seneschal

Even with Chaotic Moon-Eyed Designers' flagship products, Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest, distribution and marketing is and has been a problem. It is THE problem. These venerable titles may be two of the most popular and most played games "evar" historically, but today -- right now -- if you're not already an old fart gamer like me you probably don't know they exist or ever existed. You are unlikely to have seen them on shelves at your local game shop, wouldn't know how to get copies if you did somehow learn of them, and there are a pile of competing titles that kind of do the same thing that are much more accessible. CoC was the original horror game and the gateway for many to Lovecraft's actual stories. Great, but now there are several other Lovecraftian games to choose from produced by publishers with enough pep to get them before potential customers' eyes. It isn't unique and special anymore, unless its publishers work hard to make it so. Most of that glorious 30-year back catalog for it is long out of print. You could find some of those supplements on Amazon.com at inflated prices -- if you know the core product exists, have had a chance to play and get hooked on it, and are motivated and wealthy enough to hunt them down. That's why my mantra since joining these boards has been, "Get out of the Cthulhu ghetto." I saw the BRP renaissance as a way for Chaosium to escape from dependence on only one product, and a hoary one at that, by using its generic system to show off what the game can really do, to explore new genres and create exciting new product. Well, the exciting new product got created, but since most of it wasn't advertised and was available solely on Chaosium's website, it "didn't sell." RuneQuest? Didn't that die after the Avalon Hill fiasco? Oh, but wait. Most of today's gamers and potential customers have never heard of RuneQuest, or of Avalon Hill, or Issaries, or HeroQuest, or Glorantha, or Chaosium. They don't know that a shiny new RQ version exists or that it provides exciting fantasy role-playing possibilities. As with CoC, the title is almost impossible to find at one's local store, and there has been no appreciable advertising. RuneQuest can no longer "wallow in its elitism." It must be rabidly promoted for today's gamers to recognize that it is somehow better than D&D/Pathfinder and to be willing to pay that $60 price to experience it. The 32-page BRP Essentials could be the entryway to brief genre books the same way FATE Accelerated is. But Chaosium already had the opportunity to take that route with the Big Gold Book and with BRP QuickStart. And they muffed it. What is there to make me think that they'll do a better job the second time around?

Exactly. Nash and Whitaker have sweated blood to create RuneQuest and its assorted supplements. Are their babies now to wither and die in obscurity for lack of promotion? Most of the public -- including the portion of it that occasionally visits game shops -- doesn't yet know that RuneQuest exists. They have never heard of Glorantha or Hero Wars and are totally ignorant of Chaosium's glorious 40-year history or its products, which have been few and far between of late. We need a marketeer, someone frothing fanatical and butt-cheek twerking crazy about advertising product.

Step 1 doesn't require mega-cash. As the liberal cliche goes, think globally, act locally. Any town in North America large enough to host a college or military base (and that can be pretty small) potentially also hosts up to three comic book and/or game shops. Get a list of such towns at your local library. Use your existing computer with Internet service to search for those shops, their phone numbers, e-mail addresses and Facebook pages. Call or otherwise contact them. Let them know your game company and your award-winning products exist and ask them to carry your stuff.

Less profitable only because they weren't marketed, distributed and advertised adequately. If you have a product that is available only on your website and you don't bother to promote it vigorously, it is foolish to complain that it doesn't sell well. I, too, will miss Ben Monroe. He brought energy and a willingness to engage the customer that Chasium sorely needed. "Getting the band back together" was somewhat of a misnomer if "band members" are physically separated, each have their separate and unrelated projects cooking, and are too old and tired and broke to come up with something new. I've mentioned that appearances of Chaosium product are rare in my area. Moon Design product has yet to make its debut here; they don't exist as far as my local game shops are concerned. Broken record/dead horse time, but if your customer doesn't know you exist and can't readily examine and purchase your product, you're kidding yourself about running a profitable business. Forget the Ennies. Get quality product on store shelves on a regular, timely basis and promote it out the wazoo by every means possible. Big Macs, not Faberge egg collector items that few people will buy. History is mystery to the upcoming crop of potential players. They don't know or care that Call of Cthulhu or RuneQuest ever existed, and there are a lot of titles out there that scratch the same itch. They are going to play Pathfinder or FATE Accelerated unless Chaosium (or whatever this new entity is) reaches out, grabs them by the lapels and persuades them with evangelistic fervor that RuneQuest and/or Call of Cthulhu is the greatest thing since IOS 9 and Spiracha Taquis.

