Resurrecting RuneQuest (Black Gate)

[MOB]

A blast from the past—Black Gate Magazine has reprinted "Resurrecting RuneQuest", originally published in Tales of the Reaching Moon #5, nearly 27 years ago!

Here's some historical context. In the early 80's, Chaosium's 2nd Ed RuneQuest was second only to Dungeons & Dragons in popularity and sales. But by 1990, Avalon Hill wanted to know why their 3rd edition of the game just wasn't setting the world on fire they way they hoped it would, and commissioned a report for some answers. Tales of the Reaching Moon released the report as the "Resurrecting RuneQuest" article in Tales #5. Its publication was a catalyst for Avalon Hill bringing Ken "The Rune Czar" Rolston on board and kicking off the relatively brief but creatively fertile period which later became known as the “RQ Renaissance”.

I was part of the Tales of the Reaching Moon editorial team, along with Rick Meints. There are salutary points made in the Resurrecting RuneQuest article—a key one being RQ3’s crippling lack of new Glorantha scenario material (AH finally published my book Sun County, the first release of the “RQ Renaissance”, eight years after RQ3 came out). We won’t be making the same mistakes with the new Chaosium edition of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, due out next year.

https://www.blackgate.com/resurrecting-runequest-an-investigation-by-the-tales-of-the-reaching-moon-editorial-staff

Edited March 10, 2021 by MOB

[Yelm's Light]

Reading that article, the thing that really jumped out at me was the artwork on the boxes.  The front covers ranged from passable to pretty good.  And then you turned over the boxes to be greeted by a pencil/charcoal sketch.  Same issue as with the universally paper-covered rulebooks:  they couldn't have spent the extra nickels for cardstock covers or another commissioned piece of art, especially with the inflated price of Deluxe?

I was working peripherally in the business at the time, so I know the external effects, but I don't know what went on at AH.  I'd really like to have been a fly on the wall at some of their meetings re: Runequest.  I've also worked in more generalized, large-market advertising, and have to wonder, did they even bother to focus-group this stuff?  (Yes, that was a thing, even back then.)

In the absence of other evidence, I'm left to theorize that it was a combination of AH being cheap and just not getting the FRPG industry, which any number of people at a convention could have enlightened them about if they'd bothered to ask the right questions.  Or, for that matter, any questions.

Edited December 29, 2017 by Yelm's Light

[styopa]

I've tried to figure this out for years as well.  The character sheets was a downright offensive cash grab, even in an era where copies cost you $0.06/sheet.  Turning Trollpak into FOUR products?  Seriously WTF? (Was there anything actually new at all in those?  I never bought the AH ones as I already had it.)

The paper-covers for the rules is an easy one, in contrast.  Look at any other AH product - wargames.  Rulebooks were ALWAYS paper covers, even substantial products like Squad Leader.  It makes sense from their view that a "game" sold in a "box" didn't need more-durable covers.  FWIW lots of peers at the time did the same thing: Judges Guild products, for example, were all paper-cover.  Cardstock covers were only a thing for when the product wasn't boxed.  Art?  From their view, again who bothers with art in a "rulebook" (ala Squad Leader) unless you're diagramming line of sight?   Hell, I'm faintly surprised looking back that they didn't give us a little sheet of counters for our characters.  "Harrek 10-2 SMC, Berserk-capable leader"

And, while it may be heresy to bring up, of course the next question is: why did they sell Runequest to AH in the FIRST place? 

Granted, it's not like there was a thriving RPG industry to choose from - it was pretty much what, TSR or Chaosium?  I guess there were also FASA, SJG, Flying Buffalo, Iron Crown.  Was FGU a thing yet?  Anyway, the market cap of all of them combined (less TSR) in 1981 was probably less than AH.  I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in that discussion: what was promised?  What was paid?  There had to have been a contract with expectations and failure clauses? 

We look back with 20/20 hindsight to say that it was a dumb sale in retrospect, but if we grant (as that linked article does) that 82-23 was the Golden Era for Runequest, why sell out at all?  Was Chaosium already on the financial ropes that badly?

[Yelm's Light]

FGU definitely existed before then.  I bought C&S long before I'd ever heard of Runequest.

As for the cardstock thing, they might have learned something from Chaosium's boxed sets.  Every 'book' inside had covers that were of a heavier stock, if not cardstock in every case.  (I seem to recall that Foes was an exception, but I'm not sure.)  When I ran a game away from home, I'd pull out the books I needed and carry them in a backpack.  I didn't want to waste space or weight on a box.  And that would've worn through the paper covers a lot faster than the heavier ones.

