This is my GOTY easy. I got cool looking games I still wanna play this year but they're not gonna come close, I promise. If all my recent #gloranthaposting has not piqued your interest let me tell it to you straight: this series (including also King Of Dragon Pass and Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind) is one of a kind. If you have any love for ANY of RPGs (video or pen and paper), strategy games, or games with a heavy narrative focus, you owe it to yourself to try and dig into these. Nothing like em. KoDP has inspired many but has vanishingly few direct descendants.
What is this game? I'm about to wax long so I'll make a little Read More button show up down there. That'll be my actual hard sales pitch on this series I love.
All three of these games are about charting the course of a kinda sorta bronze age cattle herding clan, in the cubic world called Glorantha, where everyone has magic and the myriad gods are alive and speak to people. As a setting, Glorantha's history passes through many ages of the world alongside the history of conflict between the gods. Once upon a time, there was a great empire, Nivorah, that dominated the world under the authority of the sun god, Yelm. One day the rebellious storm god, Orlanth, forged a tribe of his own, strove against Yelm, cast him down and killed him. This in turn was the end of Nivorah. her people fled and splintered into various distinct peoples worshipping various lesser solar deities like Elmal, Samnal and Sargash (who traced their lineage to the dead Yelm). This brought them into historical conflict with both each other and the Orlanthi tribes who, of course, worshipped Orlanth and his own family of gods. And so on, and so forth from there.
That's a lot of words that don't tell you what the games actually play like, right? and yet they do! All of this history and lore is core to how your clan perceives and engages with the world. They sacrifice to their gods for boons that they very noticeably receive. They ritually reenact the tales of the gods, and in so doing step through to the divine realm, The Gods War and fight their gods battles once more, as the time of the gods is different from the time of mortals, and all events are concurrent and perpetual. They are rewarded for walking directly in the footsteps of the gods, or succeeding on their own strengths, and at the end of the tale the god in question will grant them and your clan a boon. Your quester can even subtly, cleverly change how this event happens gaining unexpected blessings and treasures and perhaps changing how the story is told for generations to come. Your ancestors bless you when you spite or fight the same people they did, and grumble when you make peace instead of prosecuting their grudges. Sometimes it's worth getting bloodied to get their blessing. Sometimes it's worth hearing their grumbling to make peace. And so forth.
Day to day, season to season, year to year, you are playing as The Clanring: the chieftain of the clan and their six trusted advisors. Each of you has their own skills that affect how well the clan does things, and their own patron deity that strongly shapes their outlook. The worshipper of Eurmal (the Trickster) will often advocate treacherous or even actively bad options. The devotee of Humakt (wielder of the sword called Death) will be dour and grim and ready for a good fight and radically opposed to all possible undead taint. Your Uralda (the Cow Mother) priestess will tell you that you that all problems can be solved by getting more cows, taking better care of your cows, rotating pastures, and so forth. And so forth.
And as the clanring you will set various priorities from season to season, like sacrificing to the gods and raiding your neighbors' herds (but never during the planting or the harvest!) and trading with your other neighbors and forging alliances. Maybe with enough alliances you could forge your own tribal kingdom! Maybe.
But in the meantime people will come to you with problems and ask you to make decisions. And the problems they bring to you will often not have "right" or "wrong" answers, and your clanring members will have conflicting advice, and your choices might have not-immediately-obvious outcomes, and things that worked in one year might not work for the same problem another year. Life is like that. You just do your best with the information you have and the history and tales that brought your people this far, and a bit of magic too. Have I mentioned everyone has magic?
This post is long on text and short on images, because I'm writing at 11pm and am too lazy to rig up inline images. And make no mistake, this post is sort of a test because you'll absolutely be doing a LOT of reading. But the art in these games is a feast, the events and portraits are so lavishly and expressively drawn. The music is likewise a triumph. In spite of how much of these games are mediated through maps and menus and paragraphs of text, it's a treat for the eyes and ears too.
These games last years and years, usually even multiple generations (unless you choose to do a short campaign). Your ring members grow in both skill and age, from smooth faced youths to wrinkled elders. They pass from the ring by retirement, death, marrying out of the clan, or even reorganizations just for political/divine reasons (it is good to have a diversity of deities on the ring, and in six ages 1, to consider family representation as well). New people, for better and worse, come along to take their place. New problems, for better and worse, take the place of the old ones. After a long while, the heart of the story might finally reveal itself. When it does, chase it. Bring your clan to glory. That's the games, in general! Here's a little on the games in particular.
In the first game, King of Dragon Pass (1999), you are an Orlanthi clan settling in the titular Dragon Pass, where past clans have previously settled before being destroyed by, you guessed it, the dragons. There is no King in the pass, at the start of the game. I have already said enough of how this game goes, I think.
In Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind (2018), you play as a clan from the people who call themselves the Riders (who your clan in KoDP referred to as horsespawn and frequently clashed with). You have very few gods in common with the Orlanthi, instead worshipping a solar pantheon with Elmal at the head. Also of note is the god Hyalor, who tamed First-Horse and taught the Riders to be Riders; another name for your people are "Hyalorings". The Orlanthi (or Vingkotlings, or Rams, as you call them) do not know The Horse Secret and cannot ride. The Wheels are a people descended from Nivorah as you are, and herd horses as you do, but they chain their horses behind chariots and chain their people in bondage. In some clan members' eyes, they are barely more of your kin than the Rams. I won't tell you what happens in this game. Go find out!
In Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out (2023, like literally just last month), you are the descendants of the clan from Six Ages 1 (and can load your completed save, if you like!). Times are bad now. One by one, the gods seem to be dying. The forces of Chaos are everywhere. Your seers say the world is dying, and it looks more and more like they are right. This tells you a lot of what happens already, I think. Six Ages 2 is bleak and sad but not hopeless. I loved it dearly. It resonates a lot with how I'm feeling. Who could say why!!!! lmao
In these games most numbers and variables are obscured from you by design. The "objective" of a campaign is not immediately obvious when setting out. The various actions you can take are frequently vague as far as addressing your immediate and long term problems, again by design. And the effect this all produces is a game that, in my opinion, feels extremely human and alive. You do your best. It doesn't always work out. You think hard about who your people are and what they want and make your decision and look back to them and sometimes they surprise you, both good and bad. King of Dragon Pass and the Six Ages games are triumphs of narrative design. They are as variable and number driven as Crusader Kings, they are still just programs, but they don't feel like it. They are strategy games that don't feel like strategy games. They feel like a community. Play these games, by Humakt!
