In Geek Native’s What was the first RPG? article Greg Stafford’s White Bear and Red Moon gets a mention.
Stafford started work on the Glorantha setting in 1966, nearly a decade before Dungeons & Dragons came out, but the first commercial game set there, White Bear & Red Moon, is a board game.
White Bear & Red Moon first came out in 1975 and was then re-released with the name Dragon Pass. The hex-battler had a spiritual follow-up with another Glorantha-based board game in the form of Nomad Gods.
While there was a Greg Stafford approved digital release of Nomad Gods, there’s been no new edition for either. Then, last month, publisher Chaosium tweeted a picture of the team playing a suspiciously new-looking version of White Bear & Red Moon.
Yesterday, Dicebreaker confirmed that both White Bear & Red Moon and Nomad Gods would return. Matt Jarvis, the editor-in-chief there spoke to Chaosium board game line editor Susan O’Brien who said a third game was even possible.
O’Brien told the Dicebreaker team;
He’d planned a third game in White Bear & Red Moon and Nomad Gods series, called The Masters of Luck and Death. While he wrote copious design notes, and long ago some prospective counters were released for it, the game was never published.
If our new editions of White Bear & Red Moon and Nomad Gods are a success, we’ll certainly look at bringing out The Masters of Luck and Death too, a mere four decades after it was first announced.”
The new release of White Bear & Red Moon and Nomad Gods are planned for later this year, although it has not yet been confirmed whether a Kickstarter campaign will run first.
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