And then there's the pricing thing.  Their most complex game at the time, (pre-ASL) Squad Leader, was $15, and production costs for the RQ3 Deluxe set were probably pretty close to equal.  Yet Deluxe was originally priced at $24.95 ($29.95?  I forget.  I never actually bought it at the list price).  And I understand it was even more ludicrously priced in foreign markets.  I get that there was more info in RQ than Squad Leader, but come on.  If you're going to overprice your product, at least make it durable.

As far as the sale, yeah, I'd be interested in the motivations behind that as well.  I think it may have been a combination of the cash-out philosophy of the '80's and that Greg didn't seem to have that much to do with the business side.

EDIT:  An interesting side-issue I came upon.  I wanted to tie down some range for when I bought C&S, and the edition I had (which went away in the Great Water Heater Flood of '96) wasn't any of the ones that are pictured for those I've seen.  My version had a cover with line art that was some form of red, bordering on pink, depicted a medieval battle, and had a square, glued binding, as opposed to the stapled-along-the-fold line-binding of many of the RP books from that time.  Does anybody have a similar printing?

Edited December 29, 2017 by Yelm's Light

[MOB]

6 hours ago, Yelm's Light said:

In the absence of other evidence, I'm left to theorize that it was a combination of AH being cheap and just not getting the FRPG industry, which any number of people at a convention could have enlightened them about if they'd bothered to ask the right questions.  Or, for that matter, any questions.

They were told, repeatedly. It just took a l-o-n-g time for the message to sink in. Despite Greg having a "lifelong goal to have Avalon Hill produce a board game done by me", it didn't help that the relationship between Chaosium and AH was pretty poisonous, almost from the very start. Greg talks about that over on his web page ("an epic of what a small company should not do").

2 hours ago, styopa said:

The paper-covers for the rules is an easy one, in contrast.  Look at any other AH product - wargames.  Rulebooks were ALWAYS paper covers, even substantial products like Squad Leader.  It makes sense from their view that a "game" sold in a "box" didn't need more-durable covers.  

Yes, things were viewed through the prism of how they did wargames. While they were okay with paying top dollar for covers (Tom Sullivan etc), they placed no value whatsoever on interior art because who cares about internal art in a wargame? Amazingly, despite howls of complaint about the consistently woeful work of Dave Dobyski (who was their in-house graphic designer, not an artist), the interior art actually got worse not better. The interior art in Daughters of Darkness, the last release before AH finally saw sense and hired Ken Rolston, is excrementally awful. 

1 hour ago, Yelm's Light said:

As far as the sale, yeah, I'd be interested in the motivations behind that as well.  I think it may have been a combination of the cash-out philosophy of the '80's and that Greg didn't seem to have that much to do with the business side.

Greg talks about how Avalon Hill's involvement in RuneQuest came about in the link above (NB it was a licensing and distribution deal, not an outright sale, which is part of the reason why the rights are now back with MD-Chaosium). 

[jajagappa]

2 hours ago, Yelm's Light said:

(I seem to recall that Foes was an exception, but I'm not sure.)

Foes had a cardstock cover, it was Fangs (which came in the boxed set) which did not.  Nor did the original Apple Lane in the box set.

3 hours ago, styopa said:

Turning Trollpak into FOUR products?  Seriously WTF? (Was there anything actually new at all in those?  I never bought the AH ones as I already had it.)

There was a map page missing from the Sazdorf caverns in the original which was included in the reprint. :-O  And Troll Gods had new material.  

Edited December 29, 2017 by jajagappa

[styopa]

50 minutes ago, MOB said:

Amazingly, despite howls of complaint about the consistently woeful work of Dave Dobyski (who was their in-house graphic designer, not an artist), the interior art actually got worse not better. The interior art in Daughters of Darkness, the last release before AH finally saw sense and hired Ken Rolston, is excrementally awful. 

 

It's a challenging comparison, but I would venture that elder secrets was even worse than DoD.  Not sure whether the troll, elf, or dwarf that haunt me more to this day...

[MOB]

3 hours ago, styopa said:

It's a challenging comparison, but I would venture that elder secrets was even worse than DoD.  Not sure whether the troll, elf, or dwarf that haunt me more to this day...

In DoD there's a particularly awful picture of a Walktapus and a Jack o Bear strolling together, and a picture of a shipwreck that IMO fails on just about every artistic and aesthetic level.

The difference between Dobyski's stuff and this is that Dobyski created his illustrations under duress—he was actually hired as a graphic designer (and did that competently enough) not as an artist, but had to draw to keep his job—whereas AH actually commissioned this.

