Chaosium President Rick Meints shares stories from a life-time as a collector of all things Chaosium
nb THESE SHELVES ARE JUST A PART OF RICK'S CHAOSIUM ARCHIVES
For completists, collectors, catalogers, and the curious, there are various online resources that seek to catalogue Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu related products, going back 40 years to 1981. I saw a recent request for a "checklist" type of list, so I grabbed this from our historic Master Product List. This list is pretty comprehensive, but isn't absolutely exhaustive in terms of special editions, printings and such due to incomplete past records, general laziness, and/or lack of time. After all, we are The Chaosium and not The Orderium.
Please be aware that this list does feature a few products that had a product number assigned, but got cancelled while in development, usually during the writing stage. Future Call of Cthulhu releases – of which we have many in various stages of planning, development and production – aren't included here.
A note for the real completists: if you buy the regular Malleus Monstrorum slipcase set and the special edition Leatherette Malleus Monstrorum slipcase set you have everything you need to check them all off. We don't sell the Volume 1 and Volume 2 books separately. We gave these individual SKUs mainly in case we need to send someone a replacement due to damage. Likewise for the two volume Malleus Monstrorum and Malleus Monstrorum Leatherette slipcase sets.
And before anyone asks, we do not have any of the cancelled projects in manuscript form or similar in our archives.
And regarding a similar master list for RuneQuest and Glorantha...
In 1999 the Reaching Moon Megacorp published the second edition of my book The Meints Index to Glorantha (MiG for short). The MiG included cover pictures and text descriptions for everything published for RuneQuest and/or Glorantha from 1975 to 1999.
I regret not adding to it every few months or years as new things came out, but I have slowly kept chipping away at adding to it over the last several years. But creating a new edition of my Index to Glorantha (MiG) means playing catch-up on the last 20 years or so of publications for RuneQuest & Glorantha. A plethora of wonderful publications have come out in the last two decades, plus I occasionally find something I missed from back in the day.
For example, I recently added all 4 issues of the UK RQ fanzine RuneRiter (1986-1987):
The MiG II went to the printers in early 1999, before I attended the Tentacles convention in Bacharach that spring. Thus, only the first Ye Booke of Tentacles (YBoT) made it into the book. Six of these convention fundraising books were published from 1999-2006. They are loaded with a variety of Chaosium game related articles, including RuneQuest, HeroQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon and Stormbringer. The contributors list is a veritable who's who of notable Chaosium-related personalities too lengthy to list here. It will be great to have the whole series of YBoT in the new edition.
Other things I have added are numerous fan publications by the Unspoken Word, the German-based Chaos Society, and more articles found in APA zines like the Wild Hunt and Alarums & Excursions. It's wonderful to revisit books that have been on my shelves for a while, especially the ones written by friends and colleagues, some of whom are sadly no longer with us.
Then there's Mongoose, who published over 75 RQ books between 2006 and 2011. Basically a book a month, for half a decade. This picture isn't even all of them as I struggled to keep up at the time. Being a completist worked against me since they did many of their titles in hardcover AND softcover...
The MiG II was 124 pages. The MiG 3, which I am currently working on, is going to have a distinctly higher page count... As for getting it published, I'm thinking of starting with it in PDF form, and treating it as a living document for a while as I keep adding more entries. That way people can see what is in there, possibly point out what I have missed or suggest corrections to what I have written. It also means they can get an updated PDF as substantial new information is added. Once it has spanned most of what is out of print, we can then get it printed as a book.
For completists, collectors, catalogers, and the curious, there are various online resources that seek to catalogue Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu related products, going back 40 years to 1981. I saw a recent request for a "checklist" type of list, so I grabbed this from our historic Master Product List. This list is pretty comprehensive, but isn't absolutely exhaustive in terms of special editions, printings and such due to incomplete past records, general laziness, and/or lack of time. After all, we are The Chaosium and not The Orderium.
Please be aware that this list does feature a few products that had a product number assigned, but got cancelled while in development, usually during the writing stage. Future Call of Cthulhu releases – of which we have many in various stages of planning, development and production – aren't included here.
A note for the real completists: if you buy the regular Malleus Monstrorum slipcase set and the special edition Leatherette Malleus Monstrorum slipcase set you have everything you need to check them all off. We don't sell the Volume 1 and Volume 2 books separately. We gave these individual SKUs mainly in case we need to send someone a replacement due to damage. Likewise for the two volume Malleus Monstrorum and Malleus Monstrorum Leatherette slipcase sets.
And before anyone asks, we do not have any of the cancelled projects in manuscript form or similar in our archives.
And regarding a similar master list for RuneQuest and Glorantha...
In 1999 the Reaching Moon Megacorp published the second edition of my book The Meints Index to Glorantha (MiG for short). The MiG included cover pictures and text descriptions for everything published for RuneQuest and/or Glorantha from 1975 to 1999.
For example, I recently added all 4 issues of the UK RQ fanzine RuneRiter (1986-1987):
Then there's Mongoose, who published over 75 RQ books between 2006 and 2011. Basically a book a month, for half a decade. This picture isn't even all of them as I struggled to keep up at the time. Being a completist worked against me since they did many of their titles in hardcover AND softcover...
