Green Ronin and Fourth Edition D&D

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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

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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

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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

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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

Update: A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying

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Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Quick-Start RulesOrigins, 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

Hobby Games: The 100 Best Wins Origins Award

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Hobby Games: The 100 BestOur 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.

Freeport Blog: Using the Pirate’s Guide with 4E

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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

Using the Pirate’s Guide with 4E

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Unless you’ve been detained illegally in a black site prison, you probably know that Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition came out this month. Many folks are giving it a try and I’ve heard a lot of GMs lament the fact that there aren’t any ready-made 4E settings available yet. Even WotC won’t have their new Forgotten Realms campaign setting book out until August. This is the beauty of the Pirate’s Guide to Freeport. It is a pure setting book that can be used with any fantasy RPG. It has no game stats at all, so you can just pick your game, add Freeport, and enjoy. If you are looking for a campaign setting for your new 4E game, you can start with Freeport right away.
The city can be used on its own or you can drop into any other campaign setting you like. You could even start a campaign in Freeport now, leave the rest of the world vague, and decide on the details of the larger campaign setting later. If you do want a full campaign setting right away, the Pirate’s Guide includes an optional chapter on the World of Freeport. This details “the Continent” in some detail and provides a ready backdrop for all kinds of adventures.
To complement the Pirate’s Guide, we have been doing a series of rules companions over the past year, which provide mechanical support for various game systems. We’ve done True20, d20, and Savage Worlds so far, with Castles & Crusades coming up next. We may do a Fourth Edition Freeport Companion if we can figure out how to do so under the terms of the new Game System License. In the interim, however, here are a few ideas on how to adapt Freeport to the 4E rules.
Levels: The Pirate’s Guide notates each NPC as being an apprentice, journeyman, or master. This translates easily into 4E, since characters now have a level range of 1-30. Apprentice characters are heroic tier (1-10), journeymen are paragon tier (11-20), and masters are epic tier (21-30). Now Freeport is a lot grittier than the new D&D, so you might consider making max level 15. In that case, apprentices would be levels 1-5, journeymen level 6-10, and masters level 11-15.
Races: Dragonborn are a new race of draconic humanoids and they have not featured in Freeport products before. However, Freeport is known as the Crossroads of the World and all sorts of strange folk make their way to there. Adding a few dragonborn to the mix is easy enough, particularly as the PHB paints them as wanderers without a home. They may even have come from another plane of existence.
Another sort of new race is the eladrin. They are basically high elves, which makes them the best match for most of the elves that appear in Freeport. The PHB’s elves would be the World of Freeport’s wood elves and they’d mostly be found in Rolland.
Freeport does have gnomes, and although they are not an option in the PHB there are rules for them in the Monster Manual. Those looking to make villains out of gnomes need look no further than the World of Freeport’s Autocracy of Iovan.
Classes: All the classes in the PHB can be found in Freeport. Pirates are best modeled by rogues, though fighters and rangers can also work pretty easily. Warlocks work well with the Lovecraftian elements of the Cit of Adventure. A warlock with a star pact with the Unspeakable One would make a quite suitable cultist.
Points of Light: WotC is pushing the idea of “points of light” campaign settings. The basic idea is similar to that of Warhammer’s Old World. There are villages, towns and cities that are pockets of civilization but between them are large areas of untamed wilderness that are by no means safe. At Green Ronin we like to offer many different models for campaign play, but if points of light is your thing the Ivory Ports is probably the best area of the World of Freeport for that. A border area of Hexworth could also work, with adventures focused in the Bone Lands.
These are just a few ideas on how to use Freeport with 4th edition. If you have more, come on over to the Campaign Settings message board on GreenRonin.com and share them with your fellow gamers.