Who owns Glorantha?

From: Meints, Richard (R.J.) <"Meints,>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 09:05:16 -0400

Neil, the man without a surname, asks: "Who owns Glorantha?" More specifically "Is it Greg's Glorantha?" and "Should it be?"
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• ------------- Greg owns Glorantha. He's shown me the deed. It looked remarkably like one of the property deeds from Monopoly. It had some whiteout (Tippex) on it, but it's legitimate...

Seriously though, the situation is surprisingly simple:
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• -- Issaries Inc. will publish Hero Wars material that details Glorantha according to Greg's opinion. He is the chief editor and will exercise material content control as he wants over all Issaries Inc. products.

Secondly, Issaries does not, at present, have plans to prevent any fan from publishing their own Hero Wars material as long as it follows a few simple guidelines.
http://www.glorantha.com/online-policy.html

Neil then moves on to "Generally Accepted Glorantha" and the lack of a "one true way" as being strengths of Glorantha...
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• ------------------ Let me make some wildly oversimplified observations:

There are only a few hundred gloranthaphiles in the whole world. I call someone a gloranthaphile when Glorantha matters far more than the game system used (or lack thereof).

Glorantha's popularity began to die when many of the supplements Avalon Hill published were crap. (be it for art, layout, or content)

When Avalon Hill stopped publishing, Glorantha was dead as far as 95% of the RQ game population was concerned.

"Generally accepted Glorantha" means different things to different people and it mainly exists only on the Daily.

The lack of a "one-true-way" frustrates a greater number of players than the number of Gloranthaphiles it pleases.

Fan efforts (hurrah) keep a game from totally dying, nothing more.

Issaries Inc. publications are what can really grow the audience.

As a side note:
I have never found any "one true way" material limiting. I don't feel that most people would. Play the game as you want to play it. Was anyone seriously set back by having Balazar become a blank land when Griffin Island came out? I just ignored it and kept on using Griffin Mountain, like many other people did.

Neil goes on to use a cliche I am beginning to loathe...
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• ---------- "But there is a danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater."

More likely: There is the danger that a couple of dozen people may get seriously angry when their personal work is contradicted or ignored in future Issaries Inc. publications.

Most new players will neither know nor care. Sorry if that bothers you.

Neil says the rich setting of Glorantha is its greatest strength...
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• -------------------- The setting will still be just as open to interpretation. It is still a rich setting. You can still have your own Glorantha. The only thing that will noticably change is that there will be more published work to discuss and potentially discard. (what a shame...)

Lastly, to sum up the situation as I see it:
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• ---------- Greg Stafford has had more success publishing RPG's than probably all of us on the RQ Daily combined. He is working with a variety of authors to publish Gloranthan material for Hero Wars that they feel will be a commercial success. Their primary goal is not to please everyone on the daily. Their primary goal is to bring new players into Glorantha. Issaries Inc. will let fans do pretty much all of the things they have done before. They aren't installing "truth ministers" to censor postings in any newsgroups. They aren't raiding or forcing fanzines out of existence or exercising any real control over what they publish.

There has been one unfortunate outcome from the advent of Hero Wars that has occupied a large amount of bandwidth on the Glorantha Daily:
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• ----------- There is a small group of brilliant, outspoken, scholarly writers who have written a number of well thought out, fun, and gameable things for Glorantha. Many of that same group and a few others have donated a vast amount of time, energy, and money to keeping Glorantha alive during the time of the Great Darkness. They did it all because they enjoy Glorantha. Nothing more. They didn't even expect any thanks for their efforts.

Getting ignored or contradicted doesn't sit well with them. They feel that what they have done and/or what they want to do in the future doesn't fit into the plans of Issaries Inc.

I feel qualified to say this because I am honoured to number them amongst my best friends.

Rick

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