MRQII is now "wayfarer"

[Thalaba]

Hey, that's great!

No mention of a head-hunting game though...

[Chaot]

I'm looking forward to checking out Wayfarer but am worried that with the departure of both Lawrence and Pete that any supplements MGP releases for Wayfarer will be sub-standard.

Yeah, I'm worried that support for BRP games is going to drop right off with the loss of the RQ license. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I'm glad to hear RuneQuest is out of Mongoose's hands. They always rubbed me wrong as a company anyway.

Well, yeah, I don't feel great about some past stuff either but I don't agree that there are too many BRP systems out there. I love having BRP as a relevant player in the gaming market.

[Agentorange]

Still, now that Pete is not writing for Mongoose perhaps he'll do that BRP Heroic Greece supplement for Alephtar Games...I mean he's done Rome so he might as well go for the full set

[Chaot]

He's right Pete. Actually, you owe it to yourself to write it. And get it published as soon as possible.

[Pete Nash]

Still, now that Pete is not writing for Mongoose perhaps he'll do that BRP Heroic Greece supplement for Alephtar Games...I mean he's done Rome so he might as well go for the full set

Don't worry, one way or another I will be writing a Heroic Greece supplement at some point in the future. I can't make any promises about what system/publisher yet though. I have a bit of work for Moon Design to do first.

[camazotz]

Yeah! The great RQ sale because they are making a new core book. One year after the last great sale because they were making a new core book.

Marketing masterpiece! O FLGS, please carry our books! It is an assured investment!

No words....

Well damn, this is certainly true. Not sure I can even look my FLGS owner in the eye after I spent so much time last year convincing him that RQII was worth stocking on his shelves. I love RQII as a system, and I have my hopes Mongoose will do it right with Wayfarer, but those hopes are based entirely on supersition and witchcraft at this point.

Sigh.....

[camazotz]

I absolutely LOVE the system but am not really a big Glorantha fan even though the campaign my group is currently playing in is based in Gloratha the Second Age. I know Sprange claims that Wayfarer will be 100% compatible with the current MRQII and nothing will change in the new book except for the addition of errata but I hope they include some clarifications on movement, charging, etc. I also wonder if magic will change at all. Magic in MRQII is tied to cult membership, which is a Gloratha aspect. Will magic now be somewhat divorced of cult membership in terms of spell availability, etc. I wonder?

The core book handles it more like a form of organization-member relationship; cults and religions may provide divine magic access for the most part, but you could belong to an order of sorcerers, a guild, or even a battle-mage's fraternity. I think the presentation as given in RQII is widely applicable to various settings, even if it owes its roots to Glorantha. I have like fifty various cults, guilds and orders that can be joined in my own home campaign, for example. It's a great concept, and mirrors a bit more closely than most other RPGs how "secret knowledge" like magic might be transmitted. So hopefully it'll be "de-Gloranthaized" by merely emphasizing its universal applicability.

Runes, on the other hand, are probably about to disappear big time....unless they feel like grabbing some genuine Norse runes and inserting them in!

[camazotz]

Don't worry, one way or another I will be writing a Heroic Greece supplement at some point in the future. I can't make any promises about what system/publisher yet though. I have a bit of work for Moon Design to do first.

This would make me very happy....and also cut down on a lot of work for my own Greek campaign!

[rust]

The core book handles it more like a form of organization-member relationship; cults and religions may provide divine magic access for the most part, but you could belong to an order of sorcerers, a guild, or even a battle-mage's fraternity. I think the presentation as given in RQII is widely applicable to various settings, even if it owes its roots to Glorantha.

RQII Empires has a lot of interesting and useful ideas for organizations of almost

every kind, the material that once was the RQI supplement Guilds, Factions and

Cults. It is really not at all difficult to replace the Gloranthan cults with other

organizations, and in my view it even enriches the game and gives it more co-

lour and depth to have more different kinds of organizations.

[Simlasa]

Hey, that's great!

No mention of a head-hunting game though...

That was to be the Blood Magic book for MRQ... wonder if it will get published.

[pansophy]

So, Wayfarer will be direct competition to BRP as both claim to be a universal game system. OK, Wayfarer only for Fantasy, whereas BRP can cover all genres. But to me it seems Fantasy is the most used genre for BRP.

Anyway, I am glad so many Monographs are out there for BRP that the 'Rise and Fall of RQII' does not even bother me It may also have a good thing coming with it: some gamers might be attracted to BRP now. :-D

[Simlasa]

So, Wayfarer will be direct competition to BRP as both claim to be a universal game system.

I'd rather see BRP absorb the MRQ 'options' and Mongoose blow away like dust in the wind... or go make boardgames or whatever they think will bring them better profits this month.

