Rick Meints

I'm not a big fan of so many threads, and find them to fragment the discussions on the book, but will happily go along with whatever all the reading group prefers. I noticed that this central topic for the week quickly dried up though once the specific topic ones started.

The Major Cultures section of the book had some debates concerning how big to have the cultural distribution maps. We tried them spanning all three columns, which made the few text entries easier to read, but that left little other room on the page for text. Also, the relatively little info on the maps, great as it is, didn't really impart more info when enlarged. I also really like the population boxes. A lot of "how many people could this area support" discussions went into the numbers, and it was something that Greg had spent quite some time on many years ago, including for the Genertela: CotHW boxed set. The Hsunchen section always starts a pronunciation debate (I usually say SUN-chen). Laubenstein's B&W drawings are very detailed. One thing that struck me is that many of the humans portrayed are not particularly tall in stature, which goes against a common RPG trope. The art direction grey boxed text really helps with each illustration. Because many of the ills are full page in nature we didn't want to shrink them to put the text below the picture. The art direction boxed text is also vastly edited down in content. Many illustrations involved Jeff writing pages of information, including many hyperlinks to websites with inspirational images. I think the art notes and early sketches could fill a 128 page book all on their own. For the Doraddi, a culture I knew little about, I fell prey to the temptation to spend more time reading the text than getting pages laid out. I probably pondered the "We Tried That Already" boxed text for about an hour. I got to use one of our favorite Lisa Free illustrations in the Praxian section. While we tried to re-use art very sparingly, some art from decades ago is just "too right" to not include. That Morokanth on page 26 is definitely one of those. We knew that the incomplete list of Independent minor tribes would get challenged for leaving someone's favorite out, but even at 800 pages we knew the book couldn't contain all the Gloranthan info created over 45 years. The Praxian pic on page 28 certainly put to rest the "Praxians are Native Americans" trope. The Orlanthi section also made me pause several times as I read and reread the text. I had never realized that 5x more Orlanthi live in Ralios than in Dragon Pass! until I remembered the Dragonkill. Getting the best size for the picture spanning pages 34-35 wasn't easy. Putting it on only one page only would make it too small, and much larger would have only left room for the larger than average art notes. The Pelorian section also brought me a number of revelations, but that's for next week...

I totally agree that the text on the map on page 19 is very hard to read due to its small size. One problem with creating the high resolution PDFs is that the file size gets very large. We had a number of complaints about over 500MB file sizes.

Can we please get back to talking about the Design Notes.

Here are my thoughts on the Guide. I decided to focus more on what was going through my mind as I did the 800 pages of layout, while also bringing up some "how things developed" notes. Doing the layout was something I truly enjoyed, even though it took far longer than some other projects. Credits Page: We always fret over the credits, mainly with the fear of accidentally omitting someone who should have been included. One of the reasons we chose the Calicos picture for this page, along with being awesome, is that it allowed for text to be on top of it that was readable, while also not covering too much of the picture. It also harkens to the herculean effort involved in putting the volumes together. The Lhankor Mhy protective phrasing at the bottom is something we always want to include, although we don't always customize it for each book. We also usually debate having alternate valid spellings for Lhankor and Lankhor, if only just to see if it sparks some debate. :-) P2-4: For the uber list of credits we fretted mainly over forgetting to include someone, or misspelling their name (which happened). We had to wait on compiling these credits until the very end because some backers were quite late in letting us know what name to use for them (via the backer survey). 1300 backers still amazes us. Many thanks. The top backers were on page 4, and we rounded out the page with a "festive" picture to help capture the festive mood we were in. While it is a recycled picture from one of the HQ Sartar books, we didn't hesitate to use it again here. Filling 750 pages of text with all new art was too daunting for the budget. TOC: Such a span of info was impressive. We would have preferred to have all of the continent of Genertela in the same volume, but the amount of info was way too much to make that work. In one way, the approach we took makes you want to keep going on into volume two and not see the two books as easily separate. FOREWARD: Greg wrote his foreward like a real pro and with plenty of time to spare. He asked us for feedback, but we loved it as is. I always love historical perspectives from authors. Seeing the date of 2012 makes me feel that these last 5 years have gone by in a blink... P7: The World of Glorantha map has a wonderful 3D effect which isn't always easy to achieve. Pamaltela looks massive when compared to Genertela. I like the short overview text at the bottom of the page, although balancing those three columns was not an easy task. INTRODUCTION: Once I forgive myself for not centering the H in the drop cap at the beginning I always enjoy this section. Much of the text has been slightly updated from previous publications, and still does the job quite well. I especially like the "Life and Death" info. The cosmology map on page 10 is something I frequently open to when explaining "what is Glorantha" to newcomers who stop by the booth at conventions. It captures how different it is quite well, and quickly. COINS OF GLORANTHA: This special page was something we wanted to really help set the tone of the book with. It expands what was known before, and in a very visual way. For a while we debated making the coins look more metallic, but "metallic" colors are actually rather tough to achieve if you aren't using photographs of real metals. I love the Troll Bolgs having bite marks in them. We debated what weight scale to use (metric/imperial/other) but our imperialistic metallurgic urges won out in the end. More on these coins in another forthcoming announcement... HARREK and JAR-EEL: Doing a new picture of such iconic persons is always daunting. Rick Perry channeled a bit of Lucy Lawless in this picture. We don't normally prefer to split pictures over two pages, but we wanted this one as big as we could get it, while still leaving room for the sidebar art text boxes. BONES and CRYSTALS: These are two of my favorite bits of what Gloranthan geology is different to the real world. These sorts of touches are elegant, detailed, and make gaming in glorantha all the more fun. In the crystals text we mention Falangian Diamonds... (great blurry bit of Glorantha I like being blurry)

