[MUD-Dev] Licensed setting MMOGs

[Christopher Allen]

At the smaller end Skotos has licensed a number of paper-RPG
"settings":

  - Monsters! Monsters!, licensed from Flying Buffalo (game of
  monsterous roleplaying)

  - Lovecraft Country, licensed from Chaosium (horror roleplaying
  during the dark of the US depression in the 30's)

  - Ironclaw, licensed from Sanguine Productions (furry roleplaying
  in a medieval fantasy)

  - Pendragon, licensed from Green Knight Publishing (roleplaying in
  heroic lands of King Arthur)

  - Paranoia, licensed from Greg Costikyan and Eric Goldberg
  (roleplaying in a cruelly humorous dark future)

  - Og, licensed from Wingnut Games (Caveman roleplaying)

Monsters! Monsters! is current shipping in "Monsters! Monsters!:
Grendel's Revenge", which was developed by Worlds Apart.

All the others except for Og & Paranoia are currently under
development by various outside development teams (what we call "The
Skotos Seven). Both Og & Paranoia are settings that we don't have an
outside development team active on.  The Lovecraft Country team is
releasing their first "stage" (a short-term, LARP-like, weekend
game) later in the month, and hope to have their beta of their 24/7
"theater" by the end of the year. A couple of others hope to go beta
this year.

At this point we don't know how successful licensing established RPG
settings will be. The ideal is that a good percentage of 10K or so
of active Call of Cthulhu/Lovecraft players, or 2-3K of active
Pendragon players, will establish the critical mass needed for a
small niche game to be successful.

It also has been useful to have access to setting documents -- for
instance, we developed the town of Arkham completely from maps and
descriptions from various Chaosium books. The least useful has been
game systems -- not a one has survived with anything but the most
basic elements intact. For instance, our Lovecraft Country and the
RPG Call of Cthulhu both have the concept of insanity, but they are
very different due to the limitations of the online game medium.

As Shannon described two years ago in his column "The Wilderness of
Your Intuition" http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_65.shtml our
original concept of how the development for these licensed games
should work, didn't work. The biggest issue is that it required more
team members with greater skills then we hoped. So we did a restart
and finally some of these teams are getting close to shipping.

  If someone is interested in creating a text-dominant game under
  the Paranoia or Og licenses, please let us know.

-- Christopher Allen

  P.S. I also know that Worlds Apart licensed GURPS from Steve
  Jackson Games.
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