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Announcement: Retiring the Monographs


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Chaosium has officially retired its "Monograph" series, which between 2003 and 2013 released material for the Basic Roleplaying System and, under the Miskatonic University Library Association (MULA) imprint, for Call of Cthulhu.

Established in 2003 and spearheaded by Dustin Wright, the monographs were an important precursor to the community content programs now a familiar part of the TTRPG market, including the DM's GuildStoryteller's VaultPathfinder Unlimited, and Chaosium's own Miskatonic RepositoryJonstown Compendium and Explorer's Society

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Independent creators could release titles under Chaosium's Miskatonic University Library Association or BRP brand, and — as with current community content programs — retain ownership of their original creations while using Chaosium's rule systems and IP. 

Monograph creators also performed most of the editorial and layout functions, with Chaosium printing and distributing what was submitted. While this meant quality and consistency could be somewhat variable, the monographs were a successful and innovative program that produced various products, including Cthulhu Invictus, Ripples from Carcosa, Secrets of Morocco, and Secrets of Tibet, that were later revised and republished as mainline Call of Cthulhu releases. 

Many well-known Call of Cthulhu authors also got their start writing monographs for the MULA.

"While innovative for its time as a model to support independent creators and to foster new writing talent, the monographs have been superseded by our thriving community content programs at DriveThruRPG," said Chaosium vice president Michael O'Brien.

"We will be contacting the monograph creators to finalize any payments and advise them that the Miskatonic Repository is a now an option for them to keep their work in print. For the former monographs we will be waiving the usual requirement that a title be a Electrum seller (250 pdf sales) before it is eligible to be print-on-demand. Furthermore, our community content ambassadors will be on hand to assist MULA creators who wish to convert their work to the Miskatonic Repository format," said O'Brien.

WANT TO TAKE PART IN THE MISKATONIC REPOSITORY COMMUNITY PROGRAM?

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Under The Miskatonic Repository community content license, Call of Cthulhu fans can make their own work for use with the game line available to the public, using guidelines, templates, and art provided by Chaosium.

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Whether you share your content for free or put it up for sale, this program is a digital home for terror that joins the dreamscapes of all who peruse it.

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At risk of sounding churlish.... a little lead in notice would have been good. Most of us only have a certain amount of geek money available each month for gaming so we tend to prioritise what we buy. The monographs have always been on my radar  ( I have a good few )but other things have been higher up the food chain recently. Now if notice had gone up saying

" Hear ye, hear ye ! The monographs will be retired in a month - if you want them, buy them "

Then I would have rearranged my buying list to reflect that - chaosium would still have been in the money because i eventually would have bought all the things i was going to buy....just in a different order.

Whereas now I'm slightly vexed and thinking why didn't they give us a last chance to buy if we wanted to ?

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2 hours ago, Agentorange said:

At risk of sounding churlish....

And me, I rarely criticize Chaosium, but I did just buy the BGB, hard copy and PDF. It has finally been delivered and it looks lovely, but....

Edited by Bill the barbarian
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... remember, with a TARDIS, one is never late for breakfast!

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I missed getting these where they came out, as I just couldn't afford them.

I started looking for them, and most are out of print or hard to find.  Other then Amazon, I never knew where to find them.

I do hope with this model that most of these will be made available AND not just in digital format but some kind of POD.  I know DriveThruRPG does make available some stuff in print.
 

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On 3/2/2022 at 4:03 PM, Bill the barbarian said:

And me, I rarely criticize Chaosium, but I did just buy the BGB, hard copy and PDF. It has finally been delivered and it looks lovely, but....

I’ve had the BGB (in hardback no less) since 2015. It and my two copies of Magic World are my most heavily used books though an honorable mention also goes to Delta Green

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Check out our homebrew rules for freeform magic in BRP ->

No reason for Ars Magica players to have all the fun!

