Arnwolf666
Adventurer
This is a great book and I loved all the follow up books. Great resource. I used several of these pantheons, especially Sumerian, Babylonian, and Finnish in several homebrew worlds. Thanks for your hard work Jim Ward.
Ironically, I would have kept the Cthulhu stuff in. Who did you contact for the "rights"? Sauk City/August Derleth? They didn't actually hold them as far as I'm aware, even though Arkham House acted as if they did for many years. HPL's copyrights were a mess.
Lovecraft is now in the public domain, one reason so many games have appeared in the past few years.
I read the post in detail. The larger point was that the "TSR Legal" group decision was, as far as I can tell, a mistake based on insufficient research.And apparently you just ignored James post that stated it was a TSR Legal group decision to remove the content without further input from him?
Ironically, I would have kept the Cthulhu stuff in. Who did you contact for the "rights"? Sauk City/August Derleth? They didn't actually hold them as far as I'm aware, even though Arkham House acted as if they did for many years. HPL's copyrights were a mess.
Lovecraft is now in the public domain, one reason so many games have appeared in the past few years.
I read the post in detail. The larger point was that the "TSR Legal" group decision was, as far as I can tell, a mistake based on insufficient research.
At the time Deities was being put together, Arkham House was the claimant to the Lovecraft/Mythos copyrights. That claim seemed legitimate and did not fall apart in court until the mid-1980s, long after Deities was out.
While Arkham House may have given TSR some permission, as Jim describes, Arkham House also had a contract with Chaosium that gave Chaosium priority on the Cthulhu Mythos rights. Chaosium had a similar existing contract with Michael Moorcock. Chaosium contacted TSR after Deities came out and informed them of the contracts, then offered to let TSR continue to use the Eternal Champion and Cthulhu material at no charge, if TSR would simply acknowledge on the copyright page of new printings of Deities that Chaosium gave them permission. Someone at TSR decided not to do that and instead pulled the Cthulhu and Eternal Champion material.
--James Lowder
They pulled them instead of a simple acknowledgement, it seems petty sadly.
Probably didn't want to provide free advertising for a competing game.
It is now, because he's been dead long enough, but I'm not sure that was the case in the late 1970's. Lovecraft died in 1937, and I think at the time 1e was published it was a 50-year wait before works hit the public domain (so, 1987). Then the law was changed to 75 years (so, 2012); hence the recent explosion of Lovecraft-based material.Lovecraft is now in the public domain, one reason so many games have appeared in the past few years.