Moon Design Publications are publishers of

tabletop role-playing game A tabletop role-playing game (typically abbreviated as TRPG or TTRPG), also known as a pen-and-paper role-playing game, is a form of role-playing game (RPG) in which the participants describe their characters' actions through speech. Participa ...

books set in

Greg Stafford Francis Gregory Stafford (February 9, 1948 – October 10, 2018), usually known as Greg Stafford, was an American game designer, publisher, and practitioner of shamanism. Stafford is most famous as the creator of the fantasy world of Glorantha ...

's world of

Glorantha Glorantha is a fantasy world created by Greg Stafford. It was first introduced in the board game ''White Bear and Red Moon'' (1975) by Chaosium and then in a number of other board, roleplaying and computer games, including ''RuneQuest'' and ''Her ...

. They were founded in 1998 by

Rick Meints Rick Meints is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games. Career In the 1990s, American expatriate Rick Meints was a member of the Reaching Moon Megacorp, the British fan publisher that was the center of Glorantha culture ...

and

Colin Phillips Colin Phillips is a British psycholinguist who is the director of the Maryland Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. He is an elected fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of ...

in the UK.

History

In the 1990s, American expatriate Rick Meints was a member of the

Reaching Moon Megacorp Reaching may refer to: * Reaching (sailing) A point of sail is a sailing craft's direction of travel under sail in relation to the true wind direction over the surface. The principal points of sail roughly correspond to 45° segments of a cir ...

, the British fan publisher that was the center of

culture at the time. The Reaching Moon Megacorp published Meints' book on collecting Gloranthan publications, ''The Meints Index to Glorantha'' (1996, 1999), but by the time of the book's second edition, the Megacorp was on its way out as a decade of constant publication and convention organizing had burned out its main members. Meints and Colin Phillips thus created Moon Design Publications to reprint long out-of-print ''

RuneQuest ''RuneQuest'' (commonly abbreviated as RQ) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally designed by Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson (game designer), Steve Henderson, and Warren James, and set in Greg Stafford's mythical world of ...

'' supplements. Over a six-year period, Moon Design published four compilations of old ''RuneQuest'' material under the title "Gloranthan Classics"; the first was ''Pavis & Big Rubble'' (1999) while the last was ''Borderlands & Beyond'' (2005). By the time of Borderlands' publication,

had returned from a one-year stay in Mexico and was looking for a new company to carry on the publications of Issaries, and chose Moon Design, by now done with the major Gloranthan books published by

Chaosium Chaosium Inc. is a publisher of tabletop role-playing games established by Greg Stafford in 1975. Chaosium's major titles include '' Call of Cthulhu'', based on the horror fiction stories of H. P. Lovecraft'', RuneQuest Glorantha'', ''Pendragon'' ...

. Though it got out its first book, ''Imperial Lunar Handbook Volume 2'' (2006), fairly quickly, only two more ''

HeroQuest ''HeroQuest'', sometimes written as ''Hero Quest'', is an adventure board game created by Milton Bradley in conjunction with the British company Games Workshop. The game was loosely based around archetypes of fantasy role-playing games: the ...

'' books would come out by 2008 – plus a few of Greg Stafford's "unfinished works", which Moon Design rebranded as the Stafford Library. In 2008 Jeff Richard came on board as both co-owner and principal Gloranthan author. Soon afterward the company published the second edition of ''HeroQuest'' (2009), revised by author

Robin Laws Robin D. Laws (born October 14, 1964 in Orillia, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian writer and game designer who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of a number of novels and role-playing games as well as an anthologist. Career Robin D. Laws ...

. That same year also saw the publication of ''Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes'' (2009), a massive book that expanded on the Sartarite background of '' Hero Wars'' to create a comprehensive setting for the game, further expanded by Stafford's ''Book of Heortling Mythology'' (2009) and the ''Sartar Companion'' (2010).

Publications

Glorantha Classics

References

{{reflist Role-playing game publishing companies