I rounded off 2010, a bumper year of releases with Life and Death, a setting and adventure book for OpenQuest. I started writing about 2006, so it felt like an eternity when it finally came out, to relatively little fanfare. But I was happy and proud of it.
I already told Life and Death’s origin story in OpenQuest 1st Edition’s (D101-06) post since it’s so interwoven with that rule set’s beginnings.
It’s my fantasy love letter to George Romero Zombie movies, where a magical apocalypse was brought on by a proud, vain Lion Emperor trying to ascend to the Houses of the Gods. Instead, he ends up wiping them from existence along with the route to the afterlife, which was my rationale for all the undead folk hanging around. It was inspired by a Glorantha fan saying rather angrily on one of the Glorantha-yahoo-lists 1 that you couldn’t just wipe Glorantha’s Mythology and Gods out like erasing a Hard Drive. Which got me thinking, what if you could. I also knocked the idea that after the erasing of Mythology/Gods, the five city-states of the region the adventures were set in were magically isolated by force fields up to ten miles from their city walls.
It came in two versions. The initial release was in 2010, which had two adventures. A short one-shot introduced the setting called Dead Pot Country, where the characters investigated a missing merchant’s son in a land where a dead river civilisation, think Mesopotamia, buried its dead in large ceramic pots in ordered fields. Which the characters had to go tromping across, breaking the seals and disturbing the zombies. And the longer second adventure, which was Life and Death itself. In part 1, you go to a militaristic, xenophobic city-state in the grips of, you guessed it, a zombie plague and discover the culprit behind the Zombie apocalypse. In part 2, you go up into some nearby hills and find out the secret of why the path to the world’s afterlife is blocked, and make the final choice between Life and Death.
In 2014 an updated version of the book was released that had two new introductory adventures. Joining the Guild, where the characters run for their lives in an ancient city-state and end up joining the Adventurer’s Guild. Real basic stuff to introduce the setting and the system to new players. Their new Guild’s first job is to teleport them to old ruin in the second adventure – The Dust of Eternity – overrun with guess what? That’s right, Zombies! But zombies that still half-remember their lives moan and groan and have behaviours based on that 2.
I have a soft spot for this, so it’s coming back in an expanded/revised version for OpenQuest at some point. BUT it was a pain to write due to various internal conflicts, which made every step forward hard-won. So I’m not in a great rush. When I do bring it back, I will have a clear head and write with joy. Perhaps I’ll get the other five books3 in the series that this was meant to be the first written too 3 😀
Notes
1. Remember those? Glorantha had at least two official Yahoo groups during the HeroWars/HeroQuest period, from 1999 to the early 2010s. Faults aside, that’s where I first connected with the Gloranthan Fan Community.
2. I was big into playing the first Bioshock game at the time.
3. The plan was one book per city in the setting, including the ruined city of the Lion Emperor.
