Announcing the Basic Roleplaying System Reference Document and Open Game License

[Bilharzia]

As a tangent, this is what I was thinking of re: Pendragon & BRP/CoC / the Mythos, "The Golden Dawn" by Pagan Publishing.

 

[yojimbouk]

I think the situation Chaosium finds themselves in now can be traced to three questionable, historical decisions:

1) Selling the RuneQuest game off to Avalon Hill in the 1980s - which made an overpriced game and, ultimately, left the game in the wilderness for 20 years.
2) Upon retrieving the licence back to Issaries in the 2000s, deciding that HeroQuest was where Glorantha was at, and choosing to license the old game IP to Mongoose - who developed it their own way.
3) Failing to account for the popularity of the Mongoose RuneQuest II/Legend/RuneQuest 6/Mythras design, and not finding some way of taking ownership of the BRP ‘family’ when Moon Design took over Chaosium, and instead severing ties and insodoing, creating their own competitors.

You forgot one very important misstep. A lot of Chaosium’s current problems lie with the Mythos CCG debacle. Chaosium decided to get into CCGs but they were pretty late to the party. While they produced a well received game, they went all in, thinking they were going to make the kind of money that Wizards of the Coast or AEG had made. Instead, the bottom dropped out of the CCG market and they were left with a warehouse full of stock they couldn’t get rid of. This created financial problems for Chaosium. In lieu of unpaid debts, Chaosium sold Pendragon to Paul Cockburn, and Glorantha reverted to Greg Stafford.

Chaosium was then on life support, trying to eke out as much revenue from Call of Cthulhu for the minimum cost. Some mistakes were made in this period. One was to offer a limited license to Pagan Publishing, which stipulated a maximum number of publications per year. This may have been a legacy of Pagan’s initial role as the publisher of the Unspeakable Oath fanzine. However, as it became clear the Pagan were publishing excellent CoC supplements including Delta Green, this license became too restrictive but did not seem to be renegotiated. Maybe it was because Chaosium just didn’t have the manpower to approve a larger number of manuscripts. I’m sure it’s as a result of this, that Arc Dream chose to produce a new BRP derived game system based on the Legend OGL when they revived Delta Green rather than licensing CoC again, thus creating a competitor for CoC. While there were a large number of CoC
Iicensees in recent years, such as Modiphius, Cubicle 7, Goodman Games, etc., a number of these have dropped the licenses maybe because they found them too restrictive or they didn’t make enough money.

Greg Stafford took over Glorantha and founded Issaries, Inc. to exploit it. As stated by Trippy, one misstep was the RuneQuest license given to Mongoose. I’m not sure Greg Stafford fully understood the consequences of making Mongoose’s RuneQuest OGL when it was approved. In particular, the SRD contained quite a bit of Glorantha IP, such as Broos, Gorps, etc., which while great for third party developers, opened up a can of worms. This seems to have been resolved in that such material is no longer considered open, so use of Legend OGC is valid but it’s predecessor, the Mongoose RuneQuest SRD is now invalid. What the actual legality of this is moot.

In addition, Chaosium licensed CoC for WotC for a one-off d20 game. WotC later OGL’d the sanity rules, stripped of Mythos references, in Unearthed Arcana. Now, one of CoC’s major mechanical innovations was public domain.

The RuneQuest OGL then allowed enterprising individuals to create their own BRP-like games and when Lovercraft’s works went out of copyright several Cthulhu Mythos games such as Delta Green and Raiders of R’lyeh appeared. Chaosium are now trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. To be honest, they’re better off pulling this BRP-OGL and making a Community Content Program for BRP based on the 4th Edition book to replace the BRP monographs which is what I think the community mostly wants. The BRP-OGL is not going to stop Cthulhu clones produced using the Legend OGC and Delta Green OGC. Indeed, Chaosium’s actions only seemed to have made a minor project, Open Cthulhu, much more visible.

 

[ffilz]

For me because I like sharing the material. Other do as well and some feel they can earn a living from selling their writing.


