I haven't posted more Shadows of Brimstone cards

 WARNING: In the body of this post I assume some dark motives on the part of a fellow gamer that likely didn't exist. Copyright law is a nasty tangled mess, and involves a lot of weird grey areas and few clear-cut solutions.  I misread the situation, and came off sounding like a sanctimonious prick. I still think it was the right thing for me to pull the cards in question off the internet, but I probably didn't need to be quite so "high horse" about it. I'm leaving this post intact, so that if anyone asks me what happened to those files, I can just direct them here rather than start this fight all over again.


Several weeks back, I made some cards for use with my favorite game of 2014, Shadows of Brimstone.  I posted one group of those cards to this blog, and announced I'd be making more. While I did make several more, and have played a ton of the game in these past months, I never got around to posting any other Town Item cards here. I just used them in my home.

Since then:

Some other fans have produced similar cards for their own use. Many of those were posted to the various corners of the web. This made my efforts less necessary. I slowed down my work a lot, and didn't feel very motivated to go to the trouble of posting the cards I did make. Why go to the trouble when there were so many alternatives.

At least one of those other fans made his files available via a "lightning press"-style company, where you could click a button, and pay money to have the deck printed commercially and shipped to you. The person who did this set this up so they'd get a commission from the printer, and the printer would make money, but FFP, the makers of Shadows of Brimstone would get zero money for it.

FFP, publishers of Shadows of Brimstone, asked that person to cease and desist. This was a completely reasonable request. As much as I support remix culture, copyleft, creative and artistic freedom and fan-created expansions, I can understand that Flying Frog Productions has a need to protect their Intellectual Property rights. The fan in question was profiting on these cards, which included significant amounts of text stolen straight out of FFP's rulebooks and charts. That's not cool, and FFP was in the right for asking them to stop it.

Today, that so-called fan tried to start a nasty rumor about FFP*. I'm not going to repeat it, or link to it because I don't want to give it any support. (Nor am I naming that person, nor linking to the printing company he'd partnered with, because I don't want this nastiness to drive any business or internet traffic to them.) From my perspective, it seems like that person is childishly lashing out in retaliation. I can only guess at their motives, but given the context the guesses that pop into my head are all pretty damning. That so-called fan's actions were reprehensible.

So, I'm taking the high road here, and am going to remove my versions of the Town Item cards from my previous post. FFP hasn't asked me to do anything of the sort. They probably don't even know my site exists or that I made such cards. But they've made their wishes clearly known in the more severe case of someone else making money by plagiarism and piracy, and I don't want to be (anything like) that guy.

*: Speaking of That Guy: He's responded at the original place and says it wasn't meant as a rumor, just a joke.  Feels like he's just backpedal-ing once I called him on it, but I don't know the guy, so I can't really say what's going through his head. If it was a joke, it was ill-considered. Either way, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I guess I should give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume he was so innocent regarding this that he had no idea anyone could misinterpret his words and motive the way I did. The alternative would be to pick further fights over the internet, and that's never a worthwhile use of time or energy.

(Also, FFP had previously announced they'd be releasing an "Expanded Frontier Town" supplement, which I assumed was new material, but I now realize may actually just be the sorts of Town Item cards that fans were making. I don't want my little fan project to make the original designer's previously announced expansion unprofitable. That would suck.)

I've been brainstorming entirely new cards for when my Brimstone encounter decks run low, and I'll probably still post those whenever I complete them. They'll be entirely new cards for use with the official Shadows of Brimstone blanks, not merely plagiarized or infringing text, and if I make them available, they'll be available for free.

Bitching about Scion

I'm in a mood. Where to start?

• Turns out the system "they stole from me" wasn't nearly as stolen as I thought. :) I missed one really important thing they changed from my old Improvised Weapon System: the Damage calculation.
  Damage went downhill, pretty seriously. Big skyscrapers are now (at best) +13 dice. Smacking someone with an entire Armored Personel Carrier now does less damage than a mundane axe. A 3,500 lb dumpster full of garbage dropped from +4 autosuccesses (and a bonus die) to being merely +3 dice. Across the board, the damage bonus on everything dropped by at least half, and in some cases down to a 1/3 what I'd had it at.
  This is worth mentioning, since by far the most common complaint my system ever got was "things don't do enough damage" - the new official version of the system actually amplifies that flaw. At the risk of sounding a bit pompous, my system is better.
  
