Stirring Dara Happa Lawrence Whitaker talks about how the Dara Happa Stirs campaign book, coming soon, came into being.

When I joined Mongoose in March 2007, I was sent a production schedule listing all the books for the year that I was due to write. Now, there iss very little (i.e., none) briefing attached to most titles but this is not usually an issue: the title says it all. Elric of Melnibone? Yep, that’s my forte. Dragonewts? Yes – a book on everything dragonewtish. Then there, lurking at the bottom of the list, months and months away, was Dara Happa Stirs. ‘I’ll worry about that nearer the time,’ I thought. So I waited. Then, eventually, October dawned and I realised I still had to think about what to include in a book called Dara Happa Stirs. A sourcebook? A splatbook? A campaign? All sorts of choices but the most daunting prospect was: this has to reflect one of the key lands of Glorantha, in all its glory. I’ve dabbled in Glorantha off and on for around 20 years but never in Peloria; never in Dara Happa. I suddenly found that I knew next to nothing about this place. In desperation (almost) I turned to Jeff Richard. Now Jeff is an arch-Gloranthan scholar. ‘Oh you can have a ball there,’ he said. ‘But talk to Greg Stafford. He’s done so much work on the place he may have some firm ideas on what you should do,’ So I did. I talked to Greg. ‘Gee, well, what do you think the title suggests?’ He said, somewhat archly. Umm – rebellion? Intrigue? Unrest? ‘Yeah, all that. Tell you what, read Glorious ReAscent of Yelm and Fortunate Succession and that’ll give you some ideas.’

I have had both of these books for a while but admit that I had only ever glanced at them. They are… dense works of extraordinary detail concerning myth, history and empirical chronology. They are not game books, like, say, Griffin Mountain or Pavis but a scholarly articulation of how Greg perceives the history of Dara Happa. There is stuff in there that seems contradictory, incomplete and perhaps, just too obscure to be of relevance to all but the most ardent Gloranthaphile. Yet I started reading, flicking through the chronologies, until I arrived at the Second Age and there, summarised in just a few short paragraphs, was the story of a hero, Karvanyar, who liberated Dara Happa from the EWF. This is where it became obvious. ‘Greg, this book has to be about Karvanyar,’ I said. ‘It has got to be about Dara Happa booting out the Golden Dragon.’ ‘That’s right,’ Greg said. ‘But I wanted you to realise that for yourself.’ Armed with GRoY and FS (these two acronyms became central to the project), I went back to Jeff. ‘Cool idea,’ he said. ‘And you know what? The Pergammon Museum in Berlin has a permanent exhibition on ancient Babylon. If you’re going to do this, you need to see the Pergammon stuff.’Within a few days, I found myself on a plane bound from Luton to Berlin, to spend a weekend with Jeff and his fiancé Claudia, to brainstorm ideas and visit the Pergammon.

Nothing can prepare you for what the Pergammon holds. Its Hellenic temple is awe-inspiring enough but the real prize is, without a doubt, the full Ishtar gate taken from ancient Babylon, which is Dara Happa’s inspiration. Jeff and I wandered through this incredible, living, exhibition, discussing the architecture, the iconography, the little trophies and relics brought out of the Euphrates basin and talked constantly about how an entire campaign could be created from what we were seeing. We photographed tons of things; we studied much more. We bantered and exchanged ideas, rejected about half of them and then exchanged more. Back at Jeff ’s place we sat down and brainstormed for an entire afternoon and evening about the shape this campaign was to take. I took notes in a notebook bought in the Pergammon gift-shop and filled dozens of pages with these ideas and scraps of paper that Jeff scribbled over. Steadily a detailed campaign emerged and as it did so, its scope began to hit me. The page count for Dara Happa Stirs was 96 page but there was no way I could tell the story I wanted to tell in just under a hundred. I emailed Matthew Sprange from Berlin and suggested we make this two books, with the campaign split into five-year chunks. ‘Hmmm, perhaps but what if we make it a 160 page book instead?’ Matthew suggested. So that was that. Writing began in earnest in early November, after I’d digested GRoY and FS and the reams of notes Jeff and I had prepared. There was other reading too: Enclosure

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magazine (a Glorantha fanzine from the mid-90s, which details Alkoth, Dara Happa’s earth-bound Hell) and a whole heap of material old friends like Simon Bray, Neil Robinson and David Dunham had sent me. Writing continued throughout November and into December which is, traditionally, a Month of No Writing for Mongoose’s writers. During that time Jeff and I exchanged over 100 emails, Skype chats and Google Instant Messages about the developing campaign. The same was true with Greg. Ideas were floated, trashed, rewritten, re-ordered and revised. Greg and Jeff provided such a huge amount of input and accepted a huge amount of my own ideas, that, by the time I was ready to submit the manuscript to Nick Robinson (the project’s editor), I think it is fair to say that all three of us felt that we had a definitive work on Dara Happa. I sent some of the chapters of the scenario out to various friends for playtesting. Carl Pates, another long-standing friend, Gloranthaphile and long-time Elric collaborator, playtested the first of the scenarios and came back with some superb additions to the NPCs. I ran part of the Alkoth scenario at the Furnace convention where the youngest player, Katherine Ives, was just 12. She knew nothing about Glorantha but out of all the characters in that playtest, she was the one who helped piece together the clues, deal with various rituals in the right way and came out of the scenario having had a wonderful time. That says a lot about Katherine but I think it says a lot more about the appeal Glorantha can have across the generations.

It’s now April 2008 and Nick has just sent me the proofs for the book. Not only does it look better than I had imagined, I have to say that the art is staggeringly good. Andrew Dobell, Javier Martinez, Claudio Pozas, Tony Parker and Phil Renne have done a phenomenal job of rendering Dara Happa authentically, drawing upon Babylonian and Mesopotamian art to really represent what I saw in the Pergammon and similar iconography in GRoY and FS. Hats off to those guys – they have done a superb job. The book looks and feels, exactly as it should and I thank them warmly. Nick, too, deserves praise, for championing the book, pestering for clarifications and revisions and producing something that looks so good.

a huge and personal hand in this project and if Greg disagreed with it, then it got changed or dropped. What I do hope is that most people will buy this book and be inspired by Dara Happa, just as I found myself being inspired by it. I hope they find they have a book that provides not just many hours of enjoyment in playing the Karvanyar campaign but also in designing their own scenarios set in Dara Happa that will slot in and around those in the book. I also hope that Dara Happa Stirs creates many variant outcomes: Your Dara Happa Should Vary. Whatever happens, I’ve stirred Dara Happa and now its over to you…

Dara Happa Stirs is one of the biggest roleplaying projects that I have undertaken. It was probably the most complex just due to the sheer amount of subject matter and atmosphere that needs to be conveyed. Its both sourcebook and campaign book and really, it could still have made two volumes, even at its extended length of 160 pages (which climbed to almost 200). Is it any good? Well, I am really proud of it but the real test is out there, with RuneQuest and Glorantha fans. There are people in the wider community who know far more about Dara Happa than I ever will and I am sure that there is a lot of stuff where people will say to themselves ‘Hmmm. Yes… not how I envisage it…’ and ‘Oh Yelm – that’s just wrong…’ Ultimately, that is a danger with any Gloranthan book and especially one that tackles such a dense subject as Dara Happa. All I can say is that Glorantha’s creator, Greg Stafford, had

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