It's nice to have BRP spread around and getting support... but Mongoose would never have been my choice of promoters. It's like selling your sister to some carny folk... she might get famous... but probably not in a good way.

[ewilen]

I don't really have anything against Mongoose (maybe because I was cautious about buying their stuff to begin with, so I never got burned). But like others I feel the main value added by MRQ was options and refinements that could be brought back to BRP. For example, the "culture-based character generation" and magic systems in MRQ seem like improvements on RQ3 and, at the same time, nicely applicable to a variety of bronze age/iron age/S&S settings. I've read good things about the MRQ Elric magic system, which makes me want to grab it. Then there are MRQ Empires and (for MRQ I) Guilds, Factions, and Cults.

I'll note though that Mongoose has said they'll go ahead and publish Age of Treason, which is apparently an outside/freelance setting and sounds very nice. If either that or the Eternal Champion line generates enough momentum (anyone know, for Elric?), then they could lead with those titles and not worry so much about trying to market a "generic" fantasy system.

[Mankcam]

If they keep publishing their other MRQ2 settings under the 'Wayfarer' title then they should go okay - I'm talking about Deus Vult, Wraithcon, Elric, Lankmar etc. I wonder where Clockwork & Chivalry will go to now - 'Wayfarer' seems logical, but maybe BRP instead?

Makes you wonder if Mongoose will try to purchase the rights for CONAN again - maybe we'll see a 'Wayfarer HYBORIA', that will probably sell in droves, and the system will be much better then D20 which they previously did it with - their content was great, the magic had flavour, but overall the D20 limitations dragged it down - MRQ2/Wayfarer would do it much more justice...

[PhilHibbs]

The 'critical mess" quip about the RQ/Wayfarer fanzine was a zinger.

That wasn't actually meant to be a jibe at Mongoose! Just a joke...

[Questbird]

Hopefully, Wayfarer will succeed and join the family of RQ/BRP/D100 games around.

RuneQuest

BRP

Wayfarer

OpenQuest

GORE (perhaps)

Paolo's system (can't remember what it is called, sorry, Pazio ???)

Also Fire and Sword, Ray Turney's system which you can download from here (hey it uses d20 instead of d100, but its heart's in the right place.)

[Bleddyn]

Should have been with the mess they seem to constantly make

[Atgxtg]

****WARNING***ENTERING RANT MODE*****

I for one am neither surprised nor upset about the split. I think most of the old RQ/Glorantha crowd didn't seem to care much for MRQ or the Second Age stuff. So I don7t think that line was selling very well. In my opinion, MRQ1 wasn't worth the paper it was printed on (or even the hard drive space the PDF took up), and there were lots of problems and complaints about the MRQ Cults and gods (Orlanth has Chaos rune associations?). So I can't say I7m surprised or disappointed by this.

I do feel for those few (apparently, if they were legion this wouldn't have happened) who jjust had a favorite RPG line shut off. That always sucks. But hey, at least the game mechanics(MRQ/Wayfarer) will still be in print, and there is quite a lot of Glorantha stuff out there (and more coming) that can be used with or adapted to MRQ. So it couldn't be much, much worse.

I feel even worse for third party MRQ companies. I think this spells the end of the OGL era, and/or third party licensing. I hope nobody get stuck with a load of "orphaned" supplements. I supposed PDfs could be adapted to a related system and repackaged/formatted, but those hard copies are going to be a pain to unload. Don't the main companies have any legal obligation to third party comapnies? What to stop an unscrupulous comany from setting up a bucnch of smaller comies for a trip to oblivion by suddenly killing off a product line and leaving the thirird parties holding the bag, and lots of product?

As far as Wayfarer (why not cal lit "Whatever"?) goes, I hope it tanks. Now I heard that Pete and Loz did a good job with the MRQ2 rules, I didn't look at MRQ2, so I don't know how good they are, but I've seen some of Pete and Loz's other work so I can certainly believe that MRQ2 was better than MRQ1. So I got nothing against Pete or Loz, but like several others here, I think "yet another RQ derivative" doesn't help BRP, Chaoisium, or those who play one of the many variants, or relatives, of the original RuneQuest system.

Rather than the "one biig, happy, BRP family" that some envison and hope for, what I think we have is "many, small, unhappy, dysfunctional, hostile, and inbred BRP family" that has made things worse, rather than better. Heck, this site exists in part because of that animosity. I blame this on the major comapnies involvedin this whole fiiasco. Because of idotic legal ramblings, we've had to call a system that is essentially RuneQuest, Nasic Role Playing, and another system, that is much less like RuneQuest that BRP, RuneQuest. And all so that somebody could use name recgonition and brand appeal to suckier in some old RQ players. It got to the point that is someone said that they played RQ2, we still didn't know what game they were playing. Frankly it ticks me off that somebody could print another RPG and call it RQ2. It ticks me off even more that somebody went and did so anyway, knowing full well what confusion it would cause among the RQ community.

