Topic: Aurigas Aldebaron's Address - December 2011

[Thom @ ICE]

Well, the train is finally starting to leave the station!

 We had to work on a bit of “stoking the furnace” which makes it look like we were not getting anywhere, but behind the scenes, a lot has been done.  All the legal agreements with third party licensees are now in place, and Nicholas at Guild Companion has made extraordinarily good progress in recovering “lost works” from bygone days and making those available for download.

At the same time, we are going through all the works and making some decisions about what is “intellectual property held in good title”.  In a very few cases (fortunately) we have found some game product does not fit this definition and we will no longer offer that product for sale, though we may use some of the untainted material contained within in a future product.  In a couple cases, we have found that the quality of the material does not meet the bar we have set for ourselves and those products will no longer be for sale, or again, may be re-worked into new products.  Fortunately, this clean-up is coming to an end.  The penultimate stage is getting the full, approved product array up on RPGNow.com, with the final stage getting the key legacy products in print-on-demand format.  This final stage will take some time, but progress is being made.

What’s next? Well, I’m hopeful we can continue to make progress with our international partners to forge closer ties in working together, mainly by sharing the fruits of our collective labour across a wider audience.  For example, if there is an adventure series tailored to Rolemaster authored by our German friends at 13Mann, we will work with them to get an English translation of that and get it up for sale, providing more support product for RM.  We are planning some new links on the main ICE website to our international partners as well, and are looking to share resources, like art work.

I’m really excited about our plans for the future.  HARP is a great product, but due for an update.  Fortunately, not much will be changing, but the changes proposed should add considerable value in terms of game balance, playability and infusing the game with more “High Adventure”.  In addition to HARP, the team is developing long range plans for Rolemaster, Cyradon and Shadow World, as well as looking at adding new support product lines and will do so if the right opportunity comes along.

In closing, I hope this all sounds exciting for you, our fans and customers.  Many thanks for your support. And, a special thanks to our moderators, web people, authors, artists and licensees for making the effort to help ICE keep moving forward.

- John Seal

[bpowell]

Sounds wonderful!