Rick Meints

Greg didn't always GM the Chaosium in-house campaign usually played at Chaosium HQ. I really doubt he played AND GM'd in the same session. The game logs don't represent a single session of play, necessarily. They might easily have spanned 5-10 play sessions. I don't know, as there is no indication on the papers. The PC Errol Flynn's name morphed over time from Errol Flynn to Errol Silksword and then Eril Silksword. I have no idea why. I am just going by what is written on the pieces of paper. Greg tried to hold onto the Character Sheets between sessions. If somebody showed up to play they probably just grabbed one of the character sheets available and played it, as opposed to slowing things down by rolling up a new character. I get a strong sense people were sometimes not that precious about somebody else playing their character while they weren't there, at least in some cases. These sheets are all hand-written, and by the looks of them they were done quickly. Greg wasn't big on extensive note taking. He probably had somebody else at the table fill things in. Mis-spellings are fairly rife. Also, drugs and/or alcohol were often involved. We have a memo from Greg to the players in the campaign about cleaning up after themselves, especially their beer cans. In the end, we can't ask Greg, so it's mainly down to what the players remember. Fortunately, most of them are still alive.

They should be for sale this month.

All three of those softcover books are already in our US and Poland warehouses, and they are only days away from being in the UK warehouse. I do not have an exact ETA on the Australian warehouse, just yet.

As I was searching for something else in the "Archives" I came across another RuneQuest GM sheet summary of player information: Charlie played: Alebard (Sartar, Priest Humakt); Errol Flynn (Sartar, Lord Humakt); Kragg (Sazdorf, Priest Kyger Litor) Ken Kaufer played Londra (Colymar, Humakt) Mark Chilenskas played: Elysia (Tarsh, Humakt Priestess); Valaray (Holy Country, Chalana Arroy) Sherman Kahn played: Naimless (Colymar, Humakt Priest); Urgrurl (Prax, Baboon, Daka Fal initiate) Hal Moe played: Asborn (Colymar, Orlanth initiate) Al Dewey played: Fred (Sartar, Humakt); Apatiar (Sartar, Orlanth) Greg Stafford played: Bokaz (Troll, Humakt initiate)

Reviews on DTRPG are pretty rare. We've had our most popular core items attract very few reviews. Some people at least rate the item with X number of stars, but they often don't write a review, and usually the few reviews we do get are very short in length.

DTRPG does not share much customer data with us, so we have little to share with our Community content publishers. Most initial sales tend to come from people getting a DTRPG email about new products they are interested in, followed by posts on social media (mainly our Ab Chaos newsletter and Facebook).

The hottest lists are calculated on $$ of sales divided by the number of days it has been up for sale.

Greg's daughter told me about a conversation she had with her father many years ago. She told him that she hadn't realized how poor they were when she was a kid. Greg's response was "then I guess I did a good job as a parent." In Greg's "Editorial Rambling" in WF1 he wasn't using hyperbole when he talked about them being so poor that they lived mainly off of vegetables grown in their garden, which is why it ended up in that Latin phrase. Greg always enjoyed gardening. There are glimpses of that in his writings about the Aldryami.

Chaosium's 30th Anniversary was in 2005. Founded in 1975, we are celebrating the 45th anniversary of The Chaosium this year, and are looking forward to our 50th in 2025. Typo! indeed. 🙂

We worked with Shannon to update the Chaosium history for his Designers & Dragons series. That goes into far more detail than the RPG.net article cited above. One of the big limitations is that many people don't want to go on the record and bad mouth other people in the industry in general, and in their own company in particular. That applies to people even if they are no longer employed by that company or even when they are no longer in the industry. Because I have a tremendous curiosity and interest in the history of The Chaosium I have tracked down and chatted with many former Chaosium people and freelancers who worked on projects back in the early days. Lots of great stories, although I'm not so sure they want them all in print.

That would be cool. Alas, a lot of stories got lost when Greg passed away. Not sure what you mean by "secret" history.

Side note: For many years we thought this manuscript was lost, as we only had photocopies of bits and pieces of it. We found the full original manuscript in late 2017.

We publish 13th Age Glorantha under a license that does not cover Community Content.

We are entirely dependent on freelance writers submitting projects. At this time no freelance writers have been submitting us any projects.

The PDF of the book will be available for purchase any day now. The book has not gone to the printer just yet, but it should by the end of the month.

Most RPG companies go for a specific page count when they do an RPG book, so if someone submits a page more material than will fit into the layout of a 128 page book, most companies would trim something. At The Chaosium we don't tend to do that as much as many larger companies would. If you are wondering what page counts are common, it is based on the magical rule of 32. If you look at the biggest RPG publisher's material they tend to be 32, 64, 96, 128, 160, 196, 224 or 256 pages. Those get you the best printing prices from big printing companies. For POD that is less important and I just recommend you stick with a page count that is a multiple of 4. For PDFs it technically doesn't matter at all.

