Winners, Losers and the Tomb

Winners
Wow!  What a day yesterday.  All I wanted to do was celebrate my birthday and give out some free stuff. ;)

Well I have emailed the two winners, I am just waiting for them to confirm their emails.  (ok both have gotten back to me!)

So congrats to John Harp and Michael Bolam!  You can thank the d20 and d6 I rolled!

Honestly that was a lot of fun and I need an excuse to do that again soon.

Losers
The big loser of the week is (or will be) Tracey Alley for publishing Mystara books.
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2013/06/ugh-do-we-have-to-do-this-one-again-ip.html
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2013/06/ugh-do-we-have-to-do-this-one-again-ip_13.html
https://www.facebook.com/groups/mystara.reborn/
I did not set out to ruin her week but seriously folks, IP is IP is IP.

I have seen a lot of comments of "well WotC isn't doing anything with it".  Sorry, but there is no such thing as "Abondon-ware" in fact the Mystara property is alive and kicking with the release of the "Dungeons & Dragons Chronicles of Mystara Game" out next week.
Or even "She is not making a lot of money on it". The amount made (lots, little or none) doesn't matter.  I bought those books (but got a refund) because I thought they were official Mystara books. There are lots of people that would love to make more Mystara products, people that I would love to support.  But they don't make them because they know they are not allowed too.

Of course the other loser in this is me.  I thought I had found a new series to read and instead I have to drag all this out into the light.

The Tomb
The best news though is for my birthday and Father's day I am going to play some D&D with my kids!  YEAHH!

Since it is also D&D day I think a classic is in order.   So Liam and Connor will be headed to The Tomb of Horrors!

I have copies for every version of D&D (well 1st to 4th) so I am not sure which system to run it yet.  1st ed is the obvious choice, but the boys are playing 3e now and their 1st ed characters are only 1st level.

I am expecting it to be a lot of fun!

UGH. Do we have to do this one again?? IP theft, Part 2

Here is a comparison of the map from Tracey Alley's book and the map from the Expert set.

Tracey's map

The Known World from the Expert Set

And both at 50% opacity.

So not just redrawn, but maybe even traced.

In better news I am going to pick winners later tonight!

UGH. Do we have to do this one again?? IP theft

Before I go too deep here if you want to wish me a happy birthday and win a prize, go to this thread.  If you want to see me rage against the machine some more stay here.

Still with me?  Ok.

For the record I want you to know that I was not setting out to do this. I just wanted a nice little novel about Mystara and witches to read.  Been on a great Mystara kick all week.

So I treated myself to a bunch of books on my Amazon wishlist for my birthday.  Three of them were the "Witchcraft Wars" series.  I am not sure how I found them but all I knew about them that they dealt with the rise of Witchcraft in the Mystara game world.  So perfect for me right?
The cover art looked a little off from other Mystara books, but they were new and I thought that maybe WotC was trying something new.

That's not the case.

I was so excited that the first book was free for the Kindle that I grabbed it and the next two books.
You can get it too so you can see what I mean.
http://www.amazon.com/Erichs-Plea-Book-Witchcraft-Wars/dp/1453600973/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371123885&sr=1-1

There was a map inside. I was quite excited to see it to be honest. I saw Glantri..right next to Karameikos and way north of Alfheim (on the coast)

Wait. What??

I then noticed that the publisher was NOT Wizards of the Coast or Mirror Stone but "Amazon Publishing Services".

A closer dig into the other books from this author, Tracey Alley, revealed more books and two with some pretty blatant art theft.

Here are the books in question:
The Witchcraft Wars, Book 1, Book 2 and Book 3
A Very Hairy Adventure - A Kaynos History Tale with Clyde Caldwell art from a WW Werewolf game.
An Unholy Encounter (The History Tales of Kaynos) with art from an October 1988  issue of Dragon magazine.

There is a long discussion about it that I started last night over at the Facebook Mystara group.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/mystara.reborn/584320224945880/?notif_t=group_comment

But here are my point.  I bought all three books because 1. they were set in Mystara and 2. they were well reviewed. So I do feel a little like I was ripped off. I thought these were something like those "Dragon Codex" books from Mirrorstone; novels that take place in Krynn but are not part of Dragonlance (but still published by Wizards).
I mean really. A novel set in Mystara about the rise of Witchcraft? Why not just call it "Tim Read This Damn book Now!"
If you ignore the map it reads like a Mystara book. She has a Vestlander that used to be a Monk and is now a Druid. There are half-orcs that speak Hill giant. There are elves and dwarves, The writing isn;t bad, it's not great either, but I didn't mind paying whatever I paid for them BECAUSE I thought I was sending a message to WotC that Mystara books are a good idea.
Thankfully Amazon let me return the last two books of the series for a full refund.

I have started to reach out to people at Wizards, but no response yet (no surprise it's like 6:00am there now).  This is not how I wanted to spend my birthday.

