Rick Meints

We are the Chaosium, not the Orderium, as the saying goes. We don't have a standard approach to what books get a bigger map tucked in the back. It just depends on whether we feel it works better that way, based on the maps used in the book.

Children of Fear will do so. For that matter, so will the reprints of Beyond the Mountains of Madness and Horror on the Orient Express.

Harlem Unbound has larger maps in the back of the book.

The Elf Sea is, for most intents and purposes, a backwater. In short, few rivers of consequence flow into it, and the ones that flow out of it don't really go anywhere that important. It's full of sea monsters now, which pretty much deter all but foolhardy monster hunters. Few people live near it or on its shores. Why is it that way? The short answer is that's how the authors of Griffin Mountain wanted it to be. Personally I know there's at least one Hadrosaur in there Elf Sea that gets visited by Duck Pilgrims on occasion.

Distributors cannot even order Malleus until January, 2021.

I didn't realize that I had the same experience as Ian when it came to playing Traveller before playing any Chaosium games. I bought the Little Black boxed set in the late 70s. My friends and I enjoyed rolling up characters (with the obvious common goal of getting a free scout ship out if it) and then we too, like Ian, were at a loss for what to do, and where to go. We played a few one shots, but never got into any sort of campaign before moving on to other games. Unlike Ian though, I never really played Traveller again. I bought a lot of the Traveller LBBs over the next decade or two at auction, but that was mainly just to read them to see if the game would respire some interest, but it never did. I designed a big ship inside an asteroid after I bought High Guard in the early 80s, but that was just for fun. Now the books mostly just sit on as shelf.

Malleus is indeed for sale from the US and Australian warehouses. We'll announce additional warehouses as and when the books arrive. Canada and the EU will be the next ones.

Believe it or not, the scholarly pursuit of understanding and cataloging the specific color of the dice included in each Chaosium boxed set (that included dice) was seriously undertaken by more than one gaming historian. Knowledge is good. I helped each of the efforts to gain enlightenment. I'm a big "list" sort of guy by nature and habit. Unfortunately, the answer is somewhat disappointing. The Chaosium was absolutely not "The Orderium" when it came to the dice used in any specific boxed set. In the late 70s and for much of the 80's Chaosium purchased most of their dice in bulk from Chessex. Greg Stafford and Don Reents (Chessex) go way, way back. The Chaosium bought the most economically priced dice they could, as long as they were of the right number of sides, and not factory seconds, the color of the dice did not matter at all. If Chessex had too many red D20s or Yellow D12s as overstock and were willing to sell them a little more cheaply, all the better for Chaosium. Back in the Chaosium warehouse each type of die was in a big box or fish bowl for the collators of the boxed sets to collate into the boxed sets. Chaosium collated and shrink-wrapped all of their boxed sets in house. Enduring the heat from the shrink-wrapping process was a right of passage on team Chaosium. As long as you put the required number of dice of the correct type in the box before shrink-wrapping it, all was good in the world. You wouldn't be forced to clean out the room where the goats were kept at night. The only thing that was pretty standard when it came to the dice included was that the D6s were white, smaller, and had pips instead of numbers because, wait for it, they were cheaper that way. I've spoken with Chaosium warehouse people from back in the day, including Greg's kids who would pitch in from time to time, and the answer was always the same. Color didn't matter. It was the type of dice and the quantity required that mattered. NOTE: One common characteristic of the polyhedral dice (all but the D6s) is that they almost never had paint filling in the numbers. In the early days people were used to using a crayon or their own paint to make the numbers easier to read.

Thank you for sharing that article. For the record, Moon Design Publications isn't doing business as (DBA) Chaosium. MD and Chaosium are separate companies. MD isn't currently publishing anything. I'm not sure why this incorrect distinction was needed in the article.

There's a chance.

