I’ve been curious to get along to the Joy of Six show for ages. It’s only an hour away from me in Sheffield, but work pressures at this time of year have always thwarted my plans! Fortunately, a recent change of job has meant that Sunday 13th July 2025 was clear on the calendar.
My gaming chums Matt and Tom are both Runequest fans and have been making noises about using Midgard Heroic Battles for Gloranthan battles for some time. I had inadvertently got the ball rolling with my 6mm Trojan Wars game from last year, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when Tom suggested morphing this into a Glorantha game for Joy of Six.
Matt booked us into the show and Rapier Miniatures‘ Paul Lidyard got in touch and offered to donate some minis for us to paint up for the game. The ball was rolling!
To firmly locate things in Glorantha, we decided to set the battle outside the walls of Pavis with The Rubble and the Zola Fel River (River of Cradles) in the background.
This was all new to me and I spent some time on the internet genning up on the crazy world of Glorantha! Fortunately, like Middle-earth, Glorantha is well served by fan-run pages containing all kinds of information. A pint with hardcore Glorantha fans Simon Miller and Ian Notter (of To The Strongest! fame) also helped me with inspiration.
I designed a battlefield covering a (simplified) section of the plains outside Pavis between Badside and the Sable Camp, as shown on the front cover of the Runequest River of Cradles supplement. I broke all my usual rules by making the river blue (not brown), but in my defence I think it looks the part and I already had the fabric handy!
A simple underlay of 25mm insulation foam was cut to size to go under the mat and edged with the same polar fleece fabric.
The river was cut from a piece of crepe satin and then edged with PVA, paint, sand and tufts to create a waterway.
If I’d planned far enough ahead, I could have bought some boats, but as it was, I hand-carved them from scrap balsa wood with some details using Milliput and wire. They are relatively crude, but one of the joys of 6mm terrain is that you can get away with it.
There’s no way I’d have been able to knock up 15-odd boats for a 28mm game in a few hours! Crew were added from spare Baccus and Rapier figures.
Tom wrote the background for the game which I’ll post here:
And here’s the poster that we used at the show with all the other details, though I omitted to mention that Matt scratch-built the village of Badside (next to the huge Rubble Wall at the back of the Lunar forces).
We ran the game twice over the day and were packed out with players and onlookers at several points.
One of the things that I noticed was that running a participation game on a 3 x 4′ board in a show environment meant that it was sometimes hard to give everyone passing a clear view, though we did try to talk to everyone.
Equally, with JO6 being a smaller show, it didn’t have the busy-ness of Partizan, Hammerhead or Salute, so there was more time to spend talking visitors through the rules.
Glorantha has quite a following, and many folks came to talk to us (well, Matt and Tom) about the background and setting. It’s fascinating stuff, a genuinely different Bronze Age fantasy world pervaded by magic and monsters.
The miniatures drew a lot of compliments. Many thanks to Paul from Rapier Miniatures who provided many of them for us, alongside additional models from Baccus 6mm and Irregular.
Matt had painted the vast majority of these as well as many others that didn’t make it to the table.
Tom drew up the Force lists for the event, trying as far as possible to model Gloranthan magic by use of the Traits and equipment within the book. As we play further games, we might start experimenting with some new Traits, but this first experiment worked just fine. You can find them here on the Midgard Heroic Battles Resources page.
Huge thanks for Joy of Six for having us and everyone who came up for a chat! More 6mm madness will undoubtedly follow…
mogsymakes 