MShipley88 wrote:I wonder if you have any recall of the early versions of Stormbringer.
The first box was two inches thick.  
The second box was a one inch box and the contents had been combined in a single book.
As far as I can tell, the two versions were published very close together.
Can you recall why the change between editions, or any other details?

Well, to be frank, it was for the money. In those days we had pretty good autoships (that is, automatic shipment to the distributors (and there were a lot more of them in those days too). A new edition of a game sold as well as a new game. So of course, when a game sold out we did a new edition rather than a reprint.
We also wanted to lower our cost per unit. The two inch box was much more expensive than a one inch--I seem to recall it being 50% more, though that seems incredible now. Whatever the actual price, it was significently more. And it was cheaper to print a larger book than two smaller ones, and also easier to collate it together. Finally, it was easier and cheaper to sent 1" boxes.

Calithena wrote:Thanks for the information, Greg!

My pleasure. Truely. This forum is a lot more interesting than most of the interviews I've had in my 30 years in the biz.

Thanks for the stories about Dave's GMing. I had a chance to play in one of his games once, but I didn't know the middleman very well and being a South Bay product and underage with no car I didn't feel comfortable trying to make my own way out to Concord or whatever it was.

Ah, too bad. You'd've loved it.

I'll always deeply regret not following up on that, since there aren't going to be any more chances now.

Carpe diem, my friends. We do not have any practice runs in life.

jasonw1239 wrote:There has been speculation that Chaosium will be reprinting Beyond the Mountains of Madness.
Is there any target date on that or is it merely speculation from anxious players and collectors?

I'm afraid I'm unable to help you here, Jason.
I left Chaosium amost eight years ago, and have not been privy to their publication plans since then.

jasonw1239 wrote:Thought it might be worth asking. Nobody seems to know and I just thought that there might be a miniscule chance that you had an "inside scoop".  

Actually, however, slightly less than miniscule.
And it is always worth while to ask.

Calithena wrote:Hi, Greg. Thanks for the great answers to my Hargrave queries.

My pleasure. Thank you for provoking the memories.

I had a Glorantha question. I was wondering where the Trolls came from:

Trolls were not really fleshed out until Trollpak, in 1982. They had existed, but not so clearly. The RuneQuest years really gave me reason to focus on the nonhumans and bring them into focus. Sandy Petersen, fresh from graduating with his degree in biology, was instrumental in describing the physical characteristics (I'd never heard of dental patterns, for instance) and in contributing to the social characteristics.
I really wanted to indicate that these were more than just monsters. Steve Perrin had discovered the word "trollkin," and my catch phrase became, "trolls have kin too!" I basically thought up their characteristics by extrapolating from their mythical powers of devouring, obscuring and surviving. Then I investigated details when my original RQ group interacted with them in the Sazdorf ruins.

specifically, did the Broken Sword have an influence on the early iterations of the world?

I presume you mean Poul Anderson's novel by that name.
I don't think it did. At least not consciously. Upon reading your letter I had to go and read some reviews of the novel to recall what it was about, and frankly, still don't recall having read it.
I didn't discover fantasy or science fiction until after I'd begun writing my earliest Gloranthan materials. I remember picking up one of the first books I ever saw, which (fortunately) was The Hobbit, and quite naïvely thinking, "Damn, someone else already invented a made-up world." However, once I discovered these books I did read them voraciously and I may well have read it so that it entered my subconscious mind.

Hmm, once again I was not notified that a message was here...
Sorry to take so long to respond!

MShipley88 wrote:So, Glorantha was a creation that pre-dates fantasy reading!

Yes, absolutely. I was, however, well versed in European mythology. I had read Beowulf, a version of the Iliad,  Le Morte d'Arthur, many retellings of Greek and other Norse mythology.

How far back was Glorantha in your mind?  Can you think of a year or other chronological even with which the rough outlines of Glorantha coincides in your mental landscape?

1966. My freshman year at college (Beloit college, in WI, if you are curious). I remember quite clearly sitting down at my desk to write a vignette. I still have that first page, in fact. It's framed. That led to an explanation, which led to a story, which led to the blossoming of Glorantha.

(I think the concept of fantasy worlds is very interesting.  In fact, we role-players all share memories of places that do not even exist...often with the vividness of real places.  The ruined moathouse outside of the Village of Hommlet is an excellent example.)

A real comment on the human imagination.

Also, since your concept of Glorantha precedes your encounter with Tolkien, it must also preceed your encounter with fantasy role-playing.

