Magic World: Hail and Farewell

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Lofgeornost

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As far as I can tell, Magic World and its supplements have disappeared entirely from the Chaosium website in both print and electronic versions. The PDF is still available at Drivethru, but I assume that will change eventually.

I understand that Chaosium had dropped development of the title a long time since and is focusing on Runequest and Call of Cthulhu, but I am surprised that they have stopped selling the electronic version themselves, since I'd think it would entail almost 0 cost in overhead and at least some income in sales.
 
The Basic Roleplaying book will give you much of the system, but you have to know which options to pick, and I don't currently see a way to get the magic system including summoning without MW. (It's basically the same system as Chaosium's Elric! and Stormbringer 5e.)

I see some hardcopies on eBay for not too much--cheaper than the Elric/SB books.

This move might be understandable if Chaosium would redo Advanced Sorcery as a BGB supplement, or issue a new edition of The Magic Book with all the magic systems.

The setting itself is evocative but thin. What's there isn't enough for a standalone supplement. I'm not sure how much work it would take to develop it properly; I think it would be better as a guide to creating a certain type of fantasy feel, with maybe a few locales and adventures, than as a fixed set of canon.
 
Probably nuChaosium stamping out perceived competition to their precious RQ:G because of course you want Glorantha. You don’t need these other fantasy thingies. Glorantha is superior to all of them. They know better because they touched Greg’s beard once.
 
News to me... I'm glad I bought extras a while back... but I've given up on Chaosium. I'll get my BRP stuff from other sources... TDM and the Pagans.
I'm drawing a complete blank, who might the "the Pagans" be?
 
I'm guessing Chaosium will probably cut their losses and pulp their remaining stock of Magic World and Advanced Sorcery. More is the pity, but I can't say I'm surprised; the powers that be have never hidden their disinterest in the game. Weird that they don't offer the PDF at least . . .
 
It doesn't surprise me. I thought that they were going to totally jettison Magic World years ago, after dropping support for it in 2016.

There was some discussion about Magic World over on BRP Central last month. A number of nu-Chaosium guys chimed in about its failure:
Chaosium Jeff said:
Why did Magic World fail? Personally I think it was a perfect storm of things. It took the (very good) Stormbringer rules and dropped them into a bland and unmemorable generic fantasy setting that had nothing to tie it together (unlike Stormbringer). It had an utterly forgettable name. And its production values were low. Greg and I had zero interest in it, none of the rest of the team had any connection to it. And its sales were minimal. Given the bandwidth that any product line takes up, why would we devote resources to a game that we didn’t have any interest in and didn’t generate enough revenue for us to do it anyways?
Maybe the digital sales were so poor it wasn't worth it to keep it on their site?
 
It doesn't surprise me. I thought that they were going to totally jettison Magic World years ago, after dropping support for it in 2016.

There was some discussion about Magic World over on BRP Central last month. A number of nu-Chaosium guys chimed in about its failure:

Maybe the digital sales were so poor it wasn't worth it to keep it on their site?
I guess, but they still sell a bunch of BRP monographs in PDF on the web store and I can't imagine those are selling like hotcakes?
 
I used to be a regular at the BRP Site until it became an official Chaosium forum, and the vibe over there got weird. There seemed to be some kind of specific hostility directed at Magic World by the new Chaosium clique. I'm only surprised they took this long to banish it. I never had any special love of the setting, but as Stormbringer was one of my first gaming loves, I liked it for preserving the mechanics in some form.
 
I never had any special love of the setting, but as Stormbringer was one of my first gaming loves, I liked it for preserving the mechanics in some form.
The setting was just sketch of an idea, though I think it has potential. I'd always assumed we were meant to turn the rules toward whatever setting we liked, or wanted to make up.
Maybe Nu-Chaosium was griefing it because they felt 'real' fans should be focusing on Glorantha.
 
I guess, but they still sell a bunch of BRP monographs in PDF on the web store and I can't imagine those are selling like hotcakes?
They're a mixed bag, some are quite good... but none of them have the sort of graphic bling that draws a crowd these days.
 
