Hey Ian,
>Newcomers were put off by the amount of material they needed to
>purchase or digest to start...but established users wanted increased
>detail applied on top of what had accumulated so far.
>....the existing fans want you to move on. You cannot gain new fans
>without risking losing your existing demographic.
I think you can satisfy both, though it will require dramatically reimagining the relationship Issaries has with users of the game and conveying that reimagined relationship within the text of the published products.
I remember M.A.R. Barker describing his interactions with the Tekumel fan culture in a seminar at an Origins in the early 80s. He spoke of how he'd get written reports through the mail from people playing in parts of the game world he hadn't used or described himself, and that he'd incorporate what they were doing, names of significant NPCs, political details and everything, into the canon. Those details would appear in published products and in newsletters.
This is one wrong way to do it. This method, as well as the long history of published supplements that Glorantha is carrying, both create a culture of setting geeks. Sure, they're both good methods for a while. They show a community engaged with the game. But inevitably with both of them there's a sweet spot of engagement during the lifespan of the game, at some point before the barrier to entry becomes too steep. And to be blunt, for Tekumel and Glorantha that sweet spot is many years gone. If you're going to do this, what you want to avoid is creating the geeks. The setting geeks will be your litmus test for whether you've been successful or not.
So, if I were doing this for Glorantha, the first thing I'd do is take William Faulkner's advice very much to heart: kill your darlings. In a manner of speaking, I'd hire John Byrne and start the comic book series over with issue #1. I'd reinvent the setting somehow that invalidates all the geeks. I suspect it's probably almost unfathomable to you to even consider such a move, but you're carrying a culture of static knowledge in all that published product that's absolute poison to the dynamic you need to promote going forward.
And if you get it right, you only have to do this once. Put up a picture of Faulkner for support.
Then you need to aggressively promote a dynamic of user engagement with the setting. You need to show users in the text of the game products how to use what you do publish. Demonstrate through examples and mini-scenarios how a prospective GM and player group might take a bit of sketchy setting detail and produce a meaningful scenario for themselves. And then show how another group comes up with something entirely different from the same sketchy bit. I imagine published setting something like this:
"In [location] the royal family has a summer home, where they often hunt the king's forest by day, and hold lavish parties by night, attended by servants drawn from the very same oppressed minorities who resist their rulership so violently in the capitol. Issues here: cross-class romance, revolt, royal obliviousness."
So you can still publish setting, but by showing how different play groups hook into the same bit of setting and issues and produce very different scenarios, focusing on very different nuances of the embedded conflicts, and by aggressively affirming as publisher that this is the way to play the game, you never create the setting geeks. You get a culture of dynamic and collaborative play, without the barrier to entry of authoritativeness.
Paul
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