Rick Meints

Most of the RQ2 books never had any handouts. Large poster maps are already available on redbubble.com What few handouts there are for Borderlands and such can all be easily printed from the PDF. None of those were ever in color, nor did they go to the edges of the page. Hardcovers MIGHT happen, but many of these books are a bit slim to do as hardcover anyway.

Jack O'Bears have been a part of my Gloranthan gaming experience from almost the very beginning. They were in the RQ 1st ed. rulebook (page 79) in 1978. I did not meet them in play until late 1981 when they were featured in Griffin Mountain, out in the Elder Wilds north of Balazar. They almost killed me then, despite Gondo Holst's best efforts... I should have heeded the earlier warning displayed a few months prior on the cover of Wyrm's Footnotes #11 (Spring 1981) when I saw the cover of that magazine in a local game store (but wouldn't pay $2.25 to buy it). I had no idea that Jack O'Bears technically pre-dated RuneQuest until Greg Stafford revealed their origins to me. Greg very much wanted to have a miniatures line to support the RPG. Archive Miniatures, run by the mad wizard sculptor that is Neville Stocken, offered Greg an easy "hit the ground running" solution. If Greg wrote up some of the existing Archive minis as Gloranthan creatures, then they were ready to sell immediately. Thus, Archive's bugbear miniature became immortalized as a Gloranthan Jack O'Bear. I only encountered them that once in Griffin Mountain, but the unique monstrosity that they are has cast a long shadow over my life ever since. When I moved to the UK in 1995 I soon found out that Games Workshop had published Griffin Mountain with a slightly different cover. Being a completist collector I added that Jack O'Bear to the top of my want list, and paid dearly for it at the Convulsion 1996 auction. First they tried to take my PC's life, and now they were picking my pocket. Over the next several years I heard the lament of many RQ fans that longed to play the campaign, but could not pay a collector's price to have the pleasure of facing an elusive Jack O'Bear. Now those Jack O'Bears were taunting my fellow tribe members, and something had to be done. In 2001 I had the immense pleasure of publishing Griffin Mountain as the 2nd volume of the Gloranthan Classics series of 4 books. Dario's wonderful covered showed a Jack O'Bear in action against the caravan I was with back in the day. You might recognize my first employer, Joh in that scene, along with my first Troll friend XigXag. As a married man I didn't expect to be staring a Jack O'Bear in the face again any time soon. I had young children, a wife, and a job on the road far different from the adventurer's path. My wife has always supported my "hobby", yet I didn't realize how much until she gifted me with the original painting used for the cover of Griffin Mountain about 15 years ago. It sits on the wall of my office and it catches my wary eye every day. I take heed of the original caption at the bottom of the painting, which is "harmony at twilight". Some evil bides its time... I don't know what my life would have been like without Jack O'Bears in it, and oddly enough I don't want to find out.

We can't use art we don't own.

I've played an Issaries Priest most of the my "RQ career", and that includes some VERY old-school hack-and-slash campaigns. Issaries is a cult that has a lot of flexibility as to how you can spend your time. I suppose if all you want to do is sit in a market stall, then yes, you might get a lot of push back and get left behind. On the other hand, my Issaries PC was happy to fight for the team, use my bargaining skills when it was time to parlay, and sell the loot at a greater profit after the killing was done. I also spoke a number of languages, which came in handy as we hit the road. My magic helped guard the camp at night when we thought the heavy stuff might come down. Having someone who is from a cult that "negotiates from a more neutral position" is not a bad thing to have in your back pocket. In my last gaming sessions I played an Issaries merchant enslaved by the Lunars to help build the newest Temple to the Reaching Moon. I didn't just twiddle my thumbs. I put my skills to use. It was a lot of fun. If you have an "issaries" situation you'd like to talk through how best to solve through roleplaying, I'm happy to help. Issaries isn't the greatest cult in the game to play (since I am forced to say that), but it is way up there in the pantheons of legend. Issaries is a Lightbringer, after all. Issaries was there when it mattered the most, and helped get the job done. There's that little thing called "the dawn" that Issaries helped make happen, despite all of Orlanth's screwups.

