RQ and Glorantha, new BUTS initiative

From: Joerg Baumgartner <joe_at_toppoint.de>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 96 19:45 MET DST


Marc Smylie

>OTOH, I think David has a pretty good point about the glacial pace of
>official (or even non-official) RQ products, particularly when looked at from
>the perspective from long-time players.

The glacial pace is easy to explain. Did you ever have a hand in publishing something for a magazine? It isn't that hard to write up a cool scenario idea, a few stats, and draw a sketch map. Voila, a scenario your players will talk about for ages has been born. At least if you're lucky.

So, now try and put it down so that any other referee might use it. I did this twice, so far, and found it to be damn hard work. (And bad luck if you don't read or translate German, because they haven't been published anywhere but in Free INT yet...)

Now such a scenario takes up maybe 10 pages if it is really long. An author works about 20 to 30 hours on that. Then comes the editor and layouter who works about 5 hours on it to fit it into the magazine. Finally, if you're lucky, you get an artist to do one or two portraits or similar to fit into the text, and a nice map. No idea how much time this takes, but you get the picture: there's over a week's work in this stuff.

The current state of the market can't afford full-time authors, so this has to be done besides trying to have a life.

So, if you want the system to get going, leave your customer position and get typing, I'm fairly sure you have some stuff worth publishing... If you need someplace to publish it, I offer Tradetalk, if you can stand editing on your work. If you can't stand someone else criticizing your ideas, do your own magazine, or your own web page.

Oh, don't expect any payment, unless you're really good...

>As
>much as I like my brand new _Wyrm's Footprints_ (even with the blank
>pages/printer's error) and the idea of a BUTTS package (shot down now, I
>gather), most of it is, after all, 10 - 20 year old material being recycled
>(even if it is necessary, and I agree that it is) and kind of hard to find.

Hmm. What do you complain about? That the stuff is that old, or that it's hard to find?

The problem with these reprints is that they contain ideas from 10 to 30 years ago, which have undergone strong re-interpretation in the meantime. While I am a die-hard Glorantha buff who isn't beyond comparing reprints for interesting discrepancies, most people who need stuff for refereeing prefer a single truth at a time. They won't appreciate the niceties of 1st century Malkionism as long as 16th century Malkionism hasn't been explained to them... That's part of what takes reprinting old stuff so long. Reaching Moon Megagorp have done a great job including quaint 30-year-old notions on early Malkionism into their 3rd Age Malkioni setting for How the West was One, which in turn produced issue 13 of Tales, a booklet to prepare the players, and a players' summaries volume which shed light on various facets on this topic. Just reading that stuff not everybody wants to spend real money on takes some time, to realign it with current Glorantha perspective takes more.

>Further, David's key point, after all, was "At Greg's address, he put the
>final nail in RQ's coffin," with the emphasis on _RQ_. It seems reasonably
>obvious that for some time now (since the sale, I guess) RuneQuest and
>Glorantha are _not_ the same thing in the minds of many of its designers and
>players (even the separation of the rq-rules and glorantha digests
>illustrates that pretty well).

As Greg has said, it wasn't the same in the beginning, either. Chaosium published RQ as another set of rules, leaving it to the referees to create or adapt their own world, and provided Glorantha only as a sample case. Somehow, world and game were regarded as inseparable by the customers, which astonished Greg, then.

With the re-release as RQ3 Chaosium tried once again to show the other applications of their rules system, and produced two excellent non-Gloranthan supplements with Vikings and Land of Ninja (using the same basic campaign, though - more on this later). When I became aware of RQ, I would have liked to buy more stuff on their Fantasy Earth stuff, set in the impending ruin of the vestiges of Roman civilisation in western Europe. I did buy Vikings as my first RQ supplement, and still regret that there was no follow-up on it on the plunder lands.

RQ and Glorantha aren't really the same. In fact, they collide ever so often, as show all the rules changes for the Gloranthan supplements (like extra magic systems to simulate some effect so far uncovered by RQ but essential to Glorantha). Nor was RQ the first rules system using Glorantha - White Bear and Red Moon was such a game, and there might be new games, not necessarily classical roleplaying games.

>As David was presumably not the only person
>at the Con (and several posters have made veiled references to Big Things
>which were revealed about the future of Glorantha and RQ), it should be a
>relatively simple matter of determining if this is accurate.

Some of the observations are quite accurate. Face it: classical rpgs aren't the big gaming market any more, and people who live on the gaming market will have to look out for new sources of income. I doubt that "Glorantha: The Game" would be a mega-seller. I don't think that a Gloranthan trading card game without ready availability of a complete, playable factory set would satisfy my needs, either - Mythos has me a trifle annoyed with common unique or essential rare cards, if only for ecological reasons (packaging and excess cards printed), not to mention economical. I'd like to see its Glorantha clone, but I have mixed feelings about getting it in booster packs of 13 cards... and I'd go for less artwork and more game fun any time, though the target market, _new blood_ for Glorantha, might not. A Glorantha computer game is overdue, IMO.

>Having emailed
>David, I will accede to David's wish to avoid posting his report publicly,
>but presumably those that were at the Con know what David is referring to and
>if anyone thinks he's misinterpreting Greg's _specific_ comments, then let
>the rest of us know.

I had the chance to listen into Greg's and Sandy's discussion on how to Bring glorantha Up To Speed late on Convulsion Sunday night. Greg does have new plans for Glorantha game publications, not necessarily tied only to "Glorantha: The Game" or RQ. He wants to make introductory material to the world available soon, and has done some preliminary contracting if I followed the gist of it correctly.

If this works out (which I hope it will) we would be able to buy gaming-related Glorantha background stuff without rules stuff, so anybody could use it. Having been trying to get RQ-Glorantha sold in Germany, and having experienced a publishing policy worse than AH's wrt publication rates (finally causing the project to falter with that publisher), I am quite in favour of non-RQ-related publication of Glorantha background. Scenarios can be produced as fan-products or in magazines (or both, like RQ-Adventures), and won't be used as published by most people anyway. Cameos can be posted here. The NPC database has been started recently, though I have to admit I haven't supplied any data yet (as a lame excuse, I didn't use RQ3 anyway).

If somebody wants to get started on a specific region in Glorantha (meaning he or she has read the Genertela - Crucible of the Hero Wars material, and possibly Gods of Glorantha), I will happily provide any information I have on that region in private e-mail. I can point to published sources, or explain small side remarks, though all of this will be tainted with my perception of Glorantha. Still, I do have a quite good collection of Glorantha information and I am working on a database version of that. However, that database would probably be copyright by Greg as well, given the origin of most of that data, so I can only provide search results in private, and it is still under construction.

Still, if you need to be pointed at any source or information, try me and my project by e-mailing your questions to joe_at_toppoint.de - I will try to be as objective as possible, and to reply as soon as possible. If anybody wants to join in this Q&A project, e-mail me as well... Usually I will not react at once to questions on the digest since I read my stuff offline, and often late in the night, but I'll react to private e-mail.

I can give my opinion (provided I have built one) on any topic (and have been known to do so on the digest), but I have somewhat specialised on southern central Genertela and related matters. If anybody feels like a specialist on the same or other regions and would help to do the Q&A service, tell me - or the public.

As soon as I have found out how to work my provider's web server, I'll try to put up a Q&A web page as well.


End of Glorantha Digest V3 #88


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