On Supporting Chaosium

If you follow gaming industry news then you already know the big story of the past month was the recent shake up at Chaosium that resulted in the entire upper management being replaced by the old guard of Greg Stafford and Sandy Peterson.

It appears that the old management handled the Kickstarters for Horror on the Orient Express and Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition poorly and there are some serious cash flow problems.  Despite saying COC7 was at the printers it wasn't and there were also issues in getting HotOE to European backers.  In short it was a mess and being run into the ground and the Stafford being the founder and majority shareholder in the company stepped in and took over day-to-day management.

One of things Greg is doing is cleaning out the warehouse of their non-core products at clearance prices in order to raise cash and get back to what they do best, namely Cthulhu mythos related games and fiction.  One of the really good deals was a bundle of five books for the Elric of Melniboné role-playing game on sale for $25 instead of $100.  I had seriously thought about buying this when the sale was announced and even was most of the way placing an order online when I had an attack of conscience and decided I didn't really need five Elric RPG books, even at that price, and cancelled the order,  As I've mentioned before, when it comes to wasting money on things I don't need I run against the usual geek stereotype.

Then this morning I was listening to the latest Yog-Sothoth.com Breakfast Club podcast and they were discussing what was going on at Chaosium and I came to the realization that in this case it wasn't wasting money on things I did not need but rather investing money in the continued operation of a gaming company I have known and loved since I first got into the hobby way back in 1977 with the original edition of Runequest.  I don't want to see Chaosium go out of business and I certainly don't want to see Call of Cthulhu disappear from gaming store shelves.  So buying their stuff right now is just doing my part to make sure they have the cash flow to keep operating and meet their Kickstarter commitments.

So I resolved to go back and buy the bundle.  Of course, the bundle itself is no longer for sale.  It looks like they ran out of one of the constituent books.  So I settled for getting just the core Dragon Lords of Melniboné book which was also on sale at a huge discount though the one book including shipping and handling now costs about half of what getting the whole bundle would have had I been on the ball.  A classic example of the early bird gets the worm.

So the upshot of all this is that if you like Chaosium and their products and want them to continue to succeed think about wandering over to their website and buying something that you may or may not actually need.  Every dollar you spend is an investment in helping Stafford and Peterson get the company back on its feet.