  
  
• Scion: Ragnarok released today. Turns out the fixed version of Jotunblut they'd promised us isn't better. The problems with Jotunblut were that it was narrow, underpowered, and had no real basis in any of the norse myths. I'm told they only addressed the underpowered part, and made it stronger only if you also have corresponding boons in the Animal Purview. Perhaps I'm being hasty, since I haven't read it myself yet, but it sounds like a big failure. Sidhe16's alternate version is much better. Unless I hear something wonderful about some other portion of the Ragnarok book, I'll be passing.
  
  
  
• White Wolf just announced they're getting replacing their forums, and all the old threads will be going away. If there's anything there you'd like to keep, copy it to your computer before March 1st. Man, if only I'd heard about this during National Threaten To Stop Posting Week, then I could have threatened my little heart out. The fact that my threads, posts, and username will all be deleted from their site might just be enough to stop me from compulsively checking their forums every couple of days. I mean, my campaign wrapped up months ago, why do I keep putting myself through this..?
  Answer: 'Cause there's some cool people there, and I love gaming, and the core concepts of Scion are pretty nifty even if half the mechanics blow.
  

Pleasantly Surprised

The fourth section of the Scion Companion released yesterday. (I think. I noticed and downloaded it at like 2 am.)

Flipping through it, I was quite pleasantly surprised to see my own words in it. My Improvised Weapon System is in there. It's not likely to be a matter of independent parallel invention, like Terrible As The Dawn / Visage Great And Terrible was. I can say that because the system presented there uses the exact same categories, names, and nearly exactly the same stats as my system.

I put that system on the Scion Wiki, and the Scion Forums, because I intend it for other's use. I'm quite pleased and thrilled and honored that they chose to use it. It's work based on their game, and they absolutely have every right to use it.

How neat. I'm on cloud nine.

compliance with stupid laws

White Wolf has posted new rules for fan sites.

As such, in order to keep posting content here about my Scion campaign, I'll need to provide a link to White Wolf, and some basic legal text...

Copyright White Wolf Publishing, Inc.

© [year] CCP hf. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character sheets, which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf and Scion are registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. Scion, Exalted, Vampire: The Masquerade and World of Darkness are trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by CCP hf.

Overall, I'm none to happy about this development. Since I blog about a lot of RPGs, not ALL characters "herein" are copyrighted by CCP hf. Obviously, any vampires, demigods, or the like probably are. But trying to clarify what is and isn't is going to be a big pain in the ass. Even when I'm talking about Scion, it's not like White Wolf has an exclusive copyright on Thor, Zeus, and Tlazteotl, since all 3 are drawn from mythology and tradition that's at least several hundred years old. Certainly, white wolf has it's own unique flavorful take on those three characters, and some portion of it has and will influence my own thinking about them. So, yes, within the confines of Scion any reference to them is within the domain of white wolf's copyright. But if I were to blog about how I used Thor in my heavily mythological alien-grey film noir detective game "The Case Of The Stolen Thunder" that I ran more than a year before Scion released, his depiction would therein would have had nothing to do with White Wolf and owed rather more credit to Douglas Adams than to White Wolf. There's some grey areas (pardon the pun) there that the required legal text isn't flexible enough to parse.

I think this policy is a bad mistake on White Wolf's part, and a dangerous route for game companies to travel down. It's just going to generate ill-will amongst the players and fans, and reduce the number of fan sites out there, which in turn reduces the quality of gaming. Unlike the OGL, this legal notice doesn't let someone sell unofficial books of their own design. Instead, it just requires that if you want to blog "Man, I had so much fun playing in my Scion campaign last night" you have to include a copyright statement.

Personally, that seems unreasonable, yet White Wolf's site implies heavily that their lawyers will be contacting you if you make even passing mention of their products and fail to comply with this legal directive. Why spend the money on getting a lawyer to draft you a fan site policy if you weren't planning on suing someone. Man, this sucks.

By their very nature, RPGs are intended to be creative inspiration. They are not like a novel that you can be expected to "just" read - the rule book is intended to provoke you to tell your own stories. Overall, the regulation of fan sites flies in the face of that. Chances are, Larry Lessig or the ACLU could win a case against this, if either felt so inclined. Such a lawsuit, however, would probably be largely detrimental to the roleplaying hobby, so I hope it never happens.

I wish to maintain a friendly relationship with the industry which provides my primary means of entertainment, so I will comply with White Wolf's request, even though it strikes me as ridiculous that they requested it in the first place.

In an ideal world, White Wolf would drop this nonsense, and no other game companies would try anything like this again. But this is not a reasonable world, and as such we should expect the internet to become even more tightly constrained in future years. It, like so many other elements of our society, is rushing to a bottleneck that will result in Fascism, Revolution, or one proceeding the other.