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14 hours ago, Michael B said:

I do hope with this model that most of these will be made available AND not just in digital format but some kind of POD.  I know DriveThruRPG does make available some stuff in print.

There's nothing prohibiting the original authors from publishing their material on the Miskatonic Repository. Many of the monographs could be converted to the required format within a matter of hours, provided you have the required DTP skills. As for POD, that just means reaching a sales volume to qualify. Please note though, that many of the monographs did not sell that well for any number of reasons.

We hope the monograph creators publish their works on the MR. Unfortunately, some have been very difficult to contact, and we are not even sure if they are still "in the industry", so to speak. 

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Hope that Helps,
Rick Meints - Chaosium, Inc.

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9 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

There's nothing prohibiting the original authors from publishing their material on the Miskatonic Repository ...

Is BRP-generic (non Mythos) content also welcome on the MR?  I had overlooked that!
 

C'es ne pas un .sig

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4 hours ago, g33k said:

Is BRP-generic (non Mythos) content also welcome on the MR?  I had overlooked that!

It is not. The Miskatonic Repository is exclusively for Call of Cthulhu 7th edition content. There is as yet no community content store for “BRP-generic” material.

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14 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

As for POD, that just means reaching a sales volume to qualify. 

Ordinarily, yes. Please note that (as stated in MOB’s announcement) this requirement has been waived for the former monographs. If you wrote one, and get it updated to 7th edition rules, and can prepare print-ready files, it’s already eligible for POD. Let me know if you need any advice or support meeting the relevant print specification.

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1 hour ago, Nick Brooke said:

It is not. The Miskatonic Repository is exclusively for Call of Cthulhu 7th edition content. There is as yet no community content store for “BRP-generic” material.

So MR is exclusive to Mythos content, as JC is to Glorantha content; and other settings' Monographs have no current outlet?
(I mean... this is the CoC subforum on BRPC, so I'm not entirely surprised.  Just wanting to make sure... ) .

<wistful voice>:  I  do  wish some of those other titles still had a venue...  😢

 

Edited by g33k

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4 hours ago, g33k said:

<wistful voice>:  I  do  wish some of those other titles still had a venue...  😢

My numbers maybe slightly out, but of the 111(ish) Monographs, the overwhelming majority were CoC (82), 4 were Stormbringer (pretty sure a couple were published elsewhere), and 25 were BRP and these could in theory be published using the BRP SRD. Publications like Basic Magic were just the RQ3 magic book with numbers filed off (even included Cormac), so that's never going to reappear. I'm pretty sure that Basic Gamemaster and basic creatures were just the other two RQ3 books similarly treated (i don't have those). 

-----

Search the Glorantha Resource Site: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com. Search the Glorantha mailing list archives: https://glorantha.steff.in/digests/

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15 hours ago, g33k said:

So MR is exclusive to Mythos content, as JC is to Glorantha content; and other settings' Monographs have no current outlet?
(I mean... this is the CoC subforum on BRPC, so I'm not entirely surprised.  Just wanting to make sure... ) .
<wistful voice>:  I  do  wish some of those other titles still had a venue...  😢

We do not have a license for any of the Stormbringer/Hawkmoon/Eternal Champion material, so there is nothing we can do about those titles. They haven't been sold for years, any way. As for the rest of the Monographs, they actually do have a few possible venues. We have fan licenses available that could be used for a number of those titles. Those licenses are quite simple to set up and comply with. Those products could be sold on DTRPG. The real difficulty is finding and convincing those creatives to go through the process. A number of those authors have largely gone silent though. We don't have the time to track them all down, especially when many of those titles didn't sell that well for a variety of reasons.

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Hope that Helps,
Rick Meints - Chaosium, Inc.

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21 hours ago, David Scott said:

My numbers maybe slightly out, but of the 111(ish) Monographs, the overwhelming majority were CoC (82), 4 were Stormbringer (pretty sure a couple were published elsewhere), and 25 were BRP and these could in theory be published using the BRP SRD. Publications like Basic Magic were just the RQ3 magic book with numbers filed off (even included Cormac), so that's never going to reappear. I'm pretty sure that Basic Gamemaster and basic creatures were just the other two RQ3 books similarly treated (i don't have those). 

