> >Shannon> Well, it's a damned shame that they weren't buying the
> >RuneQuest/Glorantha books.
But the French DID ! Thanks partially to superior Oriflam production values.
(Thanks perhaps a bit more to the fact that Oriflam is _one_ company (unlike AH and Chaosium), and their market strategies could thus be designed more coherently.)
But I DO understand that Chaosium did what they could under difficult circumstances, and Glorantha IS in fact alive today (not to mention CoC, etc., and Chaosium themselves).
Let's be grateful for what we have ...
Ashley Munday :
> If I remember correctly, RQ II was produced under license in the UK by
> Games Workshop, who used to be a games company but now produce "Biker
> Space Orcs on Acid" or whatever Warhammer's called these days.
>
> Now, wind forwards and AH turn out RQ III: (Sterling)39.99.
In France : ten quid extra ...
> Glorantha?
> Nope. No background, no scenarios (much). Most people thought "Blow this
> for a game of monkeys, these people are ripping us off!"
Yes, they were: AND it got WORSE !!
> When RQ III
> came out, my student grant weighed in about (Sterling)40 a week. Okay,
> what did I, and most of the people I played with do? Well, let me put it
> this way, we decided that eating was more important than buying a new
> game -
I bought it, but I don't know anyone else who did until AH (FAR TOO LATE !!) realised what a STUPID mistake they had made, and put the price down. Thankfully, some people did actually decide to buy RQ after all at this juncture.
Not that I knew any of them personally at the time ...
> Wind forward a bit more, Games Workshop produce a version of RQ III
> under license.
Ah, here's where it got WORSE.
> The product had sub-Judges Guild production, the most
> creative speellung mistorks you could imagine. The art work was terrible
> to boot - no doubt produced by the same bunch that did Warhammer.
Yup. Shite, eh?
And, in the same deal, GW got European distribution rights to RQ;
And then: DIDN'T ACTUALLY DO ANY DISTRIBUTION !!
Now, things just about worked out, for me, PERSONALLY, because I was already a RQ fanatic, and wasn't going to let something so trivial as my favourite game being non-distributed by crooks prevent me from getting hold of it. Luckily, there were Oriflam editions of stuff which would otherwise have been IMPOSSIBLE TO OBTAIN, even in Paris, and with GREAT difficulty in London. But, whatever the quality of the Oriflam editions, they didn't actually publish very much stuff either. (Well, they were hardly going to do Monster Coliseum in French, were they? Would you? But MC was at least *some* feeble form of support for RQ. Better than *nothing*, which is what we got.)
ONE of the Paris shops did do a bit of cheating, to support their clientele, and got RQ stuff through the US, But, for about THREE YEARS, RQ was, basically, NOT distributed in Europe. GW had the licence and was sitting on it, in their devious attempts to promote their stupid Ork game, and thus produced NO RQ. Oriflam was releasing hardly anything, and the rare AH release was sold, in France, to a mere handful of Latin Quarter diehards. And sometimes, you had to travel to Leisure Games to do your RQ shopping, despite the fact that you were unlikely to know that the place even existed. (Very easy to do, and I can just imagine the average french RQ player going to such lengths quite routinely, to get supplements in a language he might not be even able to understand.)
So : Where was I to find players? Answer : nowhere.
Then, AH hired Dave Dobyski, and the rest is history.
So, if people didn't buy RQ, it has NOTHING to do with the system, and it has NOTHING to do with Glorantha and A LOT to do with AH and GW. And, of course, the Fates, let us not forget ... Both RQ and Glorantha are fine (or; much better than fine!), and in a normal situation, if both RQ and Glorantha had been properly supported, and properly distributed, and RQ debugged occasionally in new editions, things might have been just a teensy weensy bit different ...
IMHO Julian Lord
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