Re: (TFT) Associatin of Fantasy Trippers

[Rogers Cadenhead <rogers@cadenhead.org>]

>I am interested in backing this up. The money is there for the present 
owners to
>take, the longer they wait, the greater it will become. We in the 
meantime could
>still be cautious and timid, but at least we could go forward.

I don't post on this list, but I check it out from time to time on the Web 
to see if anyone has pried TFT rights away from Howard Thompson.

Your plan strikes me as a really good way to get sued. Your group, however 
well-intentioned, is setting up a bank account that acknowledges the rights 
belong to someone else. Intentional violation of copyright carries huge 
penalties. Thompson could go after each of the contributors individually in 
court.

I also think it's morally questionable to set up a fund for a rightsholder 
who can be contacted pretty easily. Didn't Ty Beard or someone else on this 
list reach Howard through his son earlier this year to inquire about the 
sale of the rights?

It's a shame that TFT can't be officially revived. However, I think the 
best response is to do what Microtactix is doing -- publish new works that 
are in the spirit of the old Metagaming without being derived from its 
products in any way. If the members of this mailing list locked away their 
Metagaming products and wrote a new RPG from scratch that embodies the kind 
of rules you like, it would probably be a great de facto successor to TFT. 
I'd love to see a game like that, because I haven't been able to get my 
hands on TFT due to collectors buying it up whenever one shows up on EBay. 
I'm curious to find out why the game continues to have fans 20 years after 
it ceased publication.

Rogers Cadenhead
E-mail: rogers@cadenhead.org
Web: http://www.cadenhead.org
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