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Hermes Serpent wrote:I suspect that MoL fell prey to page count restrictions.

True, though without the Hobbits the Lake-men would have fit nicely. Then, instead of a Lake-town supplement, the LM Screen might have been packaged with a booklet on The Shire! Maybe that could be done with a revised LM Screen.

Otaku-sempai wrote:

Hermes Serpent wrote:I suspect that MoL fell prey to page count restrictions.

True, though without the Hobbits the Lake-men would have fit nicely.

It's very true that Lake-men would have fitted nicely with the Attributes ranges of a Hobbit: low Body (mostly merchants and city dwellers) and high Heart (living and prospering under the shadow of the dragon and all that, and open to travel and mixing with foreign cultures).

Of course a game about Middle-Earth must have Hobbits in the first rulebook.

Glorelendil wrote:I'm curious about the Modiphius deal with the Howard estate. Aren't most of the original REH stories, and the Conan character himself, in the public domain? I know if I were developing a Conan game I wouldn't pay a whole lot for rights to the few things that are still under copyright.

But I guess that's waaaaaaay off-topic.

Kind of off topic, but relevant... Characters can be protected multiple ways. In the US, characters may be covered by the copyright of the book they appear in. Names, graphic images, and distinctive looks can be trademarked. Note that derivative works require the permission of the original work's owner at the time of the release of the derivative... and that permission often included a requirement of assigning rights to the characters, their names and likenesses, to the original work's owner...

Note that Trademarks do not go into the public domain on a specific date... but do go when not defended.

There is an article, posted in 2002, that lists the the public domain works within the corpus of Howard's works...
http://www.robert-e-howard.org/AnotherT ... vised.html

Conan Properties Incorporated held the Conan Trademark through 1982 - as the appellate decision in Conan Properties Inc. vs Conans Pizza Inc. shows. http://openjurist.org/752/f2d/145/conan ... -pizza-inc

So, even tho' the works may be in the public domain, the character is not. At least, not as recently as 1982, and probably considerably later.

That all said, enforcing the trademarks can be tricky. It's easier to buy rights from a probable holder and cry foul if you get sued by a different (presumably actual) holder... and it's happened a few times...

And in some cases, IP's have multiple valid holders with different rights...
EG: Battlestar Galactica, Middle Earth, Spider Man...

I started reading up on the Conan thing, and it looks like the copyright claim on Conan is really sketchy. B.S., even. But for small game publishers its probably easier to pay fees than to go to court.

IANAL, but it seems bizarre that anybody could copyright a character when the books with that character are in the public domain. Sounds like something that would fall apart in front of an actual judge.

Maybe some big Hollywood studio will decide to start making Conan movies, and they'll just laugh at Paradox.

Glorelendil wrote:I started reading up on the Conan thing, and it looks like the copyright claim on Conan is really sketchy. B.S., even. But for small game publishers its probably easier to pay fees than to go to court.

IANAL, but it seems bizarre that anybody could copyright a character when the books with that character are in the public domain. Sounds like something that would fall apart in front of an actual judge.

Maybe some big Hollywood studio will decide to start making Conan movies, and they'll just laugh at Paradox.

Conan's not protected by Copyright - he's protected by Trademark.

Understanding the difference is important to anyone working with Intellectual Properties of any kind.

aramis wrote: Conan's not protected by Copyright - he's protected by Trademark.

AND BY CROM!!

Yes, I got sloppy with the terms. But pedantry aside, it seems strange that anyone could trademark a character from public domain stories. (Especially seeing that it is a person's name, still in use.)

Glorelendil wrote:Yes, I got sloppy with the terms. But pedantry aside, it seems strange that anyone could trademark a character from public domain stories. (Especially seeing that it is a person's name, still in use.)

Both the US and UK have preventions for that for terms (or names) that have come to common use. Hobbit and Conan haven't yet hit that point.

And it's not just pedantry - Trademark is a MUCH different set of IP laws in the US and UK from the Copyright laws... not having a fixed end date, just requiring continued use and defense, provides for preventing use well after copyright has ended.

Note that the trademark collection on the Conan property is derived from the comics, movies, and unique title-logo versions of the name... not just the descriptive of the character and the proper nouns "Conan the Cimmerian" and "Conan the Barbarian"...

Pedantry is a function of presentation, not information.

I'm the Original Poster of the comprehensive list of Tolkien-authored Peoples.

Seeing the Adventures in Middle-earth table of contents, I acknowledge that C7 has struck a fair balance between sticking to what the TOR has already covered (Wilderland), while making it possible for there to be characters from Eriador and the South from the get-go.

I'm relieved that even though the campaign area will initially be bound to Wilderland, the 5E book includes the key PC Cultures from throughout the Westlands: the Dunedain, Men of Bree, Riders of Rohan, Men of Minas Tirith.

Looking forward to it.