Chaosium President Rick Meints shares stories from a life-time as a collector of all things Chaosium
- Out of the Suitcase #56: Games Workshop and RuneQuest 3rd Edition
- Chaosium RuneQuest 2nd edition ranked as one of the best selling RPGs in the UK in the very early 1980s. Only D&D surpassed it in popularity. Games Workshop (GW) sold and distributed …
- Out of the Suitcase #55: Rick the Scout, and Rick the Chaosium guy
- Sometimes I feel my life has two distinct aspects that only occasionally intertwine: Rick the Scout, and Rick the Chaosium guy. In general, the overlap has always been there, as I am a G …
- Out of the Suitcase #54: Farewell to Lee Gold’s Alarums & Excursions
- In June of 1975 – the same year Greg Stafford founded Chaosium – Lee Gold published the first issue of Alarums & Excursions. Sadly, I just found out that it has ceased …
- Out of the Suitcase #53: Collecting rare Chaosium papers and paperwork
- I love buying Chaosium-related items that come with their original mailing envelope, because they were often custom branded, especially for Chaosium’s in-house magazines. For example, here’s the …
- Out of the Suitcase #52: Looking at Games Workshop’s Mailing Club Newsletters
- Many years ago I had the good fortune to purchase a set of the first eight issues of Games Workshop’s Mailing Club Newsletters. Suffice it to say that I had never even heard of them before I mov …
- Out of the Suitcase #50: Games Workshop’s RuneQuest was a cracking good read
- I recently read a post asking about Games Workshop RuneQuest 3rd Edition’s use of color art. The post featured …
- Out of the Suitcase #49: From the Archives – What Almost Never Was…
- I have a feeling that all four of these books are going to be asked about based on their recent appearance on eBay. Back in 2015 we Kickstarted RuneQuest Classic, which ended up raising ove
- Out of the Suitcase #48: ‘Good old Burly Bob’ – a basic history of Basic Role-Playing
- A few weeks ago during a podcast I answered a number of questions about the fabled “lost” manuscript for Chaosium’s Dark Worlds project (the ill-star …
- Out of the Suitcase #47: Another Martian Metals Mystery…
- Last week I posted about discovering a previously unknown to me article by Greg Stafford, ‘Broos of Glorantha’. It had featured in a 1986 edition of The Partha Pipeline, a newsletter released by …
- Out of the Suitcase #46: The Partha Pipeline still flows
- I assembled most of my Ral Partha miniatures collection in the late 1990s. Between eBay and the wonderful Leisure Games store in North London (Finchley) I purchased them all just after the Ral Partha…
- Out of the Suitcase #45: RuneQuest Advertising in (The) General…
- A few days ago I was asked about the Avalon Hill staff that worked on RuneQuest 3rd Edition (RQ3) products. From 1984 through 19 …
- Out of the Suitcase #44: “Kay-OH-see-um” or “Kay-OS-ee-um”?
- While chatting after a team meeting this week someone mentioned how different people on the team pronounced our company name in different ways. I mentioned that many years ago Chaosium ran a somewhat …
- Out of the Suitcase #43: An unexpected magazine ad – part II…
- In my previous Out of the Suitcase post, thought I’d written the complete story of that “one off” Glorantha ad from the Best of the Dragon – volume I (1980). However a Chaosium colleague, t …
- Out of the Suitcase #42: An unexpected magazine ad
- I enjoy discovering unknown gems in unexpected places. The latest discovery came via a facebook collector’s forum colleague, and it qualifies as a “never thought to look there” event. Of all places, …
- Out of the Suitcase #41: If 12 year old me would have known…
- I used to go to a fair number of model railroad shows with my father back in the mid to late ’70s, including the Ann Arbor show in 1978. Alas, I had no clue about the other “show” that would be in An …
- Out of the Suitcase #40: What Never Was… (mostly)
- One of the down sides of most of collecting RPG magazines is that most of the ones from the 70s through the 90s were published before PDFs and other electronic formats were commonly in use. Thus, you …
- Out of the Suitcase #39: Errata: a lesson on how change can be difficult…
- All RPG publishers struggle with getting the rules for the first editions of their games right. No matter how much you playtest and refine the rules, perfection remains elusive. RPG players love to f …
- Out of the Suitcase #38: ‘What happened to RuneQuest’ – An unexpected find in the Chaosium vaults
- An unexpected find… As shared here earlier, Jeremiah Evans and I went through the Chaosium vaults and archives this weekend preparing items for the Chaosium Con 2023 auction. We made …
- Out of the Suitcase #37: A recent addition to my collection… 29 years after unknowingly insulting the President of Avalon Hill
