| 12/14/2001 — I started the Chatter section on July 27, 2000 when I noticed that the rest of my site was sometimes getting cluttered with lots of text. I'm a talkative guy, after all! So now I talk about my life here, instead of all over the place. Originally this was one huge section, but in December of 2001 it simply became too large to remain as one page, and I broke it into dated sections, as you can see. —>PM |
September 30, 2004—
It feels strange to be writing here again.
This is more of a tidying-up than anything else, so let me begin by stating the obvious: Chatter has been replaced by my journal ("blog", if you prefer), at LiveJournal. I've been roleplaying a bit again in the past year, but it has been D&D (by Hobson's Choice) and I haven't had an opportunity to GM. I wouldn't GM D&D anyway - my loyalties haven't changed.
So there hasn't been much new material on this site for a long time. If you want to read my stuff now, the journal is the place to look. I've actually written more there than I have in Chatter, since it's so much easier to make posts there. I make several posts a week. Fair warning, many of them are about my son, or politics, or other, well, chatter.
But there's some game material there, too. Not anything worth posting on Pete's RQ, of course; I have NOT given up on this site, and if I come up with anything worthwhile I will write it up and post it here. But relatively disorganized comments about D&D, as well as Diablo and other computer games, are definitely a large part of my output.
In other words, when/if I write anything that I feel is worth publishing, it will go here - not in Chatter, probably, but in the appropriate place on the site.
This feels odd; I'm writing as if I were talking to someone who reads this site but has never read my journal, and it seems pretty unlikely that anyone actually fits that description.
Actually there have been some additions to this site. I added the RuneQuest Wiki, and a RQ Classifieds forum for content creators. They've seen some activity, but not an overwhelming amount. I've also made the occasional post to the Chaos Project.
Speaking of the Chaos Project, the odds are good that I will soon be archiving all current content (they'll be available online, of course) and moving the active books to a new service. Alxnet, the free guestbook service that I used for the Project, is migrating to a new system. They are requiring users to open new accounts and transfer their old data manually. I opened a new account two weeks ago, and it is still frozen. I wrote to their support team seven or eight days ago, and still have received no response.
I'm starting to suspect that this is Alxnet's way of getting rid of free accounts.
Another problem has been a huge increase in the amount of spam in those books. Since at times it isn't possible to log into Alxnet, this is particularly frustrating. What makes it still worse is that these are porno-site spams with nasty code built in, code that completely hijacks the viewer and takes them directly to the porn site.
I think I'll be replacing both my guestbook and the Chaos Project books with some of the php services offered by my host. That will have the advantage of keeping everything on-site, and remove the last vestige of commercialism. Right now, my priority is to save all the contents of the books. I no longer trust Alxnet not to delete them without warning.
Hmm. I think that for news which is specifically RQ/BRP related, I will continue to make the rare Chatter post. Speaking of which:
Is there any RQ fan who doesn't already know about this? Possibly. I wish I could tell someone in person (I'd love to see their faces). But this is the closest I can get.
Chaosium recently published "monograph" editions of Basic Roleplaying. These are the RQ3 rules with the word "RuneQuest" replaced with "Basic RolePlaying". I repeat, with emphasis:
These are the RQ3 rules with the word "RuneQuest" replaced with "Basic RolePlaying"!
The system is back in print. Apparently Hasbro told Chaosium that they could use the rule system, but they don't have the rights to the RuneQuest name. Issaries recently acquired the rights to the name, and are considering using it on some of their own HeroQuest products (which I personally think would be really obnoxious), and may possibly allow or license Chaosium to use it to - which could once again unify the system with the name. Glorantha would almost certainly NOT be part of the revived RuneQuest, however.
Chaosium plans to release a "Deluxe Basic Roleplaying" system which will be the RuneQuest 3 system combined with additional rules from other iterations of BRP such as Ringworld, to make a truly multi-genre system. Where will it go from there? They're not talking.
Or at least, not to me.
In any case, this site will continue to support RuneQuest 1, 2, 3, the various versions of 4, and the new Deluxe Basic Roleplaying as well (gotta wonder if they'll find a new name). Of course stuff about other games is acceptable, within reason.
Ah, the possibilities...if Chaosium is successful
with this, there may actually be new players coming into the
system. At last I can dream again. 
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[email protected] Copyright 2004 by Peter Maranci. Revised: February 02, 2005. version 1.1
