Wyrms Footnotes 1-14 available again

[Cloud64]

Any chance of these being published in a hardback collection, or is it another case of the quality of the original scans not being up to it? That’s something I’d love to have on my shelf.

[Sir_Godspeed]

On 1/26/2020 at 6:48 PM, Richard S. said:

I'LL TAKE YOUR ENTIRE STOCK

Good sir, I have seized your meme for my Glorantha meme collection. I hope this is an acceptable turn of events, as I am ever so memehungry.

[Bill the barbarian]

4 hours ago, MOB said:

WYRMS FOOTNOTES IS BACK! We have lovingly recreated the classic Chaosium in-house magazine and brought it into the digital age! These are not simple scans, but OCRed reproductions created by our layout team to match the original. Published from 1976 to 1982 the 14 issues span most of the early history of the company, from the dawn of tabletop gaming. Want to relive the original experience? — look no further!

 

Being OCR reproductions, do they have ToC with hypertext links and are they searchable?
Ain’t I inquisitive?

Cheers

[Lordabdul]

They do, they are, and you are

 

 

[Bill the barbarian]

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

They do, they are, and you are

 

The only thing better than curiosity is an answer, so, when are ya going ta buy me my own set, huh when? Aw, c’mon...

Puhleeze!

[Atgxtg]

40 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

 so, when are ya going ta buy me my own set, huh when?.

How illuminating.

[Prinz Slasar]

16 hours ago, Cloud64 said:

Any chance of these being published in a hardback collection, or is it another case of the quality of the original scans not being up to it? That’s something I’d love to have on my shelf.

520 pages in a heavy tome?
Hm, let's see.

I'm very interested in the PoD conditions [format, price...], too.

[Austin]

1 hour ago, prinz.slasar said:

I'm very interested in the PoD conditions [format, price...], too.

Likewise. Similar to Martin Helsdon's Armies & Enemies, this is something I expect to (eagerly) wait for in POD+PDF so I can peruse it in my armchair.

At some point, I'm just going to need to face facts and get a new "Glorantha stuff" bookshelf.

[Prinz Slasar]

2 hours ago, Crel said:

Likewise. Similar to Martin Helsdon's Armies & Enemies, this is something I expect to (eagerly) wait for in POD+PDF so I can peruse it in my armchair.

At some point, I'm just going to need to face facts and get a new "Glorantha stuff" bookshelf.

Call me an old man from the past, but for me, only printed works are the real deal.
In special case of RQG, which I only read but don't play [my house system is MYTHRAS]. I just like Glorantha and the look of the books.

PDF is nice for something like the Jonstown Compendium and I've bought all things in PDF as well, but I don't want the Chaosium books just as digital files.
PDF feels dead, cold and virtual. I want the haptic experience and the certainty that I own the stuff I've bought.
And as an aside: real books are easier zu read than hundreds of PDF-pages.

And in 40 years, my PDFs now are nothing worth, I guess. But the books on my shelf keep their value.

These are the reasons why I want all the RQ Classics to be published as PoD.
Because PDFs are nice, but pale in comparison with the real stuff.

Edited January 30, 2020 by prinz.slasar

[Cloud64]

5 hours ago, prinz.slasar said:

520 pages in a heavy tome?
Hm, let's see.

 

I admit, I didn’t realise there was so much to them. Give it to me in a two book slipcase then.

[Lordabdul]

WF issues will most probably be available only via Print-On-Demand on Lulu and/or DTRPG as sadle-stiched single issues. Not only is this the simplest option for Chaosium, it also gives you the real "haptic experience" of reading the original issues    Omnibus-type casewrap-bound volumes could be possible with POD, but I doubt Chaosium will bother re-doing 500 pages of layout, especially with the problem of figuring out what to do with page numbering, table of contents, and cross-referencing. There's virtually zero chance of a book slipcase since dual-book slipcases are not possible via POD.

[davecake]

Loving it. So interesting to see Glorantha evolve.

[Runeblogger]

What are the coolest bits from these publications?

[Joerg]

One of the coolest bits in WF1 was the reaction letter by MAR Barker (creator of Tekumel), I guess.