If you read the Authurian tales, Lancelot & Company typically wore their heavy gear only when they knew they were going into battle or were otherwise expecting trouble. The rest of the time it was packed up and tended by their squires. Their big war horses likewise were generally led behind in-saddled; knights rode lighter palfreys when the weren't charging into battle.

Actually, I got things out of sequence. Outselling D&D is merely a stepping stone. Our goal, remember, is to put a copy of RuneQuest 6.x on every home bookshelf. D&D and Pathfinder combined haven't yet managed to do that.

Again, nothing I've said is meant as a kick against you or Pete. I want you to succeed. Obviously you have personal experience with distribution chains while I do not. However, I'm speaking now as a customer, one of the guys you want to persuade to put down the better part of a day's wages to acquire the book(s) you've worked so hard to write. If I wasn't a regular participant on this website, I would have never known that RuneQuest 6 or Monster Island, etc., existed. If I wasn't already a role-player, I wouldn't have gone to my local store and seen it (fleetingly) on the shelf. And to succeed and prosper, you've got to do better than to go after aging old farts like me. You've got to create new gamers, catch the attention of people who don't normally browse RPG.net or other role-playing websites, people who don't know that Chaosium or RuneQuest (or any version of both) ever existed. Romance novels and Harley Davidson motorcycles are also niche products. Yet, I know they exist. They are available locally through multiple venues. I am perhaps not the target market for either, but if I wanted to, I could get my grubby paws on them today. Geek culture (including role-playing) is becoming increasingly mainstream. You (and small publishers generally) must find a way to make your role-playing products generally known and generally accessible to potential purchasers. You've got to find a way to turn your Faberge eggs into Big Macs. You've got to put on your Henry Ford/Bill Gates/Ray Kroc hats, your goal being to put your creations in every garage, on every home desk, on every lunch tray. If traditional distribution venues -- Alliance, Warpath, Esdevium -- aren't working for you, find a way to bypass them. Think outside the box and search for other venues than bookstores, comics and game shops to sell your product. It can be done. The makers of Super Beta Prostate and Dinovite pet vitamins bombard me constantly with the fact that their products are available. I've never seen their stuff at my local health food or pet stores, but I know how to get it if I want it. To succeed you've got to ditch this "Geez, we're a niche market" nonsense. Think BIG, dream BIG, plan BIG. You must believe that you can get a copy of RuneQuest on every home bookshelf. Your ultimate goal, of course, is to overtake D&D and Pathfinder in sales,eventually to buy out Paizo and Hasbro. You've got to start thinking that way.

"Virtual" is a synonym for "not real." A real publishing company puts physical books on store and library shelves, with electronic copies being a bonus side product for the handheld gadget crowd -- regardless of what their office or non-office structure is. Chaosium's "realness" has been shaky for the entire time I've been active on these boards. Appearances of the flagship product, Call of Cthulhu any version, on actual store shelves in my non-virtual world have been sporadic, as have appearances by support products by Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Pagan Publishing or whoever else. RuneQuest 6 has popped up twice then vanished. "Astounding Adventures" hung around briefly. No other D100 titles, period. Meanwhile, my local game stores have product by Hero Games, which went "virtual" some time ago, and by Palladium, which hasn't put out anything new since the late Eighties or early Nineties. Shoot, FGU is a forgotten historical relic, but I can still order actual physical games from them. The point of this isn't to kick Chaosium while they are down, but as Mankcam has noted there is no substitute for physical product on physical store shelves where real-live customers can discover it and shell out hard, cold cash for it. To survive, Chaosium must put product on the market and see that it is advertised and distributed, whether it is the long-awaited CoC 7th or quickie scanned reprints of RuneQuest II (the original one) or leftover "Cthulhu for President" mugs. If they're emptying out the warehouse anyway, ship those puppies to some venue that will sell them, even if it is a regional truck stop chain. RuneQuest 6 or its reintegrated Gloranthan version, no matter how wonderful it is, can't remain an elusive prestige product. It must become a well-distributed mass market commodity that can catch the public's eye and enthusiasm.

Divine intervention killed him? With friends like that ....