I must confess I hadn't looked at Traveller Book 7 - Merchant Prince since the late 1980's. I love those little black books. The Merchant Prince trade system spans about 10 pages (little pages at that). I chuckled when I remembered how the trade identification abbreviations sound like items found on a Thai restaurant menu ("Lo Ni Po Ba" for example, is short for Low population, Non-industrial, Poor, and Barren). Anyway, adapting the Merchant Prince system to Glorantha would be fairly easy. If anything it could be even simpler, while also being more granular. By granular, I mean that in traveller you were basically shipping X tons of generic "goods" while in Glorantha we might as well just start with the standard price tables, which deal with specific items. The Trade and Commerce process has to two main activities: calculating the buying cost when you are buying goods, and calculating the selling price when you sell those goods. They have the same modifiers for both calculations. Of note is that with a base buying cost of 4,000 credits, and a base selling price of 5,000 credits, you have a base profit of 25% prior to any buying and/or selling modifiers being applied. The modifiers are basically the tech level, market level, and your personal skills. None of those three things would be difficult to adapt to Glorantha, or RuneQuest in general.

The Arcane Symbol (as it is referred to in the 2nd ed. rules) was drawn by the legendary Gene Day in 1982. It's a subtle detail on the page, but I didn't notice that the word "Handouts" in the header next to the page number had been pasted over the previous header of "Insta-Plots". I had forgotten about this one page diagram which is on page 133. The Insta-Plots diagram allowed you to construct an adventure idea. Of course the irony for me is that when I constructed my first plot it read as "You found something weird which opens a gate to Detroit", and in an instant I was basically home again...

Probably 3 months, since the books have to be bound, then collated, then shipped to the Main warehouse, then to Canada.

While you are always welcome to split hairs, the Bagog cult published in the Cult Compendium was based on the version from White Wolf magazine #22, which is a slightly updated and expanded version of what was originally published in Cults of Terror.

To add further clarity: Here are the "content gaps" between the Glorantha Classics and the RQ Classics: Glorantha Classic V1 (Pavis & Big Rubble) vs. RQ Classic Pavis, and RQ Classic Big Rubble: One page on the Sun Dragon Cult. Glorantha Classic V2 (Griffin Mountain) vs RQ Classic Griffin Mountain: nothing Glorantha Classic V3 (Cult Compendium) vs RQ Classic Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror: The cults of Bagog*, Caladra & Aurelion, Donandar, Geo, Lodril, Mostal, Sun Dragon, and Yelm. Glorantha Classic V4 (Borderlands & Beyond) vs RQ Classic Borderlands, Plunder, and Rune Masters: nothing Thus, it all boils down to 7* cults. All of them are in the Cult Compendium. That PDF is still for sale. The book is for sale in the UK. We have no plans to stop selling the Glorantha Classics PDFs, so the info is "easily available". Lastly, when the massive new Cults books are published for RQG that "7 cult gap" will largely get filled. * Nick has correctly pointed out that Bagog was published in Cults of Terror as well. I used the slightly updated version published in White Wolf magazine. The two versions are basically the same, with just a few small bits added to the latter version.

We are going to be selling the POD books via our website mainly. We are testing the interface now.

You should look at the RQ Classic book descriptions on our website! In particular, we did include the RuneMasters character backgrounds, and the Designer's Notes and such in Griffin Mountain, and also the extra plunder items in Plunder.

The current status is that we have no plans to reprint the Glorantha Classics. We are going to have print versions of the RuneQuest Classics available before the end of 2020. Thus, you will be able to get Pavis, Big Rubble, Griffin Mountain, Borderlands, Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, and a number of other books soon.We are doing the final proofing on the POD process.

If we have a new edition in the works, which is the case with Gaslight, we are not going to prioritize getting an earlier edition of it available via POD. If we currently have a new edition of a book available, like Terror Australis, we are also not going to prioritize doing POD for earlier editions. We have PDFs for sale of many of those older titles, so it's not like the material is unavailable. It's a shame that those PDFs are not very good for printing out, but that's the situation. If you really want a printed copy, I suggest looking on eBay.

If you want to know the safest material to get that isn't going to cause you canonical conundrums, consider consuming just Chaosium RQ material and Moon Design gloranthan publications. Once you have all of that material, we can then chat about other material by other publishers. None of the Chaosium or Moon Design material is hard to get, especially as a PDF. I find myself looking at that material on a somewhat regular basis, and certainly far more often than the rest of the cool stuff I have on the shelves. As always, I never intend to belittle or impugn any other RQ/Gloranthan publications. That's why I am also reluctant to talk about what is canonical. Some people get into heated disagreements about why something isn't, when they think it should be. My reply to that is to use whatever material you feel is best.