One of the still hardly implemented pieces of WBRM boardgame accessories were the Masters of Magic. I remember discussing them for the "current" rules of Dragon Pass years ago, but we didn't arrive at much of a prototype for the "stacks of cardboard counters" game then.

[Lordabdul]

We could start a "Wyrms Footnotes group read" thread, or use this thread for this purpose, but from my initial skimming of the first few PDFs, my highlights are:

WF1

1. Editorial by Greg, with a very Greg-like story about the origins of WB&RM and Chaosium and all that.
2. Greg doxxing his readers   He's posting their full name and address with their questions. I wonder if Steve Perrin has moved in the last 50 years?  
3. Interesting how WF was originally a purely board-game magazine. I didn't look at the dates very closely at first so I thought it was started around the same time as RuneQuest, but it predates it by quite a bit. Still, it's fun to see that people were interested in learning more about a board game's universe!
4. First mention of "Ab Chaos" in a Chaosium document?

WF2

1. The Walktapus appears!
2. WB&RM gets ready for its 2nd printing, and WF2 contains the entirety of the differences, so that owners of the 1st edition don't have to buy the 2nd edition to get the changes.
3. D&D stats for Argrath, Harrek, and other WB&RM heroes! (well, not really D&D stats... see Greg's inimitable preface rambling)

WF3

1. The Nomad Gods, Elric, and Troy board games get teased/advertsed! Chaosium is not just about WB&RM anymore!
2. More classic Gloranthan stuff appearing and getting write-ups. Not gonna say which, you'll have to get the PDF After this, there's regularly more Gloranthan articles about familiar names and places, and less stuff about board game rules and optional missions.

WF4

1. Funny dark troll drawing/strips (by William Church) show up, and seem to be gracing the pages of many WF issues after that. This kind of whimsical illustration is what definitely gives WF a late-70s gaming vibe!
2. Many products get teased, many of which will never see the light of day. For example, "Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass" is announced here! It only got released more than 40 years later in PDF by a totally different author!   Other board games are announced, like "Shadows Dance" and "Masters of Luck and Death". Seeing announcements for things that, to my knowledge, never got released is what warms my heart the most  
3. Of particular interest, RuneQuest gets teased, and, interestingly enough, is described as "a FRPG extension of WB&RM". There's a more complete write-up of what RQ is going to be further into the issue, and the shots at D&D are barely thinly veiled. You have to read it for yourself, it's glorious. There were so few FRPGs back then that they can actually just get away with mentioning "the previous systems".
   1. Btw, @Rick Meints, page 35 somehow repeats 2 or 3 of the pragraphs from page 34. Is that a weird error that featured in the originals?
4. Review of "The Fantasy Trip: Melee"! Oh my. I'm too young to have known these things, but it's history, right there. Awesome.
5. Gloranthan mythology intensifies (insert meme gif)

WF5

1. Lynn Willis gets hired at Chaosium! Working on some games I've never heard of ("Lords of the Middle Sea"?)
2. King Arthur stuff appears in the Chaosium product line-up!
3. RQ Scenario Pack 0! (it was cut from the original book release) It's called "Geedunk Dungeon", and is very much in the style of Balastor's Barracks.
4. More teasing of stuff that never gets released! Yay!
5. RQ beginning characters. Oh my... beginning Mounted Barbarian? 30% in Broadsword... WTF? That's brutal! At least the Peasant Foot Mercenary has a respectable 55% in Short Sword and 50% in 1H Spear. That's better!

WF6

1. "Rambling Runes" segment starts, with Q&A about RQ. Right away people are trying to abuse the POW gain roll rules

That's it for now!

[Rick Meints]

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

Btw, @Rick Meints, page 35 somehow repeats 2 or 3 of the pragraphs from page 34. Is that a weird error that featured in the originals?

That duplication of paragraphs is exactly how the original publication was done. Seeing this (very understandable and appropriate) question asked motivates me to explain how these PDFs were created.

