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Ironically, I would have kept the Cthulhu stuff in. Who did you contact for the "rights"? Sauk City/August Derleth? They didn't actually hold them as far as I'm aware, even though Arkham House acted as if they did for many years. HPL's copyrights were a mess. Lovecraft is now in the public...

The article is witless. Fortnite is the *opposite* of RPGs--far more social, far less learning curve, far less friction in general than an RPG. In short, this is why it's so successful. Those of you arguing about how much and what kind of TSR crap you bought in the 90s--you are literal examples...

Here's another little tidbit. Thanks to the Thor Power Tools decision in the mid-70s (not making this up), unsold inventory, including books, is subject to inventory tax. That means that if you print a book in 2017, any unsold copies at the end of 2017 will pay an inventory tax in addition to...

This thread has a lot of smart people offering naive/non-professional opinions. The reality is a little different. I did graduate work at a top university with America's leading expert in American publication history...basically, the study of "how well books did" when they were actually...

Y'know, I was cogitating the notion about "adult" fiction vs YA fiction. And something occurred to me. Someone upthread, I believe it was @Shasharak talked about Shakespeare, Melville, and Dickens as examples of "adult" fiction. Ok, fair enough. But, isn't the defining characteristic of...

Still working it out myself, honestly. The best answer so far: reading RPG rules, for the reader, provides an experience equivalent to participating in--playing--the RPG. Reading the rules of chess, the player may imagine various moves and countermoves. But this experience is best described in...

A few points, from someone who got started in 1979 with Blue Book. The main difference between OS and NS is simple: professionalization. That's all. In this context, "professionalization" means modern product professionalization. This includes some or all of the following: design and...

Not a Sleestak, unfortunately. Wrong color, eyes too small, no occipital crest.

The distinction here is that board games consist of a finite decision space. Board game rules must be capable of managing any state the decision space produces, *and must be agreed upon by all players before playing*. That agreement is necessary owing to the finite decision space. Precision is...

Cthulhu WAS in the public domain, mostly because of Lovecraft's terrible copyright practices. Arkham House claimed them because August Derleth, a chancer on the level of Maurice Girodias, had published them after HPL's death. But proving this would have been too expensive, or I suspect beyond...

Demons were incredibly dangerous foes in 1e because of their telekinese ability...if the DM understood the possibilities.

The problem hasn't been people interested in the IP, it's been the Herbert estate. The Dune boardgame by Avalon Hill, widely considered one of the best boardgames ever made, has been out of print (and stratospherically expensive) for years because the family wouldn't authorize a new license...

The model is clearly stuff like Kingdom Death: Monster, which does fantastic with an IP that's much flimsier (and probably the worst name in all of gaming). As a boardgamer, I've seen the Enormous Box o' Plastic Crap overrun the scene in the past few years. (And "Beadle and Grimm" is a typically...

Suggestion: organize these as a quiz, guessing whether each one is an actual product or a troll/parody. No peeking!

The big problem with the article is that Lakofka assumes "Beauty" is a stat that is for women alone and overrides/replaces "Charisma". The issue here is that "Beauty" makes the character an object. It assumes that her value--and her actual power, btw, if you read the rules suggestions--depends...

My mistake. Was looking at two posts, both of which did an admirable job of not using the "G-word," and didn't think to look at the table again. You're absolutely correct.

I'm going with Dancey here. No offense, but in hindsight TSR was an appallingly amateur operation. "Customer comment cards" are exactly the kind of thing you do if you don't know how to do customer research. Spending a million dollars on "research" like that is just digging a hole deeper...

Started playing in 1979. Women were vanishingly rare back then. This didn't really change until the 1990s and the introduction of Vampire: The Masquerade, a game that brought thousands of young women into the roleplaying fold.<br>And something to keep in mind was that most roleplaying that...

To clarify, yes, associating thievery with the Romani cultural group IS a slur. As written though, people might think that the *word* "Romani" is a slur, which it isn't. It is of course the preferred term to refer to the European ethnic and cultural group, a term the group's members use to refer...

Well, but WITH fiction it was even more difficult to fill the column inches with quality content.