Before the weekend starts however, I have the final ‘midterm’ for my Philosophy class. I know I was complaining earlier about how philosophy hurts my brain (which it does), but I’m really glad I had the opportunity to take the class. I was able to learn a few new things and I was also able to find ways to help understand why I hold certian beliefs and defend things that I believe. I’m sort of disapointed that the course is over, as there are several subjects that we didn’t have the opportunity to cover that I feel would have been really interesting to cover (for example, we only had a single class on Metaphysics).

The course itself was presented in an interesting manner, utilizing popular movies to illustrate philosophical concepts, which I think really helped solidify my understanding. The movies that we watched were “Waking Life”, “The Matrix”, “Bruce Almighty”, and “Being John Malkovich”. I really enjoyed the format and I am disapointed that we were not able to cover “The Matrix Reloaded” and the metaphysical concepts that are presented there, as I think that potentially could be extremely interesting.

Onto this weekend!

Saturday is Free RPG Day. What is it? Much like Free Comic Book Day, members of the industry prepare special items to give away to help introduce the hobby to a new generation. This is the second year of the event and I hope that it becomes as successful as its comic counterpart. I’ve been organizing events at Happy Harbor Comics volume 2 and 3 to assist with the flow of the day. If you’ve ever had the inclination to give an RPG a try, please come out. We have short (1-2 hour) games running throughout the day using various different settings, which barely scratches the surface of what is being given away (or what is available).

On Sunday, Emily and I are going to Cirque du Soleil’s Saltimbanco, which is very exciting. We have fantastic seats, which I’m really hoping work well. This will be my third Cirque show, the others being La Nouba and Varekai. I’ve really enjoyed the other shows I’ve seen, so this should be no different. Also, later this summer, Emily and I will be seeing O during our trip to Las Vegas.

Anyway, I’m going to have a busy weekend, but it should be some fun.

They (Wizards, that is) finally released the system license last night. It was supposed to be done when the books were released, on June 6th, but it turns out that this delay is the least of their problems.

You might remember that in a previous rant I described the Open Gaming License as a “fantastic idea”. This license allowed third parties to publish a vast array of material for use with the d20 system. It also allowed other third parties to make use of that material; as with Open Source software, once under the OGL, always under the OGL. The license was progressive, and popular, and led to several of my favorite products, including PCGen, the Hypertext d20 SRD, and the Mongoose Pocket Guides. Many, many third parties published 3rd Edition adventures as well as sourcebooks.

(A short aside: there has been at least one jackass on the forums whinging about how the only thing the OGL and the SRD for 3rd Edition did was to allow people to play without paying Wizards of the Coast. First of all, lots of people do that; I doubt that every player in every game you’ve ever played in had their own, personal copy of each of the books being used. Second, the original core rulebooks are nice enough, but not necessarily convenient, especially when it comes to finding specific rules. Everyone I know, including myself, uses sites like d20srd.org in order to look up rules and stats quickly, even though we own the actual books.)

Obviously feeling left out of the deluge of content that this license allowed others to create, the 4th Edition license is nothing like open. At least they changed the name to Game System License; they aren’t even pretending to continue their original system.

One of the best features of an open-style license is the fact that, once something is released under the terms of such a license, it is impossible to retract, retroactively change, or otherwise screw with that content. You might release new material under a different license, but whatever has already been released under the OGL remains under the OGL, and nothing can change that.

Witness the first idiocy of the 4th Ed GSL - section 6.

Upon the first publication date of a Conversion, Licensee will cease all manufacturing and publication of the corresponding Converted OGL Product and all other OGL Products which are part of the same product line as the Converted OGL Product, as reasonably determined by Wizards (”Converted OGL Product Line”). Licensee explicitly agrees that it will not thereafter manufacture or publish any portion of the Converted OGL Product Line, or any products that would be considered part of a Converted OGL Product Line (as reasonably determined by Wizards) pursuant to the OGL.

If you are a publisher of OGL material, and you want to update that material to 4th Edition, you are required to cease publishing that material under the OGL. Let me state that again. If you publish a book under the 4th Ed GSL, you are legally obligated to discontinue producing any similar material under the 3rd Ed OGL. These assholes can’t retract the OGL, so they’ve decided to attempt to force publishers into giving up their OGL rights a different way. Note that the 4th Ed GSL also forbids you from taking an original 4th Edition item you have created and releasing it under the 3rd Ed OGL in the future.

Speaking of retracting licenses, in further direct opposition to the benefits of an open license, the 4th Ed GSL section 2 specifies that not only may Wizards retract the GSL at any time, they can change the terms at any time, and in order to continue publishing your own material, you must accept the new terms.

Updates or Revisions to License. Wizards may update or revise the License at any time in its sole discretion by posting the updated License on its website… Licensee’s continued use of any Licensed Materials … including without limitation any publication or distribution of Licensed Products … confirms Licensee’s acceptance of any changes to the License.

Don’t like the new terms? Your only option is to stop publishing completely. In fact, section 11.3 provides the actual terms of terminating your license: destruction of all inventory created utilizing the license.

Upon termination, Licensee will immediately cease all use of the Licensed Materials and will destroy all inventory and marketing materials in Licensee’s possession bearing the Compatibility Logo.

Yes, Virginia, if your license is terminated by you, or by them, you are legally obligated to destroy all of your 4th Ed GSL materials.

So, you’re a 3rd party publisher and you still think it would be a good idea to publish material under the 4th Ed GSL? Well, good luck with that. Here’s a nice kick in the balls from Wizards:

Reprinting. Licensee will not publish or reprint (a) … or (b) definitions of any 4E References, whether or not similar to those listed in any product published by Wizards.