Because I like to share my material. Able to make a profit from it give me the resources to make presentation more useful like buying art.


Because it not as useful and take more work for a person to use it their campaign which means people are less likely to use it which defeat the point of sharing the material in the first place.

There is zero reason to release a supplemental product with no support for any system. Doing that mean it more work for everybody to use the product in their campaign. By supporting a system you make it less work for hobbyists using that system and the rest are no worse off in adapting the adventure for their system. Provided care is taken in the product's layout to make it easy to separate out the system specific material.

And actually, I think it's easier to convert something from a specific system to some other system rather than something systemless (which still ends up being some kind of system, look at the Judges Guild Universal System or the "Catalyst System" from the Flying Buffalo City Book series (and a few other supplements). You need to specify what NPCs are good at so you come up with some kind of system. If it's an actual RPG, there are more resources for understanding the ratings, and of course if it's an RPG you're familiar with, much the better.

And many of the systems people want SRDs and OGL for are popular (for some definition of popular) systems that have been around for a while. There are plenty of popular D100 games that folks would love easy to adapt material for.

The D&D 3.x/D20 SRDs made an avenue for the OSR to come up with material compatible for the earlier editions of D&D (that have enough compatibility that one CAN run an adventure for one of the versions of D&D in another early version of D&D with very little conversion outside of classed characters). I can easily grab "monster" stats from any D100 game and use them in my RQ1 game. Traveller is even easier.

 

[Raleel]

thanks Y yojimbouk that was a bunch of history I didn't know all of. That explains a lot of the context for me.

 

[AsenRG]

What Raleel said, Y yojimbouk ! That was interesting, especially since I haven't followed that history closely and some of the events had eluded me.


All of this is making me wonder what's the legality situation with the Aquelarre rules!

 

[K_Peterson]

As a tangent, this is what I was thinking of re: Pendragon & BRP/CoC / the Mythos, "The Golden Dawn" by Pagan Publishing.

Yeah, it's some good material. But it certainly does not paint a pretty picture of Pendragon folklore, what with...

Spoiler

.. Arthur being a Shub-Niggurath cultist, empowered by the milk of said Great Old One, and capable of wielding "all manner of sinister Magicks against his foes"..

It would probably not be the Arthurian + Mythos experience that many gamers would be interested in or expect.

Still, a great Pagan Publishing supplement. I used some of the Golden Dawn material in a gaslight campaign a few years ago, but didn't use the "Once and Future King" info, and related adventures.

 

[Bilharzia]

As stated by Trippy, one misstep was the RuneQuest license given to Mongoose.

It may not be obvious now but RuneQuest was just about as dead as a brand RPG by the mid 90s, with the combination of the licensing woes and the court case it was poison, and Glorantha had moved to Hero Wars/Quest as a "better system", and RQ was completely dead as a publishing prospect for at least 10 years. Seen in that light the licence to Mongoose ultimately proved the case for the system since it lead to MRQII, then RuneQuest 6, then Mythras. Without the initial move by Mongoose, even given the ropey publication history which came out of that, I doubt we would have had RQ6 or Mythras in its current form.

It would probably not be the Arthurian + Mythos experience that many gamers would be interested in or expect.

Well, I think subverting tropes and expectations was the point, Pagan Publishing are the poster child for ultra-dark takes on horror and the mythos. As far as interest goes, this approach worked well for Gaiman in "A Study in Emerald".

 

[yojimbouk]

It may not be obvious now but RuneQuest was just about as dead as a brand RPG by the mid 90s, with the combination of the licensing woes and the court case it was poison, and Glorantha had moved to Hero Wars/Quest as a "better system", and RQ was completely dead as a publishing prospect for at least 10 years. Seen in that light the licence to Mongoose ultimately proved the case for the system since it lead to MRQII, then RuneQuest 6, then Mythras. Without the initial move by Mongoose, even given the ropey publication history which came out of that, I doubt we would have had RQ6 or Mythras in its current form.