Here's what I wrote for Tales 19, many, many years ago: Marsh Geography The Upland Marsh is a mishmash of mucky islands and rocky outcroppings surrounded by a slow moving murky sludge. Technically, the Creek and the River both run through it, but their routes are a deadly series of small lakes connected by rivers of crud. Think of the Cypress swamps and the bayous of Louisiana. Think moss covered trees. You are there. Now leave. Movement within the Marsh is half speed at best. Normal beasts of burden and all but the best trained mounts refuse to set even a single hoof into it. Riding such a mount would be impossible, regardless. Delecti’s corrupted servant Rihalya protects her master with her perpetual cloak of mist. Thus, visibility is limited to roughly 30 meters or so during the day and perhaps as little as 1-5 meters at night. She rises to her thickest as part of the preparations for expanding the Marsh. She precedes the foul dance of the Daughters of Darkness whenever they choose to venture out of the Marsh as well. Troll Darksense is basically useless, as are most forms of extended vision. The air is filled with all manner of spooky sounds and odd odors. At times, the stench of decay can be choking. Few beings that enter the Marsh ever forget its distinct smell.

A typical Dragonewt Plinth consists of a 6m diameter dark black stone plinth jutting out a meter from the soil. All Dwarves or any Lhankor Mhy sages specializing in minerals would know that it is composed of volcanic basalt. Casting a Detect Magic spell on the area will reveal that a Warding 12 spell extends 15 meters outward from the plinth. The warding “stakes” are four basalt stones buried one meter below the ground on the perimeter. A dragonewt symbol (A triangle with a horizontal line through it) will appear on the surface of the earth directly above each of them. On closer inspection (within 2 meters of the plinth) a series of Auld Wyrmish symbols can be seen round the base of the main plinth. The script reads, o-ou-our-ouro-ourob-ourobo-ouroborouroboro- ouroboros. (Scholars may know that is a prayer relating to the dragonewt creation myth). Capping the plinth is a 2m circular image of a dragon devouring its own tail. (Ouroboros, an ancient and powerful dragonewt symbol). Each time anyone casts an Analyse Magic spell on the plinth area they will receive a vision.

I have researched the fonts. It's too complex to make a short answer here. PM me if you have specific questions.

I pondered what happened to those stats and wondered if we had the Vikings manuscript in the archives. I didn't have time to look for that, but it gave me an idea. RQ3 licensees would sometimes add material to existing products, like Games Workshop did to Griffin Island. The first licensee I remembered that did Vikings was JOC International, who translated it into Spanish. I grabbed Los Vikingos off the shelf and lo and behold, it had the stats you seek. Here's a scan of the page (No, I don't have a translation of it.):

The following books are not part of the Gloranthan Classics: RuneQuest 1 Rulebook, RuneQuest 2 rulebook, Apple Lane, SnakePipe Hollow, TrollPak (only the cults are in the Cult Compendium), the three SoloQuests compiled into the SoloQuest Collection, Gateway Bestiary, RuneQuest Companion, and all of the material in the Old School RuneQuest Collection.

We never intended these to be exact copies. To speed up the layout process for the books we decided from the beginning that all of these books would be done with the same format, style, fonts, and general look and feel. Recreating the erratic and quirky and constantly changing layout of the originals would have just taken more time. Some of the specific fonts don't exist electronically because they predate the digital era. We also cleaned up typos, incorporated errata, and added extra bits from magazines, and even unpublished material. As for more POD titles, we do them as we can.

The Red Book of Magic is its own book, and not the second volume of the Cults slipcase set. The two volumes of the Cults book will be about 400 pages each, and just contain cults and related material.

