Rick Meints

Our plan is to have the new RuneQuest out in the second half of 2017. As a side note, we don't have much if any script for the podcasts. Before recording we do briefly chat about what we want to cover. We have the summary of what was discussed so you can leap to approximately something specific is discussed. Like many of you have said, the downside of podcasts is that you can't easily skim them, and there are only so many minutes in the day.

Selling stuff via Amazon is a real mixed bag of good and bad. The good is that they MIGHT buy a lot of your product. The bad is that they are allowed to return whatever they want to you months later, and they make you pay to ship things to their warehouse. They usually pay you 45% of the cover price. Also, they expect whatever they order to be shipped to them within 24 hours. As a side note: We try to charge only what shipping costs us. We review those costs and adjust them if they are too high or low. We ship from three locations on three different continents to help decrease what many of our customers have to pay for shipping. The cost of shipping is almost always down to volume. We would love to be able to ship you your books inexpensively, but that is difficult at the volume we ship. If you want to see what we are up against, please go to your country's post office site and see what it would cost you to ship a 2 kilo package from your country to either the UK, the US, or Australia. It's not as cheap as you think in most cases. I too love fast shipping and having a tracking number, but both of those things cost extra.

We will be selling these at Dragonmeet.

As has been famously said and often quoted, "you can't out-Amazon Amazon". They have a shipping operation with a scale far more vast than anyone else, if not everyone else.

No news.

In interviews Greg has said he told stories about Glorantha to the women he went on dates with while in college, starting in 1966. He didn't really elaborate more than that.

We have sent the backer shipment details to the fulfillment warehouses. They will start shipping to backers this week, and then we can start taking regular orders on Pulp Cthulhu and Doors to Darkness very soon, certainly in November.

The ship carrying the Guide to the USA is named OOCL GENOA. The ship carrying the Guide to Australia is named XIN YANTIAN I do not have the UK bound ship name just yet.

The printing is done. They have been collated into slipcase sets, and each individual set has been placed into a specifically designed shipping carton. The pallets of books will be loaded onto a ship literally any day.

We will start shipping to backers within a matter of a week or two.

Here's the big trivia question for the day: Was there any material specifically published for Worlds of Wonder by Chaosium back in the day? I can't think of any articles in Different Worlds magazine, for example... Since we are going to reprint the boxed set as a book it would be nice to make it all the more complete by including any supplemental material Chaosium published for it.

Microsoft word DOCX is slightly preferred. Please email me the word file (rick@chaosium.com). Thanks.

All, Thank you for the help. As for the BRP booklet, I would like to get that as a separate MS Word file. I will look at creating a separate thread/topic for the Chaosium Scanning Initiative, or CSI for short... In all honesty, there are lots of Chaosium publications that are in need of OCRing.

Hi Colin, Please don't look out your window while you read this. I want the legal swat team to get a clean shot at apprehending you... :-) On a more serious note, we know that lots of illegal PDFs are floating around on the web, for almost any and every printed book, including ours. Of course, we greatly prefer you buy a legit copy of said PDFs if they ever become available from us! In the mean time, if you are not distributing them, and would prefer to use them for the greater good, we'll leave it at that. Those PDFs can be OCRd, and there are free software packages available on the web if you don't already have such software on your computer. NOTE TO ANYONE WHO WANTS TO HELP: If you actually start OCRing something, put a simple post on this thread so people know what you are doing and don't duplicate that work.

Worlds of Wonder being reprinted is still on the cards, and the only big factor determining when it will happen is that it is (wait for it) not a high priority. We have not discovered any "rights issues". I know a number of you HATE the "not a priority" reason, but that doesn't make it any less true. As a side note, while it was mentioned very early on after the shake-up, that does not equate to it being a high priority then (or now), it only means that it was thought of early on, probably because somebody asked me about that specific book early on. One thing is for certain: when I first started working for Chaosium last year I did not say to myself "now I can quickly fulfill my dream of getting worlds of wonder back into print immediately". :-) In case you are wondering how a book like Worlds of Wonder gets reprinted, here is the basic process. Somebody takes the physical books and scans them in one page at a time. They take those scans and run them through an OCR program that turns them into a text file. That text file then needs to be edited for errors, which are mostly typos and garbled info. Once the text file has been edited to make sure all the text from the original is present and correct, it then gets put into a simple style format. Another separate effort is scanning each piece of art, graphic, or map individually at 300 DPI. These need to then be cleaned up. Taking that formatted and edited text file and the individual art pieces through layout like the RuneQuest Classics style is actually the easiest part of the process. Most of the time is spent on the error cleanup and editing. If you want to see Worlds of Wonder reprinted sooner, rather than later, please feel free to volunteer to help get it recreated (personally message me). If someone is willing to volunteer to create a single Microsoft Word file of all of the text from the boxed set, in a simple clean format, we are half way done. I am happy to work with volunteers willing to scan, OCR, and then clean up the material. My only caveats are that I cannot send you a physical copy of the boxed set or even a subset of its contents. You would have to have access to that yourself, plus have a scanner and the related software.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what you are specifically asking. We have kept the BGB in print and for sale. If you are asking if there will be an updated edition of that book, the answer is "not any time soon". If you are asking "do we plan to publish anything for BRP?", the answer is yes. The first new titles will be related to Mythic Iceland, which has become a stand alone game using what it needs from the "BRP rules". If the question is "are you going to publish an updated, slimmed down version of the BGB?", the answer is maybe. If you want a more definitive answer, please let me know what kind of assistance you are looking for. If the question is "what is the future of BRP?", the answer is still "we don't have a lot of specific plans". I know that is disappointing, and some of you may feel utterly abandoned and betrayed after many many years of valiantly supporting the "BRP" line. I stand by what the management team said in July of 2015. Chaosium has no choice but to focus on what will sell well. We don't have any money to invest in products that don't sell well, regardless of how awesome, wonderful, magnificent, and brilliant they are to a small audience of fans. If we spend time and resources on a book that won't sell at least a few thousand copies we are taking time and resources from projects that will sell a few thousand copies.