You guys see that Chris Tooley is having to remove The Big Damn Book of Monsters from BRP Central? He said it was copyright reasons.
Well . . . as much as I appreciate what he put out for the community, I was always sort of surprised that he didn't get asked to cull out the infringing artwork sooner. Yes, he wasn't selling the books, but strictly speaking they were never in compliance with copyright law -- we're talking hundreds of copyrighted images, not a handful.
 
I don’t think we should be too hard on Chaosium as the new management really did save the business and they are putting out some good things. I will continue to buy CoC stuff from them. It’s just sad that the favorite game for many of us might die now. But that’s okay as new things from different companies will come out. I can play MW for a long, long time but when the book finally comes apart I can try out OpenQuest 3 or Jackals.
 
Well . . . as much as I appreciate what he put out for the community, I was always sort of surprised that he didn't get asked to cull out the infringing artwork sooner. Yes, he wasn't selling the books, but strictly speaking they were never in compliance with copyright law -- we're talking hundreds of copyrighted images, not a handful.
Yup, I see it the same.
 
I don’t think we should be too hard on Chaosium as the new management really did save the business and they are putting out some good things. I will continue to buy CoC stuff from them. It’s just sad that the favorite game for many of us might die now. But that’s okay as new things from different companies will come out. I can play ME for a long, long time but when the book finally comes apart I can try out OpenQuest 3 or Jackals.
The binding on my PDFs should hold up for awhile longer :grin:
 
I don’t think we should be too hard on Chaosium as the new management really did save the business and they are putting out some good things.
I can only have so much enthusiasm when the custard stand near my house is 'saved' and reopened as a donut shop. Good donuts, maybe, but where's my custard?
It’s just sad that the favorite game for many of us might die now.
It's been 'dead' for years now, as far as Nu-Chaosium is concerned. Lots of games I like are 'dead'... maybe I'm a necrophiliac.
 
Magic World died the day Ben Monroe got his walking papers, today is when they finally flushed the goldfish down the toilet.

Whatever, I'm still going to do things with it because I like it and there's people still willing to put up with my GMing (God help you all).
 
I don't get the logic of this. In this day and age you CAN NOT get rid of a product that can have a PDF form. There is a Trove of places where you can find any rpg you wish for free. I mean you pay because you want to be legal, you believe it's right, you want to support a creator, you want to support a company or whatever. Ceasing to sell makes very little sense to me.
 
I don't get the logic of this. In this day and age you CAN NOT get rid of a product that can have a PDF form. There is a Trove of places where you can find any rpg you wish for free. I mean you pay because you want to be legal, you believe it's right, you want to support a creator, you want to support a company or whatever. Ceasing to sell makes very little sense to me.
I don't think logic enters into it. When I was at BRP Central, there seemed to some level of spite aimed at the game. I don't know if this was some kind of personal conflict behind the sense, but it all seemed more emotional than rational.
 
I don't think logic enters into it. When I was at BRP Central, there seemed to some level of spite aimed at the game. I don't know if this was some kind of personal conflict behind the sense, but it all seemed more emotional than rational.
The thing is iny mind if I want to kill a project I give it a $14.99 pdf. That's not so high people are likely to justify stealing it. It's not so low it's an impulse buy. It's a legal option so folks who "would by if i legally could" might not steal it. That's what I'd do if I hated a product and wanted to see its reach limited. I mean the worst case there is you actually make some money.
 
The thing is iny mind if I want to kill a project I give it a $14.99 pdf. That's not so high people are likely to justify stealing it. It's not so low it's an impulse buy. It's a legal option so folks who "would by if i legally could" might not steal it. That's what I'd do if I hated a product and wanted to see its reach limited. I mean the worst case there is you actually make some money.

Someone may have pointed this out already but It’s still available on DTRPG for around $25. I’m not sure if they’re going to pull it but I can’t see why they would kill it on their site and leave it up there.
 