Yes, I think that Greg Stafford was convinced that RQ was so dead that he might as well give the system back to the few fans remaining. What he didn't expect was that it would revive interest in the system. Similarly, when Moon Design/Chaosium launched the RuneQuest 2nd Edition (Chaosium version) Reprint Kickstarter, I don't think they thought it would prove to be one of their most successful. Previously, Moon Design's remasters of the several old RQ2 books had been fan favourites but not on the same scale as the Kickstarter. It was this Kickstarter that conviced Chaosium to revive RuneQuest and to make it compatible with the old RQ2 material rather than use the RQ6/Mythras system.

So, while we may regard the MRQ SRD as a mistake from a commercial point of view, from the point of view of making RuneQuest popular again it seems to have been a success.

 

[TristramEvans]

This seems to have been resolved in that such material is no longer considered open, so use of Legend OGC is valid but it’s predecessor, the Mongoose RuneQuest SRD is now invalid.

Is it possible for a company that did not issue a conract to dissolve that contract?

 

[Vile Traveller]

The lack of internet etiquette on the part of nuChaosium's management aside, I don't see the BRP NOGL as a mistake on their part. If nothing else, they have shown too much business acumen to make a basic (no pun intended) mistake like this. It's most likely an attempt to draw attention away from other OGL versions of the D100 system, including Legend but much more importantly Open Cthulhu, which theoretically has the potential to turn into the Pathfinder to their D&D 4E. I doubt that will happen, as Paizo are in a different league to the crew behind Open Cthulhu, but nuChaosium has a Gygaxian attitude to IP protection. Remember that the internet forums are a very small part of their customer base, so they may well feel that getting rid of a few vocal troublemakers is a win-win.

The BRP NOGL may well be intentionally unusable - it only needs to be there in case anyone asks why BRP isn't OGL (which happens a lot). It might even lead to a few misguided fans writing a few harmless monographs, though you can be sure nuChaosium will quickly stomp on it if they feel even the hint of a commercial threat.

As for their de facto take-over of BRP Central, they were invited in by the owner (whom I believe still foots the bill) and given control over their substantial sections of the boards. Immediately they posted a thread on "How can we make these forums work better for Chaosium", and brought with them an influx of non-BRP fans from their Moon Design forums, resulting in many of the long-time BRP posters fading out. They regularly comment in other publishers' or posters' threads with their nuChaosium hats on (such as when Mongoose is brought up, whom Jeff professes to hate with a passion, possibly for reviving interest in RuneQuest and Glorantha where Moon Design failed). I don't think anyone here would feel overly thrilled at the thought of WotC wading in and re-arranging the furniture.

I first became interested in this for the same reason most long-time BRP fans did (I was one of the BGB playtesters way back when that sort of thing happened in Yahoo! groups). Having gone through various stages of bafflement and scorn I am now mainly irritated because of the contempt it shows for the entire OGL movement which has grown up over the last 20 years - and which is about far more than retrocloning, and not at all about cloning modern games. Hence I have moved from trying to find out what's wrong with the thing and considering how it could be fixed to just warning gullible would-be 3rd party publishers against it. Calling this document OGL is an insult.

Is it possible for a company that did not issue a conract to dissolve that contract?

No, but it is possible for a company to aggressively hint that it is dissolved. 99% of legal action is simply the threat of legal action, because a boilerplate letter (or obscurely worded internet post) doesn't involve fees. None of the adjustments people have made, such as Mongoose taking down their MRQ1 SRDs, or 3PPs re-writing their books to the Legend SRD, were the result of actual lawyers getting paid. That's expensive when you're on shaky legal ground, even if you think you can out-spend the other side.

 

[TristramEvans]

I dunno, I ascribed this whole thing to incompetance. But seems quite a few people feel that there's a degree of maliciousness here.

