Issaries Inc. (1999-2013)

Issaries, Inc. was a game publisher incorporated in in 1999 by Greg Stafford. It partnered with Moon Design Publications to develop the flagship roleplaying game HeroQuest which was first released in 2000 as Hero Wars. In 2003, it acquired the HeroQuest trademarks from Hasbro, which led to the licensing of a new edition of RuneQuest. The company’s last statement was in 2013 and is now listed as Dissolved.

Greg Stafford founded Issaries to hold the trademarks and copyrights for Glorantha obtaining them from Chaosium. To deal with funding difficulties, in August 1997 Chaosium issued a press release to offer shares of Issaries for $100 each, planning to start the company after raising $50,000 so that a new Glorantha-based RPG could be produced. Stafford approached Robin Laws to create a new game, which became known as Hero Wars, and was published by Issaries in 2000. The original run of Hero Wars sold out in 2003, so Stafford published the second edition of his game based on Glorantha as HeroQuest. Stafford moved to Mexico in 2004, at which point Issaries stopped publishing RPGs, and when he came back to the US in 2005 he used Issaries to license the Glorantha rights to other companies such as Mongoose Publishing and Moon Design Publications.

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