The Holy Country article in the RQ Companion is still really cool. It's not like the map was redrawn. The Guide to Glorantha and the Esrolia: Land of 10K Goddesses books were written by both Jeff and Greg so I don't expect them to be "superseded". Of course, as we continue exploring and documenting Glorantha lots of little things get tweaked along the way.

I'm not sure. I hadn't considered that. I think that it is just units sold recently, but can't be sure.

I liked this book. It's a good size (neither too small nor too large). I like the art. I like the boxed text. A few small layout tips: Page 4 at the bottom I would add an extra paragraph return before the third bullet item too it is all on the next page, not split like that. Page 6, in the first column all of the bulleted items have an odd line spacing on them, which should be reduced. Page 7, the first column ends with a single line of text, which should be bumped to the second column. This can be controlled by adjusting the widow/orphan settings for the style. Page 14, the second column bullet text has the same extra line spacing problem as page 6. I like the picture on page 16, but it seems rather large, especially compared to the other image sizes. Page 30, first column, the second bullet under Encounters has a very awkwardly auto-justified first line. I would put a space in between one of the words with the / between them to potentially solve that. Page 38, try putting a bit of space between the bullet text and the boxed text in column one. I look forward to your next publication. Keep up the good work.

Unfortunately, DrivethruRPG doesn't agree that you have "sold" 271 copies of your Family History PDF. DTRPG does not count free downloads as "sales", at least not for the medal calculations. As we have politely pointed out, while you are welcome to set an item as "pay what you want", you should be prepared for half of the people who "buy" it to pay nothing. That's the case for your book. I looked at a few of our free download items on DTRPG and none of them have a medal next to them, even though we know they have been downloaded hundreds or even thousands of times.

As found on the internet: So, how many copies do you have to sell to get a medal? Copper – 50+ Silver – 100+ Electrum – 250+ Gold – 500+ Platinum – 1000+ Mithril – 2000+ Adamantine – 5000+

I have been pondering Print Options, and it turns out that a 520+ page book could be done. If we did these as a two book set I think the binding would hold up better though. An additional discrete page number could be added to each page so you could more simply turn to the page you want. An index could also be added to the end of each book.

I just happened to find a player/character list while I was looking for something totally unrelated. Astrid = Rory, Jhorkel = Rory, Genevieve Bujold Priestess of Three Feathered Rivals = Ray, Genevieve Laurin Initiate of Orlanth and Polestar = Ray, Hannibal Lee Initiate of Babeester Gor = Chris, Aciling Initiate of Humakt = Charlie, Mudd Initiate of Orlanth = Lynn, Worg (Mudd's wardog) = Lynn. second log found: Naimless, Priest of Humakt = Sherman, Naimless Initiate of Chalana Arroy = Sherman, Mikhail initiate of Orlanth = Rory, Sevil... initiate of Orlanth = Rory, Wyvark initiate of Orlanth = Dan Pierson, Varac initiate of Humakt = Dan Pierson, Widow Flynn initiate of Humakt = Charlie, Alered initiate of Humakt = Charlie, Asborn initiate of Orlanth = Hal Moe, Valaray priestess of Chalana Arrory = Hal Moe. Errol Flynn was played by Mark Chilenskas on occasion. Dobrag was played by Sean Summers NOTE: It seems to have been quite common for each player to run two characters.

In the Company archives we have many of the original layout boards used to lay out the magazine. They would type up single columns at a time, cut them out, and pasted them onto cardstock that has a blue grid on it.

That duplication of paragraphs is exactly how the original publication was done. Seeing this (very understandable and appropriate) question asked motivates me to explain how these PDFs were created. Every page you see in the PDFs went through the following process: I own a complete set of the original Wyrms Footnotes magazines. In my 40 years of collecting, if I acquired an issue that was in a better condition than the issue I currently had in my collection I would swap it out for the better one, so all the magazines in my collection all in Excellent or near mint condition. Why do I mention that? Mainly because I have access to a great paper copy to scan in on Chaosium's large format scanner. Every page from all 14 issues of the magazine were scanned. I used a program called FineReader 12 by ABBYY software to do that scanning, and straightened pages that were crooked during initial cleanup. The end product was every page as its own TIF file. I then used photoshop to clean up each page individually. That's why the background is a solid white instead of dingy gray. I centered the text on some pages. I made the art look crisper. I brightened the covers and removed the occasional scratch or dent that blemished them (my 40+ year-old originals are not in pristine mint condition). Once I had all the pages for an issue done, I would then collate and convert those images in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Once collated into a single PDF for the issue, I OCR'd the pages so they are text searchable. I added links onto the Table of Contents page so you can click and go to that page. I also added bookmarks for each article. The finished product is what you are able to purchase on the Chaosium website. Any big errors in the originals were not corrected. If I deleted the duplicated paragraphs on page 35 of WF4 that page would have just been blank, save for the one small piece of art. Thus, I didn't recreate the layout in MS Word and InDesign like I did for most of the RuneQuest Classics. For Wyrms Footnotes I scanned the originals, cleaned up the images, collated them, and added links and bookmarks. Full blown layout takes a LOT longer.