Anyway, the head of this gaming "company" claimed he was Margeret Weis' son [...] Fortunately, I have no reason to believe he was telling the truth. I hope.
Maybe he was.
Edit: Anecdote removed 'cause it looks like it's a moot point nowadays. :/
__________________
-----------------------------
Cumberland Games & Diversions
Uresia Supplements • Sparks Paper Minis • Risus: The Anything RPG
Pokéthulhu • The All-Systems Library • Free Gaming Oddities and More ... www.cumberlandgames.com
Last edited by S. John Ross; 01-12-2005 at 03:12 PM..
Sorry if this has been covered, but nothing recent came up in a search.
The Winter 2005 Games Quarterly catalogue appeared on my desk this afternoon, and the first page I opened it to happened to be a full-page add for a Firefly rpg, based on the upcoming movie. Margaret Weis Productions is apparently publishing the game in April, 2005. However, a visit to http://www.margaretweis.com/ doesn't seem to produce any information.
Has anybody heard anything about whether this is actually coming, and whether it'll be bumped until Serenity's new September release?
Oh, and for those worried about such things, the ad does include an image from the movie that may very well be considered a spoiler.
Derek
Guys,
I can confirm for you that Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd. will be producing the Serenity Roleplaying Game. We originally planned for an April release to tie closely into the film's original release date (hence the Games Quarterly information) but it will now be pushed back to premiere at GenCon in Indianapolis this summer.
Our company is brand-new, but you may recognize some of the names working on the new game. I'm Jamie Chambers, and am working as lead designer. My credits include the current line of Dragonlance titles for the d20 System (including the recent War of the Lance, along with Sovereign Stone, Snarfquest d20, and Sundered Reaches. The team includes Margaret Weis (New Yorkes Times best-selling author), Tracy Hickman (ditto, plus numerous classic RPG credits), Tony Lee ([i]Extreme Vengeance[i]), James M. Ward (Metamorphasis Alpha and others too numerous to count), Lester Smith (Dark Conspiracy), and Andrew Peregrine ("Spacefarers and Prarie Folk" in Eden Studios Presents #1). We have created a new RPG (non-d20) that is now undergoing extensive development and playtesting. The game line start with the core rulebook, a GM's screen (with supplemental booklet), and a full-length adventure.
We went into this project with love for this world and its characters, along with tremendous respect for its creator, Joss Whedon. The film should be an amazing ride, and we are hard at work creating an RPG experience that will let fans adventure in the 'Verse with an easy-to-learn, fun-to-play game. We are working with our licensor to finalize our schedule, make an official press release, and create a website that will be the online home of the game and all major announcements.
In other words... we are busting our humps to make the best gorram game in the 'Verse. We have a great crew on our small ship and we're having way too much fun. Dong-ma?
In my misspent youth working with a sad-sack gaming company (which had an innovative set of LARP rules and a good setting, but labored under the impression that they could ever publish said rules or make money off them), we were at one convention where the big LARP was being run by a competitor.
As with most LARPs, this was World of Darkness (not MET) with a simplified dice mechanic and some really bad Storytellers -- you know, the types who bring their Arete 7 blood-bound Mages who are allied with the now-dead Prince of the City into a by-the-numbers "elect a new prince" plotline when all of the players were Generation 13-to-11 vampires.
Anyway, the head of this gaming "company" claimed he was Margeret Weis' son -- although he didn't have the same last name, because he "didn't want to trade on her reputation." Even though I personally heard about his putative mother several times in the first hour of meeting him.
The point is, he considered himself a real hardcore game designer and at one point said he'd invented over two hundred completely original gaming systems by the age of 20, and had been "almost published" more than fifty times by then.
So the original post immediately made me flashback to this jerk-off, and I am filled with the fear that he was actually, you know, related to Weis and would be developing the Serenity game.
Fortunately, I have no reason to believe he was telling the truth. I hope.
I have no idea who you met. Margaret Weis' son was David Baldwin (co-author of Dark Heart and Testament of the Dragon), who I'm sorry to say passed away two years ago. The people working on the Serenity RPG are listed in my previous post.
Eden didn't ask for it - they decided it wasn't economically viable for them at the time.
I hope this doesn't suck. I also want to know why I was snubbed from the playtest. Okay, so maybe the group is full, but what about an email saying "sorry, we're full"?
Steve (and others),
Please accept my apologies if you did not receive a response about the playtester group. I try to answer all of my e-mails, but I'm currently using a combination of two spam-filters (one from our ISP and the other in MS Entourage) to try and weed out the (literally) hundreds of excess e-mails I receive. I'm finding out, more and more, that I'm losing legitimate e-mails. I'm looking to make some changes to improve the situation.
The group is essentially full, but we might be able to squeeze in a few extra bodies if you're still interested.
If this is true, why in the gorram plu-perfect special place in Hell didn't Eden get this??!!
My second thought is:
Whose legs do I have to break so that Eden does get it?
Eden's stance on this:
We tried for the Firefly license, which is different than the Serenity license.
FOX holds the rights to Firefly where Universal holds the rights to Serenity.
Now if we were to do a Serenity RPG - you cant use materials from Firefly - since those materials are held by a different film studio (ie Universal). Now unless you setup a deal for both --- in that case - awesome... but then you would have two studios to get approvals from and then you get the LOTR/Decipher fiasco where you need to run things by the Tolkien Estate and the movie studio.
FOX wanted, what we thought at the time and still do, too much money for the Firefly license.
FOX lost money on Firefly and anything they can recoup via licensing is good for them.
Serenity is its own property - seperate from Firefly... much like Evil Dead is from Army of Darkness (hence many of the reasons the RPG and Card Game were delayed - we thought we could use material and images from the Evil Dead movies)
The people at Margaret Weis Productions are good people and Im sure they can make it work.
We just have too much on our plate to take a risk on the Firefly property.
BTW you would have to break my legs to convice me
__________________
George Vasilakos
Zombielord - Eden Studios www.edenstudios.net
Linear Mode
