The Secret of the Moon Files
Jul. 18th, 2024 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aIn April 2020 I started writing new Designers & Dragons articles for a project I called "The Lost Histories". Since the 2014 publication of Evil Hat's 4-volume Designers & Dragons, I'd collected notes for about half-a-dozen additional histories, but I just hadn't been able to find the time to write them—a problem that only accelerated in the latter half of the '10s, after Kimberly and I decided to move to Hawaii in 2020.
But in April 2020, our move was done, we'd mostly managed to furnish our Hawaiian house, and most importantly I was moving over to freelance work. About half of my time was allocated to technical writing for a variety of clients (Blockchain Commons, Bitmark, Rebooting the Web of Trust, Transparent Financial), to bring in the money, while the other half of my time went to my own freelance RPG writing, as part of a new company that I created, Designers & Dragons LLC.
I immediately had two priorities for my Designers & Dragons LLC work: putting together new company histories, starting with the ones that I already had notes for, and collecting the D&D product histories I'd written for DTRPG into publishable volumes.
It's been four years. In the interim I wrote a full history of the Traveller RPG, which has already been published as _This is Free Trader Beowulf_ (print book pending!). I also finalized the first four books of D&D product histories, which Evil Hat will be publishing as _Designers & Dragons Origins_ (and though they're still a ways from publication, I just sent back my revisions of the first set of editing for the first book on Monday).
As for the Designers & Dragons company history, there's been considerable work there too, though we're likely still years from publications.
At this point I've settled on three-and-a-half books worth of "new" content: two volumes of Lost Histories covering new companies for the 70s-00s and a book of 10s Histories. The Lost Histories books are now at 109k and 114k words and the 10s is at 117k words. My plan had been to close them out this summer, but that's now pushed into next year with the decision to expand the 10s from the 120k+ words typical for the series up to 180k or so (so that there are as many 10s histories as the original histories supplemented by the new Lost Histories for each of the other decades).
And, that won't even be the end, because we're also looking at updating the original 500k+ words of histories that we published in 2014, many of which are about companies that have continued publishing in the last decade. Which means it's probably a few years before the whole project is done, even though my original goal of producing new histories is coming to a close.
Which brings me to The Moon Files that The Kraken just announced. These are excerpts from Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories, covering two new "company" histories that I wrote in 2020 or 2021, one for Reaching Moon Megacorp, the other (not announced yet) for Moon Design Publications. They tell the story of RuneQuest and the world of Glorantha in the 90s, 00s, and 10s, between its major publication by Avalon Hill and its return to Chaosium. How did the game and the world survive? Spoiler! It was because of one of the most amazing fandoms in existence, fans that are now officially in charge of the game at Chaosium itself.
My publisher Evil Hat has been super-cool in letting a few previews like this out. (There are also a few company updates over in BAYT AL AZIF for Cthulhu-related histories, which are previews of Designers & Dragons 3e, the update project I mentioned.) It's especially nice since we are a few years out from full publication.
So if you are interested in my history writing, in Glorantha, in RuneQuest, or if you want to support the Kraken convention in Germany, keep an update on Fabian Küchler's updates, as this book is going to print next week.
But in April 2020, our move was done, we'd mostly managed to furnish our Hawaiian house, and most importantly I was moving over to freelance work. About half of my time was allocated to technical writing for a variety of clients (Blockchain Commons, Bitmark, Rebooting the Web of Trust, Transparent Financial), to bring in the money, while the other half of my time went to my own freelance RPG writing, as part of a new company that I created, Designers & Dragons LLC.
I immediately had two priorities for my Designers & Dragons LLC work: putting together new company histories, starting with the ones that I already had notes for, and collecting the D&D product histories I'd written for DTRPG into publishable volumes.
It's been four years. In the interim I wrote a full history of the Traveller RPG, which has already been published as _This is Free Trader Beowulf_ (print book pending!). I also finalized the first four books of D&D product histories, which Evil Hat will be publishing as _Designers & Dragons Origins_ (and though they're still a ways from publication, I just sent back my revisions of the first set of editing for the first book on Monday).
As for the Designers & Dragons company history, there's been considerable work there too, though we're likely still years from publications.
At this point I've settled on three-and-a-half books worth of "new" content: two volumes of Lost Histories covering new companies for the 70s-00s and a book of 10s Histories. The Lost Histories books are now at 109k and 114k words and the 10s is at 117k words. My plan had been to close them out this summer, but that's now pushed into next year with the decision to expand the 10s from the 120k+ words typical for the series up to 180k or so (so that there are as many 10s histories as the original histories supplemented by the new Lost Histories for each of the other decades).
And, that won't even be the end, because we're also looking at updating the original 500k+ words of histories that we published in 2014, many of which are about companies that have continued publishing in the last decade. Which means it's probably a few years before the whole project is done, even though my original goal of producing new histories is coming to a close.
Which brings me to The Moon Files that The Kraken just announced. These are excerpts from Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories, covering two new "company" histories that I wrote in 2020 or 2021, one for Reaching Moon Megacorp, the other (not announced yet) for Moon Design Publications. They tell the story of RuneQuest and the world of Glorantha in the 90s, 00s, and 10s, between its major publication by Avalon Hill and its return to Chaosium. How did the game and the world survive? Spoiler! It was because of one of the most amazing fandoms in existence, fans that are now officially in charge of the game at Chaosium itself.
My publisher Evil Hat has been super-cool in letting a few previews like this out. (There are also a few company updates over in BAYT AL AZIF for Cthulhu-related histories, which are previews of Designers & Dragons 3e, the update project I mentioned.) It's especially nice since we are a few years out from full publication.
So if you are interested in my history writing, in Glorantha, in RuneQuest, or if you want to support the Kraken convention in Germany, keep an update on Fabian Küchler's updates, as this book is going to print next week.