Rick Meints

all good! :-) If I had my way I'd be happy to buy 80s era Chaosium boxed sets of games for the rest of my life.

Let me start by saying that regardless of whatever the final printed version the new RuneQuest rulebook refers to itself as, it is absolutely and unequivocally not meant as disrespect to any previously published version/edition of the game. This isn't about distancing ourselves from, or disowning anybody. The cover of the book will have the title "RuneQuest". That's what it will have on the spine. It's not going to state "RuneQuest Deluxe", "RuneQuest X Edition", or "RuneQuest El Capitan". On the inside, it will state "RuneQuest, Copyright 2016." It will also have that nifty circle c icon, which I can't recreate at the moment... So, enquiring minds want to know what edition the new Chaosium RuneQuest will specifically state... It probably won't. We have a hard time imaging why almost any potential buyer would reach a crisis point of confusion based on any edition number we use. Philosophically, sure, but not when getting the book. If they buy the book and/or PDF from chaosium.com they will have the choice of buying RuneQuest Classic, which drips OSR from every pore and gloriously trumpets retro in every description, or they can buy RuneQuest, the latest edition of an iconic role-playing system. If they go to DrivethruRPG the only things labelled RuneQuest will be likewise. Same for anything we sell on Lulu. When someone hears about the Design Mechanism and all the cool stuff they produce, when they look for their products online or in stores all they will find is a range of Mythras products. If someone goes into a FLGS store, do you think it is likely they will find multiple versions of RuneQuest to choose from? Do you think the store owner will only wave at dusty editions from years ago on a shelf and feign ignorance? Will the prospective buyer wander over to a shelf with Chaosium's new edition of RuneQuest next to MRQ, RuneQuest 3, and RuneQuest 6, and grab the wrong book? The only place you MIGHT find some confusion is if you surf through a few online used game resellers, and maybe Ebay. Quite frankly, we have no control over the description those places use, let alone the photos they choose for them, regardless of what we call the latest edition of RuneQuest. If someone asks a gamer friend about RuneQuest, that friend will say nice things about the edition they like best. In all likelihood they will know conclusively if their favorite edition is out of print, in print, and/or called something else when they talk about it. Jeff clearly explained why the latest version of RuneQuest can be called the 4th edition. It absolutely is the 4th edition of RuneQuest that Chaosium has had a role in. The latest version is not based on RuneQuest 6, MRQII or MRQ. Did people who bought Mongoose RuneQuest II face insurmountable confusion when looking at RuneQuest 3? Did they even have that choice in a game store? In some ways, this whole discussion reminds me of a good game of Credo! same substance? similar substance? Play the edition you love best. Tell your friends about it. Get them playing games with it. Take a look at Chaosium's RuneQuest. The rest will sort itself out.

Yes, the CoC7e Keeper Rulebook and the Petersen Guide will be on sale there. Only those two items. Chaosium intends to have a booth at Origins in 2017. If that goes well, we plan to make it a regular fixture on our annual convention schedule.

I chose the "10-20" years time frame because that lines up with the near bankruptcy cataclysm suffered by Chaosium when Mythos sales plummeted around 1997. After that the company went into a minimalist mode with their publications, with a general decline in art, layout and production values. That approach, with a few exceptions, lasted until about a year ago.

If Chaosium is to compete on the same bookshelf with D&D, Pathfinder, and many others, we must present a quality product in all aspects. While our long-standing faithful fans may have grown to love the look of Chaosium's books from the previous 10-20 years, that look does not attract many new buyers. To thrive we need to expand our audience. Thus, while the visual appeal is vital, it will always go hand in hand with great content, which is king. Great writing is what will transform a new buyer into one of the faithful.

Right now I am wondering about the relative silence, so I asked the question. I don't fear these looking cheap or out of date, since they cater to a specialized OSR market, and would mainly be sold directly to those that like that sort of thing. I don't think the latest and newest edition of D&D took any hits from WOTC/Hasbro doing special versions of the original edition boxed set and such. As for whether it's worth our time, that is a different matter. Lastly, doing an OSR version doesn't preclude fully fleshing them out and doing a new Runequest version in the future. All food for thought.

OSR format only takes a few weeks. To get them updated, fully fleshed out, and in the new RQ format means you will wait much longer for them.

To all our wonderful Chaos Cultists, We have over 5000 Gen Con participants who have added playing in a Call of Cthulhu 6th ed. or 7th ed. scenario to their Gen Con wish list. That number is staggering. We are NUMBER ONE on their most wanted list! and Gen Con keeps reminding us. So much so that they have set aside a three table room for Chaosium to run all the Call of Cthulhu games we can get added to the schedule. We are anxiously seeking GMs who are going to be at Gen Con to help us run more events. You can run a scenario of your own, or we are happy to provide you with one. You can run a game of 2-4 hours in length, as your evil heart desires. We are ready to support you as best we can. We have swag to reward our GMs with, plus a special GM raffle of a Leatherette set of books. We're happy to reward our GMs with a printed copy of The Derelict scenario we did as a special print run for free RPG day. If you are going to be at Gen Con and would like to help GM some Call of Cthulhu scenarios, please let us know. You can email todd@chaosium.com, as well as posting here. If you have a cool scenario you would like to make available to us for other GMs to run, please let us know. Thank you for all you do. Spreading the joy of playing Call of Cthulhu is a noble effort, so I shall thank you once again.

