>They market a fantasy wargame that includes evil chaotic beastmen that
>are half human but with beast (often goat) heads and legs. The forces
of >chaos are very unpredictable and gain chaotic gifts that take the
form of >random physical or magical mutations; a take on chaos quite
unlike the >D&D influenced games that were around before. These are very
popular >and visible parts of the game.
To be fair the Warhammer world emulates Michael Moorcock's eternal champion mythology far more than it does Glorantha. Moorcock wrote about degenerate chaos worshiping half-men with weird mutations, though the goat headedness was pretty obviously a homage to Glorantha. Its a case of taking two very similar source concepts and melding them together.
I do believe that Games Workshop's reprinting of RQ3 was a genuine attempt to promote the game. At that pont in their history they were still run by fans who loved Glorantha. Games Workshop were even involved in the Questworld project and had plans to publish suplements for their own Questworld continent.
Julian has pointed out that GW failed to distribute RQ to Europe and I confess complete ignorance on that point, but without GW RQ wouldn't have had half the following in the UK that it did during the late 80s. It was desperately needed CPR for the game at the time. The artwork was mostly mediocre, but with some occasional gems such as the pencil drawing of a walktapus in the creatures section in the basic rules - the best illo of a walktapus that had seen print up untill that time.
BTW the reason they split the game into 'basic' and 'advanced' was because that was part of their contract with AH - they had no choice. Given that, they did the best they could not to duplicate stuff unecesserily and keep down the cost to the punter. I remember talking to GW guys about all this in their shops at the time.
Simon Hibbs
Powered by hypermail