Horrible!

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by Jason Durall

As a funny bit of irony, I was working on an Eternal Champion book before BRP when they asked me to contribute to Pulp Cthulhu. It sounded like it was on a fast-track, and I didn't have the time to spare, so I said no. Then they pulled the plug on the EC book and asked me to do BRP, which was fine as I was still in "pre-writing" for that first product.

Now, more than three years later, EC is no longer Chaosium's and Pulp Cthulhu is still on the horizon.

Talk about unpredictable! Perhaps this needs to be on the author thread but it came up here first: Jason do you have any idea why Chaosium shifted gears and wanted to pick up BRP now? They have had the base material for quite a long time. Were they missing other resources that were needed for this? Why does it look like a profitable project now and didn't 10-15 years ago?

[Jason Durall]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Jason do you have any idea why Chaosium shifted gears and wanted to pick up BRP now? They have had the base material for quite a long time. Were they missing other resources that were needed for this? Why does it look like a profitable project now and didn't 10-15 years ago?

It wasn't like it came up suddenly ("now").

I'd pitched the book to them during Gen Con 2003. Then, around eight months later, they asked me to begin work on it. I gather that it had been on their minds for years, as I know of at least two people who'd mentioned it as a possibility while working for Chaosium years prior.

It was ultimately a case of having an author they were on good terms with and could trust to turn in a workable manuscript.

I suspect, too, that it is a case of not keeping all of one's eggs in the Cthulhu basket. Sales of Eternal Champion products had never really done that well in the last decade, and diversifying to more than just Cthulhu-related fiction and the Call of Cthulhu game line is just good business sense.