Cobwebbed Dragon wrote:
But not the only people that can produce material - Cadaver Draconis, The Hollow Men, the treatment on Ongus, and all the adventures and downloads that are available on the Cobwebbed Forest and Library of Hiabuor mean that we neither need to rely, nor have relied, on SKG for new material. If anything, the expectation that SKG will release something has stifled community output - waiting before posting our own community projects to see if SKG either might be interested in the content to publish 'officially', or making sure that what we have been working on doesn't conflict with something SKG has in their pipeline.
I'm afraid that I just don't agree. Let's look at some of the material you mention as having been released - and bear in mind I'm writing this as somebody with some view of things from the inside:
Cadaver Draconis - I think it is pretty much guaranteed that
Cadaver Draconis[/i] would never have seen the light of day without 'official'
Dragon Warriors being in existence. Most of it was originally written as part of the original draft of what became the
Players Guide and it would not have been written if that book had not been in development. For various reasons, it didn't wind up in the
Players Guide but that is what it was written for and it really is the only reason that it exists. Now, having been written, nobody had access to it except for a small number of us involved in writing the
Players Guide and I don't think the necessary effort would have been made to resurrect and save that material if not for two very important factors - (1) the knowledge that the
Players Guide was being successful enough in terms of sales to make it likely that enough people would want
Cadaver Draconis to make it worth us putting in the effort involved to get it to a final release stage - and that effort was quite considerable - and (2) the existence of the Fan Policy making it legally safe for us to do so.
the treatment on Ongus. Well I wrote that, and again, I very much doubt that it would have ever seen the light of day if not for the existence of 'official'
Dragon Warriors. That is for two reasons relating to why I bothered to put it together in the first place. The primary reason I did the work involved in creating the city of Ongus is because I needed it for two of my projects - my own campaign (which is set in Ongus) and a children's novel (fanfic, because of copyright issues, never intended for publication) set in Ongus. The first of these reasons is more significant, though the second has some relevance. The thing is, while I
might have started the novel - I think it unlikely - but I know I wouldn't have developed the city if I didn't need it for my game, and I would not have been able to get my regular game group to commit to a
Dragon Warriors campaign for a system they saw as dead. This campaign was expressly linked to the release of the
Players Guide.
and all the adventures and downloads that are available on the... Library of Hiabuor.
Virtually everything I have made available on the Library of Hiabuor site, has been written because official
Dragon Warriors exists. The only exception, I can think of, is some of the material on the Rathurbosk - and if you want you can compare the version of that I wrote in the 'Dark Ages' of no official game -
http://www.oocities.org/hollywood/8017/rathbosk.htm with what I have written since -
http://www.libraryofhiabuor.net/rathurboskintro.html - and the Heraldry stuff. None of the rest of it would be there if there wasn't an official game.
I've been running games at Melbourne roleplaying conventions since... 1997. But even though
Dragon Warriors was, far and away, my favourite game, I very rarely ran it. I ran one DW scenario (unfortunately lost) called
The White Lady at a small con in 1999, and
The King Under The Forest (as taken from Book 1) at a con specifically devoted to 'retrogames' in about 2006, but that was it. Running con games for a 'dead' system, unfortunately, is not rewarding in our local context here - nobody wants to play them unless they were absolutely cult hits. That may not be true elsewhere. It's only since the game was officially reborn that it's been worth my time to run it. And I'm not the only one - I'm not sure if it is something in Melbourne's drinking water or what, but we've had cons here in recent years with multiple DW scenarios being run and I really don't think that would have happened without an official game.in
I started the original
Dragon Warriors discussion group in either 1996 or 1997 (from memory, we started on graffiti.net, then moved to coollist.com and then to makelist.com and then to yahoogroups.com as bigger companies devoured smaller ones) - and set up (what I believe) was the first
Dragon Warriors webpage around the same time (the earliest version of the page still online is from May 1998). These were some of the very few places the game was discussed and was online for quite a long time. I've got plenty of experience of seeing what happened to the game during those dark ages - I was part of vibrant online communities for other games where lots of new material was being produced - but there really wasn't much for DW. A few webpages. In the 1990s, that probably wasn't surprising because there weren't many people on the web - but from the early 2000s onwards, that really wasn't a problem. The Wiki changed things to an extent - but I think the revitalisation of an official living version has done even more.