Heck, if Mongoose had called the game Wayfarer when they started this whole mess, we probably would have been one big happy BRP family.

If there are some good options in MRQ2/Wayfarer/Whatever d100 based system that Mongoos is publishing this week that are worth swiping for BRP, then by allm eans, taake 'em. As Matt Sprange hismelf pointed out lback in the early days on MRQ, "you can't copywrite game mechanics".

But personalty, I believe that the sooner Wayfarer dies off and the sooner Mongoose igets thier hands off of the "BRP family" the better off we are all going to be.

I get the feeling from the other publishers of "BRP related" products that the people at those companies actually play some derivative of this game. I don't get that feeling from Mongoose Publishing. In fact, judging on the various "updates" for the system, i have a hard time believing that the guys who wrote MRQ1 even read the game, let alone played it.

So ultimately, this is probably going to be a good thing for us all. No more confusion and animosity over the name of a game what is not now, nor ever really was RuneQuest.

I just hope we can all avoid the temptation to use the phase "the role playing game formerly know as RuneQuest".

[daddystabz]

Whatever you do please don't make the mistake of coloring MRQII by the fiasco that was MRQ. MRQII is the BEST version of BRP/RQ rules EVER done imho. MRQ was a disaster. Pete and Laz deserve great credit and Mongoose can at least feel good that MRQII was the best version of d100 rules ever written. Other than that one triumph, Mongoose needs to go away.

[RosenMcStern]

Wow, atg, what did you eat for breakfast? Scorpion jelly?

I feel even worse for third party MRQ companies. I think this spells the end of the OGL era, and/or third party licensing. I hope nobody get stuck with a load of "orphaned" supplements.

It actually happened already.

It ticks me off even more that somebody went and did so anyway, knowing full well what confusion it would cause among the RQ community.

What ticks me off, instead, is that he did it, completely ignoring the annoyance to old fans, and then dropped the name after 18 months. Why bother, if it was not so important to them?

[PhilHibbs]

What ticks me off, instead, is that he did it, completely ignoring the annoyance to old fans, and then dropped the name after 18 months. Why bother, if it was not so important to them?

It seems that the RuneQuest name and and Glorantha line are a package deal. They couldn't afford to keep losing money on the Gloranthan products, so they had to drop both that and the RuneQuest name. At least, I've heard that speculation, I don't know it for a fact.

[deleriad]

The only bitter, dysfunctional family members I've seen are maybe half a dozen on this site and a few extra who got burned on the original, by all accounts, shambolic playtesting of MRQ1. As far as I can see everyone else seems to get along and have a great deal of fun playing all sorts of versions of BRP and RQ. Personally I think for all the things that Mongoose got wrong they did something else great. The original Glorantha 2nd age book is a work of brilliance as were their 2nd age campaigns. For me MRQII does exactly what I want in a BRP game. If Mongoose are sincere about "Wayfarer" and get good authors to work on the setting then I'll be happy to see more high quality material for my gaming.

[seneschal]

Re: a similar discussion on RPG.net ... since "Wayfarer" is already being used as a RPG title, they should call it

World of Duckness: GlyphMission

The changes are generating similar feelings on the other site.

[Atgxtg]

Whatever you do please don't make the mistake of coloring MRQII by the fiasco that was MRQ. MRQII is the BEST version of BRP/RQ rules EVER done imho. MRQ was a disaster. Pete and Laz deserve great credit and Mongoose can at least feel good that MRQII was the best version of d100 rules ever written. Other than that one triumph, Mongoose needs to go away.

I have read nothing but good things about MRQ2, and think highly of Pete and Loz's other works (I've got nothing against them either). The only reason why I don't say anything good or bad about MRQ2's system is that I have not read it, and have no intention of buying it.

I apologize if my post/rant implied anything negative about the MRQ2 game system or either of the two authors.

[Atgxtg]

Wow, atg, what did you eat for breakfast? Scorpion jelly?

No dead Mongoose. I will readily admit that I have no love for Mongoose Publishing or they way of doing business.

t actually happened already.

My bad. Instead of saying the end of the OGL era, I should have said the end of the "Third Party Support" era. I just can't see how companies can survive in the RPG business of all things, when another publisher can pull thr plug on a product line. The RPG field is hard enough.

What ticks me off, instead, is that he did it, completely ignoring the annoyance to old fans, and then dropped the name after 18 months. Why bother, if it was not so important to them?

I know what you mean. It is like telling all the old RQ fans to go ---- themselves and then wondering why the old fans aren't buying the game. Enemy action seems far more believable excuse than bad business.