 

[Vile Traveller]

NuChaosium abandoned BRP and Magic World as soon as they took over and made it clear they would not support it going forward because they were unprofitable, and fired the line editor for Magic World who was also the one person who had kept fan's hope for the company alive. They resurrected the RQ2 catalogue in a wildly successful Kickstarter but put no resources into it after printing the core book which they again did not expect to make money off, other than Rick editing the PDFs in his spare time over the next 3 years or so. Lots of new product lines, as mentioned by others. They have done a lot to make the company viable again, it's just nothing like the company it was. Hence I find it hard to believe that they could unintentionally screw up such a simple document so badly, especially given Jeff's often-touted legal credentials.

 

[Trippy]

All of this is making me wonder what's the legality situation with the Aquelarre rules!

Aquelarre hasn’t got anything to do with BRP in legal IP terms. Although the percentile system used has a common ancestor (RuneQuest), the game system and setting are independent with their own TM, creators and publishers.

 

[Chris Brady]

Naaah, that can’t be true, must be the licensees’ fault, nuChaosium can do no wrong, you meanie you. </sarcasm>

Chaosium? Aren't they same company that tried to copyright the Mythos? The public domain Mythos?

 

[robertsconley]

So, while we may regard the MRQ SRD as a mistake from a commercial point of view, from the point of view of making RuneQuest popular again it seems to have been a success.

In general it is not a zero sum game. RPGs thrive on the network effect the more people you have playing the system and related system the larger the market is for everyone including the original rights holder.

In addition original rights holder has a goodwill factor that is hard to match by a third party publisher. People will generally assume that a product by the original rights holder will be of superior quality unless clearly proven otherwise.

What people generally trot out the D&D 4e debacle and the fact that the D20 SRD allowed Paizo to knock off Wizards as the leading RPG company. What many don't often get that Wizards had to shot themselves in their feet many times with 4e to give Paizo that opportunity. The marketing, the fact the rules were no longer recognizably D&D, the sameness of the early adventures, and so on.

With 5th edition, Wizards created a set of rules that was recognizably D&D, and outstanding marketing along with a modest variety of supplemental products like adventures that are generally well received. WIth that Wizards was able to regain the #1 spot which it still holds.

With a SRD focused on the system's mechanics under the OGL, the company get their audience to work for them. The company is only punished in market share if they do shoddy work, poor marketing, or poor customer relations.

For example people haven't ceased buying Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition because Cepheus. Instead it has creative a larger pool of Traveller fans and increase the variety of Traveller related products. Mongoose has several outstanding follow up works, mostly Imperium, related, to their release of the Core Rules while the Cepheus Engine chugs along with other science fiction settings. Nor it is a big deal that Cepheus exists after Marc Miller gave his OK for it to appear in the Traveller Forums.

 

[CRKrueger]

You forgot one very important misstep. A lot of Chaosium’s current problems lie with the Mythos CCG debacle. Chaosium decided to get into CCGs but they were pretty late to the party. While they produced a well received game, they went all in, thinking they were going to make the kind of money that Wizards of the Coast or AEG had made. Instead, the bottom dropped out of the CCG market and they were left with a warehouse full of stock they couldn’t get rid of. This created financial problems for Chaosium. In lieu of unpaid debts, Chaosium sold Pendragon to Paul Cockburn, and Glorantha reverted to Greg Stafford.

Chaosium was then on life support, trying to eke out as much revenue from Call of Cthulhu for the minimum cost. Some mistakes were made in this period. One was to offer a limited license to Pagan Publishing, which stipulated a maximum number of publications per year. This may have been a legacy of Pagan’s initial role as the publisher of the Unspeakable Oath fanzine. However, as it became clear the Pagan were publishing excellent CoC supplements including Delta Green, this license became too restrictive but did not seem to be renegotiated. Maybe it was because Chaosium just didn’t have the manpower to approve a larger number of manuscripts. I’m sure it’s as a result of this, that Arc Dream chose to produce a new BRP derived game system based on the Legend OGL when they revived Delta Green rather than licensing CoC again, thus creating a competitor for CoC. While there were a large number of CoC
Iicensees in recent years, such as Modiphius, Cubicle 7, Goodman Games, etc., a number of these have dropped the licenses maybe because they found them too restrictive or they didn’t make enough money.