"End of an era... start of a new era! End of an era... start of a new era! As part of Chaosium's restructuring, we have made the difficult decision to close our office and warehouse in Hayward, ending the 40 year physical presence of the company in the Bay Area, California. Chaosium has a global fan base, and the principal officers of the company are located across the globe. Our Axis Mundi is now online. And at conventions. The true spirit of Chaosium is present at your gaming table, collectively summoned by your gaming group. The truck has been filled with artifacts from the past four decades (here's Rick loading the company cockatrice). Rick and MOB are heading out on their thousand mile journey north, via Arcata to drop in on the President Emeritus, Greg Stafford..." The wording of the announcement seems strange to me, especially that second paragraph. I can understand Chaosium personnel being sad and nostalgic about leaving the place they've been for decades. However, the announcement is less "...but we're relocating to our new Moon Design headquarters to keep on trucking" and more "We're fading into the mists like Dian Fossey's gorillas or King Arthur at the end of the musical Camelot." I've had internet and cell phone services from entities that were located only online. Hard to get good customer service from a company that has no physical location you can phone call or write to. I've also written for entities that existed only as a web site and e-mail address -- and vanished without a trace overnight. If Chaosium now exists as a spirit I summon to my gaming table (via seance?) that essentially admits that they're, um, dead.

Unfortunately the show didn't last long enough for Trek style technical manuals to come into vogue. But consider that the studio model was 10 feet by 12 feet in size, and the spine would support a row of habitats 8-10 domes long (the others stacked on top of each lower cluster).

Before we get to specifics of our generation ship, here's a brief description of "Earthship Ark" from "The Starlost." The main body of the ship, the spine if you will, is an I-beam shaped rectangle composed of modular sections. This houses the bridge and auxiliary bridge, the computer and communication centers, a hospital, a hangar for landing craft, a police station for ship's security, fuel and engines. To port and starboard of the spine are four clusters of biosphere domes (two clusters of nine each side) plus an extra dome thrown in there for a total of 37. The domes in each cluster are interconnected with travel tubes. Individual domes are 50 miles across and in case of emergency are capable of sealing themselves and maintaining life support on their own. It isn't clear how many colonists the ship was intended to house. At the beginning of the TV series the domes and the spines have been separated from each other for a very long time. http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/props/index.html

The Big Gold Book also has a sample mech in the equipment chapter

Start with the adventure itself, before the robots show up. The adventurers are the high school student and her friends, associates, neighbors. Suddenly the icky mysterious aliens arrive and everyone has to hide from the initial onslaught then waylay ground troops for nifty gear. Work your way up to the mecha, first allowing the player-characters to overcome a small group of enemy goons (mooks?) and their more competent squad leader, defeating whatever the local scheme or conspiracy is (replacing the high school staff with robots or alien sleeper agents?). After a few sessions like that, building X-Files or Call of Cthulhu like suspense, then let the aliens pull out their ace in the hole -- a giant robot or two. Then give the PCs a chance to steal one and go head to head with the bad guys.

Yeah, give 'em a centimeter and they'll take a kilometer!

Yep, starter set ran $20 at Walmart, box and all. But it didn't contain a full set of the rules (which were available to download online for free). Dice should be cheap enough at volume to include without driving up the price significantly.

Which is why it behooves us to create as many new Magic World fanatics as possible in order to achieve volume pricing. Besides, Ninja Turtles are back. Furbies are back. A best-selling album is Taylor Swift's 1989 while Michael Jackson continues to dominate the airwaves. Jem and the Holograms are taking Netflix by storm. Tom Baker pops up everywhere from TV to comic books. They're re-making Goonies. God help us, it is the Eighties all over again!

Bah! I refuse to concede the printing and box-making industries to the Chinese. Surely there is an American firm that can make a box or print a book for an affordable price. I am inundated by colorful boxes of all sizes as my kids devour my groceries and waste my toiletries. Surely not all these producers of consumer goods have their packaging made overseas.

Thanks for the update, Rosen. It does clear the situation up and explain your renewed enthusiasm for a proprietary game system. Seems Chaosium is determined to roll everything back to just RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, as if the BRP Renaissance never happened.

The great-granddaddy of all generation ship gone wrong stories seems to be Robert Heinlein's 1941 (1941!!!) novel Orphans of the Sky, originally published in two parts as Universe and its sequel, Common Sense. Heinlein, in the same year Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, gives us many of the tropes we've become accustomed to: the mission forgotten, the fact that the colonists are on a ship headed to another star forgotten, the vessel badly off course, the crew descended to tribal barbarism, radiation-spawned mutants, warring factions aboard ship, necessary ship maintenance reinterpreted as religious ritual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky Who needs invading aliens, xenophobic cyborgs or malfunctioning robots? The humans were doing a pretty good job of killing themselves off without such exotic help.

