Does Pendragon second edition exist?
Seems pretty simple on the surface. It makes sense that after first edition would come second edition, before moving on to third. Except that the only reference to it is in the Noble's Book, and I can't find any information about it in Net searching...

I'd forgotten about this until I read one of Shannon Applecline's essays. When we were testing a new Gloranthan boardgame I asked him, and he reminded me of the facts.
I hate to contradict Beyondthebreach but, in fact, there is no real 2nd edition! We had intended to do one, being a boxed set with new organization. But that was right at the transition point where we shifted from boxing everything to having larger books. So even though Nobles Book says there would be such an edition, there was none, and so we went right from 1st to 3rd ed.
Except for Nobles Book, which would have been part of the 2nd ed. Fortunately, it fit equally well with 1st and 3rd edition, and we forgot to fix the reference subsequent printings.

Greg Stafford wrote:
I'd forgotten about this until I read one of Shannon Applecline's essays. When we were testing a new Gloranthan boardgame I asked him, and he reminded me of the facts.
I hate to contradict Beyondthebreach but, in fact, there is no real 2nd edition! We had intended to do one, being a boxed set with new organization. But that was right at the transition point where we shifted from boxing everything to having larger books. So even though Nobles Book says there would be such an edition, there was none, and so we went right from 1st to 3rd ed.
Except for Nobles Book, which would have been part of the 2nd ed. Fortunately, it fit equally well with 1st and 3rd edition, and we forgot to fix the reference subsequent printings.

No problem contradicting me!  I'm actually taking the info out of Heroic Worlds.  Thanks for clarifying it.

Greg Stafford wrote:I am not sure why Tadashi departed from Chaosium. I believe that it had been his first post-graduation job, and that he had a better offer or opportunity elsewhere. No one at the company wanted to keep editing the magazine. It was easy to publish another supplement as a magazine, and a supplement would sell for a year or two, but a magazine is good only until its next issue. Tadashi wanted to keep the 'zine, and we were glad to let him. The departure was amicable.

Thanks. I have quite a good collection of game magazines and I must say that Space Gamer and Different Worlds are, for me, the best ones in English. I still enjoy opening my Magazine Vaults and perusing them from time to time. I especially like re reading The Sword of Hollywood column in DW and Where We Are Going by Steve Jackson in Space Gamer (mr. Jackson will be in Italy this november so I plan to bring my Very Rare SJG books for signing - especially Murphy's Rules 1st edition and Game Design Theory and Practice  - because I plan a looooong interview with him).

dcas wrote:
I think HW included a lot of stuff that was set to come out at the time the book went to press (but for whatever reason was never released). It listed RJK's City of Brass as being released through Creations Unlimited in 1987.

HW got a lot of its information from gaming magazines, catalogues, and other secondary sources. The book was clearly fact-checked well, and it's 99.9% accurate as a result, but when the error creep in, this is probably why.

Greg:

I have a zip lock bag version of RB&WM with no real recollection of how I got it except that I think I got it for free for some reason at one of the early Origins as a door prize or something.  Do you recall giving any of those out back then?

ddt58 wrote:I have a zip lock bag version of RB&WM with no real recollection of how I got it except that I think I got it for free for some reason at one of the early Origins as a door prize or something.

Lucky you!

 Do you recall giving any of those out back then?

Jeez, likely to have been done. What edition is it? If you share your real ID with me, and what you were doing back then, I might even remember it...

serleran wrote:Forgive me for not reading the whole thread, but, how rare, relatively, is the box set Worlds of Wonder?

I believe that we made 5000 copies of WoW. I don't think we did a second printing, but I didn't always pay attention to those details.

I used to own it, and it was stolen, and I have been on a hunt for it for about twelve years or so, now.

Bummer about the theft. I do see it come up every so often on eBay, depending on how much you want to pay. Most of our early games go for a fair price, though not outrageous.
Hmmm, I guess that's a matter of opinion.

Was it a very popular game/setting(s)?

When it first came out it was our best selling game. I am pretty sure that had to do with the great commercial cover. But we never followed up on it decently, which is a shame. It could have been, and was intended o be, like GURPS.

BRP was always my favorite Chaosium product; though CoC is fun, I prefer to incorporate it into other games, especially Gamma World. Thanks.

I liked playing it as a "big mix" game, when people could bring any character they wanted. Very chaotic.

g026r wrote:Question for you, Greg:
Nephilim.
How did Chaosium come to publish that one?  

At the time I was feeling that we'd gotten a bit stale and needed something new. CoC was doing well, as always, but the other games had fallen off somewhat.
The guys at Multisim, the French company, were old friends by that time. The game was pretty intriguing to me and though the French market was saturated with translated American games, no game had yet been translated into English. So we decided to publish it.
It was difficult to translate. We did it in house, with Anne Merritt using her French knowledge and a translation program to get a rough draft and then make it into good English.

If I recall correctly, you guys published the "second edition" -- the first being a French-only release by some other company whose name escapes me at the moment.  Though I could, of course, be wrong.

We thought that there was a serious problem with the French game, in that as the Nephilim became more powerful (and fun to play) they also became more discernible by humans, and thus had to hide. We thought that diminished the amount of available fun. So we changed it to allow people to remain in human society, but with some difficult. That made for good play options. (Even the authors said that that was a much more playable option).
I really enjoyed the character generation, and saw the possibility of doing an entire campaign where each scenario took part during the next generation--maybe one each century, or maybe with even more time between them. But as it was we badly neglected Nephilim and its possibilities.
The problem came from Mythos. It was released at about the same time, and was such a huge success that we channeled our energy into it at the expense of Nephilim. On one hand, it was a shame, really, as maybe things would have been more stable after the collapse of the ccg market if we'd had more games. On the other hand, the market was pretty difficult for any rpg's at that time.
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jasonw1239 wrote:Hi Greg!
Good to see that you still visit from time to time.
I had a short discussion with Grodog some time back about Nephilim. I liked many of the concepts and have borrowed bits and pieces for my Call of Cthulhu campaign.
The one thing that discouraged me from running a Nephilim campaign was the layout of the main book. As a game keeper it seemed to me that the content lent itself to be divided into two books. One for the keeper and the other for the players. At the time it was released I realize that Chaosium had moved away from the boxed sets with multiple books.
Was the final layout a compromise to consolidate all of the information into the one main book?

Yes. By that time we were intent upon having both GM and player material in every book.
GM-only material sold somewhere between 1/5 and 1/10 the volme of player material, but of course, we want to have GM material out there because there is more of it, and we wanted to encourage people to become GMs.