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A little additional perspective on Jim's comments: TSR legal may have blamed Chaosium for removing the Cthulhu and Eternal Champion material from Deities & Demigods, but Chaosium offered to let TSR continue using the material, with the sole condition being the new printings acknowledge Chaosium...

A little additional perspective on Jim's comments: TSR legal may have blamed Chaosium for removing the Cthulhu and Eternal Champion material from Deities & Demigods, but Chaosium offered to let TSR continue using the material, with the sole condition being the new printings acknowledge Chaosium...

Paradox/White Wolf has made several notable and highly public missteps in their entry into the RPG market, so they may not have any idea who they are dealing with beyond the credits MacKinnon presented them. And the credit lines in the press release do not automatically mean endorsement...

MacKinnon burned a lot of freelancers and business partners, myself included, when Guardians went under. For some, he refused to even give people totals owed so they could write the loss off on their taxes. He essentially maximized damage by the way he handled shutting down the company. Nothing...

Ravenloft might belong on the list. It uses a modified D&D game engine, but many of the games listed use other engines. Cheers, Jim Lowder

Chaosium and freelancers We at Chaosium agree that William was treated badly in the past. However, almost two years ago the new management contacted William and we have been working to settle all debt and to fix any problems with his contracts. It has taken a long time because the problems...

Sorry. I probably should have mentioned this in the first post. I had creator-copyrighted material used in the archive without my permission and had a front row seat on the whole mess. As a former TSR employee who still knew a fair number of people out in Renton, I contacted WotC at the...

WotC does not have the right to reprint some of the Dragon contents, in particular several of the comics and the fiction not tied to their game worlds. They only avoided a class action suit in answer to the CD ROM archive by striking a deal with SFFWA and some of the individual creators who did...

The executive editor who took over the fiction program in late 1992 wasn't a big fan of the column and neither were many of the editors who were still working for the department.

As with the TSR game lines, the fiction lines in the mid-1990s would see a lot of experiments, new lines that will be given increasingly shorter periods to prove themselves before cancellation and replacement by the next potentially "hot" project. You're seeing the early signs of that here. The...

The TSR trading cards initially sold really well, but you hit on one of the reasons the cards burned out as a line: it was too hard to complete sets, particularly of the 1991 and 1993 series. (I'm still missing a couple cards from 1991 set and a bunch of the parallel cards from the 1993 series.)...

Wizards isn't publishing the new D&D comics, they're granting a license for another publisher to do them. They, and TSR before them, have done that many times before. So it wouldn't really qualify as an "expansion" for the company. And while the latest staffing moves may seem radical, the...

Whether or not the distinction between "fan" and "professional" for products is meaningful depends upon your definitions. If the logic behind the category distinctions runs that a publisher such as Wizards has more resources to put into a product than a fan does, where does "more" become...

Zeb's still doing a lot of work with computer games. He can occasionally be lured back to do things for the hobby game market. He has essays in both Hobby Games: the 100 Best and Family Games: The 100 Best. Cheers, Jim

Yes indeed. I was rereading Animal Farm the other day. A version set in Renton would not require all that many changes. Cheers, Jim Lowder

Barbara Young was really the person in charge of fiction for Dragon at this point--and for a large part of the magazine's run. Cheers, Jim Lowder

Agreed. And KotDT has been somewhat badly served by the frequent changes--is it fiction or is it non-fiction, or is it something else altogether? The awards would certainly benefit from a set of stable baseline definitions created to make it clear to publishers and even the jurors what is and is...

The first few books in the Dark Horse series sold very, very well, rivaling some of the Realms releases of the time. Not long after the second book came out and did quite well, someone in the front office suggested that we immediately put some game products onto the schedule to capitalize on the...

Some of the creator-owned books sold extremely well. A few outsold some of the mid-tier shared-world titles. The TSR Books titles were, however, inconsistent sellers. One release would do brilliantly and the next would not do as well. The books required more advertising and more individualized...

Having a strong local base helps. However you can still draw attendees under the right circumstances. (Indianapolis is not all that far from Columbus, after all.) Origins is still a fun show, but it currently benefits from few of those circumstances. Origins has always been known as a...