Re: Weird French Notions

From: Xavier SPINAT <spinat_at_poly.polytechnique.fr>
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 15:27:58 +0100


Allright.
I'm not very bright to state things like "the only problem is that there's nothing really new about Glorantha"... I tried to temper this sentence but it still sounds harsh. I guess I deserve the answer I get.

>Ha ha ha ha ha.
>
>Visit <http://www.tang.demon.co.uk/TOTRM/front.html> and read the
>"products" page.
>Or read the ads on the back covers of "Tales", and/or the "Zines
>Seen" column and new product announcements inside.
- -...
>May I suggest a subscription to "Tales of the Reaching Moon"? You'll
>get a couple of issues a year, bulging with new material, adventures,
>fact and fiction, cult writeups, new product details, articles by Greg
>and Sandy and MOB and plenty of others, etc.

Guess what... I've subscribed to Tales two years ago. And I know about most of the new stuff issued year after year... It's fabulous. I try to get what I can and I use it as much as I can in my own campaigns. Don't think I'm unappreciative.
But what I can say is that, the only gloranthan novelty you could find this year in the RPG-selling shops in Paris was "Trolls", a translation and compilation of Troll Pak and Troll Gods. It isn't much. So, of course, when you're already a fan, you can manage to hear about Tales and Tradetalk and all the new products... and you can manage to eventually get them. And there is the Web and all the wonderful sites, and there is the Digest.
Fine.

But how comes no french RPG magazine writes about Glorantha now (or very seldom)? No scenario? How comes RQ is never among the games chosen in RPG turnament (as far as I know)?
Last time I heard a salesman giving to a customers names of good RPG to play in campaign, he didn't put RQ in the list. Of course all this is not the reality of the gloranthan activity (in the world), but to most people (in France), that's all that can be seen: I talked last week to a player who explained to me that "RQ was a good game. It had a very amazing background"...
I don't share this view but, to most players, you can judge the quality of a game by how many supplements you can buy. And, in France, you have to have good eyes to find RQ3 material in the RPG-shops. No "official" supplements in the stores means no new players and "old" players eventually turning to other games settings.

Well, maybe all this happens only in France and maybe I'm just very jealous to see how many things are done abroad. Maybe it's just that "we french" are less creative or whatever and we deserve the situation we got because we're responsible for it.
Let's not continue this kind of depressing analysis...

>You are a sad and gloomy fellow. I am willing to bet you'd have posted
>exactly the same post five years ago, or ten, or fifteen, predicting
>the End of the World if present trends continue. And we're still here,
>filling a mailing list with informed and informative, game-directed debate.

I guess you are right. I must be a spoilsport and even a pessimistic one. But it's only because I have great expectations... but you can not live on expectations only.

All I hope is that a new gloranthan game will have a big readership in France (and that requires that it will eventually be translated because I suspect that reading in english is a problem to most french people...). I hope that this would give me and other french players new opportunities to play and to have good game-sessions... I even hope that this would lead to a new French magazine, like Broo and La toile d'Arachne Solara... but that this one won't have to stop after a while.
I can even hope that, if internet eventually reaches a large part of the french population, there would be new web-sites and new french people on the digest.
And why not a french convention?
Well, now you can say I'm getting way too optimistic.

Xavier


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