Introduction

Eunike brought her horse to a stop. The trail of hoofed prints led out of the forest and up a hill crowned with the ruins of an old abandoned fort. She smiled. If the beast-men had setup camp there, she may be able to get the drop on them. Halbar Broadjaw, her tribal leader, had tried appealing to the Provincial Administrator via Proconsul Keroventes, but to no avail. Even after Eunike’s village was raided twice, and even after they had to slaughter and burn half of the remaining sheep and cattle, for fear that they would be infected with the foul monsters’ seed.

And so Halbar asked Eunike, the village’s best hunter, to look into the matter. After a few days of searching the surrounding hills, she had finally spotted one of the beast-men. She followed him here, dragging a struggling deer to his lair. She knew why he kept it alive, but didn’t want to think about it. At least, its wailing made it easier for her to quietly follow.

Eunike dismounted, grabbed her bow and quiver, and quickly circled the hill to find a good angle of approach. She stopped and whispered to the spirits of the wild trapped inside the anklet on her right leg. When she started again up-hill towards the moss-covered ruins, she was running as fast as a wolf.

Dropping behind a crumbled wall, Eunike stopped for a minute, hoping none of the beast-men spotted her. She slowed her breathing to silence her presence, then crawled until she had a good view of the camp. She counted six beast-men. Too many for her to handle after all. She could hear the deer’s suffering, and at least a couple sheep. In a few days they would burst open with unholy offspring. By next season the village would face another, bigger raid. Eunike had to leave quietly and bring the town’s militia here… until she heard a voice.

Proconsul Keroventes was there, walking around the beast-men’s camp as he would at the town’s harvest festival. What evil business did he have with these monsters? Eunike’s thoughts went from the proconsul’s throat to the arrow nocked on her bowstring. But she had to be smart about this. Eunike gritted her teeth and pondered her next move.

You are Eunike. What do you do next?

What Do You Do Next?

The book you’re reading is a roleplaying game (abbreviated as RPG, or sometimes TTRPG for tabletop roleplaying game). In this game, you and your friends play the role of one adventurer each, in a story led by one last person, the gamemaster. The question “what do you do next?” is the question at the heart of the game.

You only need your imagination to give your friends your answer. Then, together, you collectively tell the story of what happens over the next few minutes, hours, and weeks. An RPG is a really just a long discussion between friends who tell each other one big story. But the Torang Engine brings a couple of useful things to the table. First, it provides some rules that help everyone agree on, say, how deadly Eunike is with a bow, or how good a beast-man’s hearing is when someone draws an arrow nearby. Second, it shows you how to use dice rolls to determine which way something goes, so that you don’t just decide if an arrow hits or misses… you can be surprised by the outcome!

What is the Torang Engine?

The Torang Engine presents rules designed for games set in Glorantha, Greg Stafford’s ancient world of fantasy and myth. It’s not hard to expand the system presented here to any other ancient world setting.

The Torang Engine is inspired by early D100-based Fantasy Roleplaying Games (FRPG) from the late 1970s, along with several of the many other FRPGs that followed. The rules described here are meant to emulate the gritty and deadly action of “sword-and-sandal” movies, and the high-powered heroics found in ancient mythology.

The “Torang” in Torang Engine is the name of a modest city in Peloria that saw the birth of the Red Goddess in the year 1220. This was the beginning of the Lunar Empire.

The Red Goddess represents a modern, progressive take on the old gods. She eschews the arbitrary rules of the past. She happily revives the practice of heroquesting. She integrates Chaos. As such, this is a good name for an engine that tries to do the same to the oldest Gloranthan game.

Equipment Needed to Play

Besides this rulebook, players need the following materials to play.

Dice

The Torang Engine uses many different types of dice: 20, 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4-sided dice. Sets containing all the required dice are available in all game and hobby stores. Dice rolls are abbreviated with a “D” followed by the type of dice to roll. It may be preceded with a number of dice, and followed by other dice or numeric modifiers. Example: 3D6 means rolling three 6-sided dice and adding their numbers together. 2D6+D4+1 means rolling two 6-sided dice and one 4-sided die, adding their numbers together, and adding one.

One exception is the percentile dice, abbreviated as D100. This requires rolling two 10-sided dice and reading one as the decimal place (the “tens”) and the other as the unit (the “ones”). Example: the first 10-sided die comes up as a 4, and second comes up as an 8. The result of the D100 roll is a 48. Use different colored dice for identifying which is which, or use special 10-sided dice where one has numbers in multipliers of ten printed on its sides. The result of a D100 is therefore always between 01 and 100.

Other Materials

Besides dice, the Torang Engine requires pen and paper, a couple hours of free time, and imagination. Optionally, for action scenes and combat, players may use figurines or miniatures on a large paper, neoprene, or whiteboard surface where the gamemaster draws the environment’s map.

As an alternative to a “real” table, people may play on the internet using a video chat software, a dice rolling application, and some way to share documents and maps.

Players and the Gamemaster

As with the vast majority of other roleplaying games, the Torang Engine requires one person to be the gamemaster, and one or more others to be the players (ideally three or four).

These players take on the role of “adventurers”: individuals inhabiting the game’s world, who will live through exciting stories, deadly fights, daring chases, and high-stakes encounters. Each player controls and acts as one of these adventurers. This rulebook uses the pronouns “they” and “he/him” for players, for collective or individual designations.

The gamemaster controls and acts as everyone else in the game’s world: the merchants the players meet, the beggars they ignore, the kings they bow to, and the barbarians they fight. The gamemaster prepares and improvises the stories the players go through. The gamemaster also describes the grand cities, picaresque villages, gloomy forests, and other locales the adventurers visit. Finally, the gamemaster also acts as a referee when the rules need to be applied, interpreted, tweaked, or ignored. This rulebook uses the pronouns “she/her” for the gamemaster.

All players, gamemasters, and adventurers may be of any gender. Everyone is responsible for keeping the game fun.

Rule Zero

The rules in this book are a guideline for playing in a fantasy world. If not applying some of these rules at a given time would result in something fun happening, feel free to tweak or ignore them. If the rules are sometimes better abstracted as a simple D100 roll to keep the momentum at the table going, do it! If everybody in the group wants something to happen because that would be most entertaining, keep the dice in their bag and go for that instead!

This is known as Rule Zero, or the Golden Rule: once your start playing, the game is yours, and nothing this rulebook says can make it otherwise.