The printed versions of the Guide have the same contents. We only updated the credits related pages. As for the PDFs, of course there are a number of versions of the PDF, going back to before the Guide was printed. The most up to date version of the PDFs is on Chaosium.com Anyone who has purchased the PDFs can get the latest copy there, although you will have to have an account set up on Chaosium.com, and you may also have to have Dustin add the PDFs to your list of previous purchases. We have records for who purchased the PDFs on Glorantha.com, but we did not automatically add them onto chaosium.com

My RQ2 character never used his Map Making Skill very much, despite it being included on the standard character sheet. Regardless, I never felt the need to make a cartography joke out of the title of the game. As with any game, there will always be a few skills many people seldom use, but some people love. It all depends on your campaign and your playing style. I played an Issaries merchant who relied very much on Evaluate Treasure, Bargaining, and similar. Some of the other players at the table couldn't have cared less about those skills.

The original shipping estimate for the boxed game is August, 2017, and we are still on track for that date.

I chose that name only because it sounds a lot like Taylor...

Actually, you are Talar, an outer atomic explorer, who crash lands in Prax centuries after your journey began. Your companions have their INT fixed and become herd men. You escape the baboons at Monkey Ruins, then you ride off with a beautiful herd girl. As you ride along the coast you recognize an oddly reassembled statue from your "Godlearner" era, allowing you to suddenly realize you're home, and that those bastards blew it all to hell...

We have included that article in this version. Plus I got permission from John T. Sapienze Jr. to include his review article. Those will be in the revised version due out shortly.

All of the above two sets of edits have been entered. The extra text in the intros is text Bill Keyes wrote, but it got cut from the final product. Thanks for all these typo catches.

Chaosium has been having discussions with our licensees about getting the game translated into other languages, including Japanese, German, French and Spanish, to name a few. We are very open to working with game companies to license foreign translations of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and its supplements.

The word count is only used for approximately estimating page count. It is an average. It is a guideline. If you have a project that requires a large series of maps then we might try to shoot for a lower word count. What would be helpful of course, would be a submission that details how many pages of handouts might be included. Once again, a larger number of handouts, say 8 pages worth, would be great to know of at the start so we can possibly shoot for a lower word count. Thus, if you are predicting 8 pages of handouts, letting us know that is better saying 500 words on the handouts. Many handouts have far fewer words on them than a normal page of text. You may be wondering why we prefer books with page counts that are multiples of 32. The simple reason is that you get the best prices for printing large numbers of books with those page counts. Print on Demand is very different when it comes to the size of paper used during printing. The paper size used is basically the size requested (A4, US Letter, etc.). Industrial sized printing presses, the ones used to print 1000's of books at a time, use much larger rolls of paper. After printing that paper is folded and trimmed into 32 page "gathers". If you print a book that is 34 pages in length on a big printing press they will print a 32 page gather and then have to work with a smaller, harder to handle two pages tacked onto the end during binding. That is almost as much work as doing a 64 page book which has two 32-page gathers. You may have noticed that some Chaosium books have a few pages of adverts in the back while other Chaosium books have none. Yes, that is sometimes how we get a 124 page product up to the preferred printing length of 128 pages. (32 x 4)

Harald, It was sent to your gmail address. The one that ends in 1700.

Sorry, I put up an interim version of the Print and Play. The full version is now up on BackerKit.

Yes, but doing that is not a priority.