But you're right about Elder Secrets, the pics in there are gobsmackingly bad...

Edited December 30, 2017 by MOB

[Yelm's Light]

4 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Foes had a cardstock cover, it was Fangs (which came in the boxed set) which did not.

Exactly the one I was thinking of, with the title in very large font running down the side.

[Yelm's Light]

5 hours ago, MOB said:

They were told, repeatedly. It just took a l-o-n-g time for the message to sink in. Despite Greg having a "lifelong goal to have Avalon Hill produce a board game done by me", it didn't help that the relationship between Chaosium and AH was pretty poisonous, almost from the very start. Greg talks about that over on his web page ("an epic of what a small company should not do").

Thanks for that.  Interesting...I'd heard or read the story of the genesis of Glorantha/RQ somewhere, and I knew there were tensions between Chaosium and AH at the time, but I didn't have the particulars.  So basically AH (or just Dott himself) were being willful idiots.

In Greg's position I'd probably have done the $1M offer too.  High enough for AH to have to be committed to putting effort into it, and if they did accept he was on Easy(ier) Street.    But then his 'baby' would've been somebody else's and they'd've axe-murdered it.

[Mankcam]

51 minutes ago, MOB said:

In DoD there's a particularly awful picture of a Walktapus and a Jack o Bear strolling together, and a picture of a shipwreck that IMO fails on just about every artistic and aesthetic level.

The difference between Dobyski's stuff and this is that Dobyski created his illustrations under duress—he was actually hired as a graphic designer (and did that competently enough) not as an artist, but had to draw to keep his job—whereas AH actually commissioned this.

But you're right about Elder Secrets, the pics in there are gobsmackingly bad...

MOB we see those Daughters of Darkness pics, and raise you a hand of Elder Secrets

I think Elder Secrets wins mate heh heh

Regardless of whether this was in-house or commissioned, I drew better art all over my Year 12 Maths book back then, lol

Thank the gods for the books that followed in the early 90s (including yours)

Edited December 30, 2017 by Mankcam

[Paid a bod yn dwp]

15 hours ago, styopa said:

It's a challenging comparison, but I would venture that elder secrets was even worse than DoD.  Not sure whether the troll, elf, or dwarf that haunt me more to this day...

Yes it was truley terrible...May it never happen again.

Hey maybe now’s a good time for a new art preview for RQG...some of us are having an elder secrets relapse 

Edited December 30, 2017 by Paid a bod yn dwp

[RosenMcStern]

It was not just a matter of artwork. The layout for RQ3 Deluxe was tidy and managed to make the text more usable, and IMO Land of Ninja was even better. But not only were Troll Gods and Elder Secrets illustrated "as you can see above", the books were laid out sloppily with plenty of wasted space. The impression was that of a hastily assembled product which no one really cared about. And Elder Secrets was almost all new materials not previously published for RQ2, so it was really a shame it was treated this way.

Nevertheless, we all loved Elder Secrets Tales of the Reaching Moon, the RQ fanzine of the 90s published by David Hall, MOB and friends, even produced some decent pictures you could put over the Dobyski ones to "mend" Elder Secrets. Unfortunately the layout was beyond repair.

[Runeblogger]

Thanks for posting these really bad art, it almost made me laugh out loud.  Please show us more, if you can, I've never had a look through the pages of the original versions.

I can show you some art from the Spanish translation of Elder Secrets. The company that published this supplement in Spain had the good taste to hire an artist to create art specifically for the Spanish edition. I wasn't great, but it was way better IMO (at least the weapon is pointing in the right direction!). The artist is Albert Monteys.
Below you can see the piece of art that replaced the mostali seen above:

[Ruprecht]

I always felt it was strange that they AH didn't revive Questworld as a Fantasy alternate to Glorantha. Let others expand the market for them.

[Khedrac]

And then there was the Glorantha boxed set - mine is the version where the Genertela book has two copies of pages 19 to 26 and 75 to 82, but lacks pages 27 to 34 and 67 to 74 (I got photocopies of the missing pages from a friend who had got a full copy).  One starts to ignore terrible artowrk and content re-printing when they cannot even get the correct pages into the product...

Edited January 19, 2018 by Khedrac

[smiorgan]

Walktapus and Jack O'Bear picture is so surreal ... just look at the shoes of the Walktapus. Epic. This is the stuff of legends. I'll never part from my treasured copy of Daughters.

 

[smiorgan]

And let me say that during Mongoose's tenure of RuneQuest we were inflicted art even worse than the darkest AH days.