Greg Stafford took over Glorantha and founded Issaries, Inc. to exploit it. As stated by Trippy, one misstep was the RuneQuest license given to Mongoose. I’m not sure Greg Stafford fully understood the consequences of making Mongoose’s RuneQuest OGL when it was approved. In particular, the SRD contained quite a bit of Glorantha IP, such as Broos, Gorps, etc., which while great for third party developers, opened up a can of worms. This seems to have been resolved in that such material is no longer considered open, so use of Legend OGC is valid but it’s predecessor, the Mongoose RuneQuest SRD is now invalid. What the actual legality of this is moot.

In addition, Chaosium licensed CoC for WotC for a one-off d20 game. WotC later OGL’d the sanity rules, stripped of Mythos references, in Unearthed Arcana. Now, one of CoC’s major mechanical innovations was public domain.

The RuneQuest OGL then allowed enterprising individuals to create their own BRP-like games and when Lovercraft’s works went out of copyright several Cthulhu Mythos games such as Delta Green and Raiders of R’lyeh appeared. Chaosium are now trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. To be honest, they’re better off pulling this BRP-OGL and making a Community Content Program for BRP based on the 4th Edition book to replace the BRP monographs which is what I think the community mostly wants. The BRP-OGL is not going to stop Cthulhu clones produced using the Legend OGC and Delta Green OGC. Indeed, Chaosium’s actions only seemed to have made a minor project, Open Cthulhu, much more visible.

The more they tighten their grip, the more systems slip through their fingers.

 

[Trippy]

Chaosium? Aren't they same company that tried to copyright the Mythos? The public domain Mythos?

Well, no.

Chaosium successfully prevented TSR from publishing Mythos monsters in their Monster Manual back in 1980, but at the time Lovecraft’s work was not in the public domain and Call of Cthulhu was a licensed game. In resultant years, after the 75 year threshold, Lovecraft’s work became public domain. However, the situation is complicated by other writers - the term ‘Mythos’ was actually given to Lovecraft’s body of work by other writers, for example and Lovecraft himself didn’t seem to give two hoots about third parties using his material (quite probably because it had practically no commercial value in his lifetime). Similarly, some of Chaosium’s work on the Call of Cthulhu game was also original to it - which they are entitled to want to protect.

As it stands, Chaosium has a trademark for the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and a copyright on the written material within it, as a separate entity to Lovecraft’s work which is in the public domain. That is, you could produce a game based on Lovecraft’s work, but you couldn’t call it 'Call of Cthulhu' or have it unduly resemble it. This, admittedly, can be a grey area, although it’s probably worth noting that Pelgrane Press’ Trail of Cthulhu, for example, exists under a licensing arrangement with Chaosium. Delta Green doesn’t, most notably, because they have worked out a way of linking their system to the OGL, while producing original material based on Lovecraft’s Mythos that exists in the public domain.

This recent BRP document is somewhat confusing, as it stakes a claim on material referenced in the Call of Cthulhu game, along with other Chaosium properties like RuneQuest and, most gallingly, King Arthur Pendragon, for third party games that want to use the BRP logo as a marketing brand. This is confusing as it refers to itself as an ‘OGL’, when basically its purpose it to do the opposite of an open license. Chaosium don’t have any plans to really develop support for BRP, they just want to encourage third parties to use the brand in order for them to either stop publishing ‘clones’ of their existing IPs, or communicate with Chaosium so that they end up publishing through them.

 

[rmeints]

In lieu of unpaid debts, Chaosium sold Pendragon to Paul Cockburn, and Glorantha reverted to Greg Stafford.

With regards to Pendragon, Peter Corless (not Paul Cockburn) loaned Chaosium some money when they were almost bankrupt after Mythos card game sales tanked. It was originally going to be an unsecured loan, but Chaosium decided to put up the Pendragon IP as security anyway. After a short amount of time had passed, Chaosium informed Peter they were not going to repay the loan, and transferred the Pendragon IP to Peter Corless. As you might imagine, this was something that Greg Stafford was not at all happy with. He was voted down. It was one of the factors that led him to resign from the company he had founded over 20 years earlier. Greg's separation agreement included all Gloranthan IP reverting to him.

