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A prospectus

The best part of Glorantha is the East, and it is the most underdeveloped.

That’s not quite true: the best part of Glorantha is the East except Kralorela and Vormain, which is to say the best part is Chern Durel, followed up by the East Isles.

This is sad, because both areas are terribly underdeveloped.

Chern Durel is a blood drenched gothic heath, littered with ancient ruins that seem to attract new cults every so often, where a good 80% of the settlements are dens of some combinations of slavers, bandits, cannibals or celebrants of human sacrificial rites. The overall plot of the region is about an exported Fu Manchu conquering Kralorela in the Hero Wars, until Sheng Seleris shows up again and cleans house. It’s off to the side, in a region that shows its origins as a place to easily generate adventures and encounters lifting mostly from Lovecraft (and, oddly enough, Lear’s Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo), instead of a developed place in its own right.
(oh and there’s a Zardoz thing too)

The East Isles are just the same - a hex crawl set up where you can easily make hexes to crawl, long after the hex crawl finished. The East Isles were once the eastern continent Vithaela, until chaos monsters shattered it into an archipelago in the Great Darkness. The Gods of Vithaela were split out across the islands, each island only adopting the one god of their region. So you have a recipe to quickly generate a flavor for each island to go along with an exploration game, but not really enough to make it a home.

The purpose of this blog is to focus on these regions and flesh them out. The East Isles got a really significant rework in the Guide, but Chern Durel is still largely ignored. I think the entire area has a lot to recommend, a lot to build from - Mokato is the last remaining Second Age empire, the Black Sun and Blood Sun are profoundly connected to the Hero Wars.

So with that, my initial goals are to focus on Chern Durel and give it a flavor besides “the domain of the nefarious Fu Can Shu” and “you cannot fast travel while there are enemies near you”

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