 

[Mankcam]

No...MRQ is still a few notches up from RQ3 late 1980s artwork...

Edited January 23, 2018 by Mankcam

[Jeff]

9 minutes ago, Mankcam said:

No...MRQ is still a few notches up from RQ3 late 1980s artwork...

I disagree. The crudely photoshopped Page Three model in MRQ2 is more awful than anything Dobyski did.

[styopa]

8 hours ago, Jeff said:

I disagree. The crudely photoshopped Page Three model in MRQ2 is more awful than anything Dobyski did.

Wait, what?

[Mankcam]

On 23/01/2018 at 6:46 PM, Jeff said:

I disagree. The crudely photoshopped Page Three model in MRQ2 is more awful than anything Dobyski did.

Heh heh

I still think it’s better than some of the worst RQ3 art .

However I do agree that the MRQ2 corebook had some pretty cheap bad taste pics of cheesecake fantasy women in there, they looked more like pole dancers  than shield maidens, 

Totally ruined the book actually

Edited January 24, 2018 by Mankcam

[styopa]

Are you guys talking about (for example) the bimbo on MRQ2 p102?  (I quickly flipped through and found another on 132.)

It may be cheesy, cheap, pedestrian, uninspired, prepubescent boy-fodder fantasy art, but it's certainly not BAD as art. 

What's next, you're going to say Boris Vallejo was a hack?

We're talking about technically terrible art, not offended sensibilities.   If a couple of cheesy pics of girls with improbably big boobs "totally ruins" a set of rules I think you're paying way too much attention to the wrong bits.  I'd say the same thing to Evangelicals who think RPGs are about Satan-worshipping because there's a picture of a demon or two.  Daughters of Darkness was a TERRIBLE module, only made worse by the accompanying art, not that it was a terrible product because of the terrible art.  Elder Secrets had abysmal art, but was a decent product informationally.

[Jeff]

1 hour ago, styopa said:

Are you guys talking about (for example) the bimbo on MRQ2 p102?  (I quickly flipped through and found another on 132.)

It may be cheesy, cheap, pedestrian, uninspired, prepubescent boy-fodder fantasy art, but it's certainly not BAD as art. 

What's next, you're going to say Boris Vallejo was a hack?

We're talking about technically terrible art, not offended sensibilities.   If a couple of cheesy pics of girls with improbably big boobs "totally ruins" a set of rules I think you're paying way too much attention to the wrong bits.  I'd say the same thing to Evangelicals who think RPGs are about Satan-worshipping because there's a picture of a demon or two.  Daughters of Darkness was a TERRIBLE module, only made worse by the accompanying art, not that it was a terrible product because of the terrible art.  Elder Secrets had abysmal art, but was a decent product informationally.

That was technically terrible art - as it is pretty clear it was simply a treatment/modification of an existing picture. The underlying image was pretty lame - probably an advertisement - but I doubt the artist had permission to create a derivative work of the underlying piece. And the modifications were very poorly done. But most importantly, I have no idea what the point of the picture is - beyond showing a magazine or glamour model crudely painted to have "fantasy stuff" on her.

Dobyski's art was terrible, but I have a lot of sympathy for what he at least was trying to do. I can tell that he was trying to draw a trollkin or a preying mantis (at least after some effort) - and I can understand why it makes sense to have a picture of a trollkin or preying mantis there.. 

[g33k]

4 hours ago, styopa said:

... If a couple of cheesy pics of girls with improbably big boobs "totally ruins" a set of rules I think you're paying way too much attention to the wrong bits ...

Arguably *ALL* art is irrelevant to game-rules other than diagrams used to illustrate principles of the game, which is usually not substantial for RPGs; if the text is evocative, each reader imagines whatever works for them.

Nevertheless, publishers keep commissioning artists to make art for RPGs (and variations on the "how important is the art" question are perennially-recurring forum topics).  So the question of whether art "enhances" or "detracts from" a rulebook seems valid; yes?  And at a certain point a rulebook that has had enough "detracted" becomes effectively "ruined" ...

Some people aren't willing to look beyond some art.  What if  neo-nazi imagery were randomly inserted into a rulebook where they were irrelevant?  How offensive does art have to be, to "ruin" a rulebook?

I will repeat what I've mentioned before:  In my own personal experience -- introducing RPGs to my daughter's friends -- cheesecake RPG art has been what blocked parents from allowing their little girls to play these games.

That pretty much fulfills one usable definition of "totally ruins" for my mileage.  Yours may vary.

But we've danced this dance before, so I'm leaving it there.

 

Edited January 24, 2018 by g33k