When I first saw Runequest in 1980, after three years or so of AD&D, I wasn't that impressed with the system, it was neat in lots of ways, but also had some things I really didn't like. I and the vast majority of the people I played with at the time, never played Runequest because of the system.
The reason we played Runequest in the early 80s was for two main reasons:
Why were these products so good? Because Glorantha provided a fascinating and detailed world background that just stomped on anything else around (World of Greyhawk blaahh!). From my point of view, it had very little to do with the RQ system (though it did do a good job of integrating with the world background), but more by providing a world where talented people could take the ball and run with it.
To illustrate this, by 1984, at the Con I was organising, the RuneQuest tournament had about 50% of the players of the AD&D and had grown much faster over the last 4 years than the AD&D. It really looked like that RQ may overtake AD&D on the convention scene at least then.
While Chaosium may not have produced Masters of Luck and Death, over that period of time (1978-1983) they produced some of the best roleplaying material I've seen and quite a lot of it! So, if Issaries Inc can do half the job that Chaosium did then, Hero Wars will be raging success and given the work done in the fan area over the last four or five years, I'm sure they can do as good or better a job.
It's a sad piece of history that the Chaosium/Avalon Hill agreement fell in such a big heap, but from my memory people were all pretty optimistic when it was made and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I like people criticising/discussing problems that they see with the rules and I think criticisms like Michael Cule's about design philosophies are very illuminating as we haven't seen HW downunder yet.
I think it's great to hear what people think, and to get clarifications and feedback from those who have seen the system and are playtesting it, one thing that make the Glorantha community special is that it is far more of a community than many other roleplaying groups, and all this discussion makes it seem like we are one community and not an elite with a peasantry waiting for the release of the game. Robin Laws is going to take as much notice as he wants, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about it now.
So, humour us non-playtesters and give us a bit of a sneak preview, don't bite out heads off when we say we don't like an aspect, just correct us when we're wrong and patiently explain how it works and ignore those who long for what cannot be (sounds like an Elder God, That Which Cannot Be).
I know that Chaosium and Robin are going to come out with a good game, it may not be to everyone's taste, it may not be to my taste (indeed, the idea of Plot Points being given for dice rolling and not roleplaying and achievement is anathema to me), but it will be a game that will have a good chance of putting Glorantha on a commercial footing again, something I think everyone on the list wants. Hey, I lived with the bits of the RQ that I disliked, I'll live with the bits of Hero Wars I dislike, remember Hero Wars (2nd edition) will be out a couple of years after the first edition if it is a success :-).
But forlorn looks into the past are not going to get new commercial Gloranthan material on the game store shelves, and having played DragonQuest since the early 80s and have it die on me in 1984 and not had one hundredth of the fan material that RQ/Glorantha has had, Glorantha is alive and kicking and Hero Wars seems to be a good way to keep it that way. Look at Chaosium's track record as far as games go, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer Pendragon etc, are all great fun roleplaying games, I think they've got the runs on the board for us to give them a bit of trust that Hero Wars will continue the tradition.
Martin.
PS, several years ago, when we approached TSR about buying DragonQuest, their starting price was $A250,000, imagine what the value of RuneQuest would be on the Avalon Hill books.
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