Quote:
Originally Posted by soltakss
However, Chaosium lost the rights to RQ when they sold it to Avalon Hill. They got the rights to the RQ system, but not Glorantha, when Avalon Hill stopped publishing for a number of years (as I understand it) but Greg Stafford's Issaries gained the RQ Trademark and commissioned a new version of RuneQuest. Chaosium brought out BRP which is based on their own rules system.
|
Just some notes for the record(s)...
Chaosium never lost the copyright to RQ, they sold the trademark to Avalon Hill. And then they licensed the contents of the game (under an exclusive license one has to presume) to AH. Avalon Hill was bought up by Hasbro at the end of the 90's and was transferred to Harbro's fully owned subsidiary company WotC. Someone at Hasbros legal department failed to renew the trademark registration for Runequest, so the trademark lapsed and Issaries (Greg Stafford's company) nicked the trademark just under the nose of Chaosium.
So that's how Issaries and not Chaosium got the trademark Runequest. Since the rules of a game is not copyright protected and since Stafford had some part in writing the original Runequest rules, Mongoose was able to reproduce large parts of RQ II and III in MRQ, which is why the games are so similar.
/Peter