Search results

I was just starting in TSR's book division when the Buck fiction got underway. One of my early assignments was proofing parts of Buck Rogers: The First 60 Years in the 25th Century, a very nice hardcover retrospective the company release in late 1988. As I recall the process, upper management...

Absolutely. And moving the character from prose to a comic strip, where the art (no matter how crude compared to some of the competing strips) could sell the SF concepts, was vitally important to the success, too. Dille deserves credit for those things. But to say he "created" the character is...

Actually, the first line on the page is a bit of history bending, too. John F. Dille did not create Buck Rogers. The character originated in a short story by Philip Nowlan, in Amazing Stories, and Dille, a newspaper syndicate owner, arranged for the character to become a comic strip. Now, the...

Thanks! I hope you enjoy it. The Ingram information is wrong about Ravenloft; you can see where they even got the main character's name wrong, compared to the publisher description. Ingram must have simply assumed the old data for the title was correct and tacked it on to what Elder Signs...

I think it's fair to say that TSR was a top down operation on things like the aggressive IP legal policy. Thanks! The fight for the Ebonacht books was long and pretty brutal at times, and it'll be great to have them finally see the light of day. Still working out the details on the release of...

Well, I talked with TSR's lawyers quite a bit throughout the late 80s and 90s about contracts and IP, first as an employee and then as part of a contract dispute I had with the company that dragged on after I resigned, from about 1994 until Wizards bought TSR in 1997. From my experience the TSR...

You're assuming ignorance here when you may have been encountering an employee expressing the corporate marching orders. It's entirely possible the lawyers knew the difference, but the aggressive stance the company management was taking on copyright and trademark required them to avoid clarity...

For anyone interested in more on this subject, read G. Wayne Miller's Toy Wars, a corporate history of Hasbro. It deals in particular with the acquisition of Kenner. Amen, brother. Few people in the industry make good money, and most hobby companies cannot generally afford to pay them a whole...

Is this a world-specific story, Ari, or a new setting? If the latter, please tell me that the absolutely awful contract for non-shared world fiction Dragon was floating a few months back has improved. Cheers, Jim Lowder www.jameslowder.com

Let's be clear here: Margaret and Tracy were allowed to write Soth back into Krynn. If Wizards did not want it to happen and the authors would not cooperate by changing the text, the editors in the book department would have simply changed it for them. The owner of the intellectual property has...

Thanks, Cam. I worked hard to make certain Soth stayed consistent with the character as portrayed by Margaret and Tracy. And they got him back as they had left him. I certainly understand why any writers might be annoyed or disappointed that TSR/WotC/Hasbro decided to use characters or setting...

This has all been covered before, in various interviews, but it looks like it needs to be repeated again, at least in bullet-point form. * Margaret and Tracy were not on great terms with TSR when the decision was made to move Soth to Ravenloft. They were offered the chance to write the novel...

The new Paizo anthology Worlds of Their Own contains the Gord story "Twistbuck's Game," which originally appeared in Night Arrant. It is indeed a lot of fun. Back to the original topic--looking forward to the new Gord story, KR. Congratulations on the publication. Cheers, James Lowder

You might want to add the anthology Worlds of Their Own: http://paizo.com/planetStories/v5748btpy80ht It should be debuting at the show. Cheers, James Lowder

You see that in the essays written for Hobby Games: The 100 Best. The designers who participated in the book were happy to have the opportunity to share their enthusiasm for a game--one they did not work on, one not made by the company that employs them. It's all about spreading the word in the...

A bad piece of fiction tied to an RPG is one where you can hear the dice rolling in the background--that is, the rules seem to explicitly and overly cause the characters to act in certain ways. (Unless, of course, you're trying to write metafiction about the character's or author's relationship...

Absolutely! And editors and graphic designers. Any freelancers. Of course, there are good publishers out there. If you're a freelancer thinking of working with a company, try to track down some of the writers and artists who have published with them in the past, to see if they've been paid and...

Most publishers realize that there are always freelancers out there willing to work for less than they're paying the talent now or even for nothing, writers and artists willing to sign bad contracts and accept terrible treatment to get their names in print. The unscrupulous ones take advantage...

Worlds of D&D Hi: While Drizzt and Raistlin are the stars in the first two issues, future issues will feature other characters and types of stories, from light-hearted yarns to horror tales. I'll be working with DDP on this book as an editor and occasional scripter. Cheers, James Lowder...