 

[Simlasa]

Chaosium successfully prevented TSR from publishing Mythos monsters in their Monster Manual back in 1980, but at the time Lovecraft’s work was not in the public domain and Call of Cthulhu was a licensed game.

What about the stuff in Deities and Demigods? I thought I'd read that, contrary to rumors, Chaosium had not complained to TSR about the mythos entries in that... though it was removed in subsequent printings.

 

[Trippy]

What about the stuff in Deities and Demigods? I thought I'd read that, contrary to rumors, Chaosium had not complained to TSR about the mythos entries in that... though it was removed in subsequent printings.

I think that was part of the same issue and case. Indeed, it may be Deities and Demigods that I’m referring to, rather than the Monster Manual.

 

[rmeints]

Chaosium? Aren't they same company that tried to copyright the Mythos? The public domain Mythos?

Chaosium has never tried to copyright the mythos. That's not how copyright works.

In 1980 Chaosium signed an exclusive RPG agreement with Arkham House, which, to oversimplify, stated they held all of the HP Lovecraft "Mythos" related IP. If you take a look at the CoC boxed sets from the early 1980s they bear the logo "by permission of Arkham House". That's why Chaosium objected when TSR published the first edition of Deities and Demigods, which included stats for Cthulhu and several other Mythos related Gods/monsters.

 

[TristramEvans]

Welcome to The Pub rmeints

 

[rmeints]

What about the stuff in Deities and Demigods? I thought I'd read that, contrary to rumors, Chaosium had not complained to TSR about the mythos entries in that... though it was removed in subsequent printings.

Chaosium complained to TSR as soon as they saw the first edition of Deities and Demigods. They issued a Cease & Desist letter. An agreement was reached wherein TSR would acknowledge that the Cthulhu IP was used with Chaosium's permission in subsequent printings, which TSR did. Ultimately, Gary Gygax decided against doing that and pulled the Cthulhu section of the book from later printings.

 

[rmeints]

As a side note to the history of Deities and Demigods and Chaosium's objections to the inclusion of the Cthulhu mythos:
As part of the agreement with TSR to use the Cthulhu creatures, Chaosium got TSR to let them include AD&D and D&D stats in their Thieves' World boxed set and supplements. The contract and correspondence related to this is in our company archives.

 

[rmeints]

NuChaosium abandoned BRP and Magic World as soon as they took over and made it clear they would not support it going forward because they were unprofitable, and fired the line editor for Magic World who was also the one person who had kept fan's hope for the company alive.

When you are on the verge of going bankrupt you are forced to make tough choices. We examined every product line and every product. We looked at what was profitable and what wasn't. Magic World wasn't profitable. That sucks, because it's a cool set of books. Cool doesn't pay the bills. Most of its supplements lost money, for whatever reason. It wasn't a decision based on quality, coolness, or anything other than cold hard economic facts, and it wasn't taken lightly or done quickly. If you spend $2 to make $1 you can't stay in business. The Line Editor of Magic World was let go when we closed our San Francisco office. He wore many hats, most of which dealt with running the day to day business of the office, the warehouse, and shipping. When those parts of his job were gone, we offered to retain him for what remained and he declined. I'm not sure what to make of the "kept fan's hope for the company alive" part of that sentence. There were a lot of people involved in keeping the company alive, including Greg, Sandy, the Ackerman brothers, volunteers, and all the employees.

 

[rmeints]

Welcome to The Pub rmeints

Thank you for the welcome.

If nothing else, I take the history of Chaosium rather seriously, warts and all. This is a great discussion. I'm not here to derail or control it. I was told about it by a friend, and thought I would look in.

I hope what I say helps.

 

[rmeints]

I’m not sure Greg Stafford fully understood the consequences of making Mongoose’s RuneQuest OGL when it was approved.