You are not allowed to reprint any material from the Wizards books. No problem, you say, that seems reasonable. Good, now lets look at your adventure module. Wow, that kobold wizard looks like a nasty customer. Lots of feats, spells, magic items, all that good stuff. What do they all do? Well, under the 3rd Edition OGL, you could print at least a summary of the effect of each feat and spell. Now, you get to refer the already overworked DM back to the Monster’s Manual and the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide. I know I look forward to having to look up every detail of a creature each time my players run into it. Two types of undead in that crypt? Congratulations, that’s two times the page flipping! Want to look it up online? Oh, you can’t, because there is no longer a real SRD.

But why stop there… Whats that you say, section 5.5?

no Licensed Product will (a) include web sites, interactive products, miniatures, or character creators

That’s not just a little love-tap to the mean bean machine, either - that’s a full-on, steel-toed, premeditated scrotum smashing. In order to protect their beloved (and belated, and, oh, by the way, $15 a month) Dungeons and Dragons Insider (which will provide, someday, all of these prohibited items), they have banned them entirely from third party production. History will show that Wizards doesn’t have the most sterling record of software production, as they were last seen outsourcing production to a third party to fix their bugs. And let’s not forget that D&D Insider itself, long promoted to be available when the books were first published, is now several months behind schedule. You can’t make your own character generator, at least not for distribution, and you can’t use theirs either! Awesome!

I guess all this just boils down to the following opinions: Wizards has backtracked on their previous commitment to the gaming community; third-party publications related to 4th Edition won’t be nearly as useful or as prevalent as they were for 3rd Edition; third-party software tools for 4th Edition will be non-existent.

Ah well. The best news from this whole colossal fuck-up is that they can’t revoke the OGL.

*I seem to have a compulsion to write all of this down, and make it public, even though most people who will be reading this either already agree with me, or don’t care. At least I have thus far avoided wading into the flame wars on the forums, which would almost certainly lead to self-inflicted bodily harm to my person.

3 seconds after the last panel, a lizard man comes running down the isle. Guess who he attacks first.

George Takei is taking advantage of the recent lift of the ban on gay marriage in California to wed his long time first officer, Brad Altman. Let’s hope Brad chooses less life endangering attire.

When I was drawing Mr. Sulu, I realized that he looks like a cross between Yoko Ono and (current face) Micheal Jackson. Combine that with the fact that he’s a vibrant 71 years old and, Mr. Altman, you’ve got yourself a catch.

I wonder if they will toast their love with delicious Tranya. Only if Balok is catering, one would assume. It’s more likely that Clint Howard would be working as a busboy for the catering company.

While you wait patiently for your invite to the Takei-Altman nuptuals, you should really watch this (thanks Dram).

I am running this scenario using a slightly modified version of Dan Bayn’s Wushu rules, which encourage interesting and exciting actions by awarding dice for each relevant detail.My online dice roller can be found at http://www.zanysite.com/tabletoprpgfun/dice.php Most of the players still haven’t quite grasped how and when to break their creative writing and storytelling with the action movie stunt descriptions, but I can’t fault them - they’re all interesting to read.

http://forums.valorin.net/smf/index.php/board,2.0.html

Star Trek, a 2009 sci-fi film that is directed by J.J. Abrams and written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci is the eleventh Star Trek film. It is a prequel to The Original Series which features characters like Kirk that will be played by Chris Pine, Spock by Zachary Quinto, Scotty by Simon Pegg, McCoy by Karl Urban, Sulu by John Cho, Chekov by Anton Yelchin and Uhura by Zoe Saldana. The shoot is supposed to last for 85 days that will be held shot on 11 sets in the Paramount back lot with a two-week location shoot in Iceland. This film, with an estimated budget of over 150 million US dollars making it the largest among any Star Trek film to date, will be released on May 8 2009.

The development of the World of Warcraft movie is ongoing at the moment, and just a few weeks ago there was some information released on the movie. This movie has a budget of over $100 million committed to it, which just relieves gamers even more to know that it will definitely not be a low effort film.

The movie will take place approximately a year before the start of World of Warcraft, and will include races that you have played and lands that you have wandered in. This is great because it means that players are really going to be able to relate to the World of Warcraft movie and that it will be familiar to them.

This is really important because a lot of video games have been adapted to the big screen and when they did they were so different that they really were not all that successful.

It is actually more of an adventure than a movie, and although no director or cast has yet been assigned, as already stated here the movie is already in production and so information on this will be released in the near future.

World of Warcraft Movie - Find Information

If you want to find more information on the World of Warcraft movie, there are various websites and other resources available that you can visit regularly and keep updated on the movie and on its release date, because this is still subject to change.

Of course the Blizzard website is going to be one of the best places to go for information on the movie, as they are the creator of the Warcraft game and so they are going to be the first to have information and details on this movie. Even checking back with them every month will be helpful and help keep you up to date.

Gamers and producers of the movie alike are sure that it will be a big success, and it is really a surprise that a World of Warcraft movie is only being released now, since the video game has been around and intensely popular for years now.

By Games Editor

Attention World Of Warcraft Players - Don’t Buy Gold! Discover the most effective methods for making gold and learn the secrets of hardcore players. Visit Wow Opulence for more details …

Share This

Check out the gallery here.

If you are interesting in helping, its 100% php/mysql backend and I’ll accept any help I can get. Its a bit rough to post publically right this very moment, but if you’re interested let me know and i’ll shove the SVN repo somewhere for everyone to nab once I get it somewhat stable.