn toward the “cool gameplay options” perspective. His temples are infrequent, and his initiates rare, but they get access to some of the coolest magic in the game: Teleport, Guided Teleport, Proteus, and Meld Form. The latter are used to basically sacrifice a creature’s shape so the adventurer can transform into it when they wish (don’t worry, its soul isn’t consumed—we aren’t Lunars, after all!).

Really, you could play an entire RuneQuest campaign in any Homeland from the core rules using just The Lightbringers. It’s got all the classic archetypes, from sages to rogues to warriors to healers.

This solid choice of content is complimented by clear care with the text, and time lavished on the book’s presentation. The layout is gorgeous, and I’m looking forward to seeing my physical copy when it arrives. The harmony of playable content and clean presentation make this the strongest release I’ve read from Chaosium in years—possibly ever.

I’m often fairly critical, even of things I like, because I think that critical voices are important when writing a review. This time around, I don’t really have a lot of feedback on this book. The main topic which comes to mind is cult spirits. These are typically described thematically, rather than in rules text. To draw on Mastakos again, his cult spirits are “spirits of Movement and Change.” What are those spirits? What do they do? How many Rune points do I need to use to summon one, and where? While I don’t know if all these questions needed to be answered for every single cult, I do feel there was a missed opportunity to enrich the cults further with these details.

I do want to also note that there is a minor amount of repeated content in the book. After deliberation, I think it makes sense. The repetition’s function is to avoid cross-reference, and ease play at the table. In my eye, that’s a good reason.

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Illustrations

The artwork in The Lightbringers is absolutely phenomenal. No holds barred, no ifs, ands, or buts (though there are a few butts). This book is completely gorgeous, thoughtfully illustrated with a well-mixed blend of artistic styles and content. Each cult opens with an illustration of the deity, and many also have a full-page panel.

The panels are probably my favorite pieces. In particular, what they do really well is make the gods feel gigantic, and embodied. Many of the panels have the deities towering over the landscape, with trees, humans, or other elements providing scale.

In addition to illustrations of the deities, there are in-world illustrations of objects of devotion, and of worshipers. These do a brilliant job adding context. I especially like the inclusion of crude art—such as the statuette of Eurmal—which, while not technically stunning, creates a believable texture for the fantasy world.

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Conclusion

Based on Chaosium’s marketing, I believe there are three intended audiences for this book.

For players I recommend this book whole-heartedly if you’re interested in playing an adventurer who worships one of these deities. Even if you aren’t, you’ll probably still enjoy consuming this book and seeing how the Lightbringer religion intersects with your own cult. It’s probably in my top five for RuneQuest.

For gamemasters I think you need this book. The social context of the Orlanth cult and the Lightbringers religion provides a thorough grounding in the game’s setting which builds upon the Homelands introduction in the core rules and the Starter Set. I feel that this book has done a good job straddling the line between armchair and table, between newbies and veterans, between player tools and gamemaster worldbuilding. I agree with Chaosium: in my opinion, The Lightbringers is a must-buy.

For readers of creative mythology, I’m less persuaded. That’s not a condemnation of the book. Rather, it’s a recognition that The Lightbringers is a game book. It is describing the setting of Glorantha for people who play RuneQuest. I think a book aiming at a general fiction readership needs to tell the mythology in narrative prose, rather than summarized paragraphs. This strikes me as a marketing error, not a flaw in the book’s development. (For the record, my gold standard for creative mythology is Lord Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana.)

Overall, The Lightbringers is really, really good. If you’re interested in RuneQuest and Glorantha, I recommend picking it up. It’s a beautiful, engaging book which admirably stands as an exemplar that tabletop games qualify as art.

See you next week to discuss The Earth Goddesses! Until next time, then.

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