Green Ronin Publishing

I know a lot of fans have been waiting to find out if Green Ronin is going to support 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons and it's a fair question. Green Ronin's second product ever was Death in Freeport, an adventure for 3rd Edition that debuted the same day as the Player's Handbook almost eight years ago. We went on to do quite a lot of 3E support, ending only a couple of months back with the d20 Freeport Companion. Now Wizards of the Coast is terminating the d20 license and offering a different way to support the new edition of D&D. It's called the Game System License and we waited from August of last year until June of this year to see it. We've spent the last few weeks reviewing the license and discussing it internally and we have come to a consensus.

Green Ronin will not be signing the Game System License (GSL) at this time.

We plan to do one product in support of 4E: the Green Ronin Character Record Folio. This will be an update of the d20 System Character Record Folio and we'll be publishing it under the Open Game License (OGL).

Other than that we'll be giving our full attention to our own game lines: Mutants & Masterminds, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, True20 Adventure Roleplaying, and Freeport: The City of Adventure.

We had hoped to include 4E support in our plans, but the terms of the GSL are too one-sided as they stand. We certainly do not blame Wizards of the Coast for wanting to defend their intellectual property and take more control over the type of support products D&D receives. We do not, however, feel that this license treats third party publishers as valued partners. Under its terms WotC could frivolously sue a signatory for supposed violations of the GSL, lose the actual court case, and still ruin the winning company because the license specifies that the signatory has to pay WotC's legal fees. Also, the GSL can be changed at any time and WotC is not legally required to so much as inform its licensees.

Let me be clear in stating that I don't think that the people in charge of WotC currently are just waiting to attack companies with frivolous lawsuits. Once you sign the GSL though, you open yourself up to that at any point in the future. Who knows when new people will take over the D&D brand and who can say what their vision will be? Who knows when the political winds at WotC will change again and things will get even more restrictive? We do not want to operate under such a cloud moving ahead so that's why we won't be signing the GSL.

This means the Green Ronin Character Record Folio is the only 4E compatible product you'll be seeing from us this year and likely for 2009 as well. Perhaps WotC will revise the GSL in the positive way, but we cannot build our business on maybes. We know this will disappoint those of our fans who have embraced 4E and we're sorry about that. We have to make the best business decision for Green Ronin's future and right now this is it.

Thank you for your continued support.

Chris Pramas
President
Green Ronin Publishing

John Baichtal of the GeekDad blog on Wired.com posted an entry today that's all about Pirate's Guide to Freeport. Read all about it!

The Pirate's Guide to Freeport Takes Systemless To a New Level

The nominees in this year's ENnie Awards have been announced, and we're honored to have garnered several nominations:

• Pirate's Guide to Freeport: Best Covert Art, Best Cartography, Best Setting, Product of the Year
• True20 Freeport Companion: Best d20/OGL Product
• Hero High: Best Supplement
• True20 Companion: Best Supplement
• Hobby Games: The 100 Best: Best Regalia
• True20 Narrator's Kit: Best Aid or Accessory (Honorable Mention)

Voting will run on enworld.org from July 21st through August 3rd.

Mutants & Masterminds, Second Edition recently sold out of its third print run. Looks like the World's Greatest Superhero RPG is recession proof as well as bullet proof. We have already sent it off for a fourth print run and took the opportunity to fix the small amount of errata from the previous printing. The game will be back in stock in August. If you need a copy of Mutants & Masterminds before that, the PDF is still available and we have a small amount of copies of the third printing in the Green Ronin Online Store. Don't forget that the M&M Pocket Player's Guide also has the contents of the core rulebook minus the GM material, so it makes a good substitute as well. Wild Cards goes to print next, so stay tuned for more M&M action!

Today in Robert J. Schwalb's fifth Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying design journal, he writes about the noble house, the "meta-character" in any SIFRP game.

SIFRP: The Noble House

Origins, our first big convention of the summer, is over and it's time to give you all an update on A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. On June 21 Green Ronin participated in Free RPG Day and we gave away thousands of copies of a Quick-Start to introduce people to the new game. More were given away at Origins the following weekend. Today we are happy to announce that a PDF of the Ice and Fire Quick-Start is available for free on our website. Now those of you who weren't able to get a physical copy can check it out.

The game itself is finished and entered layout a couple of weeks back. However, we are revising the release date to October. We had really hoped to debut the game at GenCon, but things always get more complicated when licenses are involved. As fans of the series already know, George R.R. Martin has been hard at work on the next volume, A Dance with Dragons. Basically, there was no way we were going to get in the way of George finishing the book. That, of course, must be his priority. So, we're going to take a couple of extra months to polish the game and make it look truly spectacular. Then we'll launch it in grand style. We may release the PDF version of the game earlier, but the printed game will come out in October.

This does not mean that George R.R. Martin fans will leave GenCon empty-handed, however. We will be debuting the Wild Cards campaign setting for Mutants & Masterminds there. We'll also be giving away the remaining few hundred copies of the Ice and Fire Quick-Start there, so if you want a hard copy get to our booth early in the con.

We'll be continuing our series of design journals for A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying over the next few months, as well as preview the art and layout. Thanks for your patience. We know it will be worth the wait.

SIFRP Quick-Start Rules

A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying

Our crew at Origins Game Fair reports in that Hobby Games: The 100 Best has won the Origins Award for Publication, Non-Fiction.

Thanks to everyone who voted and anyone who has enjoyed reading Hobby Games 100 even half as much as we did, and congratulations to all the winners and runners-up.

Today on the Freeport Blog, Chris Pramas discusses how to use the Pirate's Guide to Freeport with Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition.

Using the Pirate's Guide with 4E

Today we present the fourth of Rob Schwalb's Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying design journals, wherein he reveals just what destiny has in store for your SIFRP character, or in actual fact, what one can achieve by either spending or burning Destiny Points in the game.

SIFRP: The Hand of Destiny

This Saturday is Free RPG Day, and we're taking part in a big way with the Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Quickstart. This free book contains enough rules to get you started playing, pregenerated characters, and an adventure.

We think it's always a great idea to check in with your local stores to see what's new, and this Saturday you've got some extra incentive, since you can also go home with tons of cool free stuff from your favorite RPG publishers. Check it out!