Here are some links.
Her website/blog, http://traceyalley.weebly.com/novels.html
Amazon page, http://www.amazon.com/Tracey-Alley/e/B003OVMKFU/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

I should just stick with reading witch books where the witch gets pregnant by her lesbian lover.   After all, I have a reputation to maintain.

ETA: Part 2 is here.

Happy Birthday to Me! Here's a Gift for You!

Today is my birthday!

The great thing about being this age is I am pretty much at the point where if there is something I want I go out and get it.  So all I asked for this year was some time to play some D&D with my kids.

But someone needs a gift.

To celebrate this and recently reaching 1,000,000 hits I want to thank you my loyal readers.

Here's the deal.  I am gong to give away a $5 DriveThruRPG gift car and a $5 Amazon gift card.

What do you need to do to get it?
Almost nothing!
Just post below!

Make sure I have a way of contacting you (email is best) and I'll pick two people at random.
That's it.

Post. Get lucky. Win.
I'll email you and you tell me which of the two prizes you want.

Thanks so much for making the Other Side as much as it has been and here's to the next 1,000,000 hits!

White Dwarf Wednesday #68

White Dwarf continues to evolve here in the late summer of 1985.  We are now squarely in the issues where I have no personal connection with.  I wasn't reading WD anymore at this point, though I was heavily into Dragon at this point.  Also at this time I had pretty much dropped every other game I had played in favor of AD&D alone.

Our cover this time has some orcs and what could be a halfling or a small old human.  They are about to get ninja'd by a dude in the background.  I did say it was 1985.  This is another cover from Brian Williams.

Ian Livingstone discusses the data from the last reader survey.  People love the comics, which I don't get, but hey this thing is 28 years old now.  They also enjoy Open Box (which I do get).  Ian also mentions that WD subscriptions are on the rise.

Ok on to content.

First up is something we could use in the Old-school world now.  An Artificer character class for AD&D.
It's a pretty neat little class really and can help explain why the world has so many magic items.  What is nice is that was a way for dwarven characters to get some spells.  I am pretty certain I would have had at least one character using this class.

Open Box has a lot of products.  I think instead of talking about each one I'll focus on the ones that interest me.  There is a new Fantasy RPG called Dragonroar that I have never heard of.  It looks like what we call a Fantasy Heartbreaker.  It only gets 5/10 for being too narrow in scope and simple.  Maybe this why I have not heard of it.  The other game is Twilight 2000. It also only gets 5/10.  Now of course I knew about Twilight2k but I never played it.  I do recall years later picking up a copy at a game auction and it only confirmed what I had known for years.  I don't like Post Apoc games.  I like Gamma World and by extension Mutant Future, but so much in these games feels so contrived.  Plus I think I was reading it in 2002 so I rolled my eyes a lot and said "yeah. right" while reading it.
Interestingly enough there is a breakdown on what all the different aspects of the review mean.  Only about 60+ issues too late, but A for effort guys!

Nest is Critical Mass, an ad for the new TSR Conan game.

Crawling Chaos, another well liked article is next.  This time dealing with clergymen and hypnosis.
Beneath the Waves is a new series of dealing with aquatic adventures in AD&D.
Solo Adventures deals with running solo supers games.

The first adventure of the issue is Lone Dragon a scenario for Traveller.  It includes deck plans for the Lone Dragon.  These adventures are usually pretty hard for me to judge.  This is followed by The Travellers which has stats for two of the main characters.

The Star of Darkness is an AD&D adventure for 3rd to 4th level characters.  It uses the artificer class and would be a good introduction to the class.
Treasure chest has a lot of new spells.

While not an inspiring issue, certainly a serviceable one.  RuneQuest material has dropped off considerably but we have picked up more Call of Cthulhu which is nice.  AD&D continues to be popular though I despite my complaints on quality I do miss Fiend Factory.  

We are about to hit the 70s and 1986. My memory of this time tells me there was a lot going on publishing wise even if the industry was in the midst of a cool down period.  I'll see if the issues track with my recollections.

There was supposed to be a giant-sized poster with this issue.  My garage-sale copy is missing that.   Anyone know what it was?

I Cut up My B/X books!

Well after 32 years I finally did it.

I sliced up my Basic and Expert books to put into a binder.
Er...sort of.
Instead I printed out my copies of the Basic and Expert books out on PDF.

I printed them a page to a side because my printer here at home can't do dual sided.

Rearranged them by chapters.

And put some tabs in.

So far it looks really nice.  No cover yet, need to buy more ink.

OSR Specific Publishers?

Hey all!

I am working on a few side projects and it dawned on me that I am not 100% certain who all the players are in the OSR publishing biz.

Sure I know the big names. Even some of the smaller names.  But who else is there?

In particular I was looking for the smaller publishers to see what they are doing.  Maybe even feature a couple now and then here.

So. Who are you?  What do you sell?  If you are a small publisher then let me (and everyone else) know!!