Is D100 Dead?

For various reasons, chief amongst which the fact that I have been directly impacted [my book The Celestial Empire cannot be sold any longer, see below], and yet I strive to remain impartial on my blogs, I haven't blogged much about the latest news in the small world of D100-based role playing games. For those of you who are unaware of the latest developments, here is a short summary of what has happened during this eventful summer.

• Moon Design has taken control of Chaosium and announced that they wouldn't publish the 404-page Big Gold Book any longer. Instead they will publish a 32-page booklet called BRP Essentials. 32 pages? That's tantamount to setting the clock back to the 80s and the slim Chaosium BRP booklet :-(
• Ben Monroe, who was the driving force behind Magic World, has left Chaosium.
• The Design Mechanism's RuneQuest licence — which has made gateway (i.e., non-Gloranthan) RQ products such as Luther Arkwright possible — has expired and will not be renewed. Loz and Pete will now work on an upcoming fully Gloranthan version of RuneQuest for Chaosium (ETA mid-2016).
• Third party licences (e.g., Alephtar Games') have also been rescinded. As a result, celebrated historical RPGs such as Rome (which had won a silver ENnie) aren't available any longer.

Except for D101 Games' OpenQuest, this doesn't leave us with much non-Gloranthan D100-based gaming left. Is D100 gaming dead?

Forgotten Secrets of Glorantha

I have already mentioned Sandy Petersen's excellent panel about Gloranthan secrets, called “Elder Secrets of Glorantha”, that I had the privilege to attend during last year's The Kraken convention, er, gaming vacation. I believe that much of the information divulged by Sandy at his panel was quite novel.

Well, Fabian Küchler has made the transcript available as a ‘chapbook’, i.e., a fundraiser booklet for The Kraken. The PDF will probably be publicly on sale, but the dead tree version is only going to be available for attendees; it will have art by Jon Hodgson and be a limited and numbered print run.

If you want to pre-order a print copy of this chapbook, write to fabian [at] the-kraken [dot] de. More information here.