General Green Ronin Update

Because of the current climate with D20, I'll be frank in saying that we played this one as close to the vest as possible at first, to avoid a situation where someone with more resources could negate the work we were doing on this book by beating us to market with a similar project of their own. It's the nature of the beast that d20 publishers are releasing products along very similar veins (looking at GR's schedule, there are already multiple competing publishers who have also planned Dwarf books, Witch books, Superheroes games, and so on) and while a certain amount of parallel development is to be expected we really wanted to avoid any sort of predatory, adversarial situation cropping up.

Once we passed the critical stage of development on the books, we contacted each of the publishers whose content we intended to include. One thing Chris wanted to do was make sure that the spells were credited properly: if a publisher wanted the spells to be credited to the author, Chris wanted to get those authors listed! He's very much a "credit where credit is due" kind of guy. :) We also specifically asked permission to reference the other publishers' books in the back cover text, because that's not something you can just automatically do.

What we found once we contacted the individual publishers is that overwhelmingly they were happy to help. Some folks even offered to send us electronic copies of their OGC in the future, for future volumes. Only one publisher expressed concern about the project, but we were able to have polite and reasonable negotiations over the material and ease their concerns.

I'm very proud of Green Ronin's cooperative relationship with other d20 publishers. I would much rather find a way to work together, or side-by-side in a non-adversarial way than jockey for position in a ruthless, cut-throat manner. The industry is too small to go around pissing everyone off! If I wanted a life of corporate shenanigans, I would pick a different career (like one with financial rewards for being a backstabbing ****). :)

Regards,
Nicole
 

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Oooh, we'll save the "d20 climate" discussion for another thread (or ignore it entirely...) :)

I do have a follow-up question that your reply raised, about crediting the individual authors:

Is it really an option, where Section 15 is concerned, to deviate from what is listed in the original work from whence you lift the open content?


Wulf
 

Wulf Ratbane said:
I do have a follow-up question that your reply raised, about crediting the individual authors:

Is it really an option, where Section 15 is concerned, to deviate from what is listed in the original work from whence you lift the open content?

I believe Chris's intention was to include the original authors in the credits page of the book (along with the people who directly worked on our book, like our editor and proofer).

I guess I should ask Chris before I go putting words in his mouth, but I *think* that's why he was asking about original authors.

Nicole
 

Two things strike me about the listing of contributors:

1) No FFG Spells and Spellcraft. Ack! Scheduling probably got you there, that's a sad loss.

2) I wonder if you've compiled the first big list of "Folks Who Play Nice..."

Make that three things...

3) Looks like there are some typos in there. ;)
 

GR might be acting polite and not including stuff that's been released within 6 months or so of the book hitting the shelves.

Frankly this will probably help boost re-orders and sales of older products cited in the grimoires. I sort of wish the OGL were more inherently citation-friendly but so far the companies I've talked to has been pretty helpful with telling me how to cite them in a product.
 

Wulf Ratbane said:
Two things strike me about the listing of contributors:

1) No FFG Spells and Spellcraft. Ack! Scheduling probably got you there, that's a sad loss.

2) I wonder if you've compiled the first big list of "Folks Who Play Nice..."

Make that three things...

3) Looks like there are some typos in there. ;)

1) Yeah, Wil contacted us about trying to get some of the Spells and Spellcraft content in, but timing didn't work out.

2) Only in my head. :)

3) Hey, I'm just the office chick. I'm lucky I had *any* copy of that material on my machine... I'm supposed to be concerning myself with invoices and spreadsheets.

Speaking of, I really should log off and do some "real" work. Yikes! ;)

Nicole
 

Nikchick said:
I believe Chris's intention was to include the original authors in the credits page of the book (along with the people who directly worked on our book, like our editor and proofer).

Yes, that's correct. Some companies preferred a company credit, so you'll notice, for example, entries like "Team Paradigm" in the credits. As Nicole said, I'm a strong believer in credit where credit is due.
 

2WS-Steve said:
GR might be acting polite and not including stuff that's been released within 6 months or so of the book hitting the shelves.

Yes, that was a conscious decision. We didn't want anyone feeling we were undercutting their sales or anything by using material that was too recent. The only book used that's been out less than six months is our own Freeport book.
 

Electronic Copy of OGC

I love the idea of compiling all OGC spells in one place. I would love to see the same thing done with other crunchy stuff like monsters, skills, feats and prestige classes.

But what I REALLY want is a formatted, text file of the material. I want to be able to index it and put it on a PC/notebook/PDA for quick searching. I want to be able to annotate it with campaign-specific house rulings. I want to be able to cut-and-paste a number of full spell descriptions so a player can have the rules for his entire repetoire of spells printed out.

Is anyone thinking of doing this? I would pay for a tab-delimited file or xml file of all the spells or all the monsters.

I think it would be awesome to see d20 products come out with a CD-ROM of all OGC in formatted text files. Or to have a publisher post this stuff to the web.
 

I just want to say extend my thanks to Chris, personally, as he's a VERY nice guy and I'm hopeful that Pocket Grimoire does well. Anyway, keep up the good work guys. It's appreciated on this front if nothing else.
 

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