Books going in and out print is really part of of life, be it for RPG
companies, fiction publishers, university presses, or what not. Sales
tend to decrease with time (not true for rulebooks; very true for
adventure books), so it's an impossibility to keep books in print, and
it's often hard to reprint books as well, because of the costs
involved. I've scoured many a used game/book store to find a rare
treasure.
All I can really say regarding old RQ2 Glorantha products is this:
- If you're photocopying them you're violating the author's
intellectual property. By doing so you're also making it less likely
that Chaosium/Issaries will ever be able to reprint the background
material that appeared in those books.
- Saying the books aren't available in the used game market is really
false. I put together my entire RQ2 collection between about 1990
and 1995, much of that which I was a student at Cal (and thus wasn't
making big bucks). I paid as little as $2 for some books, as much as
$100 for a few. (Yes, even including a complete set of Wyrm's Footnotes,
and the Alpha/Beta/Gamma stat books.) I've included my listing of
where to find old games below.
- We've made some items available on our web site:
http://www.glorantha.com/library/
Many items are not available, because we don't want to limit
ourselves from ever printing new copies of that particular material.
There will be an update soon, when I extract myself from other
piles of work.
- Saying you can't understand Glorantha without those books is also
false. Anything really important on a global level has appeared in
_Gods of Glorantha_ or _Genertela_. The other supplements just
provide details which you can happily vary in your own campaigns
without changing the big picture. You may not know anything about
what appears inside the Big Rubble, but likewise you probably don't
know much about what's on Monster Island in the middle of the
ocean. Neither fact should prevent you from running a game in those
locations, especially not just the random chance of whether a book
has been published in the past or not.
- As Rick pointed out most of the important stuff (the background
material) *has* been reprinted under RQ3. The unimportant stuff (the
adventures and the stats books) have not. The only two losses that
are really of some note are _Griffin Mountain_ (which got
bowlderized when republished as _Griffin Island_), and the Holy
Country information from _RuneQuest Companion_ (which will be more
than replaced by upcoming issues of Tradetalk and Tales of the
Reaching Moon).
I can tell you briefly that Issaries doesn't plan to revisit old
locales in the first few years of publication (instead you'll get to
travel to Orlanthi countries, the Lunar Empire, the homes of the Elder
Races, the hero plane, and the oceans), so if you take the time to
search out those RQ2 products, it'll be worth it for a few years at
least. (And I trust that most people will be very happy to see totally
new locales detailed, rather than just revisiting Dorastor and Prax.)
Shannon
- --
If you've seen this list before, I've added one online used game
seller.
Here's places to find out-of-print games:
- Titan Games, Sentry Box, and Dragontrove - Online used game sellers:
http://www.dragontrove.com
http://www.sentrybox.com
http://www.titan-games.com
- Crazy Egor's - A game store that sells used games by mail:
VOX: 601-863-0215 FAX: 601-863-0323
- Used book marketplaces on the net which occasionally sell games:
http://www.bibliofind.com
http://www.interloc.com
http://www.abebooks.com
- The usenet groups rec.games.frp.marketplace or rec.games.board.marketplace
- Local conventions
Good luck!