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Chaosium news
RuneQuest Classics in print-on-demand, soon
Chaosium’s Rick Meints is teasing the POD version of all those RQ2 titles, soon to be available via Chaosium’s website. The BRP forum link features a Facebook video, so if you have Facebook blockers in your browser, you can see the same video on Twitter.
You will need to make quite a bit of room on your shelves!
For the past 30 years or so, one would have had to find them on the second-hand markets, often featuring damaged box corners and margin annotations. These new POD versions won’t have the boxes and loose papers, but they will be much more affordable and annotation-free!
On the forums, Rick also answered some questions about the maps and other similar handouts from classic boxed sets like Trollpak:
Most of the RQ2 books never had any handouts. Large poster maps are already available on redbubble.com.
What few handouts there are for Borderlands and such can all be easily printed from the PDF. None of those were ever in color, nor did they go to the edges of the page.
Rick Meints, BRP forums
And also:
All of the red bubble maps for RQ2 are EXACTLY like the original map. We didn’t remove ANYTHING from them. We specifically set them up to go with these books, not as some “piece of art” devoid of game useful details. If you take a look at any of them you will see they have a legend on them.
Rick Meints
Finally, Rick answered a question about the potential for RQ3 reprints:
We don’t need a license to do the Avalon Hill era RQ3 supplements. Chaosium retained the copyright, especially on all the Gloranthan supplements. Greg got all that as his part of the split of Chaosium’s assets when he left the company in 1998, and Moon Design bought it all from him in 2013. Many of the RQ3 supplements that were RQ2 updates, like Apple Lane, Snake Pipe Hollow, the Gloranthan Bestiary, and TrollPak aren’t worth reprinting (at least beyond the TrollPak map). They aren’t different enough. The Monster Coliseum and Griffin Island boxed sets, RQ Cities are too generic. Daughters of Darkness and Eldarad are a hard pass. Not much point in reprinting Gods of Glorantha, Troll Gods, Elder Secrets, or the Genertela boxed sets as that range of info is already in print in a more comprehensive fashion, or soon will be. Reprinting Vikings and Land of Ninja are tempting, but they are not a priority. That just leaves Sun County, Strangers in Prax, Shadows on the Borderland, Dorastor, and Lords of Terror. We might reprint the first three, and maybe do the last two as a combo reprint, but I haven’t spent any time thinking about that. I would like to get the Troubled Waters scenario from River of Cradles reprinted, but I wouldn’t reprint the rest of the book since Pavis and Big Rubble are both available again.
Rick Meints
Let’s look at Rick’s shelves, featuring the new POD books (above), while we wait for a potential POD version of Wyrms Footnotes or, even, maybe, Tales of the Reaching Moon…
Chaosium at PAX Online
PAX 2020 Online is now finished and Chaosium has posted a summary of their events from last week. Following are a few highlights, but, most importantly, remember that Chaosium is running a 10% off sale at their website until the end of the month, using the “PAXONLINE2020” coupon code! It was supposed to only run during the duration of the convention, but it looks like they extended it by a week!
RuneQuest Live
Chaosium’s Todd Gardiner led a group of well-tattooed players through their first RuneQuest adventure…. finally, a game that features an Eurmali trickster!
Myth and Fantasy Gaming Panel
Glorantha’s Jeff Richard and Pendragon’s David Larkins are joined by video-game narrative designer Merry Borys-Piątkowska to talk about bringing mythic themes in gaming experiences.
Tips for writing in the RPG industry
Are you a Jonstown Compendium author, or are you thinking of becoming one? Community programs like these (including the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu and Explorer’s Society for 7th Sea) are great ways of getting started. Chaosium’s Michal O’Brien (MOB) talks about it as part of a PAX Online panel on getting started on the RPG industry.
Jeff Richard interview on Niezwykłe Przygody
Polish RPG YouTube channel “Niezwykłe Przygody” (Google Translate tells me it means “Unusual Adventures”) has an English interview of Jeff Richard. It doesn’t contain much new information but, as always, there might be new details and anecdotes you haven’t heard before. In any case, I’m sure giving a thumbs up to a RuneQuest video is never a bad idea!
Gloranthan Maps at RedBubble
This will become more relevant as the aforementioned classic RQ2 print-on-demand books become available: many Gloranthan maps are available on Chaosium’s RedBubble store as posters, canvas, pouches, and even blankets! Among the most recently added items we have a remastered Sun County map, featured in the picture above.
