News: Ravenloft back to WotC - and a FoS message

[Joël of the FoS]

Here's the announcement from White-Wolf - Monday August 15th :

Arthaus Reverts Rights to RAVENLOFT and GAMMA WORLD to Wizards of the Coast

Sword & Sorcery Studios to release electronic manuscript for VAN RICHTEN’S GUIDE TO THE MISTS

Atlanta, GA and Renton, WA; August 15, 2005 — Arthaus Publishing, Inc. and Wizards of the Coast, Inc. today announced that they have reached an agreement for the reversion of rights to the RAVENLOFT and GAMMA WORLD campaign settings. Wizards of the Coast has tentatively agreed to allow White Wolf, which solicits and sells all Arthaus products, to continue to sell back stock in both lines under its Sword & Sorcery umbrella brand through June of 2006.

This reversion means that the RAVENLOFT supplement Van Richten's Guide to the Mists will not see print. Sword & Sorcery Studios will release the unproofed manuscript (by authors Carla Hollar and Rucht Lilavivat and outgoing developers Jackie Cassada and Nicky Rea) as a free download available at http://www.swordsorcery.com. The manuscript will be available this September.

"It has been a pleasure to publish and work on these two classic properties," said Stewart Wieck, Managing Editor of Sword & Sorcery Studios. "These are icons of the RPG culture, and I think we did them justice, added to their lore, and gave them a fresh treatment for this generation of gamers."

Arthaus Publishing licensed the rights to RAVENLOFT, the gothic horror brand of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS®, in 2001 and—under the Sword & Sorcery banner—has released 19 different products in the line over the last four years. Van Richten's Guide to the Mists was to be the twentieth product in the line. Arthaus licensed GAMMA WORLD in 2002 and released six products in the line.

"Sword & Sorcery has done a great job with both lines," said Rich Redman, Wizards of the Coast's Assistant Brand Manager for Licensing. "We never had any doubts that these lines were in good hands."

You can read it here: http://www.white-wolf.com/arthaus/index.php?line=news&articleid=276

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Esteemed and honoured members of the Fraternity,

You probably have heard the news by now – Ravenloft’s license with White Wolf has come to an end. After VRGttMists September PDF free release, no more new Ravenloft books will appear in the near (or foreseeable) future. We share with you the concerns of this change…

However, we will turn this energy toward keeping the Ravenloft setting alive through our presence on the Internet. From the Black Box to the present moment, Ravenloft has had a brilliant past and had even seen death, which was cheated by the setting coming back to life again. You can trust us that we will work hard to continue to keep this setting alive, which the Kargatane brilliantly proved could be done.

The setting won’t die until there are Ravenloft fans actively sharing ideas and new material. Ravenloft always will have an audience as many D&D fans look for something different in horror RPG.

Sadly, many planned books will never be written as planned (e.g. the Gazetteer series being one of the most important losses).

To fill this void, the Fraternity of Shadows (FoS) intends on releasing as much quality fan made material as we can (i.e. the already announced Lost Children of the Night netbook, QtR # 12, etc.). If possible, we will also try to develop e-Gazetteers, too (with S's story should WotC agree to give us the authority to do so). Also, we will try hard to obtain authors’ notes, WE's, and other goodies asked by the fans.

In the future, you can trust the FoS work closely with WotC to see what they will do for Ravenloft, and then, what we can do in this new context. We will continue to inform you of theses developments as soon as possible.

Our overall objective? This great community will remain alive and well (or perhaps undead, depending on who's raising it)!

Let’s lift our glasses to Ravenloft! To the fans! To the authors!

To everybody still fighting to keep this light in the darkness!

Sincerely,

David, Dion, Eddy, Jason, Joël and Stephen

 

[Ibram]

Its a shame that RL is probably going to fade out now.... I always liked the setting (and would have bought more of the books if I actualy had money). RL was the first AD&D setting book I ever bought, and I mined it heavily over the years for my homebrew games. It also lead me to my first internet gaming community (the now defunct Kagarate... I had some good times there)

 

[Joël of the FoS]

Its a shame that RL is probably going to fade out now....

Well this is one of the possibilities. However, Ravenloft has a very strong brand recognition, so we can hope something good from WotC. The next book Heroes of Horrors was influenced by Ravenloft, so we'll see...

Joël

 

[wedgeski]

Well this is one of the possibilities. However, Ravenloft has a very strong brand recognition, so we can hope something good from WotC. The next book Heroes of Horrors was influenced by Ravenloft, so we'll see...

