Every once in a while people talk about Chaosium and RuneQuest and it's kind of annoying to see all the facts that they get wrong. Not that I know the truth, but at least I have a better idea from Eric and he can't be too wrong since he's been involved with Chaosium for the last few years. So here's a few things as recollected by me from a second-hand source, so there are errors. But I think it's more right than what most people think.

Greg Stafford created Glorantha, which is a world. I think it was more of a fun thing for him to do, much like JRR Tolkein created Middle Earth as a hobby. It wasn't intended to be anything for public consumption. When Chaosium was formed and RuneQuest was developed, other people put in a lot of work. Greg is not the kind of person who could have put RuneQuest together by himself. But since I don't remember the other guys' names I won't mention any.

RuneQuest did all right. It was just a vehicle for Glorantha and not really meant to be a D&D killer or anything like that. Chaosium expanded and did other games, but I won't go into that. RuneQuest went into a second edition and the company was doing well. So it's kind of surprising that RuneQuest ended up in Avalon Hill's hands.

It wasn't really Chaosium's fault. Certainly not bad management, although the company has never been run as a tight ship. What happened was one devious accountant and a bit of embezzlement that almost put the company under. To save the company RuneQuest was sold to Avalon Hill. Chaosium would still develop the Glorantha supplements but Avalon Hill owned it and probably got most of the profits. There was a clause in the contract wherein if no new RuneQuest materials was published for a year then ownership would pass back to Chaosium.

Avalon Hill did a fairly good job promoting 3rd edition RuneQuest. Certainly that's the version that I'm most familiar with and there was a lot of material for it. But Avalon Hill wanted to do more than Glorantha. Several RuneQuest supplements are generic fantasy and have nothing to do with Glorantha. Needless to say Chaosium didn't like this state of affairs for their pride and joy. But there was little they could do about it.

And then one day Avalon Hill woke up and found itself in deep financial trouble. No, that's not right. Avalon Hill has pretty much always been profitable. Not stellar but not a money pit. Avalon Hill's parent company on the other hand, was having financial troubles with some higher profile projects. Monarch decided to concentrate on some magazine and shopped their other assets, including A-H, around. Eventually Hasbro bought Avalon Hill from Monarch.

But, during this uncertain time. Very few things were published by Avalon Hill. One of these things was RuneQuest. I'm not too sure how it got worked out, but in the end Avalon Hill kept RuneQuest and the system while Glorantha returned to Chaosium. Avalon HIll can do whatever they want with RuneQuest, make it into a space game or whatever. They can't use any Glorantha materials anymore.

The hardcore Glorantha fans like that. There aren't too many, but enough to form a good sales base. People were hired, Chaosium was split up into little companies, each having one or two games of the old Chaosium (mostly to keep bad sales in one line from sinking Chaosium -- really all the companies still work in the same building). Issaries was created to handle Glorantha and the next Glorantha RPG, Hero Wars, has been released.

Hero Wars is not RuneQuest. It's not the old Glorantha. The setting is different than the old RuneQuest Glorantha, more epic. Greg is still in charge of the background and history and world. Other people are in charge of actually taking that material and creating coherent supplements with it. And Greg is flexible, you can convince him that the world should work this way, not the way he thought. And that's the current state of Glorantha.