Yes, of course. Fantasy roleplaying didn't exist until D&D came out in 1975, the same year I released White Bear & Red Moon. I'd released that board game as a "do it yourself epic," wherein I supplied the setting and the characters, including vast and exotic armies; and then each play of the game was the plot.
I encountered D&D early (the first copy ever sold by TSR) as I think I've related on this list, and some time afterwards met my next door neighbor who was playing it. I played some, but didn't like the game much. Much too... well, homogenized and bastardized. I was quite offended to see swarming hordes of kobolds ready to be hacked to pieces.

How did Glorantha become a role-playing project?

First some effort was made by Hendrik Jan Pfeiffer, the neighbor with whom I played my first D&D game; and two of his friends, Art and Ray Turney, to make some D&D stuff out of WB&RM.
Then I was at a party at Paul Zimmer's house, called Greyhaven. It was a fairly regular party swarming with science fiction folks. (It's where I first met Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Diana Paxon.)
Also I met Clint Bigglestone, who told me some friends of his wanted to do some D&D stats on the board game. I told I didn't like D&D, but would talk. I then met his D&D players, Steve Perrin, Steve Henderson and Warren James. They were all bit SCA fans, charter members. They told me they didn't especially like D&D either. I sketched out the requirement I'd want for a Gloranthan RPG, and from the original team only Ray Turney wanted to continue on and so he joined that team (he worked most of the magic system out). The result was RuneQuest.
I had sensed hat RPG was a better vehicle for fantasy than board games They worked hard on it, missed deadlines (of course. Who knew what a job i was going to be?). One day I told them the book was done enough for me and we rushed it into publication to get to Origins (maybe GenCon, but I am not sure GenCon existed in hose days). We were so hurried that we actually misspelled Glorantha on a map, and misspelled Chaosium on the back cover.  
Well, it was enough. We were off and running.

MShipley88 wrote:Interesting how Wisconsin figures so much in the start of RPG's.

I think it must be due to the cheese.
Or else it's just so boring that it precipitates flights of fancy.
But the place that I feel is a strange center of RPG is Minneapolis/St. Paul, from whence came Dave Arneson and M.A.R.Barker

How did you come to know so many well-known fantasy and science fiction writers?  What, for instance, were they doing in Wisconsin?

They were in CA, actually. I left WI in '68, and have done little more than visit there (mainly for the old for GenCons) since.
As for how I met them--a combination of luck and cojones.
LUCK: I believe that I got to the Grayhaven party through Isaac Bonewitz, who I had met through pagan connections at that time. But when I learned that it was a gathering of SF authors, I went even though I knew next to no one there.
COJONES: I'd ask "Where is Poul Anderson?' until someone pointed him out, and then go up and humbly introduce myself, and try to start a conversation. I did the same thing at SF conventions. Heck, one time I called up Harlan Ellison out of the blue.
I learned that a lot of those folk were pretty darn stuck up., or just too busy for a fan boy.

Also, could you relate any details about the forming of Chaosium?

The company was formed when I lived in one of Oakland's ghettos, east 14th St., if you know the area--over near the Oakland Coliseum. I lived in a four room apartment with my wife, two very young children, and then some dear friends (2 adults, 2 kids) from Chicago moved in with us "for a few days. until we find our own place." They stayed for months, and it was all chaos. (Get it? Coliseum of Chaos = Chaosium)
WB&RM had already been accepted by a couple of publishers, but the first company (I forget its name now) went out of business. Then the second, which was Battle Flag, went out of business, too. Then my local game store owner (Gary Grady) said he'd like to do it, but then decided to get a divorce and so he couldn't start a new game publishing business and complicate that further. (He did later start a game company, and published those very successful early Sherlock Holmes party games.) The good part was that each time someone had accepted the game they made suggestions for changes that improved the game.
I was wondering what to do about getting it published. We didn't like living in the dangerous part of town, either.
One day I did a Tarot Card reading and got absolutely explicit results, clear as day. As a result of that decided to publish it myself. I went out and the next day got a job working in surgery at Providence Hospital. My parents took the kids into their house for a year (very sad, that) so both my wife and I could work, and after a year we moved out of Oakland to Albany, CA.
I saved about every penny and started Chaosium on the $10K I earned that year. I got my friends, with whom I was doing a fanzine called Wyrd at the time, to help out. (Steve Swenston, art; William Church, map. Bill Johnson, who did the editing, was not in on Wyrd. I'd met him while working at the hospital.)
I went to a SF convention in LA, gave a copy to a dealer there who was selling games, and next day he ordered some from me and gave me a list of other distributors.
"What are you sales terms?" he asked me.
"What are sales terms?" I asked back. Whatta business man I was!    
I never put out a job search for employees. Whenever I needed someone, there was someone right there that I could hire. So my first employee was Tadashi Ehara, who did business; then Lynn Willis, who I initially hired to layout his own boardgame (Lords of the Middle Sea), then signed him on permanelty; later Charlie Krank, Steve Perrin, Sandy Petersen, etc.