We didn't announce we had started selling the BGB again because we never really stopped selling it, although it has been out of stock for short periods of time. It's been available on the Chaosium website for years. As for Magic World and Advanced Sorcery, they are also still for sale on our website. If there is any other title that you are looking for, please feel free to ask. As long as we have the rights to publish it we can make the title available one way or another. While some of you would love to buy the BGB or similar BRP products from your FLGS, that is relatively unlikely to happen. They were never carried by that many game stores even when they were first published. That said, a game store can special order a number of titles from us, if they choose to contact us and do so. It's sad to say, but most BRP titles, with all respect to the authors, artists, etc. that created them, never sold that well. Even when they were made fully available to distributors they were not purchased by them in large quantities. Of course if distributors buy few copies then the stores buy even less. As a side note, many of the BRP titles Chaosium sold to Amazon have been slowly returned to us after languishing in their warehouses for who knows how long.

Because we do the softcover BGB as a POD title we have no plans to do anything other than keep printing and selling it as is.

Chaosium's current quandary with the BGB is that it is not so much a rulebook as it is a vast collection of various ideas and guidelines for various genres. Using "BRP" for a Hi-tech Space game is very different in many aspects to what rules are needed for running a Fantasy based game. Thus, we have mainly focused on working with authors, like Pedro and his Mythic Iceland series of books, to make sure the "BRP" rules work with his setting and are included in his books. This is basically what happened in the Golden Age of Chaosium back in the 1980s. There was no Big BRP rulebook you had to buy. If you wanted to play a game, you bought that specific game, be it RuneQuest, Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, Ringworld, Thieves World, ElfQuest, Worlds of Wonder, or Superworld. None of those required you own a separate rulebook along with that boxed game. They were complete in and of themselves. Yes, of course, there was a "Basic Roleplaying" book published by Chaosium in the 1980s. It was about 16 pages and was specifically targeted at people brand new to roleplaying who wanted to know what it was all about. It was absolutely not intended to become a rulebook used for running other games. Thus, Chaosium has spent its time developing games with authors so their game is a complete stand-alone package, and not reliant on owning a big book of info that contains a lot of rules, options, and such that are probably not applicable to, or important for, that specific game. We have looked at a very distilled down version of "core" BRP rules applicable to any genre, and have referred to it as "BRP Essentials", but we currently see that material as something that may just get provided to authors as opposed to being a published product. We MIGHT publish BRP Essentials some day, but we're not 100% sure how much of a priority or a necessity it will be. In some ways, the Call of Cthulhu QuickStart already does a lot of what a BRP essentials would do, plus we WILL be publishing a RuneQuest Quickstart in the first half of 2017 and it will do likewise.

You can buy the softcover version of the BGB for $39.95 on our website: http://www.chaosium.com/basic-roleplaying/

We will be selling it shortly. I suggest you subscribe to the Chaosium newsletter so you will get notified as soon as it is officially announced.

The problem is we don't have anyone in house who is good at editing them, and thus we rely on volunteers. Sometimes we get great ones, and sometimes we can't find a good volunteer. If someone would like to volunteer, we'll go from there. Please email me at rick-at-chaosium-dot-com.

We will announce the start of pre-orders via a number of social media outlets, including our Ab Chaos newsletter distributed via Mailchimp, G+ Glorantha and Chaosium groups, here on BRP Central, a banner on the Chaosium website, the Chaosium FB page, the Chaosium twitter account, and similar. Once we know the Guide is on the ships that will take it to our fulfillment warehouses in Australia, the UK, and the US pre-orders will start, most likely in October. Pre-orders will stay open for about one month, depending on how the sales go. Sadly, we have no idea which, if any, distributors and Game Shops might carry this book set. It is not the kind of item that Game Stores usually like to stock due to it costing more than many other RPG products. The Guide Set, which will be in a custom made shipping carton, will weigh 15 pounds (almost 7 kilos). Brick and mortar game stores will be able to order it directly from Chaosium.

Lion Rampant in Canada distributes this book to Canadian game stores. We are trying to set up a fulfillment warehouse in Canada, but our first two contacts have not worked out.

Agimori Powder Description: A small pouch full of chalky white powder that has a reddish tint. Cults: Associated - Most Praxian Tribes and Cults, Most Fire Cults. Enemy - the Agimori. Knowledge: Fairly common in Prax and Pent. Relatively unknown elsewhere. History: It is believed the powder was first created during the great darkness, when the bones of many slain Agimori littered the Wastes. Procedure: Most Praxian shamans know the ritual to make this powder. The bones must have been dried by the desert wind for several months. Fresh bones will not work. The bones are ground into powder, and then mixed with a small amount of human blood. During the ritual the shaman sacrifices 2 points of their temporary POW, like casting a spell. Powers: One dose of the powder is enough to cover a SIZ 16 creature. The powder provides 5 minutes of protection from regular fire damage (up to 4 points per melee round). Value: 500L per dose.