Upcoming Glorantha publications (Old thread 2015-2022)

[swashbuckler]

On 9/8/2019 at 3:36 PM, Christoph Kohring said:

Yes, there will be a GAC (1602 [!]-1655) & no, it's not just "rumour & speculation" as @Jeff is working on it. If we get it in 2021 we should be happy & if it's next year, we should be overjoyed, now, shouldn't we?!!

Here is what @Jason Durall recently wrote on the RQ Facebook page:

André Jarosch added:

And @Jason Durall impishly replied:

 

I *love* the new RQG, but my potential players are waiting til Cults comes out before they're willing to invest time and money diving back into Glorantha for the 2nd, 3rd, or fourth time. For *all* of them, Cults completes the basic set--none of them are *against* any of the other stuff, but they don't think that any of it is as crucial to gameplay as Cults is. I have to admit, as much as I'm excited for all the stuff that's coming out (this is the best iteration of Glorantha yet, IMHO), I don't disagree...

I really wish it would get bumped to the front of the line!

[Lordabdul]

1 hour ago, swashbuckler said:

I really wish it would get bumped to the front of the line!

It is already at the front of the line (it's currently Jeff's focus, as much as the GAC, last we heard). Chaosium staff has already explained elsewhere on the forum that the Cults book requires a lot of art to be produced, and that there have been a lot of revisions because it's supposed to be as much a foundational book at Guide to Glorantha, and as such, it has to be done right. So yeah, we'll be lucky if we get it in 2020.

[g33k]

4 hours ago, lordabdul said:

It is already at the front of the line (it's currently Jeff's focus, as much as the GAC, last we heard)...

Yeah; the art and layout just take TIME.  Especially, I believe, the art.  The 2 books of adventuring materials, that Chaosium expects are coming out next, are simply easier to produce, and shouldn't slow the Cults Duo by much, if any.  Holding up everything else for the Cults would just be an artificial -- and needless -- delay on those products.

[swashbuckler]

On 11/20/2019 at 10:17 PM, g33k said:

Yeah; the art and layout just take TIME.  Especially, I believe, the art.  The 2 books of adventuring materials, that Chaosium expects are coming out next, are simply easier to produce, and shouldn't slow the Cults Duo by much, if any.  Holding up everything else for the Cults would just be an artificial -- and needless -- delay on those products.

Right, and I want to stress that I *love* this line. I wish there were an intermediate PDF or something; like: buy the book now and and get an early PDF so you can start playing right away, the way lots of kickstarters do. I'd pay full price up front for the print book TODAY to have access to something like that, because that's honestly the minimum it would take for me to be able to lure my main players back into the game.

We here all know it's a new Chaosium now that takes deadlines and delivery very seriously, but a lot of them still have that old, "yeah, I'll believe it when I see it," attitude about Chaosium and RQ in particular. 

[g33k]

4 hours ago, swashbuckler said:

Right, and I want to stress that I *love* this line. I wish there were an intermediate PDF or something; like: buy the book now and and get an early PDF so you can start playing right away, the way lots of kickstarters do. I'd pay full price up front for the print book TODAY to have access to something like that, because that's honestly the minimum it would take for me to be able to lure my main players back into the game ...

Chaosium doesn't want to do this as a KS project.  But... huh... y'know, that doesn't mean they cannot take some of those same KS notions and apply them to their own business practices, and come out with a best-of-both-worlds situation  This is actually a decent notion, IMHO... 

I realize the art & layout need to be done, the printing, etc.  But for those of us who are REALLY eager -- and see some of this content as "essential" --  what about a "very-early-access" PDF?  I mean, you see (quoted above) that this group won't even consider playing without this content (I presume they are not alone); the entire production is wonderful, but the writing is essential.

So:  let us buy the PDF (text-only), at the regular PDF price, just as if it were ready for commercial release:  text-complete but without art & layout.  It could give the "tribal edit" crew all that much more time to work before Chaosium places the order for the print run.  As per normal Chaosium practice, you can update the PDF and provide customers with periodic updates (art&layout, tribal-edit, etc.), and (also as per normal Chaosium practice) an e-coupon for the price-of-PDF discount on the printed-copy.

Everything the same... except early access to the text.  And -- not to put too fine a point on it -- early access to the revenue!

Which kinda looks win-win, to me.  @Jeff or @Neil(and/or whoever else @Chaosium) ?

 

[Joerg]

It doesn't even have to be modeled on Kickstarter. Baen Books has a policy of selling selected books electronically as Advanced Reader Copies (E-ARCs), taking a premium payment (when compared to regular E-Book price once the book has been released in the final edited edition). The very limited print run of the unformatted, unillustrated GaGoG is similar, but on dead aldryami, and reaching a lot less people.

