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Post Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2012 10:28 am 
 

Munafik wrote:does Eldritch Enterprises have any plans to offer their products in OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, or Swords & Wizardry statistics in future?

Indeed we do. Negotiations and production are in progress as we speak. :)

We understand your position and it's not rare. However, I refused to cede WotC the rights to as much as half of our all-new work by making them OGL products.

Sorry if my post rains a bit on Eldritch Enterprises' parade

Not at all. We welcome honest and well-considered opinions, such as those you present. (Ill-considered impulse rants, otoh, are another matter...)

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Post Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2012 1:37 pm 
 

Thanks for taking the time to address my concerns, Mr. Mentzer. I understand your reluctance to cede any of your rights to WotC, but am pleased that you are still willing to please us lazy gamers that want to be able to integrate a module directly into their 1st Edition AD&D/D&D games with little to no work. As soon as the modules are converted to one of the three 1st Edition AD&D-compatible systems I mentioned above, I will immediately place an order for print copies of such.


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Post Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 11:01 am 
 

ExTSR wrote:We understand your position and it's not rare. However, I refused to cede WotC the rights to as much as half of our all-new work by making them OGL products.


While I applaud everybody at Eldtrich Enterprise for releasing their first batch products, there is a big misconception here about the Open Game License. You are not ceding Wizards any rights you are not granting to everybody else. Also as a practical matter Wizards has only used the OGL once beyond the d20 SRD in any of their published product and has never used any third party material. And more importantly for adventures you can declare everything but the actual stat blocks themselves as product identity.

For example on page one of the preview PDF you have the Behemoth.
---------------------------------------------------------
... akin to famous Japanese monsters of cinematic history.

Spider Behemoth
AC 0[20], HD 50; HP 750; ATK 1; DMG 10d10 (crushing foot); MV 50'  <----------- This is the only thing that would be under the OGL.
Deameanor: Does not take....
Appearance: ....
-------------------------------------

For examples of this see Necromancer Game and Goodman Games Adventure modules. This is an example of the boilerplate they use

Designation of Product Identity: The following items are hereby designated as Product Identity in accordance with Section 1(e) of the Open Game License, version 1.0: Any and all Dungeon Crawl Classics logos and identifying marks and trade dress; all proper nouns, capitalized terms, italicized terms, artwork, maps, symbols, depictions, and illustrations, except such elements that already appear in the System Reference Document.
Designation of Open Content: Subject to the Product Identity designation above, all creature and NPC statistic blocks are designated as Open Gaming Content, as well as all material derived from the SRD or other open content sources.

Using this on a new monster means that not even the name is under the OGL only the actual mechanical stats.

I am pointing this out because I am see that you post on various Old School forums. From my experience is the stat block format and lack of compatibility will be a deal breaker for many if not most of your target audience. It would be a shame if they didn't sell as well as they could have because of this. Particularly it from a misunderstanding of the OGL.

I do realize that one of your partners had a bad experience with the OGL. While I am a known advocate for open gaming, I realize that there are people that want to keep greater control over their work, and Ithe OGL can accommodate this.

ExTSR wrote:
Munafik wrote:does Eldritch Enterprises have any plans to offer their products in OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, or Swords & Wizardry statistics in future?

Indeed we do. Negotiations and production are in progress as we speak.


I hope this works out and looking forward to seeing what else you and the rest of the folks at Eldritch come up with.

  

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Post Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 1:31 pm 
 

Thanks for your input, Rob. Your excellent work is well-known in the biz; thanks for those contributions to our mutual hobby.
(For those who don't know of RSC, see HERE.)


Eldritch has established legal and ethical positions with these generic non-OGL versions of our products. In doing so we are breaking new ground, instead of following the route so many others have taken.

I haven't had any 'bad experiences' with the OGL, but we feel that there are legal implications in using it, beyond the simple matters you bring up. We are also not willing to cede that the OGL is irrevocable (time will tell).

As noted above, we WILL be doing OGL versions to specifically target various game systems. We're quite aware that most gamers are math-resistant and don't want to do the conversions.

Taking the long view, I feel that sales data for these generic versions (and similar generic treatments of other products to come) may prove to be a minor share of overall company revenues, but the products amply serve their purposes at this time.

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Post Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 3:47 pm 
 

ExTSR wrote:Thanks for your input, Rob. Your excellent work is well-known in the biz; thanks for those contributions to our mutual hobby.
(For those who don't know of RSC, see HERE.)


Thanks for the shout out.

