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[bryant]

I'm very sad to hear that Hogshead Publishing is going out of business. It's not that they're bankrupt or any such; apparently it's just not fun any more, and I can certainly understand that. Still a shame.

Hogshead and its founder James Wallis have provided high quality gaming for the last decade. They started out as the holders of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG license. WFRPG has been an important alternative to D&D in the fantasy RPG genre in both mechanics and style. I believe the prestige class system in D&D 3E owes a lot to Warhammer's career system, and the Warhammer world beats 7th Sea all hollow as far as alternate Europes go.

Hogshead also published the tremendously influential New Style line, which deliberately broke expectations of what an RPG was. I wouldn't count all the New Style games as successes, but the line was bookmarked by Baron Munchausen and De Profundis and those two alone would make the New Style line important to the industry.

As if that wasn't enough, Hogshead recently rescued Noblis from the abyss, republishing it in a beautiful coffee-table edition which raises the bar for RPG layout and design. Simply lovely stuff. (Fortunately, Guardians of Order will be picking up the Nobilis line with the full cooperation of the author.)

Hogshead, you'll be missed.

Comments

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

Wow. This is shocking. I can only hope that GoO continues to release Nobilis stuff with the high quality Hogshead did. Sheesh.

[bryant]

I hope so. They're good guys up there. We'll see.

I'm... really sad that I'm never going to get to work with James. We'd kicked around a few ideas over the years but nothing ever panned out, for various reasons.

Sigh.

[gwenix.livejournal.com]

James is pretty stressed out, it's a bit more than "just not fun anymore".

But yes, alas. He did fantastic work with Nobilis. :/

[bryant]

I'm not surprised, although I hesitated to guess in a public forum. But -- yeah.

*sigh*

[mechagm.livejournal.com]

It always bums me out when a good, small game company goes away.

It's good to hear that GoO is picking up Noblis... don't know much about the game, but I am always happy to see games that people are fond of being picked up by other companies... though for some reason I am surprised it wasn't Atlas who picked it up... they seem to have a habit of doing that. (Ars Magica & Feng Shui to name a couple) GoO seem like a pretty good company though, so hopefully it will work out.

Ah, well.

-peterB