Quote:
Originally Posted by peterb
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
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Close, but not quite. AFAIK, Chaosium made no effort to get the RuneQuest
trademark. They were too busy with other things.
Mongoose was able to write MRQ for the sole reason that the rules of a
game cannot be copyrighted. Greg's background with RuneQuest and
BRP had no bearing on the situation.
-V