Rick Meints

The POD versions are the latest and most up to date.

1. I'm not really up to speed on what other companies are doing with the ORC license. It's a fast moving target. We will certainly be one of the first, or in the first batch of releases. 2. I don't have any info/update to provide on when a draft license will be available. I think April is the earliest to expect to see something, but it could be later than that, depending on how the various reviews go.

The thickness of the book in the image is too thin. That looks more like a 128 page book, and the latest edition of BRP is far bigger than that. I shall let our 3D modeling people know they might want to adjust that in future renders, as applicable.

Marketing prefers to do that now.

Plan on about $40, not including any shipping costs.

There will be a free SRD related PDF for BRP with no art, etc. That's part of the ORC license announcement. We will also be selling a hardcover full color BRP book with color art (PDF option as well).

I saw that on eBay and after some pondering realized what probably happened. These are real Partha minis (spaceships). That is a real Ral Partha RQ minis blister pack. Somebody at the manufacturing site probably grabbed that blister pack to do some ad hoc packaging for someone so the minis wouldn't be rattling around loosely. That said, this isn't some unreleased set of RuneQuest minis, a prototype, or similar. There is no product number or description on the package. This isn't much different than me taking a Chaosium box, putting something random in it, and then handing it to someone. This is kind of interesting and a little bit funny, but it isn't really RuneQuest related.

To be clear, buying the previous edition of a book does not automatically mean you will be getting a new edition of a book for free as some sort of upgrade. People who bought RQ Classic did not get RQG for free, just like people who bought CoC 6th edition did not get CoC 7th edition for free when it came out. Sure, small tweaks to an existing book mean you get an updated PDF. That doesn't apply to this project. Unless I am missing some perks you get on DTRPG, like you have store credit or similar.

Name dropper... 🙂 Chaosium wants to get all of our product lines on Roll20, it's just a matter of time and resources.

I'd considering buying the PDF from Chaosium when it comes out and then get that money as a discount coupon when the printed book becomes available later this year. Best of both worlds.

Yes, but it is a long list. It also depends on what source files we have to create the POD version. Some PDFs are ok when you look at them on the screen, but not so great when printed out.

Funnily enough, if that tool became available for Chaosium to use, we probably would use it in some capacity, at least internally. What I would hate though, is if a bot went to some pirate pdf site used all those pirated pdfs to scrape our actual content.

I'll admit that what the bot scraped and collated was vaguely entertaining. I don't know if it is "reasonably well versed" as opposed to it having a script that goes to websites via some set web search order and then grabs related content that it throws into its word blender. Yes, the Digest (and most forums) was full of lots of speculation, contradiction, and debate. When people post stuff, you pretty much know that they are probably doing just that. When a bot is basically being asked to scrape "facts" off the web and put some smooth phrasing around it I don't know what level of trust people are placing in it being factual. It will be interesting to watch how much it improves over time. My main concern is that it will somehow get access to all of our published books and just scrape content from those and rephrase it just enough so it doesn't look like they are plagiarizing from our books. If it gets to that point some people may stop buying our books/PDFs because they can just ask a bot to provide them the exact same info. For example, you ask it what taverns and inns are in Pavis and it regurgitates a list of what you would find in the Pavis supplement.

That chatGPT "word salad" might be interesting to read if you know nothing about Glorantha and don't care if it is totally incorrect. Otherwise it is a complete waste of time.

FOES is one of the few RQ2 titles that didn't get re-released as part of the RQ Classic Kickstarter back in 2015. The main reasons were that it is just sets of computer generated stats, has very very little Gloranthan content, and would have been very hard to scan/OCR/clean up. Originals are also available on the used game market for reasonable amounts of money ($20 to $40 on average), at least as far as collector prices go.

We have a few spare sets that we printed for the Kickstarter in case of damage/loss/defects. We are willing to sell the 3 volume set for $1000, just like on the Kickstarter. We are not going to make it available on DTRPG, nor as PDFs.

correct

It is the 2011 version, as is.

