I'm not sure all of them are on topic here, so I'll try and skim through to the bits that are...
> Then they did
> the Unspeakable act. They sold Runequest to a Board, wargame
> company-AH. I still despise that day. And of course AH
> changed Runequest for the worse.
While many (most?) people would agree with you, Greg has repeatedly "taken the blame" for all the changes. Chaosium still designed and wrote RQ3...
> Issaries then makes "Hero Wars" and returns to making stuff
> for it in Glorantha. Praise Be !! But this new stuff is not
> RQ. BOO !
Since AH still own the rights to the RQ name, if nothing else. Had
they not been swallowed by Hasbro then a new edition of RQ, RQ:Slayers
would have been out by now - Entirely "Glorantha-Free", mind you. I
am uncertain as to how much similarity it would have had with previous
editions beyond the name...
> So now here is a wonderful question. Since Hasbro is
> the Big bully on the Game Block,. What are the doing with
> their old holdings of Avalon Hill & Runequest?? Can
> Issaries/Chaosium get RQ back?? Is it worth it??
Presumably they don't think so. Big corporations seem to have strange ideas of the worth of "Brand Names" that they own but don't wish to (currently) exploit. Moon Design Publications are reprinting old (RQ2) Gloranthan Material - to date they have done Pavis & Big Rubble as a single volume and Griffin Mountain. My understanding is that they can republish everything except the rules (presumably, again due to the AH licence)
>What about all the TSR/ Wizards stuff??
<snip>
> But I'm worried about getting anything if Hasbro is
> going to "Shelf" it.
I think that unlikely, and, my understanding is that the open games licence would allow 3rd parties to continue to support it indefinitely. I also suspect that in D&D's case the name really would be worth someone buying it off Hasbro if they decided to drop it... however this discussion doesn't belong here. If you want to follow it up, I'd suggest usenet or the forums at RPG.NET
> I just wish Issaries/Chaosium could
> put out/reprint old thing(Wyrm's foot)
See comment about Moon Design above. Tales of the Reaching Moon produced "Wyrms Footprints" a few years back - a "Best of Wyrms Footnotes" (I have a nagging fear I have that the wrong way round, but you know what I mean in any case), which may still be available "new"
> I do not hate Hero Wars, I just really
> do not like the system and I do not have the 50-100 dollars
> to invest in books to be able to play and run properly.
> So I ask again. Is RQ salvagable?? Is it worth it?? Is
> there much to convert HW to RQ?? does anyone have an easy
> system tool to do it?? Or am I just too far gone to
> care??
>
Is RQ salvageable as a commercially viable proposition? I doubt it, personally, (especially if you can't afford Hero Wars!). That said, it still has a lot of fans (Some of whom love the system and hate Glorantha...) so I think it will survive for a while yet through Web support etc.
People who Like Glorantha but not Hero Wars have reported that they have found the 2 latest HW books ("Thunder Rebels" and "Storm Tribe") to be useful, even though they have no "RQ" material in them. Conversion is not going to be "Trivial" (like say RQ2 to 3, or AD&D 2E to D&D 3E), for a start the ganes have very different design philosophies. Again, this may not be the best place to ask - there is a RQ-RULES mailing list, I believe (although I'm not on it, and can't remember the address) which might be able to help.
Alternately, check out some of the Scenarios on the Issaries web site (www.glorantha.com) - either the Original ones, or the conversions from RQ Scenarios (Gringle's pawnshop, Rainbow Mounds, the Garhound Contest...) and see if you think you could use the information to run the scenario using RQ rules. There are also some fan-contributed cults there too, which again, you could look to see whether you could convert them back to RQ - it's not really an answer to your question, but at least it's a "free" way of finding out for yourself ;)
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