Delecti approves of this over-simplification... 😉

Yes, the Roots of Glorantha series of books are one of the rarer and least known about items on the list of Gloranthan Publications. Published in 2007 and 2015, they only contain very early Gloranthan lore, both in terms of when they were written (1966-1976) and the eras of Glorantha they document (early, early stuff). Most of the maps related to these writings ended up in the Greganth Atlas, another very rare item, although not technically one of the Roots of Glorantha series. Each of the 6 RoG books is about 256 pages. The Atlas is about 100 pages. As for the 2007 "Rainbow" version, the contents are basically the same, although I thought we added a bit to Volume VI in the 2015 set that wasn't in the 2007 version. I've added a picture so you can better understand why the 2007 set is called "rainbow". Greg used the standard paper colors available at his local copy shop. Just to be up front about it, Greg originally sold these in 2007 to a very small handful of super scholar-collectors for big $$$. This was at a time when Greg's income was quite low. That's the main reason we did likewise when we offered them as part of the Guide to Glorantha Kickstarter. Greg didn't want us to significantly lower the price he had charged previously.

The HotOE Kickstarter suffered from a number of poor decisions and the problems they created. Yes, vastly undercharging for shipping, especially overseas shipping, was the largest problem, but by no means the only significant problem. Anyway, this new printing of it in a revised format will mainly alleviate the scarcity situation. It's a fantastic campaign, and it shouldn't have to be purchased at collector prices by people who just want to read or play it.

To provide some more info based on the above responses: We chose to get HotOE back into print for a few reasons. First, we were getting asked at least once a week if there we had any spare copies lurking around somewhere. Second, the book was already laid out in InDesign so adjusting the layout, although it took some time, was easier than having to scan, OCR, and re-layout a book from scratch. Thirdly, it's already set up for 7th edition, so nothing to convert. Lastly, while we say it will be at least 2-3 years before it gets a full color treatment, please note the phrase "at least". Alas, it could be longer than that. We will probably print a batch of HotOE for our warehouses for direct sale, and then see how it sells before solely offering it as a POD title. The copies we sell first will probably be hardcover, although for POD we might offer softcover too. We haven't decided on a price just yet, but the books are 368 and 388 pages. We are doing a small bit of checking for typos and such, and then it's off to the printer. If we do a batch print we will probably print it in the US and in Lithuania. As for other older titles, how quickly we get to them depends on a number of factors, largely similar to the ones listed above. There are some that we definitely do not have a good electronic layout file for. Those are potentially a lot more work.

Thank you! I now have the Erasure song I Love to Hate You stuck in my head... 🙂

LATEST NEWS: We are very close to having a Print on Demand (POD) version of Horror on the Orient Express ready. By "very close" I mean in a month or so. It's not going to be a big box full of 6 books and bling. We have redone the interior layout of the FIVE original main books and combined their contents, without cutting anything, into two books. Each of those books is about 360 pages. The first volume is a combination of Book I (Campaign Overview), Book II (Throughs the Alps), and Book V (Strangers on the Train). The second volume is a combination of Book III (Italy) and Book IV (Constantinople). The original Book VI (all the handouts done single sided) hasn't changed, and will be available as an optional purchase. This new "version" is not a full color treatment like you see in our latest books. It's a modest reworking of the original B&W layout, no new art, and a few typos corrected. The full color poster map of the campaign will be available on redbubble.com as well. We'll also have a POD version of the small Traveller's Companion booklet (it's already done). We will do an updated full color version of HotOE some day, much like we did with Masks of Nyarlathotep, but that is far down our production schedule. It's in the queue behind Gaslight, Dreamlands, and Beyond the Mountains of Madness, which means it's at least 2-3 years away. Lastly, we intend to make more older CoC titles available via POD. Unfortunately, that's not always as easy as it sounds.

Goodman Games has shown that there is a healthy market for a game that is as least 10x bigger than ours. What works for D&D doesn't always hold equally true for RQ.

This isn't on our production schedule, and I doubt it will be any time soon. Firstly, we don't have the current bandwidth, so we would have to farm this out. Secondly, farming it out would not be that easy because very few people enjoy converting stat blocks. Thirdly, even if we did farm it out to someone willing to do the work and could do it well, we wouldn't do a single book with basically the whole book done twice. Griffin Mountain would be 500 pages! We would just "dual stat" the book. In the end, the most likely thing to happen would be a volunteer working with Chaosium to convert the stat blocks to RQG, which we could then make available as a free or low cost PDF. We could even do all of them collectively as a POD book. Any volunteers to do the stat conversions?

Masks will get added to Roll20. I do not have an ETA.

It's on Greg's main Dragon Pass map he used in his house campaign too.

For full disclosure, there were points in writing the article that I was an uncertain Rick Meints. 🙂 Greg and Sandy were both very supportive when providing feedback. When I asked Greg about how he approached writing Gloranthan material he kind of leaned in and said in a slightly low voice, "just make it up in a way you find interesting".