Rick Meints

The PDFs were activated for sale last night.

The first five Wyrms Footnotes were $1.50, 6-8 were $1.75, and from 9 onwards having the princely price of $2.25. Thus, you are paying less for the PDFs than you would for the magazine back in the late 70s and early 80s. As a side note, $2.25 in 1980 is the equivalent of about $7.00 now.

Being reprints, none of this is "new". Some people have sought to get a hold of older out-of-print material. This project makes about 500 pages of such material available again for $25. Bits and pieces, and sometimes large portions of the material were reprinted later, such as in Wyrm's Footprints, but that too is long out of print. Some of the material has never been reprinted until now. We're talking about over 100 "articles". That's a lot to slice and dice and figure out whether the info was used again, or is currently in print. As has been said, a few of the articles ended up in the RQ Companion, which was out of print for over 35 years, up until about a year or so ago. Ultimately, nobody NEEDS this material to play a Gloranthan game, unless you happened to only have a copy of White Bear & Red Moon from 1976. Then you'd find the rules clarifications and errata for the game VERY useful. Other than that, this is just a wonderful set of material from the late 70s and early 80s, when The Chaosium was a new little upstart company launching its first war games and first roleplaying game. I love how they often devote several pages to current and forthcoming products and their status. If you have ever heard people joke about Chaosium and the phrase "next year", this is where the phrase originated and became infamous. It's where Greg himself famously joked "Never heard of it" after several years of providing updates on his forthcoming HeroQuest RPG.

Something MAY happen with back issues of Tales of the Reaching Moon, but there have been some delays.

Available now as PDFs and via Print on Demand. A couple of covers are not shown because they didn't fit in well and were, in a word, bland. Individual PDFs will be $2.49 each. The PDF bundle price for all 14 issues will be $24.99. We have not figured out the POD prices, but they would be a fair bit more.

Greg contributed a series of campaign write-ups in the Wild Hunt APA. For those of you unfamiliar with the nature of an Amateur Press Association publication, basically you could be a contributing member or just a subscriber. They were published monthly, and would contain 100-150 pages of material submitted by the contributing members. Being before the internet, and even email, each contributor would type up their own pages on a stencil, and then mail them to the main editor. In the case of the Wild Hunt, that was Glen Blacow and Mark Swanson. They would use all of the stencils submitted to use a mimeograph machine to make copies, and compile an issue. They also added a table of contents and front cover to each issue. Each contributor wrote on average between 2-12 pages. Not only would each contributor write up some new material for whatever game(s) they were interested in, they would also devote a lot of their page space, sometimes almost all of it, to commenting on what other people had published in recent previous issues. Because they precede home computers, at least prior to some point in the 1980s, and the fact that maybe 50-200 copies of each issue were made, they are rather rare. They also don't particularly stand up well to the ravages of time either, plus of course many copies have been lost to people throwing them away at some point over the last 40 years. Most of the authors got into the habit of giving a title to their regular contributions, and Greg called his "Dragons Past" and "Son of Sartar". I am still researching the exact number off issues Greg contributed to the Wild Hunt, but it is probably at least 6-12 times, mainly between 1978 and 1980. As has been said, some of these WH articles were later published in Wyrms Footnotes and Different Worlds. I believe his 4 Son of Sartar write-ups appeared in issues #42, 45, 46, and 47 of the Wild Hunt. I am only certain that Dragons Past #3 was published in WH #38. Fortunately, I believe we have all of the Dragons Past and Son of Sartar articles in the archives. Stay tuned for more on what we may do with them.

Perhaps you might want to rephrase your original question if you would like us to answer it.

What leapt to mind for me was having someone use the Dinosaur as the animal for a bound allied spirit.

Depending on your style of play, Glorantha tends to be a "cash poor" economy compared to many other game worlds. Some of the rarest Gloranthan artifacts would be worth a very high "price" to a number of groups who would benefit the most from attaining said artifact. An artifact treasured by the Lunars could command a princely reward. Possibly a large estate, title, and income, not to mention favors from those in power in the Empire. The same could be said for something valuable to the Lhankor Mhy cult, who could offer a variety of training, assistance, and such as "payment in kind". When you speak of prices equal to a king's ransom therein shows the only possible source for reward, someone, or some group holding great power. Other than the dwarves, who tend to horde various metals and such, I doubt hardly anyone would have 300,000L in cash or bullion. As for the Ernaldan Mirror, I would think a deal made with the High Priestess of that cult could involve great rewards, although it wouldn't be 15,000 gold wheels.

I would try contacting Bill Keyes, Ray Turney, Steve Perrin, and/or Charlie Krank. They would remember the most and can be contacted via email. Some of the others may be as well, but I have not had contact with them.

Chaosium has a number of RQ projects in the works, including books on the West, the East, and Trolls to name but a few. We tend not to talk about forthcoming books much until we have a complete first draft of the book submitted. We don't want to set false expectations for when things will be published. We also prefer to not have continual/regular questions like "when will X book be done". If we knew, we would announce it, as opposed to just having to give vague answers. As has been stated in this thread, Chaosium is reliant on the desires of our work for hire author pool and the projects they want to work on. Most of the authors have only agreed to take on projects because we did not demand a firm deadline for manuscript delivery. The only in-house authors we have are Jeff and Jason. Jeff (as an author) is mostly working on Gods of Glorantha, and Jason wears many hats besides "author". We want to communicate, and we love announcing new books as and when we can. Usually, the hardest question to answer for any specific book is "when?". We don't enjoy being vague or non-committal, but we just don't know when a book will be ready until the book has gone to layout.