Both Sides of the Table: From the Player perspective, most of your focus is upon improving your one character. You learn new ways to be more effective in any situation or conflict because you have the benefit of what is on a few sheets of paper, possibly even just one side of a single sheet of paper to understand. While there are a LOT of possibilities for what direction you can take to improve your character and their effectiveness, it's still rather focused once you have rolled up your PC, picked a cult or two, and have various starting stats and skills to build up. From the Gamemaster perspective, you usually cannot focus on NPCs to that level of detail. You have many more to potentially understand and deploy during a scenario, let alone a whole campaign. PCs learn and improve the nuances of their one character over many sessions, while the GM might only have a Zorak Zoran Rune Lord and entourage for use in one encounter/battle, so understanding every detail about them is a mighty big task. The main antagonist can be better understood if they survive longer over a story arc, but they are probably the exception. Thus, in the end, a GM can't stay on top of 20+ NPCs if they try to understand them and utilize each of them like a PC would their one character. That amount of homework would be beyond the time, and probably interest, of 99.9% of GMs. Thus, the use of shortcuts. Nick B. summarizes them quite well. I may very well be a lousy GM, but when I have GM'd a game of RQ, D&D, or similar I pretty much apply those shortcuts to all of those systems. I am happy if the scenario has a few basic tips, usually a sentence or two, on "the tactics of the bad guys", and that usually suffices for me. As always, that is just my style and may not be your style of GM'ing. If it is not, more power to you, and I would never want to impart the impression or judgement that you are doing anything wrong. It isn't, it's just different. As for monsters, and how many are available in official supplements, I kind of see it as a "quantity vs. quality" situation. We have focused on fewer monsters that have more detail to them. Many of them could even be playable as PCs. Having Quantity AND Quality is not so easy to achieve, especially for a smaller game company. Every time somebody says "D&D has X so why don't you", I am mindful that WOTC has 100X the resources we do to devote to their game.

I'm sorry, but I never intended to discourage anyone in any way from wanting new books. I want new books. I'm quite sure you do to. Please reread what I said, such as "My strong belief is that having to know everything before playing anything is fairly self-defeating." That isn't telling you to not want new books. There's also: "many gaming groups could easily get by with starting with just a single book or two of cults". Please notice the word "starting". That is my advice to start with one or two books and go from there. I am not saying or implying anyone should only buy one or two books in the end, just at the start. In the end, I standby what I said, and so I will restate it another way to hopefully add clarity: I can't imagine a campaign that would require every cult book before getting started. You certainly wouldn't need to be familiar with all 100+ cults to get started. Build up your knowledge over time. There are many people, myself included, who look forward to getting every volume of the Cults series, regardless of whether I will use each and every one of them in play.

I would imagine that many gaming groups could easily get by with starting with just a single book or two of cults. Which one(s) would depend on the approximate nature and location of their campaign. It's pretty safe to say you don't need much if any info on the Sea Gods if you are adventuring in Pavis, nor would you need Western choices if playing in Sartar. If you aren't based in the Lunar empire you probably wouldn't need a Lunar Cults book, etc. My strong belief is that having to know everything before playing anything is fairly self-defeating. That would be like having to read and understand everything in the Guide to Glorantha before playing Apple Lane. I get that many people want to know a lot because there's a lot of cool info to read, but most of it doesn't have to used in playing a game or campaign.

I always feel the need to caution people from jumping on any pre-order offer. We announce games to distribution 6 months or more before the item is released. Even if we ship to the Distributor that store uses to get their stock, it is going to take a while for that Distributor to get the new item, get it into their system for sales to game shops, then those shops have to order, and then they have to get the items shipped to the store. Just because a game becomes available to a Distributor on Fictiontember 1, they may not trickle down to game shops for a month or more. We have no control over how nimble a distributor is, nor how quickly game shops then order it. Chances are, if you want to purchase it as soon as you can and get the item in your hands, ordering it on Chaosium.com is your best bet. (and you get a free PDF of that physical product).

Layout hadn't begun on the books (Prosopaedia being the exception, but unaffected) when the decision was made to switch from a slipcase set of 3 or so books to smaller page count books sold individually. Thus, little layout was scrapped.

When I made the first draft of the auction item list I did indeed start from my master collector's list of everything Chaosium has published going back to 1975. That master list also includes some notes on things that were cancelled because people occasionally ask about them, especially if those items were advertised as in the works, or were sometimes assigned a product number. I went through and bolded the items that we were actually going to auction and didn't delete many items from the master list. I thought stating clearly and simply that only the items in bold were going to be auctioned was sufficient. Unfortunately, that message seems to have caused confusion. Since getting that feedback, I have eliminated all the items not being auctioned from the updated auction catalog that will be available soon. The full catalog has pictures of each item. I have included the first few pages of the catalog below, which has just a list of the items actually in the auction before the picture pages. There is one other reason of note for why I included a more complete master list than just will be auctioned. We get asked during the auction about different editions or printings of items that had multiple editions or printings. More specifically, how can you tell the differences between them. The complete master list helps to do that. Some people even just like reading the list and learning about cancelled projects. I certainly do. 2023 Auction Catalog-p1.pdf2023 Auction Catalog-p2.pdf2023 Auction Catalog-p3.pdf