Call of Cthulhu d20 Preservation Society

Turanil said:

After Western End Games (Star Wars d6) died, WotC bought the right to produce d20 SW. Let Chaosium disappear from bad business decisions, and then WotC (or someone else) buy the license and do stuff for CoC d20.

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You don't really need to purchase the rights to publish a mythos game, you just can't call it Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium owns the trademark on the title). Most of HPL's estate exists in the public domain and has for years because nobody bothered to copyright it. Derleth claims to own the copyright but HP's aunts were the inheritors to the estate and not Uncle Augy. Since the Aunties never did anything to protect Howie's estate the rights would have lapsed in the early to mid 70s and even then, again in the mid 90s. The only thing protect is the trademark terms like Call of Cthulhu, Mythos etc. that Chaosium and Uncle Augy have used in their book titles. If I wanted to publish a game set in the word of H.P. Lovecraft I could, it is just coming up with a recognizable title that doesn't violate the trademarks.

Jason

d20 Cthulhu by Gaslight

I've added my Victorian era professions for d20 CoC PDF I did a couple of years ago to the Preservation Society.

teitan said:

You don't really need to purchase the rights to publish a mythos game, you just can't call it Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium owns the trademark on the title). Most of HPL's estate exists in the public domain and has for years because nobody bothered to copyright it. Derleth claims to own the copyright but HP's aunts were the inheritors to the estate and not Uncle Augy. Since the Aunties never did anything to protect Howie's estate the rights would have lapsed in the early to mid 70s and even then, again in the mid 90s. The only thing protect is the trademark terms like Call of Cthulhu, Mythos etc. that Chaosium and Uncle Augy have used in their book titles. If I wanted to publish a game set in the word of H.P. Lovecraft I could, it is just coming up with a recognizable title that doesn't violate the trademarks.

Jason

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Funny, this was discussed earlier in the thread, and many other times on EnWorld.

I have seen so many conflicting things on this, do you have any refrences, websites, that sort of thing confirming the lapse of copyright (I know I have seen statements that some stories are still under Arkhan House copyright elsewhere)? Thanks!

Well, for the longest time copyrights persisted for 50 years after the authors death, which means that if any of the HPL's copyrights existed that they would have gone PD in the early 80s! In the 90s, Senator Sonny Bono pushed a bill through congress that ruled that any copyrights qould persist for life +75 years. Because the HPL copyrights would have, according to previous laws, long before passed into the PD under the old laws, then the new law (which is the basis that Arkham House continues its arguments) would NOT affect the HPL's copyrights. Basically, using the old law of life +50 and looking at the Bono Act you see, very clearly, that HPL was dead more than 50 years before the law passed. The Bono act became law in 1998, HPL died in 1937 which means that his copyrights would have lapsed in 1987 under the old law(barring anything done before 1923 which would already be in the Public Domain). The Bono act did not protect copyrights retroactively, as in no copyrights could be recovered under the Bono Act so HPL's creative work would have passed into the PD by quite some time, especially the pre 1923 material. The only way to protect this material is through exploitation of trademark laws which is how groups like the Ordo Templi Orientis have maintained their claim on the Equinox and Orriflamme periodicals which had long before ceased publication (Equinox in the 1960s, Orriflamme in the 1940s) but were trademarked in the mid 70s. I learned a lot about copyright law looking into the estate of Aleister Crowley (which, if I had 1,000 dollar in 1993 I could have purchased because that is what was paid for it).

As for a reference on the Bono Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act is about the best I could dig up on short notice. It very clearly states the key element though, the Bono-CTEA is NOT retroactive.

Jason

I've sent Chaosium a query asking if they'd be willing to license support of CoC d20 to a third-party publisher, but no response as yet. (I'm not surprised, this is Chaosium we're talking about...their response time can be measured in geological epochs )

It occurs to me, however, that given the copyright issues (S.T. Joshi layed out a nicely detailed picture in one of his books on Lovecraft that pretty much ends with the conclusion that it's all PD), that it would be a fairly simple matter for a publisher (say, I dunno, Adamant) to put out a line of PDFs using the Open Content sanity/madness rules and other stuff from OGL Horror, and release it under the title "Lovecraft D20" or something...

