glorantha

[Atgxtg]

Originally Posted by Kloster

IIRC, he stated that for him, the Mongoose deal was mainly a financial one, that brought him more cash than the whole HQ line.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

No surprise there. A few companies that started doing d20 stuff to supplment their regular lines have commented that one d20 book can finance a year of supplement for another system.

Mongoose is now a pretty big player in the RPG field and so can probably make a good sized offer.

THat Greg doesn't talk much about MRQ (I've read comments like "I wouldn't have done it that way, but it's their game"), while you can usally get him to talk about other games he has been involved with, like HQ or Pendragon gives a pretty clear indication. I don't think Greg is playing any MRQ.

[lawrence.whitaker]

Having worked very closely with Greg on the 'Dara Happa Stirs' book for Mongoose, I don't get the impression that he doesn't care about what gets developed. He might not care too much for the system, but as far as the Second Age is concerned, he's put a great deal of effort into providing Mongoose's writers with the precise tools to reflect his vision, and his own writing seems to have developed the second age.

Greg's been extremely supportive about the Dragonewts book, Dara Happa, and is very keen to see what further Second Age projects are developed. So to say that his interest is purely or mainly financial is a little on the disingenuous side - both to him, and to Mongoose, which is very keen to ensure that all its Gloranthan output gets an official seal of approval.

[Merak Gren]

Originally Posted by Kloster

IIRC, he stated that for him, the Mongoose deal was mainly a financial one, that brought him more cash than the whole HQ line.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

Let's be thankful for small mercies. Had Greg just been thinking of the money, he could have licenced it to D20 and to hell with it.

Not that happy with MRQ but it is compatible to a great extent.

[NickMiddleton]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

I'd be inclined to shout "Questworld" if we could get enough people to want to game in the same fantasy setting. Some sort of baseline setting would be nice, as long as the rules don't limit other uses of BRP.

That was precisely the original motivation behind Gwenthia, albeit we wandered quite some way from that original motivation fairly rapidly...

I think any "in house" setting needs to be "in house" at Chaosium. While there are a lot of other worlds, include Jorune, they are owned by someone else and so would be difficult to impossible for Chaosium to use.

The difficulty is there is no "in house" at Chaosium: they have no designers / writers on staff any more (well, Lynn Willis has written stuff in the past, but I gather these days he only does editorial work). It's possible they might consider some sort of supervision / licensed arrangement I suppose...

Either a Chasoium closed setting, or an open setting that we all work on, could be nice. That's why I thought of Questworld. Back in the early days of MRQ several of us were going to put together an open game world, but the concept died after MRQ came out and half the contributors decided that they didn't want to play MRQ.

The concept, however, is still a good one.

Indeed, and perhaps something that this community could do in it's wiki, or on a clsoed sub set of the forums?

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

[Kloster]

Originally Posted by lawrence.whitaker

Having worked very closely with Greg on the 'Dara Happa Stirs' book for Mongoose, I don't get the impression that he doesn't care about what gets developed. He might not care too much for the system, but as far as the Second Age is concerned, he's put a great deal of effort into providing Mongoose's writers with the precise tools to reflect his vision, and his own writing seems to have developed the second age.

Greg's been extremely supportive about the Dragonewts book, Dara Happa, and is very keen to see what further Second Age projects are developed. So to say that his interest is purely or mainly financial is a little on the disingenuous side - both to him, and to Mongoose, which is very keen to ensure that all its Gloranthan output gets an official seal of approval.

Note that my comment about the 'mainly financial' deal is not derogatory. I'm working because my job pays my rent and my food, not by pleasure. I perfectly understand this motivation, even if I don't like the result.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[Triff]

Originally Posted by NickMiddleton

That was precisely the original motivation behind Gwenthia, albeit we wandered quite some way from that original motivation fairly rapidly...

What was the concept behind Questworld? Gates from which you could travel form world to world or something like that?

Indeed, and perhaps something that this community could do in it's wiki, or on a clsoed sub set of the forums?

Not a bad idea. A problem could be agreeing on the type of setting/world to create though.

SGL.

[Triff]

Fantasy earth, with all the myths being true, could be one idea.

SGL.

[golden wheel dancer]

It's a nice idea to have a new world that BRP is dedicated to. But Glorantha is a tough act to follow! I think for me it was Greg Stafford's style of writing as much as anything else that hooked me as a youth. Concise and crackiling with symbollism.

Though for me Glorantha has become too realistic. The light brush strokes have become precise incisions. It used to be like falling into an Asterix book, now it is like reading a star trek technical manual.

I agree with you trifle's tractor that mythic earth could be the closest thing to catch that flavour we like.

[lawrence.whitaker]

Originally Posted by Kloster

Note that my comment about the 'mainly financial' deal is not derogatory. I'm working because my job pays my rent and my food, not by pleasure. I perfectly understand this motivation, even if I don't like the result.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

I was actually responding more to Atgxt's comments - so I don't take the idea of a financial deal as derogatory at all. We all have to earn a crust somehow.

The wider inference is that Greg's bunged Mongoose the Second Age setting and doesn't take much of an active involvement with it - which really isn't the case. He and Jeff Richard put together books like 'Middle Sea Empire' and 'History of the Heortling Peoples' precisely to act as a frame of reference for Mongoose writers, and, certainly, everything Gloranthan I've written for GtSA has been run by Greg, and then been subject to very detailed and useful discussions.

[lawrence.whitaker]

Originally Posted by Triff

What was the concept behind Questworld? Gates from which you could travel form world to world or something like that?



Not a bad idea. A problem could be agreeing on the type of setting/world to create though.

SGL.

The idea behind Questworlds was that Chaosium would define a base world, with geography, politics, cults and so forth, that was distinct for Glorantha but would be developed by fans, leaving Chaosium (back when they had it) to work on Glorantha's specific development. The concept's great in theory but it never really developed in practice - perhaps because, really, shared worlds require an enormous amount of commitment and resource to properly develop. There was no intrawebnet back then, and its taken the www to really offer the online collaborative tools necessary to make shared world development effective.

Whilst Gwenthia's being developed as product for publication, the intention was always to develop it to a certain stage and then release it as a basis for others to then develop as they wished. The existing body of Gwenthia is offered under the Creative Commons licence and does provide a very good basis for world sharing and development, using BRP as a system, if people want to.

I think the Design Mechanism would be very happy to discuss with those on this forum who are interested in using Gwenthia, just how they can do so, using BRP. It actually moves things back to the original vision and, given that we'll produce Gwenthia independently anyway, won't impact on our longer term plans for a glossy book.

Let's discuss this more on the Gwenthia thread. I've a whole host of supportive documents people can have, using the CC licence, to kick start a sort of shared world experience.