Arthaus reverts rights to Ravenloft and Gamma World back to Wotc

[Gundark]

They do seem to be trying to clean up all loose ends with their IP though, so that causes me to wonder if D&D has a buyer....

What?!? is there anything else to back this up? Who would buy D&D?

 

[Monte At Home]

Ravenloft, as a setting, was never my cup of tea (I wrote one product for it, back in 2E days), but the products were always high quality, both from TSR/WotC and from Arthaus.

I didn't run a Ravenloft game, or even a horror game, but I did mine the 3E Ravenloft books for monsters and plot ideas when when I wanted things to be creepy or disturbing. They never let me down.

 

[TiQuinn]

As a setting, Ravenloft never really lived up to its promise for me. It always remained a good idea on paper than in actual implementation. I also never got the sense that it broke any new ground since 2nd edition days. Still, I love horror RPGs, and the monster books for Ravenloft were a gold mine of ideas. Hopefully, someone will breathe new life into the idea somewhere down the line.

 

[Soel]

Never played GW, but Ravenloft never appealed to me at all...It was "horror", in the same way that black metal is "scary." Just came off as silly...

 

[humble minion]

I never ran Ravenloft, but I do own the rulebook, the Van Richten's Guides, and a complete set of the Gazetteers. The latter, particularly, are some of the best pieces of world-building I've ever seen in a roleplaying supplement. Having said that, however, I have to admit I share the opinion that the work the Kargatane did for the line was by far the best, and that WWs in-house designers didn't really manage to keep the standard up - Champions of Darkness was terrible, and even Gazetteer V was a considerable step down from the first four in the series.

My pie-in-the-sky hope is that Arthaus folding means that the Kargatane may somehow again get their hands on the setting, but finance aside I don't even know whether they'd want to at this stage. Still, a bloke can dream...

 

[Klaus]

Re: Ravenloft.


Well, there goes a source of income...

 

[Reynard]

Well,

This is hardly surprising. I can't speak for Ravenloft but Gamma World was obviously a dismall failure. That the rights would be allowed to revert to WotC is just a natural conclusion. As has been noted previously Darwin's World 2 just totally blew D20 GW out of the water. When I read GW I kept getting the feeling that it was the author's half-finished manuscript prior to playtesting. They had some interesting ideas but the execution was abominable.

Usually, I am happy to let the ignorant spew nonsense, but this is just going too far. Bruce Baugh has said, repeatedly, that Gamma World d20 did just fine -- though it certainly didn't break any records -- and it was always intended to be a limited run (though more books might have been added if it had sold really, really well). Not to mention the fact that 'abominable' is one hell of a strong word when one you mean is 'I't didn't stroke my nostalgia like I thought it should have.' Never once in the year leading up to its release did Bruce even suggest that this was yer daddy's GW. That you didn't listen and then cried yourself to sleep because there weren't any mutant cacti isn't really Bruce's, mine or WW's fault, now is it?

 

[Vocenoctum]

That you didn't listen and then cried yourself to sleep because there weren't any mutant cacti isn't really Bruce's, mine or WW's fault, now is it?

Why would you gain an IP, then not use it? if GW was changed that much, it seems silly to be proud of the changes, just make another game...

 

[Vocenoctum]

Re: Ravenloft

I've always liked Ravenloft, and when Arthaus got the license, it was great... until I saw the books. Denizens had some very neat monsters in it, but no idea of how to make a monster's stats. I think CR's were determined by random method.

The core book was so-so, very low quality in layout, not very much in the way of rules, but the location material was nicely done. When they did a 3.5 revision, they did what I'd always feared when I heard 3.5 was coming around. They basically revised about a page of material and republished the book under a new title. (okay, I didn't buy it, so I may have the amount of material revised changed, but overall the book was not significantly altered)

Van Richten's Arsenal was decent, lots of good ideas with very bad execution. Heroes of Light didn't even have the good ideas. I skipped the Gaz's, and quickly lost interest in the substandard material.

This is coming from someone that has quite a lot of 2nd edition RL books though. The quality in Arthaus never matched the old TSR stuff, and it was easier to convert the old books myself then use the mangled rules from the newer books.

That said, I'd love it if someone published Ravenloft, but I doubt WotC will bother with it. It's a shame this didn't happen sooner, so some of RL could have made it's way into heroes of Horror.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Not to mention the fact that 'abominable' is one hell of a strong word when one you mean is 'I't didn't stroke my nostalgia like I thought it should have.' Never once in the year leading up to its release did Bruce even suggest that this was yer daddy's GW.

On the other hand, "abominable" is a perfectly suitable word to describe the sloppy mechanical design of the new Gamma World or the lack of even half-decent mutation rules in a game that has always been, first and foremost, about mutants.

I knew about the lack of mutant plants long before I purchased my copy-- and I both understood and accepted the reason they were left out. However, I was not informed that the section on mutant animals would be a paragraph at the end of the races chapter telling me to use the Moreau rules from d20 Modern, nor was I informed that this version of Gamma World was going to have the most anemic set of mutation rules in any edition.

The tragedy isn't that Gamma World didn't sell well; the tragedy is that it wasn't made well.