Yes, the original Basic Characters / Magic / Creatures and Gamemaster were the RQ3 booklets with Gloranthan IP removed. Magic was reworked as a full BRP BGB compatible release and is still available in PDF:  https://www.chaosium.com/the-magic-book-pdf/ There we’re plans to fold a chunk of Basic Gamemaster into a Magic World supplement, but that was never finalised before the line was shut down.

10 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

We do not have a license for any of the Stormbringer/Hawkmoon/Eternal Champion material, so there is nothing we can do about those titles. They haven't been sold for years, any way. As for the rest of the Monographs, they actually do have a few possible venues. We have fan licenses available that could be used for a number of those titles. Those licenses are quite simple to set up and comply with. Those products could be sold on DTRPG. The real difficulty is finding and convincing those creatives to go through the process. A number of those authors have largely gone silent though. We don't have the time to track them all down, especially when many of those titles didn't sell that well for a variety of reasons.

Some of Stormbringer Monograph material has been found a new home by the indefatigable Marcus Bone at http://www.stormbringerrpg.com/?page_id=63 

As for Fan Licensing… Erm… the only general thing on Fan Material I can find on the Chaosium web site appears to contradict the above?

Quote
  1. Non-Retail.
    1. You cannot charge for access to your materials or site; nor can you distribute your content through retail channels such as DriveThruRPG, OneBookShelf, Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, App Stores etc (even if the material is free).

The previous “small publisher” commercial license (which DID allow one to charge for material and use retail channels such as those listed, and thus have a way to recover production costs and allow the possibility of PoD) was removed some time ago from the license section of the web site as far as I can tell; the only sections left are those on the Fan Material policy (from which the above is quoted, with emphasis added), Commercial Licensing and Community Content Programs. Or have I missed something?

 

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2 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

The previous “small publisher” commercial license (which DID allow one to charge for material and use retail channels such as those listed, and thus have a way to recover production costs and allow the possibility of PoD) was removed some time ago from the license section of the web site as far as I can tell; the only sections left are those on the Fan Material policy (from which the above is quoted, with emphasis added), Commercial Licensing and Community Content Programs. Or have I missed something?

That is correct. But the BRP monographs could be republished on DTRPG using the BRP SRD/OGL. The creators wouldn't even need Chaosium's permission (or pay any royalties) to do that.

On 3/6/2022 at 4:40 PM, g33k said:

So MR is exclusive to Mythos content, as JC is to Glorantha content; and other settings' Monographs have no current outlet?
(I mean... this is the CoC subforum on BRPC, so I'm not entirely surprised.  Just wanting to make sure... ) .

<wistful voice>:  I  do  wish some of those other titles still had a venue...  😢

 

As @Rick Meintssaid, the Stormbringer stuff is off the table. Of the BRP titles, many of these were just filed off RQ3 rulebooks done in-house, because Chaosium no longer had the rights. If/when we do a revamp of the BGB I guess we can look at those again, but it's likely they won't be repeated: after all, Chaosium now owns RuneQuest again.

Of the other BRP monographs, as outlined above they could republished on DriveThruRPG (or elsewhere) using the BRP SRD/OGL. Or released as fan works non-commercially under the Fan Materials policy.

But as @David Scott noted, the vast majority of the monographs were for Call of Cthulhu, so we're going to prioritize getting the MULA stuff sorted first as we have an ideal venue in the Miskatonic Repository for republication.

The reality is, none of the monographs were selling well for a very long time (we took them down on December 31st, but it was several weeks before anyone even noticed). The Miskatonic Repository gives all the MULA monographs a chance of a new lease of life, especially as we're going to allow them all to be POD from the outset.

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