Every page you see in the PDFs went through the following process:

I own a complete set of the original Wyrms Footnotes magazines. In my 40 years of collecting, if I acquired an issue that was in a better condition than the issue I currently had in my collection I would swap it out for the better one, so all the magazines in my collection all in Excellent or near mint condition. Why do I mention that? Mainly because I have access to a great paper copy to scan in on Chaosium's large format scanner. Every page from all 14 issues of the magazine were scanned. I used a program called FineReader 12 by ABBYY software to do that scanning, and straightened pages that were crooked during initial cleanup. The end product was every page as its own TIF file. I then used photoshop to clean up each page individually. That's why the background is a solid white instead of dingy gray. I centered the text on some pages. I made the art look crisper. I brightened the covers and removed the occasional scratch or dent that blemished them (my 40+ year-old originals are not in pristine mint condition). Once I had all the pages for an issue done, I would then collate and convert those images in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Once collated into a single PDF for the issue, I OCR'd the pages so they are text searchable. I added links onto the Table of Contents page so you can click and go to that page. I also added bookmarks for each article. The finished product is what you are able to purchase on the Chaosium website. Any big errors in the originals were not corrected. If I deleted the duplicated paragraphs on page 35 of WF4 that page would have just been blank, save for the one small piece of art. 

Thus, I didn't recreate the layout in MS Word and InDesign like I did for most of the RuneQuest Classics. For Wyrms Footnotes I scanned the originals, cleaned up the images, collated them, and added links and bookmarks. Full blown layout takes a LOT longer. 

[PhilHibbs]

When I saw that the PDFs were scans, I had mixed feelings. Great for authenticity, not so great for searchability. But it appears modern technology gives us the best of both worlds - the scanned image appears to be a layer on top of a text layer that is searchable. Or maybe the text is on top but set to be transparent.

Edited January 30, 2020 by PhilHibbs

[Lordabdul]

27 minutes ago, Rick Meints said:

Seeing this (very understandable and appropriate) question asked motivates me to explain how these PDFs were created.

Great, thanks for the explanation -- it's always fun to get a little glimpse behind the scenes. Thanks for your hard work!

I personally love seeing the little quirks of old publication technology. For instance you can tell on some pages of WF1/2 that the 2 columns of text must have been typed separately on 2 different pieces of paper, cut, and then placed side by side on top of a white sheet before photocopying... as a result, you can see that the 2 columns are not perfectly parallel or even vertical.

15 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

But it appears modern technology gives us the best of both worlds

Yep it does!

[Rick Meints]

In the Company archives we have many of the original layout boards used to lay out the magazine. They would type up single columns at a time, cut them out, and pasted them onto cardstock that has a blue grid on it. 

[Prinz Slasar]

@Rick Meints

Fascinating insights.
Thank you very much for your painstaking work.

Great to see these treasures coming back to the public and the young fans of RQ/Glorantha.

Edited January 30, 2020 by prinz.slasar

[Cloud64]

7 hours ago, lordabdul said:

WF issues will most probably be available only via Print-On-Demand on Lulu and/or DTRPG as sadle-stiched single issues. Not only is this the simplest option for Chaosium, it also gives you the real "haptic experience" of reading the original issues    Omnibus-type casewrap-bound volumes could be possible with POD, but I doubt Chaosium will bother re-doing 500 pages of layout, especially with the problem of figuring out what to do with page numbering, table of contents, and cross-referencing. There's virtually zero chance of a book slipcase since dual-book slipcases are not possible via POD.

But there’s no harm in  indulging ourselves in some wishful thinking, which was all it was really

[JustAnotherVingan]

19 hours ago, Runeblogger said:

What are the coolest bits from these publications?

I think my favourite article was the Sartar High Council, one that inspired me to really think about how players affect the wider world and how the wider world affects them.

[Rick Meints]

I have been pondering Print Options, and it turns out that a 520+ page book could be done.

If we did these as a two book set I think the binding would hold up better though.

An additional discrete page number could be added to each page so you could more simply turn to the page you want.

An index could also be added to the end of each book.

[SDLeary]

50 minutes ago, Rick Meints said:

An index could also be added to the end of each book.

I believe this would be your task, as you seem to be the Master of Indices! 😉

SDLeary

[Austin]

On 1/31/2020 at 8:18 PM, Rick Meints said:

I have been pondering Print Options, and it turns out that a 520+ page book could be done.

If we did these as a two book set I think the binding would hold up better though.

An additional discrete page number could be added to each page so you could more simply turn to the page you want.

An index could also be added to the end of each book.

My bookshelf says "yes please!"