As always, I am sorry to disappoint you yet again Frank, but I am sure you saw that coming as you typed your post. We don't have the time, energy or desire to do that sort of sifting and sorting. It really isn't worth it when we have people pushing for new RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, and other material. If anyone wants any of the Gloranthan Classics they can easily buy them on the secondary market. They are also available as PDFs, so nobody can say they can't get access to the material. Yes, they can say they want to buy a reasonably priced printed copy, but that isn't just ups flipping a switch somewhere. Doing a special POD project to make a few dozen people happy just isn't worth spending our time on it, no matter how cool it would be. You all should know by now that I love getting things back into print. If it was quick and easy I would have already done it. I'm an Issaries merchant. I'm always out to make a quick Lunar. You can see that in person when I'm working the Chaosium booth at conventions (I really miss that right now). Sadly, the current pdfs we have of some of the Gloranthan Classics don't print out well for POD. They were made to look good on a screen. When we create a book we create two versions of PDFs for it. One is for "interactive" viewing on a screen, and the other is for "print ready". They have different settings and requirements. The "Print ready" version is a much larger file (sometimes 10X the size) than the interactive version. I don't have the print ready versions of the Gloranthan Classics because, as I have said several times in other similar topics, those books were done back in the stone age when film was used to print books. I would have to redo the pagemaker (yes, pagemaker) layout to get a "print ready" PDF for them. As for your last point, I look forward to one of the tribe doing such a page by page analysis and summary. I don't have the time to do it. In the end, the differences are quite small, especially when you are looking at about 1400 pages of material, out of which I would guesstimate there are maybe 50 pages of gaps in material. In the end, there isn't some vast body of material that is only available in the Gloranthan Classics.

THE RQ Classics ARE NEWER than the Gloranthan Classics. the RQ Classics were done in 2016-2019. The Glorantha Classics were done in 1999-2005. The only substantive difference between these books is the art, plus some RQ3 cults in the Cult Compendium. If you want the Pavis & Big Rubble Gloranthan Classic in printed form, you can buy the RQ Classic Pavis book and the Big Rubble Book and you are basically only missing ONE page of information. If you want the GC Griffin Mountain, just buy the RQ Classic Griffin Mountain. No difference there, same for GC Borderlands and Beyond, just buy the RQ Classic Borderlands, Plunder, and RuneMasters.

The back covers of the actual printed slipcase sets say China.

Ancient One: You seem to know more than me, so I can't really provide you with additional information. I could have sworn we had the books printed in China because they do our slipcase sets and boxed sets, but I'll defer to you. I chose the date I did because I am tried of disappointing you with honest estimates, estimates that sometimes need to get adjusted for unforeseen circumstances. The books are printed and collated. They are in the process of being shipped to our warehouses. They'll get there when they get there.

We can't tell you "exactly" because there are unknown variables that can impact the arrival date. There is a backlog to unload cargo ships at all of the US West Coast ports. Sometimes there are customs delays. Sometimes there are truck shipment delays. There could be a covid related shutdown. If you want a firm exact sales date I suggest you use December 18th, at 12:37pm EST. You'll be able to buy the set then. NOTE: You may very well get the chance to buy it much earlier than then, but I cannot guarantee it, and you pushed for an EXACT date. 🙂

We will have limited editions of many of the books (128+ pages) bound in leatherette, just like we do for RQ and CoC.

We at the Chaosium usually announce a book's definitive premier in the product lineup when layout of the final manuscript has begun. We have numerous books in the writing or editing stage, but we don't like to say "when" they will be done. We used to estimate "when" and ultimately ended up disappointing people when inevitable delays happened. We also spent a lot of effort providing "no update" on the status of these future publications, which then led to lots of "why" questions. Please use the following table to understand why Chaosium isn't telling you when a future book will be ready: 1D10 Result 01 Author is late on finishing the manuscript 02 Editor is late on editing the manuscript 03 Artist(s) are late on delivering art 04 Art direction is taking longer than expected 05 Manuscript requires extensive rewrites 06 Art requires extensive revision or was rejected 07 Author gives up and a new author must be found 08 Artist disappears and art must be reassigned 09 Roll twice on table and combine delays sequentially 10 Roll thrice on table and combine delays sequentially

No offense taken. I just thought I would politely answer your question, despite not being the social media guy. We don't usually provide blow by blow updates on products with detailed reasons for delays, mostly because they are not predictable, not do we always know what specifically caused for the delay.