Only you can say if you would have done the Cobwebbed Forest without an official game being around, but even if you had, that would really mean one really good website - would there have been others? I'd say the evidence from 2000 to 2008 says its unlikely. It's not that nothing was released - if you look in the archives over at Yahoogroups alone, you'll find a few things that I think are great - but honestly, I've never seen much get traction.
Cobwebbed Dragon wrote:
As for not doing PR, I think it's naïve to assume that the game will become popular and successful without it. It will be picked up by the fans, some interested bystanders, and some collectors, but it will then quickly be overtaken by the next new kid on the block and forgotten about without some continued momentum by SKG. Great as it is, the Players' Guide is just going to be a curiosity to a lot of people.
While I'd love
Dragon Warriors to become mega-huge, I think even with the best PR in the world, that would be unlikely in a world where even
D&D seems to be struggling against
Pathfinder and almost everything in the fantasy RPG field is an also-ran. I actually think the Silver Bestseller status on DriveThru isn't bad, especially when I look at other games that aren't reaching that stage. I'd love it to do better - especially for the people who'd like to get some money for the work they've put into it
But in terms of financial success, I think the fact that James Wallis in an association with Mongoose couldn't make enough money to make it worth his while is the pointer that that's not the measure we need to look at.
Cobwebbed Dragon wrote:
Without the SKG fan policy, the community produced and released a wealth of content. And in the 4 years it took SKG to release a couple of adventures and the Players' Guide, the community hasn't exactly been idle. The Players' Guide is a great publication, but the adventures are no better than anything the community has produced (in the Knight's Tale, possibly a little worse...). I also think if no-one had picked up the licence after Magnum Opus, the Players' Guide material would have found an outlet, just as so much else has, but that's pure speculation.
Maybe you could tell us about this material that the community has been producing because honestly, I'm having a hard time trying to work out what you might be talking about. If there's a lot of new material out there, I've genuinely missed it. Which is entirely possible, but if so, I really want to know about it, because I want to plunder it.
But I don't think the Players Guide or Cadaver Draconis would have seen the light of day if Serpent King hadn't taken up the licence. I could see real legal hurdles that would have put me off, but I also think people may underestimate the amount of work that went into getting these out. I was pretty heavily involved in the final editing phases of both the Players Guide, and of Cadaver Draconis and I put hundreds of hours into the Players Guide and dozens into Cadaver Draconis - and that's just me, not everybody else. I was astonished at how much work was involved with things that to me looked almost finished when I got to that stage - I have no conception of how much work was involved getting them to that stage. I wish I felt able to share the editing document from the Players Guide. Would I have done all that with the risk of a C&D hanging over me? I doubt it.
Cobwebbed Dragon wrote:
That was one of my concerns when we migrated away from Yahoo - just as we have no control over Yahoo's changes in policy, should anything happen to you or your finances (or just your emotional investment in Dragon Warriors generally), this forum could disappear...
I'm never likely to be in a position where my finances are that bad, and it's even less likely I'm going to become less emotionally invested in Dragon Warriors, given how long I've been involved in it now
But, yes, there are risks. But I honestly think the risks of Yahoo shutting down are greater, and even without those risks, it was becoming almost impossible to use due to the 'improvements' they forced on us with the neo interface and the numbers of ISPs that were blocking all messages because of the huge number of groups sending nothing but spam. And while I had one other person helping me with moderation over there, if something had happened to me, it's likely that that group would have been overrun with spam or nobody would have been able to post in a couple of months anyway. You probably would have seen the number of spammers who tried to join this forum in the first couple of months of its existence - that problem was ten times worse on yahoogroups and I had no ability to put in place the type of controls that eventually seem to have (touch wood) stopped the problem here.
Cobwebbed Dragon wrote:
You could be right; and then we'd be no worse off than we were before - discussing the game, sharing our homebrew material (which is no more or less valid than the 'official' stuff SKG produces), and generally keeping the game alive the same way we have for the past 30 years without SKG. I'm not being negative; I'm just being ambitious - we don't need SKG for new material (although that is nice when it happens
), we need them to be our standard bearer - co-ordinating this community and luring new gamers away from Dragon Warriors' inferior cousins.
I'd love to see that too - and I think you will notice that the Serpent King blog is getting more active, and I think that is a first step to getting more active in other ways too. But I think they are still clearing a bit of backlog and I'd rather they focused on the things only they can do first (releasing official material) rather than other things.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