I used to be a regular at the BRP Site until it became an official Chaosium forum, and the vibe over there got weird. There seemed to be some kind of specific hostility directed at Magic World by the new Chaosium clique. I'm only surprised they took this long to banish it. I never had any special love of the setting, but as Stormbringer was one of my first gaming loves, I liked it for preserving the mechanics in some form.
That pretty much sums up my experience as well.
I did use to be a frequent flyer at BRP Central, but the overall vibe became less free-form once the focus was almost solely on CoC 7E and RQG.

I do love both of those games, but BRP Central was previously much more loose and encouraging of all BRP games.

This partially led to me loitering here actually
 
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As far as I can tell, Magic World and its supplements have disappeared entirely from the Chaosium website in both print and electronic versions.

Thanks for posting this. Ive been searching the website for Magic World and it was driving me crazy as I ordered some hardcopies a while back and I wanted to send the link to someone else... I just assumed it was me.
 
Cull the conspiracy theories. There are solid business reasons for most actions at Chaosium these days. MW sold terribly bad, and while a trickle of money from the pdf sales might be nice, you also get constant questions about the line, someone has a problem downloading a file and so on. Yadda yadda.That's a cost.

Is there a distinct focus in the love and warm feelings on BRP central about some products? You bet. Go look at any forum and you will see it. Gloranthaphiles are just like other fandom, they love their thing. Nothing new, and that's the focus of RQ as of now.

Chaosium focus on where the money is, and that is RQ and CoC, simple as that. We might not like it, but that's a fact. These guys a gamers a heart, but they are businessmen as well, and better ones than most rpg publishers.
 
Someone may have pointed this out already but It’s still available on DTRPG for around $25. I’m not sure if they’re going to pull it but I can’t see why they would kill it on their site and leave it up there.

I'd wondered about that myself; I'd assumed that it was simply a question of bureaucratic slowness, either on their part or Drivethru's. But what A AndreasDavour says makes a lot of sense:

Cull the conspiracy theories. There are solid business reasons for most actions at Chaosium these days. MW sold terribly bad, and while a trickle of money from the pdf sales might be nice, you also get constant questions about the line, someone has a problem downloading a file and so on. Yadda yadda.That's a cost.

I suppose leaving it up at Drivethru could be the best of both worlds, from Chaosium's perspective; they might still make s little money on the game--though $25 is pretty steep--and they've passed on any costs having to do with download problems, etc. to another host.
 
Cull the conspiracy theories. There are solid business reasons for most actions at Chaosium these days. MW sold terribly bad, and while a trickle of money from the pdf sales might be nice, you also get constant questions about the line, someone has a problem downloading a file and so on. Yadda yadda.That's a cost.

Is there a distinct focus in the love and warm feelings on BRP central about some products? You bet. Go look at any forum and you will see it. Gloranthaphiles are just like other fandom, they love their thing. Nothing new, and that's the focus of RQ as of now.

Chaosium focus on where the money is, and that is RQ and CoC, simple as that. We might not like it, but that's a fact. These guys a gamers a heart, but they are businessmen as well, and better ones than most rpg publishers.

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I suppose leaving it up at Drivethru could be the best of both worlds, from Chaosium's perspective; they might still make s little money on the game--though $25 is pretty steep--and they've passed on any costs having to do with download problems, etc. to another host.

You're right, that does make a lot of sense.
 
Cull the conspiracy theories. There are solid business reasons for most actions at Chaosium these days. MW sold terribly bad, and while a trickle of money from the pdf sales might be nice, you also get constant questions about the line, someone has a problem downloading a file and so on. Yadda yadda.That's a cost.

Is there a distinct focus in the love and warm feelings on BRP central about some products? You bet. Go look at any forum and you will see it. Gloranthaphiles are just like other fandom, they love their thing. Nothing new, and that's the focus of RQ as of now.

Chaosium focus on where the money is, and that is RQ and CoC, simple as that. We might not like it, but that's a fact. These guys a gamers a heart, but they are businessmen as well, and better ones than most rpg publishers.
The counter to that argument is it causes ill will when you cut a product. WotC has seen the benefits of continuing minimal support for multiple dead lines of product. HERO seems to be on that train as well.
 
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