Wednesday, August 31, 2016

An update on the Majestic Stars and other things


First off, I will posting part 20 of the Fantasy Sandbox series tomorrow. I plan to update the sandbox series every Tuesday and Thursday until it done. Here to hoping that plans don't go awry.

Some bad news on the Majestic Star front, the campaign fell apart due to real life circumstances so that is done for now.  Plus I contacted Green Ronin and they are not interested in any type of third party development for the AGE system right now. 

However luckily half of the work I did on the Majestic Star is pulled out of the d20 Modern SRD so I will able to reuse a lot of it for a similar game. Right now I am pulling together DnD 5e, d20 Modern, and the Mongoose Traveller SRD and seeing what I get. 

Hopefully I get enough done to inflict it on the J Squad at Gold Star Anime on the 10th.

So everybody knows Jason Kemp of Samardan Press pulled together an excellent retro-clone of Traveller with the Cepheus Engine System. What happened is that Mongoose Publishing went ahead and released a 2nd edition of Mongoose Traveller. The problem is that they decided to drop OGL support and the Logo program in favor using the Community Content program over on the various OBS web sites. Well that problem is fine if you want to publish Third Imperium related material. But for publishers with original setting it totally screwed them.

And just like DnD 4e, they don't have to wait for Mongoose to fix the situation, they returned using the 1st edition SRD and now using a variety of euphemism to indicate that they are still supporting traveller (2d6, etc).  This situation leads to people, like Jason Kemp, to create full rule sets to serve as a reference and play aid for these publishers.

The lesson to be learned from all this, is the if you are a publisher with a long established product line and you decide to break compatibility either totally or partially. Your customers won't view this as a favor. So you better have a damn good reason other than you want to "improve" it.
  

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