That is making the assumption that Greg approved of it, or even knew about it before it happened. Short answer, he didn't.
If you have any proof that he did, I would love to see it.

 

[TristramEvans]

If nothing else, I take the history of Chaosium rather seriously, warts and all.

So, complete tangent, do you know the story behind what happened to Pendragon 2nd Edition?

 

[robertsconley]

I posted this over on the BRP Forums

Rick Meints said

HG Well's Martians are fine to use in general, regardless of being in Malleus

Why? When the wording of the license preclude such use. My point about the license strict wording over the use of concepts and characters that appear in Chaosium branded RPGs hasn't been addressed. Instead we have various staffers, like yourself, assure people that it is OK. So why it is OK for me to use a Knight, Martians, a Dragon, a Chimera, a Merchant when it is not OK to use the Questing Beast, Hastur, Broos, etc when the wording of the licenses concerning Prohibited Content doesn't make a distinction between the two lists? Should I consider the statements made by you and other staff legally part of agreeing to the license? If so that would be highly unusual.

 

[Simlasa]

I'm not sure what to make of the "kept fan's hope for the company alive" part of that sentence.

For a good while there, official or not, Ben Monroe was what amounted to the public face of Chaosium. He was on various forums, talking up the games and being a generally enthusiastic and friendly guy. People liked him.
After the changes we got M.O.B.... and he sure ain't no Ben Monroe.

 

[Vile Traveller]

When you are on the verge of going bankrupt you are forced to make tough choices.

As I have mentioned before, I have no doubt it was an apparently sound business decision (I won't comment on might-have-beens given the lack of support MW received towards the end of the previous management's reign). My statement was in response to the choice of encouraging community content creation for RQ7 and CoC through OneBookShelf vs. the BRP document, which seems in line with the company's main interests. Now, it can be argued that BRP is not suited to licencing in that manner because it has no inherent setting, on the other hand, Magic World does and would have functioned in a similar manner. BRP, on the other hand, could have been released as an edited-down SRD (taking out any elements you wished to retain as IP) under the WotC OGL v1.0a - to much rejoicing and applause. The oft-repeated line about the OGL not working with IP other than WotC's is simply wrong, as is borne out by two decades of 3rd party publication much of which is not open content.

 

[AsenRG]

Aquelarre hasn’t got anything to do with BRP in legal IP terms. Although the percentile system used has a common ancestor (RuneQuest), the game system and setting are independent with their own TM, creators and publishers.

I know, this PR debacle just reminded me of it! That's not me saying that they are actually connected.

 

[urbwar]

For a good while there, official or not, Ben Monroe was what amounted to the public face of Chaosium. He was on various forums, talking up the games and being a generally enthusiastic and friendly guy. People liked him.
After the changes we bot M.O.B.... and he sure ain't no Ben Monroe.

Having met Ben before, he's pretty friendly in person as well. I almost got back into BRP with him doing stuff. Soon as he got dumped, i said "nope" If I wanted to do something D100 related, I'd go with Renaissance, since the Cakebread & Walton people seem pretty cool. Or OpenQuest, as I have backed a few of Newt's projects (like River of Heaven and the OpenQuest 2nd edition).

 

[Trippy]

I know this may be unpopular to say, but could it be the case that Mongoose making an OGL of their RuneQuest licence back in the 2000s, hasn’t really done any measurable harm to Chaosium’s IPs anyway? Notwithstanding the loss of control, of course.

I mean, one could cite Delta Green going independent of Call of Cthulhu, for example, but then again I own both. Buying Delta Green hasn’t inhibited me from buying Call of Cthulhu any more than it would had it been made as a Call of Cthulhu supplement.

 

[CRKrueger]

I know this may be unpopular to say, but could it be the case that Mongoose making an OGL of their RuneQuest license back in the 2000s, hasn’t really done any measurable harm to Chaosium’s IPs anyway? Notwithstanding the loss of control, of course.

