The Chronicles of Future Earth Player’s Guide – Out Now!
Way back in 2018, I wrote an article for Black Gate about the Kickstarter we were running for my science-fantasy roleplaying game, The Chronicles of Future Earth. Subtitled “Cosmic Fantasy Roleplaying in the Post-Historical Age”, it was a world of long-forgotten ancient technologies, strange mutated monsters, gods, demons, and weird intelligent species fighting against forces of entropy and domination threatening to destroy reality. Using a radical new version of the Fate Core rules system, it was a setting which had inspired me for over twenty years, I’d published a novel in the setting, written RPG adventures and supplements, short stories, and more. Now it was going to be a massive standalone roleplaying game in its own right. I was excited. The Kickstarter funded 225% of its goal. It was going to happen.
Then, my husband was diagnosed with cancer, died, and my life exploded. No warning, fast, brutal. For several years I wandered lost, unable to even read more than a few pages, let alone write. But time and the friendship of good people, the support of the fantasy, SF, and RPG communities, all worked their magic, and slowly I recovered. Last year I published a “superheroic swords and sorcery” RPG called The Lair of the Leopard Empresses. This year, at last, and with an entire new company, Typhon Games, I published the first book in The Chronicles of Future Earth RPG — the Player’s Guide. John and the Black Gate team have very kindly had me back to give you an update on how the far future of planet Earth is looking, almost six years on!
Several years ago, I published my first ever roleplaying game supplement, a 200-page softback for the Starblazer Adventures RPG, using the Fate 3rd edition rules. Black Gate‘s very own Howard Andrew Jones reviewed it 
There’s an amazing Kickstarter running at the moment. If you’re a fan of world-building, if you want to check out a world that’s been built over more than 40 years of group endeavour, with deep myths, histories, and cultures, one of the most compelling worlds in fantasy and certainly in fantasy roleplaying, you may want to 
Glorantha owes a lot to Joseph Campbell, too. The “hero path” is an integral part of the world – how its inhabitants relate to the very real (and often mercurial) gods which surround them, and how heroes can penetrate the timeless realms of the gods and return with treasures physical and mystical. If, like me, you’re interested in the transcendent aspects of the stories we tell one another, Glorantha is a compelling world.
Over the past few years, Jeff Richard has been working on a book which looks like it will set a new standard in RPG supplements – a guide to the whole world of Glorantha itself. It’s a massive undertaking – an encyclopaedic opus detailing the places and cultures of a whole fantasy world, in exquisite detail. It’s been attempted twice before – once in the 1980s and once a decade ago – but in relatively abbreviated form. The new Guide to Glorantha is anything but abbreviated: it comes in at a whopping 400 pages of 10″ x 12″ book, detailing the geography, history, and cosmology of Glorantha, its cultures and races, as well as two continents, two subcontinents, and multiple archipelagos, plus a massive atlas filled with highly detailed and gorgeous maps – over 64 pages worth at the last count. The Guide to Glorantha is system agnostic – it doesn’t contain any games mechanics content, it’s pure setting detail, so you can use it with any game ruleset, or just read it for the pure pleasure of it. The Kickstarter has been running for a little over a week, and already has blown through its initial target. As a result, the initial scope of the project has expanded hugely, so that we’re now getting more regions detailed, more maps added, and an entire new “Companion” to the guide detailing things like the geography of the mythic regions of Glorantha, plus monographs by key industry writers. For those of us who’ve been playing quests into the realms of myth, this is nothing short of breathtaking in its ambition.