[Lordabdul]

On 11/22/2019 at 9:38 AM, swashbuckler said:

buy the book now and and get an early PDF so you can start playing right away, the way lots of kickstarters do

FYI that's more or less what Chaosium does already. Books have been available for purchase as PDF just as they were going to the printer... then when the books come out, you get the PDF price as a discount.

Releasing "earlier-access" PDFs might be useful to crowdsource typos and other proof-reading stuff, but ultimately it also adds some management/production overhead, so it really comes down to whether the Chaosium people think it would make things easier or harder for them.

Edited November 24, 2019 by lordabdul

[g33k]

12 hours ago, lordabdul said:

... but ultimately it also adds some management/production overhead, so it really comes down to whether the Chaosium people think it would make things easier or harder for them.

It probably does add some overhead, at that.

It also lets them begin getting revenue earlier ... possibly MUCH earlier, for an art-heavy item like a 2-vol cults book! -- and that's pretty valuable in its own right.

I'm not saying it's clearly the best move for them.  But it does look like it's at least worth a solid "think-about" the several upsides vs the downsides, rather than a dismiss-out-of-hand.  😁

 

[swashbuckler]

On 11/24/2019 at 3:20 AM, lordabdul said:

FYI that's more or less what Chaosium does already. Books have been available for purchase as PDF just as they were going to the printer... then when the books come out, you get the PDF price as a discount.

Yeah, I've done that for just about everything that they have offered since they started. But that's for a complete book, with pretty much final everything. I'm talking about an early-access version, like g33k mentioned. I have no idea if that would be practical or even practicable, but I'd be will to pay a premium for it! 

[Glorion]

On 9/7/2019 at 4:46 PM, SNaomiScott said:

I'm pretty much the same myself.

Would it be nice to have a big campaign that you can sink the players into for several months a la Pendragon? Sure. It would definitely help give the players a strong taste of what the Hero Wars and Glorantha (esp. Dragon Pass) is about, and would be handy for newcomer GM's to get a feel for running a RQ game, but...

As you say, it could also set up a situation where players (and potentially GMs) are trying to outshine the big names of the Hero Wars and steal the thunder (no pun intended).

At the same time, I *love* the ambiguity surrounding the stories of Argrath as presented in King of Sartar, and can see myself possibly being a little disappointed by anything that attempts to offer a definitive canonical answer to the question of 'who is Argrath?'

There's a part of me that would love to see something like this, but another, larger part that would want it be focused around something less established than Argrath's rise to power and subsequent deification (maybe).

 

At one of the RQ Cons in the '90s, Greg stated that King of Sartar was simply the Sartarite version of events a thousand years later, and he was planning to write a different one, equally valid, in which the Lunars win and Argrath loses. I do hope the Grand Campaign includes that possibility!

[Steve]

I updated the RQ section based on the information given today in the "Runequestions" seminar at Dragonmeet in London (just based on my own notes, and of course I could have missed something or got something wrong).

Edited November 30, 2019 by Steve

[jajagappa]

5 hours ago, Steve said:

I updated the RQ section based on the information given today in the "Runequestions" seminar at Dragonmeet in London (just based on my own notes, and of course I could have missed something or got something wrong).

For a quick and easy reference, Nick Brooke live-tweeted the session with notes here: 

 

[jajagappa]

5 hours ago, Steve said:

(just based on my own notes, and of course I could have missed something or got something wrong)

Btw, the Nochet book has multiple writers involved.

[Orlanthatemyhamster]

Four years later and nothing, so not so much a pipeline as a straw.  

I'll get me coat.

[g33k]

53 minutes ago, Orlanthatemyhamster said:

Four years later and nothing, so not so much a pipeline as a straw.  

Ummmm ... what?

Like, I'm honestly confused by what you mean, here.  The hardcover was released in 2018, it's now 2019, and Chaosium has 2 hefty RQG books out, plus a "GM's Screen Pack" (that in any other game system would be called a "Colymar Supplement (plus Screen)").  We also got a couple of freebie adventures (Broken Tower, Rattling Wind), and they'vr just opened Jonstown Compendium on DTRPG, with 5 excellent titles (yes, fan content; but a fair bit of Chaosium effort to make it happen).

I'll grant you it's not a flood-tide!  But it's a decent flow of product, hardly a "straw."

Coming up shortly are a couple of adventure-centric books, then the adventure-centric Starter Set and then the GM Sourcebook.

More books further down the pipeline.

Maybe I've misunderstood ... ?

[Orlanthatemyhamster]

Yeah, my mistake, sort of.

While this thread was started four years ago, the publishing, or more accurately the republishing and overhaul of much of this material wasn't until much more recently.

And I agree some of it is new, not really a huge amount, but significant enough to merit mention.

So I'm sorry to have been misleading.

