Jason D

One adventure.

I speak as someone who loves starter sets in general, and is greatly disappointed by many. I've seen too many of them that are essentially big empty boxes with 4-5 hours, tops, of use. The goal with this one was that anyone who runs RQ will find some useful material in it. The next installment of the development blog goes into the contents.

So many variables: 1. We have no idea when your birthday is, so let's say the time until your birthday equals ?. 2. Printing takes X time, shipping to our four warehouses in the US/UK/AUS/EU takes X time, getting through international customs takes X time, then additional shipping from customs takes X time. Then it's a case of how long it takes our warehouses/fulfillment centers to from "pallets of boxes on loading docks" to "ready to put product into the mail." Let's call that time... X. So putting those together, it's hard to say whether ? is greater than or equal to X+X+X+X+X.

It's her. Different artists have different takes on the pre-generated adventurers.

The next blog installment goes into more detail IIRC.

On the issue of whether Moorcock's relevant still, Tor Books seems to think so: https://www.tor.com/2021/03/02/revealing-omnibus-editions-of-michael-moorcocks-elric-of-melnibone/comment-page-1/?

I was actually in contact with Adamant about that and was supposedly going to be a part of the writing team. (Huge fan of China Mieville's work.) I was told that they'd be happy to have me work on it. However, there were so many stalls and delays and inexplicable "soons" that it became apparent it just wasn't going to work out. The publisher was just then also going through Far West situation and had a licensed deal take a nose-dive due to some rights tangle they had nothing to do with (Buckaroo Banzai), so it became clear that there was no clear path to publication, much less to serious development. I gather that the rights passed back to Mieville, and somehow ended up in the hands of Zak S, which is not encouraging given his relationship to the RPG industry at present. So my guess is that a Bas-lag game is stalled until the rights leave Zak's hands, if those rights are still there. I suspect if another Bas-lag book were to come out the license would be much more appealing, however there doesn't seem to be one on the horizon for the immediate future. (He seems to be primarily interested in nonfiction/political works these days.)

My awareness of it came from a few posts on the Stormbringer/Elric RPGs Facebook group, where someone (whether an overenthusiastic fan or developer with Titam... it is hard to know) claimed that it was in the works. Given the situation, that may have been speculative, premature, or magical thinking.

Quite the opposite. Trying to clarify what seems to be deliberately missed. A French studio has the rights to do Mournblade and (I gather) Hawkmoon in French. They have indicated on social media that they want to do an English version of Mournblade, called Stormbringer. I am led to understand that they don't have global rights, which I assume includes English. Rick - who knows far more about these things than I do - says the same. The BBC is doing an adaptation of Hawkmoon, and has the game rights currently wrapped up with their license. I don't really know the specifics of that license. It may include more elements of the Eternal Champion IP, it may also be in conflict with the French license. Or the BBC license may have an exception letting the French studio have the French game rights. Usually, these things either take effort to resolve, or the rights expire.

Intellectual property licenses are weird and sometimes messy things, especially when it comes to larger IPs and multiple licensees. Many seemingly contradictory things can be true simultaneously.

You could always pick up Basic Roleplaying with expanded rules for mutant abilities, psychic powers, and super powers.

You might be the first person to have said that in years.

I have a theory that you could run almost any Call of Cthulhu (and especially Pulp Cthulhu) adventure with Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and Liz Sherman as your investigators without changing much of anything. Just beef up the number of foes (maybe a last-minute summoning), add an enigmatic talking animal, describe a lot of broken statues, and be sure to have Hellboy fall through the floor at least once.

Let me know if you should ever want to play some Elric!/Stormbringer. 🙂

Yes. Pedro just turned in his completed and updated drafts of the updated Mythic Iceland and the Mythic Iceland Companion. We're looking at doing them as a slipcase edition together, and sold separately.

Moorcock's works were just re-released less than a decade ago by Gollancz, and are still in print. The BBC Hawkmoon series will likely spike readers to that novel series and associated Moorcock books. I have very little doubt that a new edition of Stormbringer would find an audience among longtime fans as well as newcomers to the character and his amazing universe.

All of those issues were with the old management, who are no longer with the company. Chaosium is essentially a new company, fiscally stable and responsible, and the company has done much to rectify the mistakes of the past, even going above and beyond what could be reasonably expected. I cannot provide more details, but a major goal has been to re-establish goodwill with the Moorcocks.

These are underway.

As seen above, this is in the discussion/consideration phase. The ball is in Mark's court. We'd be happy to work with him on it, as we are huge fans of his work (as you will see in months to come as more RQ/Glorantha products featuring his art come out). I am uniquely positioned to say that this would be quite the thing, having run a Conan game back in the day using Elric!. We at Chaosium are also big friends with the people at Cabinet Entertainment, who own the rights to Conan, but currently Conan is licensed by Modiphius and they are still actively supporting the line. It goes without saying that we're huge fans of Moorcock and Stormbringer and would happily work on a new Eternal Champion game - or anything with MM - if the Million Spheres align just right. Pedro just turned in completed manuscripts for MI and the MI Companion, so it's now a question of how quickly we can do it. Though Harn is quite an interesting setting (I played some back in high school and college), I think there's too much crossover between the core RQ audience and its potential audience for Chaosium to consider it as a setting. I don't know much about it. Is the author interested in talking to us? We're happy to discuss licensing BRP/RQ if someone reaches out. On my own wish list, I'd love to see us do another original setting or two using RQ as the core engine, perhaps something more unexpected like the New Sun novels, Bas-lag, Neveryon, Empires of Dust (Anna Smith Spark's novel series), or Charles Saunders' Nyumbani. There's only so much time in the day, though, so we have to focus on just a few things at a time. 🙂

If it's a problem, then just give him a minimal skill in Tradetalk. Communication is mean to be a roleplaying challenge, not impossible. I'm currently doing a sweep for corrections for the reprint and will just add Tradetalk to his skills just to make that explicit.

I only just saw this, but I'll see what I can do.

That last version seemed to work, but that's what Apple support tells us.

As a note, the new version promulgated has this on the copyrights page:

Is this based on the latest version? It's been uploaded apparently in the last 24 hours.