- While attending RQ Con 1 in Baltimore way back in January of 1994, I gladly took a small bit of time to wander through the “dealer area.” While there, I scanned through everything on offer at the Ava …
- Out of the Suitcase #35: From the Archives – Sage Advice from Greg Stafford
- In the late 1970s Greg Stafford ran an ongoing RuneQuest RPG campaign, which generally became known as the “Chaosium house campaign.” Many of the earliest Chaosium employees and fans played in i …
- Out of the Suitcase #34: (Re)Forging friendships by chance…
- One of the best parts about going to various tradeshows and conventions includes making new friends and catching up with old ones. Most shows I manage to take a few moments to chat with Don Reents of …
- Out of the Suitcase #33: Collecting and dealing with personal demons…
- One of the joys and curses of being a completist collector means you seek out every printing, edition, and variant of each item. The most recent occurrence of this for me relates to the Citadel …
- Out of the Suitcase #32: A quirky game company, indeed; plus Rick talks to the God Learners
- I was trying to clean up and file away a bunch of papers on my desk last recently when I came upon an Avalon Hill catalog from September of 1983. I wondered if it would mention anything about RuneQue …
- Out of the Suitcase #31: Cults of Prax, One for the Ages…
- I can’t imagine playing RuneQuest in Glorantha without Cults of Prax. Fortunately, when our GM Tim Webster introduced us to the game he already owned it. Cults of Prax and the RuneQues …
- Out of the Suitcase #30: A few jokes at Glorantha’s expense
- The back side of the Jan/Feb 1981 Chaosium order form included a few Gloranthan themed jokes. I don’t think these were ever published elsewhere. Fortunately, they are as corny now as they were 40 yea …
- Out of the Suitcase #29: Kids, that’s how layout was done back in those days…
- A relic from The Chaosium archives… I came across the original layout board for page 134 of 1990’s Cthulhu Casebook. This is the Star Elder Sign – which first appeared as the ‘Arcane Symbol’ in Cal …
- Out of the Suitcase #28: How ‘Beyond the Pass’ became Griffin Mountain
- I played through Griffin Mountain in the summer of 1981 shortly after it was published. It’s my favorite RuneQuest campaign. Here’s the story about how Griffin Mountain came to be …
- Out of the Suitcase #25: As Authentic as Thaumaturgy can get…
- Before The Grand Grimoire there was… Authentic ThaumaturgyIn the late 1970s Chaosium founder Greg Stafford sometimes helped other individuals get their projects published. The eclectic mi …
- Out of the Suitcase #24: Wherein the back cover gets finished…
- Last night after dinner I took another pass over the text for the back cover of my collector’s and reference guide to all things RuneQuest and Glorantha. This is the third edition of The Me …
- Out of the Suitcase #23: Facing the facts of a chaotic past…
- Just the other day we had a fan ask about the Chaosium “Dragon” logo and why it didn’t always have the dragon facing to the left on our products. While a short answer was given, there’s a bit more to …
- Out of the Suitcase #22: Thieves’ World – A Classic Case of being ‘The Chaosium’, not ‘The Orderium’…
- While the 40th Anniversary of Call of Cthulhu is almost upon us, it debuted in November of 1981 and had little time to become widely-known before the end of the year. But Chaosium produced a bum …
- Out of the Suitcase #21: The first Manual of Monsters
- Steve Perrin’s unexpected passing has gotten me to thinking about his far-reaching legacy within the world of role-playing games. As I ponder his role in those early days I find myself pulling v …
- Out of Suitcase #20: The art of obscure finds…
- I recently got asked “what are some of the rare or obscure items in your collection?” I have a number of unique items, and it’s hard to pick just one. Last night I was writing about one of them for m
- Out of the Suitcase #19: Another Mystery Solved… CHA2341
- Every so often we get a wonderful completist collector of Chaosium games ask us about some of our product numbers that never got used. One of the earliest ones we skipped was CHA2341 in the Call of C …
- Out of the Suitcase #18: What Perilous Encounters await our heroes…
- A last minute request pleasantly shifted some of my work priorities recently. Many of our current projects mine our vast library of prior Chaosium publications for inspiration and depth of material. …
- Out of the Suitcase #17: the first Appendix N
- Recently the Grognardia blog wrote about the strange serendipity between the bibliography in RuneQuest, which came out in 1978, and the bibliography in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters …
- Out of the Suitcase #16: So what’s the scoop on Call of Cthulhu Classics?