I'll be amazed if the Ravenloft brand doesn't reappear in an official guise at some point in the future. I doubt that Wizards will let all that name recognition go to waste.

 

[Trickstergod]

I'll be amazed if the Ravenloft brand doesn't reappear in an official guise at some point in the future. I doubt that Wizards will let all that name recognition go to waste.

...Planescape?

I wouldn't imagine Ravenloft would receive much more than Planescape has thus far.

 

[wingsandsword]

I'll be amazed if the Ravenloft brand doesn't reappear in an official guise at some point in the future. I doubt that Wizards will let all that name recognition go to waste.

As was said: Planescape.

WotC supposedly doesn't want to fragment their customer base by producing lots of settings, so they introduce a whole new completely supported system that is different enough from normal standards of D&D as to require new a core class and NPC class, as well as completely new races. Now, 3e players get to be divided between "Core", "Realms" and "Eberron". They don't want to make one-shot books of these settings, but they had no problem making Ghostwalk, as a niche pseudo-setting product.

They have no problem making a Planar Handbook of general planar related material, but they are loathe to call it "Planescape" and really touch on a lot of PS specific planar issues.

They'll make "Heroes of Horror" as a horror-themed book, but never call it "Ravenloft".

I just don't understand WotC's attitude about these things. Sit on IP that most companies would call solid gold and refuse to use them. Start to license them out, then recind those licenses and refuse to issue new ones, burying the entire property as much as they can.

 

[Trickstergod]

I just don't understand WotC's attitude about these things. Sit on IP that most companies would call solid gold and refuse to use them. Start to license them out, then recind those licenses and refuse to issue new ones, burying the entire property as much as they can.

...Wizards didn't rescind the Ravenloft license.

White Wolf is the one to blame here. They let the license expire, as far as current info about what's going on indicates.

 

[wedgeski]

...Planescape?

I wouldn't imagine Ravenloft would receive much more than Planescape has thus far.

Ravenloft has already received more than Planescape, in being licensed at all. The gothic horror milieu isn't a tenth as bizarre as the Planscape line, and is well understood by both hard-core and casual gamers (I would warrant, nothing other than anecdotal evidence to back this up!). I'll stand by what I said.

 

[ForceUser]

I have several of the S&S Ravenloft books, and while they nailed the mood and tone of the setting (no surprise), the mechanics, on the balance, blew. I was especially disappointed with the monster book for its lack of interesting critters. Caveat: the section of the core rulebook dealing with iconic horror monsters--vampire, werewolf, ghost, hag, mummy--was excellent.

Still, I doubt WotC can do the setting justice. They're too focused on mechanics. I'd rather have crap crunch and great fluff that the other way around when it comes to Ravenloft.

 

[Orius]

I just don't understand WotC's attitude about these things. Sit on IP that most companies would call solid gold and refuse to use them. Start to license them out, then recind those licenses and refuse to issue new ones, burying the entire property as much as they can.

Because like you said, WotC doesn't want to fragment the market. Sure it is a shame to see many of these settings, some of which had great ideas, fade into obscurity, but there's also the fact that too many settings led to the demise of TSR. D&D doesn't have enough players to support a dozen different settings at once, and trying to market them will simply hurt the game over long run as it did 10 years ago. If WotC can be blamed for anything, it's for being perhaps a bit too cautious with some of its business decisions in order to correct some of TSR's most egregious blunders.

You and Trickstergod both mentioned Planescape. Now while that setting had plenty of fans, there were also plenty of fans who absolutely hated the cant, low-level planer adventuring, factions, the Lady of Pain, whatever. And those fans wouldn't even bother to touch anything named Planescape with a 10 foot pole. I think WotC did a good job with the Manual of the Planes, putting in enough Planescape related fluff and crunch to help get a 3e conversion off the ground, buit not focusing it so strongly on the setting that those who hated the setting would reject the book. What one person could call "pandering to the lowest common denominator" another person can call "sensible marketing practices".

I'd prefer to see WotC do things this way, wrt to Ravenloft, this would mean sourcebooks and the like which touch on horror themes that don't require the setting, but which makes references to it for the old fans, and perhaps as a way of exposing it to newer fans who can still track down the older stuff on eBay, or WotC ESD program (are they still doing that?) or whatever. I wouldn't mind seeing them do something like this along the lines of the Birthright setting, presenting rules for stuff like bloodlines that isn't tied down to a specific setting, but which uses Birthright as an example.

For settings that have been dormant for a while introducing new stuff also introduces the risk of alienating the old players as well. One needs only to look at the Greyhawk and Dragonlance settings to see how true this can be.