My first published work, The Throat of Winter, was released five years ago this week!
To celebrate, I’m going to deviate a bit from my previous attempt at scheduling December’s articles to talk about The Throat of Winter’s inception, growth, and impact. Along with—naturally—some peeks into the original version of the adventure.
Which was not written for RuneQuest.
Origins
Shortly before my Christmas vacation in 2018, I received my physical copies of Free League’s new TTRPG, Forbidden Lands, through the game’s Kickstarter campaign. Naturally, I brought ‘em along as reading material while visiting family. Just as naturally, being in the Midwest wintry weather was very much on my mind.
Forbidden Lands absolutely fascinated me. Free League’s Year Zero Engine (YZE) was the first “dice pool” system I ever really sank my teeth into, the first system I tinkered with which was substantially different from either D20 or D100 styles of play. Already self-identifying as a writer—I’d been writing heavily for about two years at that point—and lacking an easy way to try the game out, writing out a module felt like a natural use of my vacation time.
Since the publisher is Swedish and I was reading/writing during the winter holidays, it felt only natural to utilize Krampus as the villain lurking within the Throat. I’m fairly sure the adventure’s name came first—the notion of “throat” feeling strange and evocative, allusive to how winter wind “howls” outside the window—and then inspired the body-shape of the cave’s interior. Lungs, stomach, intestines, and so on.
Around this time is also when I began gamemastering my first RuneQuest campaign. RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (RQG) came out the previous summer, and when real-life scheduling put our group’s RQ3-ish game on hiatus I decided to try my hand at running the new edition.
Throat pretty much lazed around on my computer, forgotten, until Chaosium’s Michael O’Brien (who often goes by MOB) announced the creation of this “Jonstown Compendium” thingy over on the BasicRoleplaying.org fan forum. And well, I had an adventure sitting around, already finished. So just add some statblocks and call it a day, right?
Well, not quite. The Throat of Winter needed a bit of a makeover to really turn it into a “Gloranthan take on Scandinavian myth.”
The first version of the adventure built upon concepts from the world of Forbidden Lands. They weren’t wholly incompatible with Glorantha, but I did need a new backstory and mythic explanation. After all, Glorantha’s elves aren’t mammals with magical ruby hearts! Plus YZE doesn’t transliterate quite as directly as I’d hoped into a D100 game.
And then, of course, figuring out how to source artwork and stumble through Adobe InDesign for layout…
Fortunately, since I had an RQG game going I could slot the new version of The Throat of Winter easily into our game. In hindsight, Krampus has actually become a bit iconic for our group. And, from what I hear online, he’s quite memorable for other groups, too. This has been a pleasant surprise, since I certainly didn’t anticipate it while writing the adventure!
If you haven’t read the adventure, Krampus—affectionately called “Carp Nuts” by my players—is a covetous demon who steals Rune magic from others. In the original RQG text, one of these spells may have been … Sever Spirit. Just a single casting, saved for a rainy day. After all, an immortal respawning demon doesn’t have that many rainy days, right?
Well, one of my adventurers had a fiery breath attack due to attuning a bit of True Dragon’s Blood, and nearly melted Krampus in a single shot. So yeah, the demon fired back, and killed the adventurer before the rest of the group curb-stomped the wounded Krampus. (Don’t worry, the downed adventurer got resurrected.) Knowing that my groups tend to be a bit peculiar in their lust for danger in RuneQuest combat, I decided to tune Krampus down a wee bit to his published version.
In the end, I did have a PDF available for MOB to upload. The Throat of Winter was one of the five original products available on the Jonstown Compendium alongside other great early work like Armies & Enemies of Dragon Pass and Tales of the Sun County Militia. I don’t think anyone at the time could have guessed how much the program would expand and grow. The Jonstown Compendium is a beautiful thing, and I really do think in a sense it carried RuneQuest’s torch during Chaosium’s slow years from 2020 until beginning Cults of RuneQuest last year.
Whether making old material accessible or creating engrossing new works, everyone involved should feel proud of the last five years. I’m excited to see what the future holds!
Looking for more RuneQuest on your shelves this holiday season? Check out this print bundle from Akhelas! It includes all my works presently available in Print On Demand, but will only be available for a short time longer. (Yes, I’ll probably do one next year—but do you want to wait a WHOLE YEAR for more books?)
Impact
Let’s take a look at how The Throat of Winter wound up impacting my creative work and life.
In particular, a long, long influence from Forbidden Lands has been the concept of an “adventure site.” This approach to adventure design utilizes a dungeon-style “sandbox” to present every location the adventurers might visit. In the original game—with a setting which explicitly has only small settlements due to recent magical events—this is limited to villages, dungeons, and castles. Logically, it can be expanded to really anything you come up with.
This design philosophy is why To Hunt a God fully described the Temple of the Bones, and is why The Queen’s Star is built around an open-ended narrative. Goals and events, not specified narrative, is at the heart of adventure site design—and helps put the players at the heart of the story.
Without writing that original version for Forbidden Lands, it’s likely the way I think about adventures would be quite different. Without being involved in the Jonstown Compendium so early, it’s likely I wouldn’t have built up the skills to try being a working writer. It’s quite possible I would have written something for RuneQuest or for the Jonstown Compendium—even if not at the beginning—but without being on the ground that early it’s hard to imagine being “sucked up” in the community content program’s excitement.
Another important piece is that, by the time the Jonstown Compendium started up, I was very much in a creative rut. I was at the end of my MFA program, and struggling to figure out how to finish my thesis novel. (Turns out I never did finish that one, but that’s a story for another day.) My RuneQuest writing to some extent was a release valve, giving me a new venue in which to creatively explore. It likely became too much of an obsession, but it also has been very rewarding.
Publishing anything is nerve-wracking. Publishing for the first time is the most intense. Just breaking the glass and putting The Throat of Winter out before the public was an accomplishment on its own. More amazing, it’s been received quite well. People play it. Krampus becomes a yearly in-game danger, feuding with players as he awakens each Dark Season. Imagining the fantastical nonsense I write about is fairly easy. Imagining people playing and enjoying my work is, for whatever reason, more difficult. It’s humbling and heartwarming. I’m incredibly fortunate.
If you’re on the fence—climb over it. Give it a try. Publish. It’s always better to go for it than to hesitate.
A Printed Future
This isn’t exactly news since I believe I’ve mentioned it since this past summer, but The Throat of Winter will eventually be available in print!
My next book, Howl of the Wild Hunt, is an anthology of four adventures. In addition to the brand-new “title track,” it collects three adventures which haven’t previously been available in print, including The Throat of Winter. The label “Coming Eventually” remains apt, because we’re still chipping away at the new layout and remaster of the old material. Mostly visual changes, but inevitably there will be a few text changes too as we go. I’d hoped to get this out by the end of 2024 but, well, life happens!
(To be crystal clear, the delays are 100% my fault—all co-conspirators are excellent and blameless individuals.)
I do, actually, have a print copy of The Throat of Winter. It is one of two (the second of which was a gift to my mother).
Getting “legit” physical editions out and available excites me. I hope they’ll continue to generate many more years of adventure.
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