Rick Meints

Avalon Hill may not have owned Glorantha, but they always had the rights to publish whatever they wanted for RuneQuest. AH didn't really delay in publishing Gloranthan material. They launched RQ3 in 1984, and then Gods of Glorantha was published in 1985, followed by a number of reworked editions of Apple Lane, a Gloranthan Bestiary, Snakepipe Hollow, Troll Pak, and such in 1986-1988. There's also the Genertela boxed set in 1988. These were all done by Chaosium staff, and then published by Avalon Hill. Avalon Hill could and did publish Gloranthan material from early on, and Chaosium was happy to participate in such projects.

I think the main difference in your timeline is that you are basing it on game shop availability, which you are welcome to do. Of course we announce dates based on when you can buy things on the Chaosium website, and not two months later when it may show up in game shops. We have far less control over when things show up in game shops, or which game shops will carry it. Thus, we stick to announcing Chaosium website availability. When Jeff specifically said that the first three products would be on sale before Christmas, we thought that wasn't going to be read as 1st Quarter 2018, but as the end of November 2017. Following on from that would mean that the Scenario book and GM book would be out in the first quarter of 2018, probably around February/March. Then you can start seeing another book every 2 months on average after that.

We aren't doing a Kickstarter for the new RuneQuest because: Kickstarters take up a lot of resources to set up, run, and administer long term. They end up costing us over 12% of the money raised, off the top. Stretch goal "additional new content" often greatly delays the release of the product by many months. Many game stores are reluctant to order Kickstarted product because they figure most people have already bought it. The only way to keep shipping costs "reasonable" is to ship everything at once, so if you have a lot of rewards in the KS it ALL has to be done before anything ships. In short, we found that we spend a lot of our time, more than anything else, focused on Kickstarter tasks at the cost of "making the game" tasks. For unknown products we will still use Kickstarter, but for everything else we don't feel we need to. Kickstarter is a wonderful marketing tool. It has many benefits and advantages. That doesn't mean it's right for every product we produce. As for being "puzzled by the organized play choice", we will probably launch it early in 2018. Because it is #4 on the list doesn't make it a 2019 goal or something. As always, you are welcome to ask before assuming something negative. If we had Kickstarted the new RQ, the campaign wouldn't have probably launched until September at the earliest, and if there had been stretch goals with new contents the first books would probably not have come out until some time closer to the middle of 2018, pushing everything else further into 2018 with an OP campaign possibly not until the end of 2018 at the earliest. We prefer the new timeline. Three great RQG products out this year, followed by additional items every month or two after that. We know what each of the books is already, without stretch goal added content. To be clear, we are building an RQ product pipeline that will release 6 products per year, at a pace of a book every other month on average. Big gaps between new product coming out sap the momentum. Kickstarters make maintaining that momentum harder to do.

As for the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha Kickstarter, we'll be making some announcements about it very soon. Yes, that's the name for the new edition of RuneQuest. We've started referring to it is RQG for short.

The update has been posted on Kickstarter.

On Kickstarter I will post an update for RQ Classic on Monday. It will contain no bad news.

Part of the reason is based on tradition, the rest of the reason is that it's slightly more costly to print on those inside covers than not printing on them. Other than that there is no good reason. I can't speak for any other companies, but only a few print on the inside covers and when they do it is often a map.

Whenever we refer to the page count of any of our books it strictly refers to the internal pages. Thus, the 48 page QuickStart has 48 internal pages, plus a front cover, back cover, and unprinted inside covers. SOME might call that 52 pages, but we won't. It's very rare for us to print on the inside front and inside back covers (other than the OSR Packs which had that, and it was cheap to do in B&W)

All of our PDFs can be printed out. "Printer "friendly" is too difficult to do for all printers, of course, but it can always be printed out.

The printed RQ Quickstart will be sold for a nominal fee that covers our costs. The PDF of the RQ Quickstart will be free.

