Thieves and Stars

Submitted by Claudia on Thu, 02/12/2010 – 20:03 

It took me a while to write something – not because of the lack of topics but due to a lot of work and sicknesses of little Finn which has kept us very busy in the last weeks. Still a lot of work but Finn is fine again and I now have some time to write again.

I’m pretty sure – everybody who reads Breakfast and Games bought already Sartar Companion. If somebody had forgotten to order it so far – do it quick! Be sure – we directly convert the income into diapers 🙂

However – what is the news on Moon Design? Jeff is cursing a lot. He is happy about the sales but curses about stupid people putting the pdf on torrent sites for free download. He calls this “stealing the money out of my pocket,” and I agree. I’m a big fan of Open Source projects (I really love the idea and I love the cool applications people develop – even if they usually function only to 90%) – but here people decide to give out information for free (or under certain agreements). It is something else if selling pdf’s is part of your business and people are stealing them. It’s like stealing diapers off little Finn.

A month ago I had lunch with an ex-colleague of mine. He told me that his son 12-year-old-son started to play this weird miniature games and shows some interest in this funky role playing stuff. I said that’s cool and so much better than watching TV or playing Online-Games in my opinion. Then he said that all this books are so expensive (I know they have not much money) and somehow the topic came to “is there a possibility to download them in the internet or he could photocopy them…” I was torn because downloading or photocopying destroys the already very hard role-playing-game-business. On the other side I was so happy to hear about fresh young blood in the hobby which should be supported! I threw in the possibility to buy stuff second hand. I don’t know if this is he right way in between…

But I can tell you: Jeff is very frustrated about pdf-thieves! And I totally can understand that because it took a lot of time and effort to put Sartar Companion together! But this is not really news.

Jeff is just finishing is writing part on Pavis. Don’t be to ecstatic – now comes the art and then layout. Rick and Jeff plan to publish it in summer 2011. It will be published in two books – one about Pavis and one about the Big Rubble – both at the same time.

And they have many more plans for next year. One is the Guide to Glorantha. The put star maps of the world into this and I saw some of the pictures they already work on. It is soooo cool stuff! I love the pictures which are oriented on the Sky Disk of Nebra – you know the disc they found some years ago which is from the Bronze Age and shows the star constellations? Maybe you don’t but in Germany it’s well known. We visited the place a few years ago and Jeff collected a lot of material and handed this over to one of his artists. He used it as a model for the Glorantha-sky-version – here is a little appetizer by the very talented Eric Vanel. 

Maybe you can interpret the stars to find out when the Guide is planned to be published. No? In the moment the plans are fall of 2011.

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