Hm. Something to think about.

GMSkarka said:

It occurs to me, however, that given the copyright issues (S.T. Joshi layed out a nicely detailed picture in one of his books on Lovecraft that pretty much ends with the conclusion that it's all PD), that it would be a fairly simple matter for a publisher (say, I dunno, Adamant) to put out a line of PDFs using the Open Content sanity/madness rules and other stuff from OGL Horror, and release it under the title "Lovecraft D20" or something...

Hm. Something to think about.

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You should do it. But instead of just Lovecraft, you should do a series of "Horror in the style of X" pdfs, where X is a recognizable style of horror.

Italian Zombie Apocalypse/gore type films

Hell, Italian psycho-horror would be a good one. Dario Argento is worth a series on his own.

Carpenteresque flesh grotesquerie (though I wouldn't suggest this for a title)

Old Style Universal Studios horror

Hammer Films

80's style slasher films

50's era atomic "horror"

Psychobilly horror

Cronenberg's body/identity paranoia


The possibilities are (almost) limitless


Patrick Y.

Masks d20 Conversion

Narfellus said:

As much fun as CoC one-shots can be, for a larger, overarching storyline, i would have to recommend picking up one of Chaosium's modules. Masks of Nyarlathotep is a great one, one of the best adventures i've ever read. Seriously, it's fun and creepy just to read from a GM's point of view. Beyond the Mountains of Madness would be another one, and then there's one i have i want to run one day, Escape from Innsmouth. And all of them are combat heavy in my campaign, but the PC's have only fought mostly cultists so far, and one wearboar that they were able to kill with a silver-plated axe, but once the Mythos creatures start pouring in their little peashooters won't be doing much good. Fortunately, they have one brave character who will have access to an Elder Sign if he ever finishes reading the Libris Mysteriis.

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And of course, I can't resist a plug for my d20 conversion for Masks of Nyarlathotep.

GMSkarka said:

I've sent Chaosium a query asking if they'd be willing to license support of CoC d20 to a third-party publisher, but no response as yet. (I'm not surprised, this is Chaosium we're talking about...their response time can be measured in geological epochs )

It occurs to me, however, that given the copyright issues (S.T. Joshi layed out a nicely detailed picture in one of his books on Lovecraft that pretty much ends with the conclusion that it's all PD), that it would be a fairly simple matter for a publisher (say, I dunno, Adamant) to put out a line of PDFs using the Open Content sanity/madness rules and other stuff from OGL Horror, and release it under the title "Lovecraft D20" or something...

Hm. Something to think about.

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I would buy it! I would love to see some Gaslight type stuff too!

Gomez said:

I would buy it! I would love to see some Gaslight type stuff too!

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Heh---I've actually been working on a project called "AGE OF GASLIGHT", which is a D20-Modern-based adaptation of my old Age of Empire RPG from 1996.

Arcane Runes Press said:

You should do it. But instead of just Lovecraft, you should do a series of "Horror in the style of X" pdfs, where X is a recognizable style of horror.

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That's a pretty stellar idea...but I wonder about the sales appeal with such a wide-ranging focus. Also, I'd be talking more about doing adventures (since that's what people would want, I think, as time-savers) rather than genre supplements. Really, though, the attraction for me is twofold: 1) I've always been a big fan of Lovecraftian horror, and 2) It fills a support void that there is some demand for.

GMSkarka said:

I've sent Chaosium a query asking if they'd be willing to license support of CoC d20 to a third-party publisher, but no response as yet. (I'm not surprised, this is Chaosium we're talking about...their response time can be measured in geological epochs )

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Yeah, don't hold your breath. I e-mailed them six months to a year ago and never heard a word from them.