Jonstown Compendium news
Since the Jonstown Compendium is hosted on DriveThruRPG, you might be interested to know that an optical and organizational change is upcoming. You can test the new look and feel on their “preview” website. There doesn’t seem to be any broad “community content” link on the front page anymore, but you can still get to the Jonstown Compendium via Chaosium’s publisher page. Our own Joerg likes the useful filter options on top, and Ludo appreciates the prettier and less cluttered layout that features bigger covers. What do you think?
Legion
Neil Gibson gives us a huge collection of Broo NPCs to stink up your games with danger and disease! The book has beautiful illustrations, various levels of detail between various NPCs, and new deadly diseases to challenge even the most dedicated Chalana Arroy healer. And, in case Broos make you go “ewww”, there is no mention of their breeding practices, so you can use this book to bring pure heavy metal goat-headed monsters to your table, without any of the problematic stuff!
War Elephants of Fonrit
After producing the impressive Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass and Men of the West, Martin Helsdon doesn’t seem to be able to stop: apparently, his idea of “taking a break” is “producing a smaller book”. We’re not going to complain! His latest work is a small booklet titled War Elephants of Fonrit, which should pretty much tell you what it’s about.
Across Solara’s web
Rollenspiel in Glorantha
Our German correspondent reports that the German translation of “RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha” managed the basic funding in less than 90 minutes, which means that there will be German language rules. Now we are looking at how big it can become. Half of the stretch-goals are waiting: mainly digital excerpts from the GM Screen package, and the Colymar tribal and clan lands maps also in printed form, translated where necessary.
The folks are Chaosium are even pointing out some interesting trivia about Julia Rawcliffe, the German translator.
Sandy Petersen on alien lifespans
Sandy Petersen, of Glorantha and Call of Cthulhu fame (among many others), has a video channel mainly focused on Mythos related topics. However, his recent dive into the lifespans of various lifeforms, including alien ones, is full of ideas also appropriate for fantasy roleplaying (including a small jab at D&D!). What do you think the lifespans of various Gloranthan species is? Does the Man Rune dictate the life-spans of Gloranthan humanoids?
HeroQuest (the other one) is coming back?
The Avalon Hill website is featuring a countdown for something related to the old and legendary HeroQuest board game. The trademark had been abandoned some time in 2001 and Greg Stafford acquired it, making it possible to rename the then recent “HeroWars” into the “HeroQuest” we know and love. Last year, the trademark saw a bit of paperwork movement, seemingly letting Hasbro own it for board games, while Moon Design (and therefore Chaosium) retains it for roleplaying games. GeekNative has a bit more context… what do you think it is? Well, we won’t have much longer to find out.
Nick Brooke in Black Gate magazine
The previously mentioned Black Gate online magazine recently featured an article by Nick Brooke. As you might expect, Nick writes about A Rough Guide to Glamour, the Jonstown Compendium, Tales of the Reaching Moon, and other Brookian topics.
RuneQuest combat example
If you have a bit of trouble wrapping your head around the crunchy combat system of RuneQuest (we’re not going to blame you on that), playing an example combat might help. BRP forum member Trotsky took it a step further and wrote down his experience, along with nice screenshots of his Roll20 setup. Later, Runeblogger got the permission to post the whole thing on his blog for posterity. Check it out! Can you spot any mistakes? Did you learn something?
Meanwhile, on Earth
Longhouses aren’t just for Vikings
This short video shows us that some inspiration for Orlanthi culture doesn’t necessarily come from the Vikings. Linear Band Ceramic (LBK) culture brought agriculture, long houses, and a social segregation into carls and cottars during the neolithic period. The video is full of story seeds, even if some of the presented material is speculation. Our hobby is a speculative one, so who cares?
LBK is one of the first “Hill Barbarian”-like cultures in Europe, even though they spread along river valleys, whereas Gloranthan rivers invaded pre-existing agricultural lands. But that is a potential topic for a podcast episode.
Some suggested reading comes in the video description, so if you have access to a university library or another academic outlet, hunt these up!
Exploring Roman cities
The always fascinating Digital Maps of the Ancient World has a compilation of Roman cities you can explore as a superimposition of points of interests on Google Maps. You might get some good scenario or NPC ideas after clicking on a few buildings!
And now, for something completely different
We know that many Gloranthan gamemasters play an incredibly diverse and, sometimes, ahem, “original” musical selection during their games. So what about, say, a cover of a Nirvana song in classical Latin? (Joerg is guessing that it might be titled “Olet de anima decennialorum”)
There are quite a few other “anachronistic” covers around on the tube, which some people call “bardcore” with a tongue firmly planted in the cheek. Check out some medieval ACDC or Metallica, for instance, or maybe even some Deep Purple!