But in my defence, this has happened before.
The doom of Runequest/Glorantha was that stuff appeared at a snail's pace. The stuff was good, wonderful even. but there was so little of it. My group would have bought three times the amount published, more even, could RQ have challenged D&D for its crown? No. But it could (and was briefly) have been a power at court.
It was definitely let down by a lack of product, and in my opinion an imbalance between scenarios and background, but I have nothing but my guess to prove  this and would be happy to be proved wrong and made to eat my words. 
Here is a list of RQ publications and if  you weed out the fan stuff (and some, if not most of it was bloody good) and the reprints (reprints with D&D don't really matter so much as they publish sooo much. It's much more noticeable with RQ as their catalogue is that much smaller) it's pretty thin on the ground in its forty (yes forty!) year existence.

I think Mongoose was when it was at its most prolific.

https://index.rpg.net/display-search.phtml?key=system&value=RuneQuest


Please feel free to correct me in every and all aspects of what I have written, it would be good to see that they have been really churning it out.

PS.  I have been playing since '81 so I have probably lost quite a few stats, if you know what i mean...

[g33k]

On 12/9/2019 at 2:39 PM, Orlanthatemyhamster said:

... While this thread was started four years ago, the publishing, or more accurately the republishing and overhaul of much of this material wasn't until much more recently...

The guy who started this thread comes back periodically and updates it, removing stuff from "Upcoming" as it gets published (or as Chaosium removes it from consideration), modifying at need, etc.  So the top-post is actually relatively RECENT, not a snapshot of what-was-coming-4-years-ago, still not out.

I'm pretty sure that most or all of the RQ Classic Kickstarter project was originally on the "Upcoming" list, for example.

I think the backbone of the list (as it stands right now) is probably the info gleaned from one of the 2019 panels from Kraken?  Or maybe Essen?

 

On 12/9/2019 at 2:39 PM, Orlanthatemyhamster said:

 ... I think Mongoose was when it was at its most prolific.

https://index.rpg.net/display-search.phtml?key=system&value=RuneQuest
... 

OK, Mongoose.  I'm guessing you know that -- while it DOES have it's fans (and a few more who use snippets) -- the Mongoose "2nd Age" stuff generally went over poorly.  Chaosium was frustrated, and many fans were so disenchanted with Mongoose product that they just... left.

Someone @Chaosium (Jeff I think, but maybe someone else) revealed some sales numbers:  the 1st Mongoose supplement sold reasonably well, but it went rapidly downhill, with each successive supplement selling about half as many as the prior one.  Notwithstanding the prolific output of TITLES... Mongoose was effectively killing the line!  The last ones were money-losing books, and Glorantha was (if sales are a measure) positively hemorrhaging fans.   

I don't find Mongoose line to be an example of "RQ done right..."  In fact, rather the opposite (that said, the MongTrav line seems to be very good, overall!  Maybe Mong-Matt just "gets" Tav's Imperium setting better; I dunno...) 

 

On 12/9/2019 at 2:39 PM, Orlanthatemyhamster said:

... But in my defence, this has happened before.
The doom of Runequest/Glorantha was that stuff appeared at a snail's pace. The stuff was good, wonderful even. but there was so little of it. My group would have bought three times the amount published, more even, could RQ have challenged D&D for its crown? No. But it could (and was briefly) have been a power at court.
It was definitely let down by a lack of product, and in my opinion an imbalance between scenarios and background, but I have nothing but my guess to prove  this and would be happy to be proved wrong and made to eat my words. 
...
Please feel free to correct me in every and all aspects of what I have written, it would be good to see that they have been really churning it out.
 

OK, so...  mid-2015 was "the Return of the Great Old Ones" to Chaosium, and the Ascension of the MoonDesign team to the Board of Directors, main writers, Operational Management, Business Management, and General Dogsbodies (I used to call this "nuChaosium" until I learned that some were using that in a critical or pejorative sense.  😞  )

Below, you'll read my own fan-POV understanding of what followed.  I expect I'll have gotten some details wrong, but I believe it to be broadly correct; more right than wrong, even in the details.

MD took over a company that had "Kickstarted itself to death," out of cash and with minimal revenue streams, but huge obligations.  Artists and authors had gone unpaid.  That's just the publicly-known bits... I've got to suspect a bunch of other red ink on the books.

So they began by setting Chaosium's house in order, both as to business operations and creative output.

Once the existing KS's were back on track, AND the Ol'Faithful line (CoC) was pipelined with new product, AND their audit showed a path toward a sustainable company (sadly taking MW out of production, and some unpopular staffing changes)... THEN they turned to RQ, with the twin initiatives of the RQClassic-KS + new edition.

The 1st draft of the new RQ edition was based on TDM's Mythras, but (sometime in late-'15 / early-'16) Chaosium backed away from that and elected to base the new edition on the RQ2-centric chassis they wrote in-house.