We haven't really gotten to the generation ships yet. They'd have to be even larger to accommodate presumably thriving dynasties of would-be settlers and the biosphere needed to provide for them.

No, we aren't assuming that. That's why our colonists need that 15-month food supply for themselves and for their livestock, and a store of seed and/or live plants from the ship's greenhouse. They need something they know they can eat until their crops and livestock get established. Again, the Jamestown example is instructive. The early settlers survived on food brought from England and starved when they didn't have it until they learned how to hunt American game and cultivate American fruit and vegetables -- and how to cultivate European introductions in an unfamiliar environment. And that was merely moving to a new continent on the same planet. Learning what alien plants and animals are palatable or how to adapt Earth crops and livestock to alien soil and climate would be a challenge. Are there metals in the soil that could poison the colonists via their fresh broccoli harvest? Are there amino acids and enzymes in the flesh of native animals that would make them inedible to humans, or even merely make them taste terrible? Wasabi sauce is your friend. An on-board greenhouse or hydroponic garden is a good idea and a long-established sci-fi convention. But would it survive on a sleeper ship where even the maintenance personnel are asleep most of the voyage? No one awake to water and fertilize the plants, and no one awake for years at a time to maintain and correct that automatic lighting, watering and feeding system. If the light bulbs burn out or the water nozzles get clogged, what then? On a regular spacecraft or on a generation ship that isn't a problem. Someone is always around to tend the plants, since they cleanse the air and provide food and medicine. Re in-space mutations. Rosen, you do want our poor, benighted colonists to survive, don't you?

Satellites would certainly be helpful and could be placed by EVA crews from the main ship before landing. But here's the deal: once you're down on the surface, you're down. You've expended all your resources and energy to get to the new planet and have landed your colonists in (presumably) virgin wilderness. There aren't any launch facilities to send astronauts up to a space station or other orbital facility. And there isn't excess fuel to do it, even if you had a launchpad and ships capable of going back up. Those satellites you've placed had better be in the right positions to do their jobs, and if a component burns out or they wobble out of orbit, too bad. You won't be able to do anything about it until your new society has developed the infrastructure and industrial capacity to return to space. Re: living on planets. The health and cultural reasons aren't mysterious at all. Unfortunately, the human body is designed to need a certain amount of gravity and a certain amount of air pressure. Without them, bones and muscles atrophy, lungs collapse, and bodily fluids don't distribute themselves correctly. The real world limitation on man's starfaring dreams is the human body itself. Our machines could conceivably go all sorts of places. Biology, not technology, is the challenge. That's one advantage of the sleeper ship we've been speculating on. Colonists may have to heal accrued cellular damage but their bones and muscles, preserved in suspended animation, will still be able to handle it when they step out on a planet. With a generation ship, the arriving colonists may be physically weaker and more fragile than their forebears even if they've had some sort of artificial gravity. Not a good thing if you're trying to build a settlement in a potentially hostile environment. In addition to the hard work of actually building them, artificial habitats are necessarily cramped compared to a planet, and you still have to get your air, water, and food from somewhere. Because they are cramped, and because a careless act by one person could kill everyone on the station or habitat, the societies that develop there will be tend to be restrictive and authoritarian. Lots of rules about what you can and can't do -- to protect the general welfare, of course. Leisure activities, whether or not you can have pets and if so what type, how many kids you can have or whether you can bear children at all, all sorts of things will be under scrutiny. Naturally, any sort of dissent -- against the leadership or at work or school -- will be severely punished because a riot or other irresponsible activity could damage or destroy the colony. Re: Broo in space. Um, we do want to keep our colonists healthy, mentally and physically, don't we?

Time Lord in the U.S. suffered from several things. It came out during the original DW series' nadir. It was marketed in book stores but not in game shops. And it was published as a small paperback book entirely unlike the boxed sets and magazine sized books American gamers were used to. Booksellers, who never figured out what to do with RPG materials anyway, put it with the sci-fi and fantasy novels instead of with the D&D sets. It got lost. Plus, as the author himself has admitted, the rules were pretty rudimentary. Gamers who did find Time Lord were put off by the system even if they though FASA's Doctor Who RPG rules had been wonky.

No, no. Didn't take it the wrong way. I appreciate all your brainstorming.