MShipley88 wrote:How did the partnership with Avalon Hill to print RuneQuest items come about?

And why did AH suck the life right out of Runequest like a ... like a ... damnit, what were the "vampires" in RQ called again?

MShipley88 wrote:How did the partnership with Avalon Hill to print RuneQuest items come about?  Was it really a partnership, or something else?

Xaxaxe wrote:And why did AH suck the life right out of Runequest like a ... like a ... damnit, what were the "vampires" in RQ called again?

Vampires.  
The Avalon Hill story is an epic of what a small company should not do. It was an uneven "something else" from the start.
Now, it'd been something of a lifelong goal of mine to have Avalon Hill produce a boardgame done by me. I had bought U-Boat, an AH game, in 1959 or so (I still have the game, though I will probably eBay it.) It was the first "realistic" war game I'd ever seen, though I'd played Conflict avidly before that (unrealistic, because your unit movement depends on dice rolls.) In 1962 I moved to Illinois from Connecticut, just before my freshman year of High School. I had two friends: one was a war gamer, and the other was a juvenile delinquent, so I spent half my time playing wargames. They were all Avalon Hill, of course: Tactics II, D-Day, etc. So I'd always dreamed of them publishing one of my games.
When we were successful with RuneQuest we'd decided to stop producing boardgames. They took twice as long to produce, cost twice as much to manufacture, and sold half as much. So Tadashi and I went to Avalon Hill to see if we could sell them our board games. We met Eric Dott, who was a pretty unlikable old guy. Cantankerous, foul mouthed, crude and one of the leading slum lords of Baltimore. The game business seemed to be an appendage to the printing business, which seemed to be the day job front for Eric.
The interview went well enough, and Eric agreed to purchase Dragon Pass (the new title for WB&RM) and Elric which they did eventually produce. So my dream came true.
Aft closing that deal, Eric told me that what he really wanted was to publish RuneQuest. Now, as I said, it was one of our moneymakers, but we'd reached a business plateau by that time. It was clear we needed to have a full time marketing guy to expand our market and keep up with the rest of the market, which was at that time getting larger and increasingly professional. But no one had miraculously appeared to be hired.
Well, I told AH I'd sell them the game, which was what they wanted, for a million dollars. And I would have, too. So they discussed, instead, a license deal.
Back home we discussed the options, and decided that AH might be just the right ticket to do the manufacturing and marketing for us. They were still one of the largest game manufacturers in the industry. Chaosium, meanwhile, would do the acquisitions, writing, design and layout—all our strong suits. Looked good!
We worked out a contract where they promised to spend such and such in advertising, etc etc. Looked great!
Of course, they wanted a new edition. We seized the chance to do a new edition and threw in every house rule we had, plus some more. The result was RQ3. One thing that I did insist on was keeping a close grip on the Gloranthan content. We didn't license that to them. Thus the core game came out and was set in Fantasy Europe, a setting we planned to develop at length.
When we got the color proofs back for the first release of the game I hit the ceiling. In direct violation of the contract they'd taken the designer's names off the box! I protested to Eric, who simply aid, "We don't do that at Avalon Hill. Want to kill the deal right now?" I should have said yes, but I chickened out. I backed down. Big mistake. From "dreamcome true" to "nightmare."
And from then on things just got worse and worse. They ignored our expertise and kept making demands that we tried to meet, and it never clicked. We put out the character sheets, they demanded it be in a box, and then they complained that it cost too much. They demanded product come quickly, even it was to be reprints, and then complained that they were reprints.
At one point Eric revealed he was going to have three RPGs available through AH, and RQ would be "the Cadillac" of the line. He sent me a manuscript of Powers & Perils and asked for an honest assessment. I told him it was awful, neither original nor well written. He accused me of professional jealousy. Go find a copy yourself and make your own mind up about that.
Relations got worse and worse. They weren't spending the promised money on promotion, etc. Finally I told them Chaosium was going to withdraw from the deal. I sent a letter stating the contract violations they had committed, and we stopped working with them. They tried to do a new edition of RQ, which never got into print for various reasons, but I had already forbidden then to use any Gloranthan content in their game.
It ended up with bad feelings all around. It was a business disaster for Chaosium, because we ended up pouring a lot of our energy into it and not getting as much out of it as we would have if we'd just done our own product. Thank the gods that Call of Cthulhu was a success for us, so we stayed in business.