The Blue Room dealt with the problem of payment by (perhaps rather optimistically) asking everyone who downloaded a document to send something like $5 to the list administrator - however if you were in the UK you had to send a cheque to the administrator's sister-in-law who would send it to him who would forward it to M.A.R Barker...
While this was a great way of getting new and OOP Tekumel material to fans who at the time were unlikely to get it it in any other way, this clearly didn't work too well as a revenue generator and after the Blue Room's untimely demise the same documents were eventually made available free from www.tekumel.com (a superb site well worth a visit BTW).
So (having got the shameless plugs for the new Tekumel game and for Tekumel.com out of the way) I'd say that providing you can find a simple online way to deal with international payments - and paypal sounds like the way to go - this is an excellent idea and if there is no way to get material like John's novella or Chris' scenarios published on paper I'm sure that enough of us would pay for it this way to justify the time and expense of getting it online.
Another factor that's worth thinking about is the high cumulative
cost of new Gloranthan material - I must have spent over £100 on
Issaries books to date plus $100 for GTA membership which adding in
£25 for the Griffin Mountain reprint, £7 for the Unspoken Word,
£12.99 for Masks of Pavis, £20 for the Lunar Empire Map, £10 or
whatever for the last two or three Tradetalks(all these prices are
from memory so apologies if any are wrong), some insane amount for
Missing Lands and maybe another £200-£300 getting to/at just one con
accounts for a pretty large chunk of my affluent 40-something leisure
budget and probably far more than most new teenage/student fans
(assuming any exist)could afford to spend.
Accordingly any way that gets new Gloranthan material online - particularly scenarios of which Issaries has only published four in 6 books and 1200 pages - at a cost below the vanity-publishing levels of low print-run FRP publications will probably reduce the entry cost to Glorantha and is also worth Issaries looking at given that they seem to have far more publishable material than they can possibly fit into their original schedule.
Roger
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