While we have the chance to do at least 2 or 3 more "unpublished" scenarios like the Sea Cave, it seems like there isn't much interest in doing them in this OSR format. Is that how those that have seen the Sea Cave feel? As for which ones are in the hopper, we have the Howling Tower, Miskander's Tower, and an Aldryami one.

BRP Essentials will be around 64-96 pages, probably, and have a very nice layout. It will be on nice paper and in softcover format. We don't see it as needing a lot of new art, and it won't be out by Gen Con this year. We do have someone working on it.

One of the things with Gloranthan "canon" is that it actually covers a very small range of Gloranthan information. Most of the details that could be documented for Glorantha haven't been written about. That includes ducks/durulz. Most RQ2 duck pictures were drawn by Jaquays, and are line drawings. They don't lend themselves well to portraying feather color and such, as previously mentioned above. The original source of inspiration for ducks, the 1950's era Uncle Scrooge comics by Carl Barks, were all originally done in color, but with very simple coloring and only white feathers. Nobody really bothered with coming up with any detailed back story for them beyond a few sentences. You could probably put everything written about the ducks (other than the occasional stat block) from 1966 to 1990, on to a single sheet of paper. It was during the Tales of the Reaching Moon era of the 1990s that people started people writing more about them, and illustrating them more. To be blunt, just because something is portrayed as X in Glorantha doesn't mean that it is the only way something is. In this example, ducks being mainly drawn as having white feathers doesn't mean they don't have other colored feathers as some sort of canonical decision. Most of those sorts of details haven't been thought about much. Similarly, nobody has decided for the purposes of canon that all Jack O'Bears have brown fur like a Grizzly Bear. Maybe up north near Valind's glacier there are polar jack o'bears, or somewhere more tropical there are panda jack o'bears. Then again, maybe they are just a singular chaos horror and they all look totally identical... No biggie to me either way. All I ask is don't make them skeletally thin like the GW figure. Stick with the Archive Miniatures look which is far more menacing. :-)

We are far from perfect and have all manner of improvements still to do. We always welcome constructive criticism and feedback in general. As always, thank you for your patience and support.

We haven't forgotten about the BRP line (wink: you guys won't let us...) and Mythic Iceland is a great first step towards a line of new/updated BRP products. We have a new BRP essentials on our list of future projects (no date assigned so no need to ask). Once again, it is not because we do not respect/appreciate/like what was done before. It has never been about that since we looked at all of the product lines a year ago, and many times since. It is cold hard economics that determine our choices. Many BRP items, including MW, didn't sell that well, regardless of how awesome/cool/neat/perfect you think it is. Spending $5000-$10,000 on a book that sells X hundred copies is not the best use of our time and resources. Let me conclude with this historical anecdote: Back in its heyday Chaosium had the production motto of "if it won't sell 7000 copies we won't do it". While we aren't back to those levels, we are adopting that approach with a lower production number and building from there.

We'll have the PDF for sale on the Chaosium website as soon as we correct a problem with the index not being linked correctly.

Gen Con doesn't care what we do with our seminars, and has never said a word about it to us.

They will probably be available on youtube. That's where all the previous Gen Con seminars of ours have ended up being found. We have no concerns, qualms, or issues, with the seminar being distributed like that. It was free to attend. No exclusivity.

Chaosium is not an exhibitor at Origins this year, although we want to do so in 2017. At Gen Con we will have the slipcase set for sale.

We plan on recording all of Chaosium's 5 seminars at Gen Con this year. They are all in the Gen Con Event catalog, and are scheduled for Thursday and Friday evening.

Much of this is not what we would call errata. Most of this is spelling/grammar/typo related.

Yes, it will be for sale our Booth #423 (Chaosium) at Gen Con.

We'd prefer not to get into stylistic changes for the most part. There could be too much back and forth on those.

The 272 page Pulp Cthulhu book is done, and the files have been sent to our printer. We are awaiting proofs in a few weeks. Expected ship date is probably early July, but I need to get that confirmed with the printer. Kickstarter backers (3005 of them) can now download it via BackerKit. It will go up for sale on Chaosium.com very soon, once backers have had their chance to download it first.

While that was true when those issues were published, when Tadashi left Chaosium in 1985 to strike out on his own he took the ownership of Different Worlds magazine with him. If you look at later issues of the magazine you will see that it was published by Sleuth Publications.

Yes, of course they will.

Unfortunately, magazine reprints are seldom as easy as they would seem. They take a lot of time, especially as the number of issues involved increases. The main reason that both the Dragon Magazine (1-250) CD set and the White Dwarf (1-100) DVD both failed in the end were because of copyright issues and author/artist permission. It's not easy tracking down and getting dozens of people's permission, etc.