I mean, one could cite Delta Green going independent of Call of Cthulhu, for example, but then again I own both. Buying Delta Green hasn’t inhibited me from buying Call of Cthulhu any more than it would had it been made as a Call of Cthulhu supplement.

The only “Harm” is people don’t have unlimited money. Still, for Mythos, I pull from CoC, ToC, DG, Cthulhu d20, RoR, etc.

The only reason someone doesn’t get my money is if the product is no good.

 

[Trippy]

The only reason someone doesn’t get my money is if the product is no good.

Precisely.

 

[rmeints]

So, complete tangent, do you know the story behind what happened to Pendragon 2nd Edition?

Greg Stafford explained the 2nd edition as a simple mistake of announcing a product before actually figuring out what the final product was going to be like. The first edition boxed set of Pendragon sold quite well. So well that they ran out of boxes, and in 1989 they sold the remaining sets of all the contents, sans box, for the lower price of $14.95 instead of $21.95. Chaosium, in true contrast to being the "Orderium" had an unfortunate history of not always updating product numbers when new editions of a game came out (like 2nd and 3rd edition of CoC both using 2301-X). When they initially planned on doing a second edition of KAP, they initially intended to keep it as a boxed set, and so they kept using CHA2701-X as the product code for it. They also announced the product to distributors.

Lo and behold, as they grew closer to determining the final KAP2 product they realized that boxed games, despite their lovely nature, were just not worth the money. The boxes cost $1, were prone to damage, and certain countries taxed them differently than books. Arkham Horror was their last boxed game in 1987. When any boxed game went out of print, the next edition of the game would be a perfect bound book. Thus, the next edition of KAP had to have a product number that made sense. They already announced 2701-X as a boxed second edition of KAP, but they weren't going to do a boxed set. The "X" designation meant it was a boxed item. Thus, while they could have had the "second" edition of KAP use the next available product number 2709, they didn't want to confuse the distributors even more with having two second editions of the game floating around in their ordering systems. In the end, Greg decided just to call the new edition of Pendragon CHA2709 the "third edition", even though there never was a second edition actually produced or sold. For all I know, he thought it was funny to do so (Greg was a well known trickster).

 

[rmeints]

I posted this over on the BRP Forums

Rick Meints said

Why? When the wording of the license preclude such use. My point about the license strict wording over the use of concepts and characters that appear in Chaosium branded RPGs hasn't been addressed. Instead we have various staffers, like yourself, assure people that it is OK. So why it is OK for me to use a Knight, Martians, a Dragon, a Chimera, a Merchant when it is not OK to use the Questing Beast, Hastur, Broos, etc when the wording of the licenses concerning Prohibited Content doesn't make a distinction between the two lists? Should I consider the statements made by you and other staff legally part of agreeing to the license? If so that would be highly unusual.

Without trying to be evasive, we'll answer that question over on that forum. We're trying to keep the discussion from getting further fragmented. You are welcome to copy any answers here, of course.

 

[Sommerjon]

For me because I like sharing the material. Other do as well and some feel they can earn a living from selling their writing.


Because I like to share my material. Able to make a profit from it give me the resources to make presentation more useful like buying art.


Because it not as useful and take more work for a person to use it their campaign which means people are less likely to use it which defeat the point of sharing the material in the first place.

There is zero reason to release a supplemental product with no support for any system. Doing that mean it more work for everybody to use the product in their campaign. By supporting a system you make it less work for hobbyists using that system and the rest are no worse off in adapting the adventure for their system. Provided care is taken in the product's layout to make it easy to separate out the system specific material.

So you have no issues with chaosium then.

You can continue to work with the ogl and By supporting a system you make it less work for hobbyists using that system and the rest chaosium are no worse off in adapting the adventure for their system. There's no issues.

 

[TristramEvans]

So you have no issues with chaosium then.

You can continue to work with the ogl and By supporting a system you make it less work for hobbyists using that system and the rest chaosium are no worse off in adapting the adventure for their system. There's no issues.

No one in their right mind would work with the BRP OGL as presented