[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

The author got arrested for some sort of sexual misconduct. I believe the charge was statutory rape. Unfortunately, the media played this up as "the evils of RPGs" like they did with D&D years ago, and it draw a lot of negative publicity. Killing the project.

It's slightly more complicated than that, though I understand why you phrase it that way.

Oliver Jovanovic, the primary overseer of the rework and playtest got arrested for sexual battery and possibly enslavement; he essentially hooked up with a woman he'd met over the Net for a BDSM encounter that apparently went wrong. While no one but the participants know what really happened here, its to be noted that he was initially convicted but was freed on appeal sometime later, and the indications from the appeal court was that the original court screwed up big.

Avalon Hill sold quite a lot of product to a younger audience so they severed their connection like a machete when this happened.

Mechanically the game was stillf is a rought draft/playtest version and not everything had been worked out. THere were a few changes and not all had been tested.

The final version was considerably farther along than a rough draft; I'd characterize the completed version parts as pretty much in final draft format (note that there were numerous prior drafts, so its possible you hadn't seen the last draft). It wasn't, however, complete; to the best of my knowledge the rework of the monsters chapter wasn't complete. However, character generation, mechanics, and the magic chapters (the biggest part of the rules) were finished, and to the best of my knowledged, were playtested to the extent they were mostly going to be. There would likely have been some last minute adjustments while they finished up the creature chapters, but as I was there for most of the prior playtest, it was mostly done, far as I can tell.

There is a playtest version of the rules kicking around. Sounds like our local beetle has one.

I used it hybridized with RQ3 and some material from early drafts for the version of the game I use now when running RQ; I wasn't happy with everything in it, but it was a basically sound rework. In fact, one of my biggest objections wasn't so much about mechanics but that it had swung back to being Glorantha-centric.