- With the recent launch of our Kickstarter a lot of people have been asking what’s scoop on Call of Cthulhu Classics? Since I did a lot of the work, I am happy to explain…We scanned in nea …
- Out of the Suitcase #15: The Curse of the Cthulhu Completists…
- As I was preparing for our 40th Anniversary reprinting of the Call of Cthulhu Classic boxed set I started to notice something. Between 1981 and 1989 Chaosium printed the Call of Cthul …
- Out of the Suitcase #14: Helping Stamp Out the Mythos
- I happened to come across both of these stamps as I was sifting and sorting through things the other day. I had forgotten that Chaosium had licensed these in 1996. Sadly, Benway Tanner Enterprises of …
- Out of the Suitcase #13: Reaching Moon Megacorp – “one of the best decisions I ever made
- This entry is taken from his foreword for the recently-released Life of Moonson Book Two: The Freeform, available in the Jonstown Compendium on DriveThruRPG.One of the best decisions I ever made …
- Out of the Suitcase #12: The Chaosium – releases from 1975 and 1976
- Note: initially, I thought of doing a series of posts showing the products released by the company each year. But 1975 and 1976 were both low volume years for The Chaosium, so I’ve combined them her …
- Out of the Suitcase #11: 1981 a Golden Age for Chaosium? Plus, a solution to Rick’s real-life Call of Cthulhu mystery
- I pose the question: was 1981 the Golden Age of Chaosium? While Chaosium has had a number of epic years full of ground-breaking RPG releases, I submit for debate that 1981 was one of the best, if …
- Out of the Suitcase #10: can some Investigators help solve this mystery with Library Use…
- Forty years ago, on Halloween 1981, The Chaosium debuted our Call of Cthulhu RPG on an unsuspecting world. Canadian artist Gene Day, well-known for his work for Marvel Comics, painted the&nb …
- Out of the Suitcase #9: More about the MiG
- As I mentioned in an earlier ‘Out of the Suitcase’ post, I’ve recently been in the process of updating a book that went out of print over 20 years ago. Back in 1999 the Reaching Moon Megacorp pub …
- Out of the Suitcase #8: the 20th Anniversary Edition Call of Cthulhu Rulebook
- The Call of Cthulhu RPG turned 20 in 2001. In August that year Chaosium produced a special edition “leatherette” binding of the 5th edition rulebook (5.6 if you want to be precise). The …
- Out of the Suitcase #7: for completists, collectors, catalogers, and the curious…
- For completists, collectors, catalogers, and the curious, there are various online resources that seek to catalogue Chaosium’s Call of Cth …
- Out of the Suitcase #6: Maps and Legends
- I was sorting through some things when I came across these original maps from 1979. Drawn by William Church, they debuted in the 2nd edition RuneQuest Rulebook. For years they were tacked up on Greg’s …
- Out of the Suitcase #5: The Meints Index to Glorantha, aka the MiG
- In 1999 the Reaching Moon Megacorp published the second edition of my book The Meints Index to Glor …
- Out of the Suitcase #4: cataloging a bit of Chaosium history
- Last Saturday, during an informal discussion about Chaosium history on Discord, I briefly mentioned the old Chaosium catalogs and what wonderful information they contain. The catalogs provid …
- Out of the Suitcase #3: Sometimes things are less dicey than they seem…
- Believe it or not, the scholarly pursuit of understanding and cataloging the specific color of the dice included in each Chaosium boxed set has been seriously undertaken by more than one gaming history …
- Out of the Suitcase #2: Ducks, Ducks, and more Ducks
- Over on the RuneQuest Facebook group there’s been a wonderful, fragmented discussion of the origins …
- Out of the Suitcase #1: Jack O’Bears and Me
- ‘Out of the Suitcase’ is a new regular series of posts from Chaosium President Rick Meints. An avid RPG collector, his love of all of Chaosium’s publications, plus anything Gloranthan or RuneQuest …
Related Pages
1979, 1999, Ducks, Griffin Mountain (classic), Jack O'Bear, MIG, Reaching Moon MegaCorp, Rick Meints, RQ2, William Church (artist)
Page Last updated: 2026-08-24 10:56:13