ExTSR wrote:Eldritch has established legal and ethical positions with these generic non-OGL versions of our products. In doing so we are breaking new ground, instead of following the route so many others have taken.

I haven't had any 'bad experiences' with the OGL, but we feel that there are legal implications in using it, beyond the simple matters you bring up. We are also not willing to cede that the OGL is irrevocable (time will tell).


I would be interested in seeing a blog post, essay, etc on yours and the rest of Eldritch's thoughts on this.  Sounds like there been a lot of thought put into this.

ExTSR wrote:As noted above, we WILL be doing OGL versions to specifically target various game systems. We're quite aware that most gamers are math-resistant and don't want to do the conversions.

Taking the long view, I feel that sales data for these generic versions (and similar generic treatments of other products to come) may prove to be a minor share of overall company revenues, but the products amply serve their purposes at this time.


I saw that in a earlier post here and made sure I mention that in my blog post over on Bat In The Attic.  It would a good thing to know how well generic adventure products sell. My Points of Light and Blackmarsh books are not a good indicator of the generic format as the hex crawl format precludes having long stat blocks of any short. So it wouldn't matter if I was using d20, GURPS or any number system for those books.

The only suggestion I would make in improving your generic format is not make a d20 style stat block but rather compress much of it into a stat line. That way more focus is on the adventure text. For example something like

Spider Behemoth
POW: 1,500% (not a typo!); DEF 50%; HT 70; MV 50'  INIT -20%(motionless)/+25%(moving); DMG 10d10 (crushing foot); SP Huge Mass;
Demeanor: <text>
Appearance: <text>

Doing this will avoid the issues that d20 adventures had with the same style of stat block.

  

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Post Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 4:07 pm 
 

robertsconley wrote:The only suggestion I would make in improving your generic format is not make a d20 style stat block but rather compress much of it into a stat line.... Doing this will avoid the issues that d20 adventures had with the same style of stat block.

I originally wanted a statline instead of a statblock, for space issues. We went with the majority vote amongst the partners. ::sigh:: A one-line method is certainly not out of the question in future products.

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Post Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 4:08 pm 
 

And for those of you seeking conversion help, here's a cheatsheet (over at DF):

http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewt ... 2&start=24


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Post Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 11:05 pm 
 

ExTSR wrote:And for those of you seeking conversion help, here's a cheatsheet (over at DF):

http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewt ... 2&start=24


Excellent! Thanks for the link.

  

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Post Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2012 11:08 pm 
 

...and the beginnings of a blogreview:

http://www.tenkarstavern.com/2012/04/re ... first.html

  


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Post Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2012 7:53 am 
 

ExTSR wrote:And for those of you seeking conversion help, here's a cheatsheet (over at DF):

http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewt ... 2&start=24


Not getting this link to work unfortunately. With regards European shipping costs, I'm happy with PDF copies for now, looks good :)


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Post Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2012 11:02 am 
 

Recently I posted a Stat Conversion Crib Sheet for Lich Dungeon Level 1 (newly available from Eldritch Ent. Ltd.) over at Dragonsfoot. Since then they've had massive SQL errors. (I'm not arrogant enough to believe that my post has anything to do with that).

Since the info has become temporarily inaccessible, and our own website still sucks like a floozy with a black hole, here's the info, actually expanded somewhat: on GoogleDocs. (I hope this works, I'm not great with webstuff.)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ypj ... hpWlQ/edit


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Post Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2012 1:07 pm 
 

Fantastic, thank you sir!

I've got the low level Eldritch modules ready to check out later this evening, looking forward to reading them, even if it is only PDF  :D


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Post Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2012 3:19 pm 
 

Change the link on the Bat in the Attic post to point to Google Docs. Thanks for letting us know.

  

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Post Posted: Sat May 12, 2012 6:59 pm 
 

Anything in paper yet?


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Post Posted: Sat May 26, 2012 6:42 pm 
 

FormCritic wrote:Anything in paper yet?


Another two weeks and I'll bump the question.  Print versions sometime soon?


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Post Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 4:38 am 
 

http://eldritchent.com/

Checking out their website it doesn't look like it has been updated since Sept 2011.

As I understand it there were softcover print copies at Garycon and I have heard mention that there will be hardcover copies at Northtex but otherwise, nothing...


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Post Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 5:05 am 
 

I got a mail yesterday from drivethrurpg saying that the covers had been re-designed and were available for download
I'm not sure if that's a good bit of news or not.


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Post Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 9:46 am 
 

Per Frank, on March 30...

ExTSR wrote:Same site should offer paper shortly (or so I'm told).


So, those of us who can't get to a con would like to buy these...


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