Welcome to another issue of Starry Wisdom, our Chaosium Quarterly. Each season it is our pleasure to bring you the latest news and views from Chaosium Inc. It's our goal to keep all of our readers informed about our little California game company while providing support materials for our popular games. And of course no issue would be complete without some sort of Freaky Surprise.This issue is extra special. It completes our first trinity. So we've decided to celebrate by also including a free game: Stomp! Those of you who are among our more experienced allies will certainly recall that Chaosium was originally a wargaming company. Back when the earth was young and roleplaying was just a glint in Grandpa Gygax's eye, a tiny little company called Chaosium released the first of its many wargames: White Bear Red Moon. Stomp! came much later, and perhaps represented Chaosium at its best. It was innovative, irreverent, was full of little cheeky elves up against the big slow moving establishment while raiding its vegetable garden. One could say that not much has changed in this regard. Chaosium is still a small company hanging on by its bootstraps, poking fun at giants, and winning just often enough to keep coming back to the garden. We've had a lot of vegetable garden coups in the past. Coups such as Call of Cthulhu being voted into the Origins Awards Hall of Fame. Our game is only the second RPG to ever achieve this honor (The first one was recently purchased by a bigger giant Š.) Another recent coup is our Mythos CCG. Mythos has done pretty well for us despite being a relatively small and easy to collect CCG. This success has allowed us to release an unprecedented amount of support materials for all of our RPG's and allowed us to publish more fiction than ever. I think those are fine coups for such tiny elves.
What will our next vegetable garden coup be? Maybe it will be the re-ascendance of Glorantha in 1998. It could be our continued success in the fiction market. Maybe it will be a Cthulhu-themed X-files episode (oh, man, that would rock, but isn't likely unless someone reading this writes for Fox!). Maybe it will be a huge Cthulhu for President campaign in the year 2000. Perhaps it will be just surviving to the year 2000. Our industry is facing big changes again. Just look around. Where have all the old companies gone? How many of them are still owned by the people whose visions created them? Big changes and lean times are perhaps nothing new to Chaosium. These cheeky little elves been surviving, and sometimes thriving, for 22 years now. How do we do it? The answer is very important: YOU. Chaosium survives due to your support. We'll be here as long as you continue to play our games, read our books, and support the retailers who bring them into your community. Some of the faces will change, and they will be missed. But Chaosium itself will endure as long as you believe in us. That makes you an honorary elf too. So paste your picture to one of the elf counters proved on the back cover and meet us in the vegetable garden. There are giants to taunt and veggies to steal!
This issue is dedicated to Nunzio Fireheart, Rob Heinsoo, Chris Hudnall, Drashi Khendup, Sam Shirley, and Eric Vogt. Steadfast Allies all.
May your coups be mighty ones!
Dustin Wright
Leng Embassy
This article was drawn from Starry Wisdom V1 #3, Summer 1997.