I have answered this question a few times on other forum threads, but here it is in more detail: There are 4 volumes in the Moon Design Publications "Gloranthan Classics" series: Pavis & Big Rubble (1999), Griffin Mountain (2001), Cult Compendium (2002), and Borderlands & Beyond (2005). There are no plans to do any more volumes in that series. Could we do more volumes, sure. Will we do more volumes, probably not. I don't like to say "never", but that is very very very likely to be the case. PDFs of all 4 volumes will remain available. Printed versions of the last two volumes are still available for sale on Chaosium.com and both have a decent stock of books left, so I would be surprised if they don't last a while. Will you reprint the first two volumes of the Gloranthan Classics? It is extremely unlikely that we will do another regular print run of them. Not in hardcover or in softcover. As I have said several times, we do NOT have a good "printer ready" version of Pavis & Big Rubble any more. That book was produced from FILM, not a PDF. Yes, back in the stone age books were made "camera ready" and produced from film. I didn't create a great PDF of that book for the printer, because they did a lot of the pre-press work for me. Yes, a PDF of Pavis & Big Rubble obviously exists (and we sell it), but a lot of the graphics in it would have to be redone in Photoshop before it could be used to print out a great looking copy of the book. The PDF looks ok on a computer screen, but not so great when professionally printed. Some day all 4 volumes of the Gloranthan Classics will be available as POD, probably via Lulu or DTRPG, but I regret to announce that it isn't a high priority for us. In the end, wonderful as the printed Gloranthan Classics are, the number of people who haven't already bought them, but still will actually buy them isn't as big a number as you would think. For example, the Cult Compendium is brilliant, but we sell maybe 1 or 2 hardcover or softcovers of it per month. Why not do more new volumes of Gloranthan Classics? In a way, we will be doing a lot of what you want via the RuneQuest Classics line of books. The Gloranthan Classics line of books was only called that because Moon Design could not use the RuneQuest Trademark, which was still controlled by Avalon Hill. That isn't an issue any more. Pavis, Big Rubble, Griffin Mountain, Troll Pak, the SoloQuest Collection, the RQ Companion, and Rune Masters are all in the works. Those are all well on the way to being reprinted this year. All the RuneQuest Classics will be available in printed form as well as PDF. Once the initial print runs have sold out we may reprint them again, or they WILL become POD titles on Lulu and/or DTRPG. The only real differences between a Gloranthan Classic and a RuneQuest Classic book are: RQ Classics use the original covers, no new art is being commissioned (which saves a lot of time), and each book is a single title.

As a collector of Chaosium related stuff for many decades, I have at least a decent understanding of the average selling price for many of these sorts of items. Corum books don't come up for sale that often, but when I see them go through a normal auction (one that starts at $1 or so and goes through regular bidding) the typical final price I would expect to see would be between $35 and $60. Obviously the Corum book could go for way less or way more if either the seller or the buyer is unaware of the typical price and is in a rush to sell/buy. Unfortunately, Ebay has far fewer auctions than it used to years ago, and is now used by many sellers as a store with fixed "Buy It Now" prices that tend to be on the high side especially for "collectables". Every now and then one of those items may get purchased by a buyer who either doesn't know, doesn't care, or just wants it immediately, but most of the time those overpriced items get relisted over and over and over again.

Sadly, it's not a "we could make a deal, but can't be bothered to find the time" situation. We have no news to report.

When I said "not currently on the schedule", I thought that would be read as "RQ3 reprints are not currently on the production schedule", as in "no firm plans". When I said "releasing a number of RQ3 supplements as RuneQuest Classics" I thought that would be read as "RuneQuest Classics", which means straight reprints in a slightly updated layout. I tried to not refer to them as being done as Gloranthan Classics or RQG revisions. Why are we NOT going to be doing any more "Gloranthan Classics"? Moon Design style "Gloranthan Classics" involved a lot of new art, and a lot of "compiling" for some of the volumes. Some people loved that, and some people didn't care for it. Thus, we now simply do straight reprints of single books, with no new art, etc. which we refer to as RuneQuest Classics. Why reprint some RQ3 scenario material as "RuneQuest Classics"? Because that is much easier and faster to do. RuneQuest Classics do not require any new art, nor do they require a full color layout, any updating of material etc. They are largely easy to use with the new edition of RuneQuest as is, with minimal conversion. Lastly, a lot of people really didn't like the delays on "new" material for RQ3 while AH focused on slightly revised versions of things like Apple Lane, Snake Pipe Hollow, Troll Pak, and such. The cool thing with doing RuneQuest Classics reprints is that they do not require anything from the authors and artists of the new RuneQuest material. While they work on new stuff, we have other people (recently added to the team) that work on the Classic reprints.

Probably about 90%, unless you really dig sorcery.

As little as possible, especially for scenarios.

We have discussed eventually releasing a number of RQ3 supplements as RuneQuest Classics. Not currently on the schedule though, need to get the RQ2 Classics done first.

Probably 90%.