My impression of the whole
Stormbringer line is that it has always had extremely bad market timing.
Hawkmoon, for instance, was intended to extend the entire line into a system called, "Eternal Champions."
This boxed set came out about 5 years too late and was priced well out of the range of a casual purchaser. Since its appeal was therefore almost guaranteed to be limited to an already shrinking group of
Stormbringer players, it was doomed from the start.
Another example would be Chaosium's
Dragon Lords of Melnibone for
d20, and
5th Edition Stormbringer. These two products were released virtually simultaneously. Fans of the
Stormbringer game mercilously condemned the
d20 version, even though
Dragon Lords of Melnibone was an excellent publication...head and shoulders above the masses of lame
d20 offerings from too many companies.
The simultaneous release of both products in competition for the same niche pretty well seems to have doomed them both. Chaosium then canceled the
d20 project after only one module and then seems to have made almost no effort to support
5th Edition Stormbringer.
Chaosium published the very good
Atlas of the Young Kingdoms Volume One: The Northern Continent for their
Elric! version of the game. The natural progression would therefore have been to publish the Southern and Western Continents. Instead, Chaosium published
The Unknown East: Forgotten Foes of the Bright Empire. (The title of this publication alone should have been enough to give a hint as to its relative value to
Elric! fans.) The looked-for Southern and Western continent additions to the atlas were allowed to die in the manuscript/proposal stage. Very curious.
Ah well, they all suck anyway.
SUCK!
Mark
