Frank Menzter's Empyrea

[MOB]

Our friend, the gaming legend Frank Mentzer recently launched a Kickstarter for his Empyrea fantasy setting - this is an ambitious project opening up one of the classic RPG fantasy settings to many different game systems (including RuneQuest, Pathfinder, and plenty of others). Frank has assembled an illustrious team of guest authors and artists to work on this project, which has been 40 years in the making. We encourage you to take a look at this - and as always, if you like what you see, please support it!

 

[Joerg]

Which edition of RuneQuest is he going to support? RQ2 Classic (which he knows from way back, as he said in an interview) or RQG?

Not that it matters much, if the magic is being re-written to match the setting.

[MOB]

On 11/10/2017 at 4:29 AM, Joerg said:

Which edition of RuneQuest is he going to support? RQ2 Classic (which he knows from way back, as he said in an interview) or RQG?

Not that it matters much, if the magic is being re-written to match the setting.

The new rules.

[tgcb]

The Empyrea Kickstarter was cancelled.

Lot's of "Mentzer drama" out there  - you can research it yourself if interested.

[styopa]

Curious that the conversation is about $75 for the basic campaign setting being too high a price point. 

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, maybe it was economically reasonable considering what they were going to include, but - if that was the case - as the lowest-tier-that-you-get-something-physical then they just wanted to try to include too much.

Of course, you might even be able to charge that for a finished product, but people backing a KS product expect to be getting a discount for a product because there's an implied risk-investment in the format.

 

So my real reason for even bothering to comment on this...do we know what the price-point for RQG is going to be yet?  I admit, I'm slightly concerned.  (Not for me, I'm one of the guys that's going to buy it pretty much regardless.)  

For those keeping track, IIRC DMG was $18? $20? in 1980, I think RQ3 boxed set from AH was $24?

$24 in 1981 is about $60 today.  Damn, I feel old.

[Yelm's Light]

3 hours ago, styopa said:

For those keeping track, IIRC DMG was $18? $20? in 1980, I think RQ3 boxed set from AH was $24?

$24 in 1981 is about $60 today.  Damn, I feel old.

The DMG was $15.  I'm not sure how much RQ3 was originally, since the copy that I have came in a mass buy I did from EBay, and was the 1993 edition anyway.

[tobarstep]

9 hours ago, styopa said:

For those keeping track, IIRC DMG was $18? $20? in 1980, I think RQ3 boxed set from AH was $24?

$24 in 1981 is about $60 today.  Damn, I feel old.

If I had to guess (and a guess is all it is) I'd say about 60 USD. That seems to be the going rate for hardcover, full-game books. If it's split between player and GM guides, they might be more in the 45 USD range.

[trystero]

In their January 1985 catalogue, Avalon Hill sold the RQ3 Deluxe Edition box for US$38, which works out to about US$90 today. (They also sold the Players Box for US$20 and the Gamemasters Box for US$25.)

I seem to recall the Deluxe Edition box originally being US$40, but don't have a source for that. I do know from firsthand experience that it was £40 in the UK in 1984, which works out to £117.99 today, which in turn converts to US$154.28 today. Eye-wateringly expensive, that import.

[styopa]

13 hours ago, trystero said:

In their January 1985 catalogue, Avalon Hill sold the RQ3 Deluxe Edition box for US$38, which works out to about US$90 today. (They also sold the Players Box for US$20 and the Gamemasters Box for US$25.)

I seem to recall the Deluxe Edition box originally being US$40, but don't have a source for that. I do know from firsthand experience that it was £40 in the UK in 1984, which works out to £117.99 today, which in turn converts to US$154.28 today. Eye-wateringly expensive, that import.

Then again, wasn't one of the hashes on AH their pricing being far above 'market point' at the time?

[trystero]

I think AH's high price for RQ3 was part of the reason that edition wasn't as big a hit as it deserved to be. (RQ3 certainly didn't really take off in the UK until the publication of Games Workshop's licensed — and much cheaper — hardback edition.)

[MOB]

5 hours ago, trystero said:

I think AH's high price for RQ3 was part of the reason that edition wasn't as big a hit as it deserved to be. (RQ3 certainly didn't really take off in the UK until the publication of Games Workshop's licensed — and much cheaper — hardback edition.)

A high price coupled with sub-par production values: the shoddy stapled paper covers of the core books. And then the next two boxed releases were both character sheet pads in boxes, again at a premium price. Followed by the unexciting, non-Gloranthan Monster Coliseum. After being treated to such amazing RQ2 product as Griffin Mountain, Borderlands, Big Rubble and Pavis, let alone Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror, it was an inauspicious start...  

Edited November 8, 2017 by MOB

[Oracle]

6 hours ago, MOB said:

... And then the next two boxed releases were both character sheet pads in boxes, again at a premium price. ...

Yes, these two boxes I've never understood. The only RQ3 supplements I've never purchased ...

[Yelm's Light]

I knew something about the business side in those days, and shall we say I was less than impressed with the Boys from Baltimore as regards RQ.  They knew wargames, but not RPG's.  They basically followed the same format they'd used for their boardgames and, as mentioned, the character sheet packs were a dumb idea to begin with.  They did, however, do a good job with Dragon Pass, but I attribute that to its being a traditional war game and hence in their wheelhouse.

