Green Ronin Online Store Announcement

Physical books ordered in August from our Green Ronin Online Store won’t be shipped until the week of the 25th. Convention season is in full swing, and our staff won’t be around to ship new orders until then. Our physical books are of course also available on Amazon.com and elsewhere online, so you need not wait for us to get back. PDF sales from our site will chug right along without us, so feel free to purchase some pixels.

SIFRP Design Journal: Weapons

Today we have for you a new A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Design Journal by Robert J. Schwalb. Learn all about the properties of weapons in the game, and check out some sample stats for axes.
SIFRP Design Journal: Weapons

ENnies Voting Restarted

From ENnieAwards.com:

Voting booths were reset today in order to address some technical glitches. If you voted Monday, July 28th, please return to the ENnies site to cast your vote again.
We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

If you voted in the ENnies on Monday, please vote again. Thanks!

ENnie Award Voting Now Open

Voting for the ENnie Awards is now open.
Green Ronin received 8 nominations this year and now a public vote will determine the winners, which are awarded Friday night at Gen Con in Indianapolis. Cast your vote for the Pirates Guide to Freeport, True20 Freeport Companion, Hero High, True20 Companion, Hobby Games: The 100 Best, and other great RPG products. You can vote from Monday, July 28th until Wednesday, August 6th.

Green Ronin and Fourth Edition D&D

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

ENnie Awards Nominations Announced

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)

Congratulations to all the nominees!
Voting will run on enworld.org from July 21st through August 3rd.

Mutants & Masterminds Fourth Printing Underway

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!

SIFRP Design Journal: The Noble House

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