So there's our starting-line, really.  From there... call it 2.5ish years to get the new-RQ draft written, playtested, edited, art'ed, laid out, etc.  Not stellar, but hardly a slacking pace!

Mid/late '18 was when Chaosium began selling the new edition.

Now we have 4 all-new RQG items in print-or-PDF, with a 5th item in PDF and going to print shortly.  There is also the systemless Glorantha Sourcebook, sort of a 6th item:  partially a 13G product but also with a LOT of Chaosium creative input! These include a dozen or so adventures, and a small Sandbox sufficient to launch a campaign.  There is yet another collection of adventures &c about to drop in PDF (with print to follow).  That is less than 2 years' output, from 1st product to last.

This is a very credible output!

Are they "churning it out"?  You tell me... YGMV, as always; but honestly I hope they are turning out a BETTER product than is implied by "churning."

[Rick Meints]

Comparing the output for any roleplaying game against the output for D&D is always going to come out the same way. D&D in all its editions has wildly outsold all its competitors. It's pretty much had an 80-90% market share for all or most of its lifetime. TSR became a very large company compared to any other RPG company. By larger, I mean larger by a factor of 10.

A few things on product output:

• Chaosium produced 23 RQ products between 1978 and 1983, of which 21 were Gloranthan. (The wargames WB&RM and Nomad Gods not included)
• Avalon Hill produced 29 RQ products between 1984 and 1995, of which 23 were Gloranthan (6 of the RQ products were mostly reprinted/updated material)
• Mongoose produced 63 RQ products between 2006 and 2011, of which about 30 were Gloranthan. (I excluded French language titles)
• The Design Mechanism published a lot of great RQ material, did not publish any Gloranthan material for RuneQuest
• Since 2016 Chaosium has resumed publishing RQ and has published 6 RQ products for Glorantha. (I include the Sea Cave and the Glorantha Sourcebook)

You can slice and dice and categorize those products slightly differently, but that's what was produced. Of course, the NUMBER of products is less telling than the page count produced. I have that tallied somewhere, but that seems a bit overkill for this conversation.

In the end, we are trying to produce quality Gloranthan material for RQ on a regular basis, with the goal of getting to at least 6 RQ products per year. I believe 2020 will see a number of great RQ products come out.

[Bill the barbarian]

5 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

In the end, we are trying to produce quality Gloranthan material for RQ on a regular basis, with the goal of getting to at least 6 RQ products per year. I believe 2020 will see a number of great RQ products come out.

Thanks for the update, sir.

[Shiningbrow]

Q: will there be hints (or better) as to how great big things happen? Somewhat more detail than, e.g., Argrath got a bunch of magicians together and made a dragon rise up...

This sort of relates to a few posts earlier about merely being a sidekick in all of this.

 

[redmoongoddess]

Can I get another source for a Kralorela sourcebook being an upcoming project? That twitter thread doesn't really give a lot of evidence for it beyond it being a place you can sail to from Nochet. IMO that doesn't really confirm or deny the idea of it being the topic of an source book either way. Is there an different source that gives more insight on it I'm missing?

[7Tigers]

It has been announced several times that David Millians is in charge of first Kralorela sourcebook, with Godunya cult description and new Draconic Mysticism rules in it, all around Lur Nop port area.

Quote

Lur Nop (large city): This city in Wanzow is the only port of Kralorela which is open to foreign shipping. Traders from Vormain, the East Isles, Teshnos, Teleos, and the Holy Country meet here. Each barbarian nation has its own enclave, carefully overseen by the mandarins. Near the city is the Thousand Dragon Cliff, renowned for its numerous draconic images which have been carved out of the rock since before the Dawn.

 

[Rick Meints]

On 1/11/2020 at 4:03 AM, Redmoongodess said:

Can I get another source for a Kralorela sourcebook being an upcoming project? That twitter thread doesn't really give a lot of evidence for it beyond it being a place you can sail to from Nochet. IMO that doesn't really confirm or deny the idea of it being the topic of an source book either way. Is there an different source that gives more insight on it I'm missing?

Yes, David Millians is heading up the Kralorela project. We have not had a final draft submitted yet, so no ETA on when it will be published, although probably not in 2020.

Last I saw it was 150,000 words, or about 200 pages in MS Word.

[Richard S.]

On 1/11/2020 at 3:44 AM, 7Tigers said:

new Draconic Mysticism rules

excited draconic screeching

I've been waiting for this for ages!

[Shiningbrow]

I'm curious - why is the East getting a book written up in.the short term, when it appears that many would like to see the West covered in more detail, especially given the significance of sorcery?

(Yes, I understand that the GM book, and/or perhaps CaGoG may cover some, but...).