The RuneQuest Quickstart, at least the Free RPG day version (it may get tweaked over time) will be 48 pages, which includes an intro scenario with pregren characters. The scenario has its own thread. We are going to sell the Quickstart for many years to come. How many stores carry it long term we do not know, but it will be available on Chaosium.com for purchase.

The whole "X of Pavis" series is out of print.

We will probably only reprint it as hardcover.

We are out of stock for a bit until we get it reprinted.

If I may digress slightly with a true story: I am the scoutmaster of a Boy Scout troop in the US. It has about 40 young men in it, mainly between the ages of 11 and 17. Sooner or later one of them is bound to ask me about my "day job". I tell them I work for a game company that publishes roleplaying games and board games. Board Games they instantly understand. When they hear "roleplaying games" they almost always take that to mean "computer games". I then start explaining that Chaosium publishes paper game books for games sort of like "Dungeons & Dragons", which is almost universally met with a blank stare of recognition (half of the adults do likewise). Somewhat oddly, a number of the boys in the troop run verbal "scenarios" as games with other boys. You'll see a group of them sit around the table doing a "role-play". One of the guys is a "dungeon master" who guides the action by asking the guys what they are doing in the story. There are no character sheets, no books, no paper, nothing ever rolled up or written down. When a "fight" or some other conflict happens the DM will say "roll a die" and the player calls out a number between 1 and 20. I have no idea (after playing RPGs since 1977) how the DM determines failure or success, but it isn't by referring to any charts or any rules, let alone any stats or skills used for gauging difficulty. For those scouts that seem interested, I have handed them a Call of Cthulhu QuickStart, or told them they can download some stuff from our website. One of the older guys who was pretty good at being the DM I gifted with a CoC 7th ed rulebook from our "dinged and dented" bin. He mainly plays Pathfinder now, but at least he is gaming with books and dice... Thus, after interacting with a large number of young people over the last 15 years as a parent and scout leader, I can say a wide cross section of young (and older people) have no real clue as to what pen and paper roleplaying games are all about. To be fair, some of the dads say "I played that a couple of times when i was in school", but that is far from the majority, and sometimes I think they are humoring me so the conversation is less awkward. Lastly, the people who visit me at home and spot my game library pretty much glance at it with total indifference, like you would at somebody's set of silver spoons from each of the 50 states, or your gran's salt and pepper shaker collection (not that there is anything wrong with any of those things). That's why I feel a booklet like the original Chaosium "Basic Roleplaying" is needed now at least as much as it was in the 80s. ps: at least it's encouraging to no longer get asked if RPGs are all about Satan worship or being a witch any more. That seems to have ended when the 80s ended...

I love the original Basic Roleplaying: An Introductory Guide book. I would be happy to use that name again in that specific context. I have a feeling some people will feel it is an overt attempt to desecrate, destroy, and belittle the BGB though. I strongly feel that an introduction to the D100 system, and answering "what is a roleplaying game?" is a much needed thing.

All good. If someone has a better new term for scaled down intro version of a game, we are open to suggestions. We don't mind the term "QuickStart", but it isn't exactly poetry.

I'll assume g33k is trying to be funny and say nothing more.

In general, the RQ QuickStart will be similar to the CoC QuickStart.

Chaosium is going to have a presence at Necronomicon. The team is working on exactly what that means, but we will definitely have product there for sale.

It isn't for sale on the Chaosium website. We found a few spare mint copies in the archives, and they are with me in the US. You can private message me if you are interested in one, and are a welcome to make an offer.

The best model for most fan publications would be to sell the books/magazines as PDFs and also sell the printed books on a POD site like Lulu or DrivethruRPG. Believe it or not, this is not something that Moon Design or Chaosium has ever opposed when asked. Quite frankly, we almost never get asked by the past publishers. I don't know why more have not done this, other than some of the very early products may not currently exist in electronic format that is easily usable, like a good PDF.

Chaosium can sell you a mint copy of the game from its archives, if you are interested.

I have a few spare copies if you want to private message me.

It was a pleasure being on your podcast, Dirk.