[Numtini]

12 hours ago, MOB said:

A high price coupled with sub-par production values: the shoddy stapled paper covers of the core books.

To this day, I honestly will never be able to emotionally separate how much of my highly negative reaction to RQ3 was the tissue paper books.

[jajagappa]

21 hours ago, MOB said:

A high price coupled with sub-par production values: the shoddy stapled paper covers of the core books. And then the next two boxed releases were both character sheet pads in boxes, again at a premium price. Followed by the unexciting, non-Gloranthan Monster Coliseum. After being treated to such amazing RQ2 product as Griffin Mountain, Borderlands, Big Rubble and Pavis, let alone Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror, it was an inauspicious start...  

And then came the repackaging of previous content across multiple boxes and books, and of course, the "art"... 

[BWP]

On 06/11/2017 at 3:49 PM, trystero said:

In their January 1985 catalogue, Avalon Hill sold the RQ3 Deluxe Edition box for US$38, which works out to about US$90 today. (They also sold the Players Box for US$20 and the Gamemasters Box for US$25.)

I seem to recall the Deluxe Edition box originally being US$40, but don't have a source for that. I do know from firsthand experience that it was £40 in the UK in 1984, which works out to £117.99 today, which in turn converts to US$154.28 today. Eye-wateringly expensive, that import.

In Australia, it cost A$90 for the Deluxe set in 1984, which was indeed staggeringly expensive for an RPG.  I seem to recall your typical boxed RPGs at the time being in the A$25-30 range, which itself was pretty daunting for a poor Uni student (although I managed to buy an awful lot of them any way ...).  I was (so far as I know) the first person in my home town of Newcastle to buy the RQ3 box and at the time I wondered if this was going to be a good investment ....

I didn't mind or even quite liked most of the system changes in the rules, and while I wasn't impressed with the production values I coped.  (I laminated the covers, but it didn't help much.)  What bothered me is that it took a long, long time to get anything meaningful and new for Glorantha.  Don't get me wrong, Vikings was very well done, but it didn't have a lot that was of much use in a DP or Prax campaign (at least as I understood things at that time).  In the end I would rather have spent my $90 on new boxed supplements equivalent to Trollpak, Pavis, etc.  Oh well.

[MOB]

3 hours ago, BWP said:

In Australia, it cost A$90 for the Deluxe set in 1984, which was indeed staggeringly expensive for an RPG.  I seem to recall your typical boxed RPGs at the time being in the A$25-30 range

I have the same memories! The paper covers inside only heightened the sense we were being gouged.

3 hours ago, BWP said:

What bothered me is that it took a long, long time to get anything meaningful and new for Glorantha.  Don't get me wrong, Vikings was very well done, but it didn't have a lot that was of much use in a DP or Prax campaign (at least as I understood things at that time).  In the end I would rather have spent my $90 on new boxed supplements equivalent to Trollpak, Pavis, etc.  Oh well.

Paper covers and boxes of character sheets aside, that was the fundamental flaw of RQ3 - there was nothing new to actually play, if you wanted to continue playing in Glorantha, following on from the wonderful adventures in Borderlands, Griffin Mountain etc. It took eight years before the first all-new scenario material to come out (Sun County), new stuff to actually play.

Such a mistake will not be made with the new edition, RQG.

[Yelm's Light]

1 hour ago, MOB said:

I have the same memories! The paper covers inside only heightened the sense we were being gouged.

Paper covers and boxes of character sheets aside, that was the fundamental flaw of RQ3 - there was nothing new to actually play, if you wanted to continue playing in Glorantha, following on from the wonderful adventures in Borderlands, Griffin Mountain etc. It took eight years before the first all-new scenario material to come out (Sun County), new stuff to actually play.

Such a mistake will not be made with the new edition, RQG.

Given the quality of the Quickstart, I expect great things.

[styopa]

7 hours ago, MOB said:

Paper covers and boxes of character sheets aside, that was the fundamental flaw of RQ3 - there was nothing new to actually play, if you wanted to continue playing in Glorantha, following on from the wonderful adventures in Borderlands, Griffin Mountain etc. It took eight years before the first all-new scenario material to come out (Sun County), new stuff to actually play.

I think that was really the key to a lot of the visceral dislike for rq3 amongst the oldest generation of rq'ers.  Nobody likes "campaignus interrupts".

For me, I learned rq2 at gen con around 1982, loved it, but playing it remained a theoretical thing until rq3 came out and I convinced my d&d group to play in my medieval fantastic Europe campaign.

But AH was clearly outside its expertise in their attempt at rpg's.

[Yelm's Light]

Formatting choices aside, RQ3 never gave me a compelling reason to play it.  The fatigue system was a joke, and since my campaign was firmly ensconced in eastern Genertela sorcery was unnecessary (and a real pain in the ass from a game balance point of view anyway).  And variable skill increases were easy enough to HR in without shelling out a bunch of lucre for a marginally-different game.  In fact, the systems were close enough that once AH actually did come out with their scenario packs it was another simple matter to convert to RQ2.