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Absolutely. Buck Rogers did a lot to popularize SF tropes and conventions. Saying "that Buck Rogers stuff" was a way of referencing SF in general for a whole generation of people unfamiliar with the genre. That was a dismissive phrase, but it speaks to the influence of the IP when it comes to...

Well, "total BS" is kind of harsh. It's fair to say Dille originated Buck in the form for which the character became most famous. He does deserve a lot of credit, and you could argue that he "originated" the Buck Rogers the public knew and loved. I wouldn't word the description of his role the...

Indeed. One of the things that can be said in Lorraine's favor was the amount of creative freedom the staff had on many, many projects. So long as products made the money they were supposed to make, the staff had a fairly free hand with content. There were individual products that saw too much...

Buck was very influential. It popularized lots of SF tropes and conventions. It was not the birthplace--as in the place where they originated--of rockets or robots or the like. Cheers, Jim Lowder

By the by, if you look around the official Buck Rogers site, the place that started the whole discussion, you'll also find the claim: "Buck Rogers is known as the birthplace rockets, robots, and ray-guns!" (see: http://www.gohero.com/buck_rogers/buck_rogers_influence.htm) That statement needs a...

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...