Yes, David Millians is heading up the Kralorela project. We have not had a final draft submitted yet, so no ETA on when it will be published, although probably not in 2020. Last I saw it was 150,000 words, or about 200 pages in MS Word.

I believe we are staying the course on the size of the Rubble, as per P:GtA. That's how Chaosium's documented it since the 1980s, since the Pavis and Big Rubble boxed sets came out. We prefer not top label things as "canonical". Use whatever works best for your campaign.

The Nochet book won't be printed this year. That much I can say. It's a 2021 product at the earliest.

I was recently asked about these, so I thought I would post the info I provided: Ian Thomson, assisted by several other authors, wrote a number of expansions for topics related to the Pavis and Big Rubble RQ supplements, each batch of which got called a "Companion". They are: Volume 1 is in Ye Booke of Tentacles 3, and is about 40 pages of material. Published in 2000. Volume 2 is a whole book called The Masks of Pavis, and is 135 pages. Published in 2001. Volume 3 is a whole book called The Legacy of Pavis, and is 130 pages. Published in 2002. Volume 4 is a whole book called The Shadows of Pavis, and is 138 pages. Published in 2002. Volume 5 is a whole book called Beyond Pavis, and is 134 pages. Published in 2004. These are not to be confused with what appeared in Tradetalk magazine issues #8 and #9, which were called Pavis and Big Rubble Special Part I and Part 2. That material was written by Ian Thomson and crew as well. Alas, Ian has largely retired from the internet these days.

Yes, I posted just an abridged summary. The basic approach is once you have 25% in the skill you can cast 1 point RUNE spells, at 50% you can cast 2 point RUNE spells, and then at 75% you can cast 3 point RUNE spells.

This is from Greg's Son of Sartar #3 contribution to Wild Hunt #46 in 1979 "RUNEQUEST doesn't have a magical system for mages, just a very well developed clerical system." (Warren James) METHODS OF WIZARDRY There are three general methods of Sorcery. To make it fit within a conception of the previously presented theistic form of Gloranthan worship it is useful to envision the individual human being as the deity which is worshipped or invoked to perform. This fits in perfectly well with Gloranthan mythology and cosmology wherein people are all descendants of Grandfather Mortal who was created with bit of all of the deities in the cosmos, therefore being a microcosm of the universe himself. The three methods are: 1. GENERAL SORCERY – In this manner a wizard may attempt to cast a spell using his own innate skills at that particular magic. This is a Knowledge Skill which must be learned for at least 25% before it can be used alone. 2. CEREMONIAL MAGIC – In this a magician is able to reproduce a magical act by use of sympathetic magic and other skills. It requires props and time. Ceremonial Magic can be used to cast a spell or to bolster one cast by Sorcery. It is a Knowledge Skill. 3. DEMONOLOGY – This is summoning a spirit or demon or god and engaging it in spirit combat to force it to teach magic to the individual. This is essentially a way of learning magic without books or reading rolls.

Comparing the output for any roleplaying game against the output for D&D is always going to come out the same way. D&D in all its editions has wildly outsold all its competitors. It's pretty much had an 80-90% market share for all or most of its lifetime. TSR became a very large company compared to any other RPG company. By larger, I mean larger by a factor of 10. A few things on product output: Chaosium produced 23 RQ products between 1978 and 1983, of which 21 were Gloranthan. (The wargames WB&RM and Nomad Gods not included) Avalon Hill produced 29 RQ products between 1984 and 1995, of which 23 were Gloranthan (6 of the RQ products were mostly reprinted/updated material) Mongoose produced 63 RQ products between 2006 and 2011, of which about 30 were Gloranthan. (I excluded French language titles) The Design Mechanism published a lot of great RQ material, did not publish any Gloranthan material for RuneQuest Since 2016 Chaosium has resumed publishing RQ and has published 6 RQ products for Glorantha. (I include the Sea Cave and the Glorantha Sourcebook) You can slice and dice and categorize those products slightly differently, but that's what was produced. Of course, the NUMBER of products is less telling than the page count produced. I have that tallied somewhere, but that seems a bit overkill for this conversation. In the end, we are trying to produce quality Gloranthan material for RQ on a regular basis, with the goal of getting to at least 6 RQ products per year. I believe 2020 will see a number of great RQ products come out.

https://www.chaosium.com/the-smoking-ruin-other-stories-pdf/ please look under "Other Details". The page count is 192 pages. We try to include the page count for all our products.

Joerg, When's the last time we didn't have stitched binding for one of our books like this? All our books for the last several years, if they are 128 pages or more, have a stitched binding.

The main maps are full pages with no background towards the end of the book.

Ever so close. Ever so close. Likely a day or two away.

Getting the first two volumes of the Gloranthan Classics onto Lulu isn't that simple if you want the art to print out well. We don't have a print quality PDF of those two books because they were done when printers prepared film to print the books, and they did a lot of art prep for the film. The PDFs look ok on screen but many of the pictures don't print that nicely.

Redoing the layout on 10 volumes of the Stafford Library in Microsoft Word is far from insurmountable, it's just a matter of time. Even if it is only 4 hours per book, that's a solid week of someone's time, though.