The Gaming Den

Someone else in another country has a wildly popular project pertaining to your license and offers to promote it for free. And you say 'no'.

I mean, honestly.

What?

He's referring to how Record of Lodoss War was basically someone's D&D campaign.

It's basically free publicity for D&D. Whether people realize it, or not.

Wow, wierd question but ok:

First: Record of the Lodoss War Anime/manga is based off of session transcripts of actual sessions of the old Dragon Lance Adventures from 1E early AD&D 2E.

So, if it seems like a screwed up version of "dragons of X" thats because it IS.

The thing is, the Lodoss guys didn't ask TSR for rights or anything because they didn't have to.

Anime at the time was in its infancy in the American/European market and so NOBODY CARED.

You might be thinking that TSR would have had their legal staff frothing at the mouth like when white-wolf thought they were going to get 15% of everything related to "Underworld."

But it wasn't like that. Nobody wanted an anime tie in. WTF was anime? Besides, TSR already had gotten burned on a shitty cartoon once before and it had created a disaster so epic that it caused them to get rid of one of the games original developers.

They were probably glad that most people didn't associated Lodoss with D&D. They figured that their target audiance was probably a little old for cartoons and if they had tied it in they would have lost credability as an "adult" game. Also, the anime occassional uses the word "demon" to describe some of the bad guys and this was RIGHT when TSR was trying to expunge anything "demonic" from D&D.

Thanks for the explanation, but what was the "finger" mentioned in the thread title?

But they didn't have to foot the bill of the prior cartoon, but yeah, TSR was run by people with strong opinions and not much vision.

-Crissa

hogarth wrote:Thanks for the explanation, but what was the "finger" mentioned in the thread title?

Thank you for explaining; I thought "give the finger" was a metaphor in this case, but apparently not.

It's a metaphor for saying no.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:It's a metaphor for saying no.

-Crissa

Saying "no" to what? Did the writers of Lodoss make some proposal to TSR?

It's a metaphor for snubbing.

They said no to any tie-in. Aside from that, I dunno what was offered.

I always think of Parn as the paragon Fighter.

-Crissa

I should watch Lodoss one day. I always felt Slayers was a good D&D-ish thing, starting with "I am going to [place]." "Oh! You are [a player character]! I will go with you to [place]." then the whole "If you value your town that much, and REALLY need saving, pay up", before moving on to the "I have too many templates", priests smacking things in the face and so on.

/tg/ had a whole thing about Lodoss War as a D&D campaign, with plenty of OOC hilarity explaining why scenes happened the way they did due to inter-PC drama and stuff. "Fine! My next PC will be a Frenzied Berserker, enough of this thief crap."

Lodoss, in my experience, is terrible. It's dry and painful compared to something that's actually fun to watch--like Slayers. Which is why all my D&D games are intentionally way more like Slayers than like Lodoss.

I think we watched one episode out of the whole box set, wondered what the hell we were doing, and put on American Psycho or something instead. I don't even remember.

Lodoss has the problem of format. There's a couple renditions of it missing huge chunks, and the best version of it still spends the majority of it blathering on about what happened last chapter.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:They said no to any tie-in. Aside from that, I dunno what was offered.

On what occasion did this occur? What exactly was the proposal?

I don't know, and I don't know. I'm not that old, and the internet really didn't cover it back then.

-Crissa

I watched the 13-episode OVAs a long time ago. They rocked.

Crissa wrote:I don't know, and I don't know. I'm not that old, and the internet really didn't cover it back then.

-Crissa

Then I agree -- it's outrageous that someone related to TSR might have done something to the makers of Lodoss War at some point in the past.

Well, we do know that after the fiasco that was the D&D cartoon, they did basically no media they couldn't control with an iron fist. They got caught in this spiral of trying to appease middle america which never would be appeased. Harry Potter, anyhow?

And they were always quick to defend their IP rather than attempt partnerships.

-Crissa