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Thanks to OgreCave for its article pointing out that Wizards Of The Coast, the Hasbro gaming division best known for the Magic: The Gathering CCG, is now trying a collectible charm-bracelet game called Star Sisterz. Apparently, the game "combines the popular beaded trinkets with truth-or-dare-style questions on cards" in order to target the difficult-to-reach female demographic, and "girls might be charged with going to the mall with their clothes on inside-out or reading a page from their diary aloud to all of their friends - how embarrassing!" The official site has more information on this 'game', although OgreCave notes the more interactive Duel Masters CCG, the current Japanese collectible card game of choice, will launch around the same time, with comics, videogames, action figures, and a TV show on Toonami/Cartoon Network all contributing to the Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh styled media blitz.

Thanks to OgreCave for its article pointing out that Wizards Of The Coast, the Hasbro gaming division best known for the Magic: The Gathering CCG, is now trying a collectible charm-bracelet game called Star Sisterz. Apparently, the game "combines the popular beaded trinkets with truth-or-dare-style questions on cards" in order to target the difficult-to-reach female demographic, and "girls might be charged with going to the mall with their clothes on inside-out or reading a page from their diary aloud to all of their friends - how embarrassing!" The official site has more information on this 'game', although OgreCave notes the more interactive Duel Masters CCG, the current Japanese collectible card game of choice, will launch around the same time, with comics, videogames, action figures, and a TV show on Toonami/Cartoon Network all contributing to the Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh styled media blitz.

VonGuard writes "It's been 12 years since Magic: the Gathering was released, by WotC, and the game is now six million players strong. The East Bay Express has a long-form piece narrating the trials and tribulations of a man who's trying to turn pro at this addictive trading card game . Richard Garfield is always demanding the mind athletes be treated with the same respect as physical athletes. As you can see in the story, however, we're not quite there yet."

Thanks to the QT3 forums for pointing to a Bastion Press column discussing why EverQuest and its sequels may always be the most popular MMORPG series. The author argues that EverQuest, though not without its problems, is good at keeping up with the competition: "Sony learns from other products released into the marketplace, and they continue to watch new developments from new games and absorb the more innovative features." This is all part of what he calls 'The Skaff Effect', referencing a similar phenomenon seen in another genre: "Despite a number of very good games in the tabletop RPG marketplace, none of them have ever managed to topple D&D as the #1 game in the field. Skaff Elias (one of the guys behind the Magic revolution) hypothesized that any new game released into a marketplace dominated by one brand would only serve to drive more consumers to that brand."

Thanks to the QT3 forums for pointing to a Bastion Press column discussing why EverQuest and its sequels may always be the most popular MMORPG series. The author argues that EverQuest, though not without its problems, is good at keeping up with the competition: "Sony learns from other products released into the marketplace, and they continue to watch new developments from new games and absorb the more innovative features." This is all part of what he calls 'The Skaff Effect', referencing a similar phenomenon seen in another genre: "Despite a number of very good games in the tabletop RPG marketplace, none of them have ever managed to topple D&D as the #1 game in the field. Skaff Elias (one of the guys behind the Magic revolution) hypothesized that any new game released into a marketplace dominated by one brand would only serve to drive more consumers to that brand."

Thanks to the QT3 forums for pointing to a Bastion Press column discussing why EverQuest and its sequels may always be the most popular MMORPG series. The author argues that EverQuest, though not without its problems, is good at keeping up with the competition: "Sony learns from other products released into the marketplace, and they continue to watch new developments from new games and absorb the more innovative features." This is all part of what he calls 'The Skaff Effect', referencing a similar phenomenon seen in another genre: "Despite a number of very good games in the tabletop RPG marketplace, none of them have ever managed to topple D&D as the #1 game in the field. Skaff Elias (one of the guys behind the Magic revolution) hypothesized that any new game released into a marketplace dominated by one brand would only serve to drive more consumers to that brand."

spongebob writes "The great Dave Arneson was interviewed on his current work and upcoming releases at EnWorld. Arneson is one of the most important figures in gaming, because he was co-author of Dungeons & Dragons, that little game who spawned an entire industry (or two, if we count videogames). Despite this, he doesn't enjoy the immense recognition given to Gary Gygax, the other author of Dungeons & Dragons. This is perhaps explainable with the fact that Gary Gygax had a long and high profile career as game designer and manager of TSR Hobbies (then TSR) for many years and for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons' creation. Anyway, Dave remains a sort of 'unsung legend' of the gaming world."

travail_jgd writes "Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons and Dragons and the owners of the popular d20 license, have made some changes that are very unpopular in the RPG community. The new clauses allows WotC to censor d20-branded books with sexual, excessively violent, or other questionable content by revoking the book's d20 license: 'Wizards of the Coast may terminate this License immediately... if it deems, in its sole discretion, that your use of the Licensed Articles does not meet the above standards.' (The full listing can be found in a 12 KB RTF file.) Needless to say, people aren't happy. BTW, Wizard's own 'Book of Vile Darkness' violates most of the new rules." There are further details about this change, which only affects "any work carrying the d20 logo", over at GamingReport.com.

travail_jgd writes "Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons and Dragons and the owners of the popular d20 license, have made some changes that are very unpopular in the RPG community. The new clauses allows WotC to censor d20-branded books with sexual, excessively violent, or other questionable content by revoking the book's d20 license: 'Wizards of the Coast may terminate this License immediately... if it deems, in its sole discretion, that your use of the Licensed Articles does not meet the above standards.' (The full listing can be found in a 12 KB RTF file.) Needless to say, people aren't happy. BTW, Wizard's own 'Book of Vile Darkness' violates most of the new rules." There are further details about this change, which only affects "any work carrying the d20 logo", over at GamingReport.com.

travail_jgd writes "Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons and Dragons and the owners of the popular d20 license, have made some changes that are very unpopular in the RPG community. The new clauses allows WotC to censor d20-branded books with sexual, excessively violent, or other questionable content by revoking the book's d20 license: 'Wizards of the Coast may terminate this License immediately... if it deems, in its sole discretion, that your use of the Licensed Articles does not meet the above standards.' (The full listing can be found in a 12 KB RTF file.) Needless to say, people aren't happy. BTW, Wizard's own 'Book of Vile Darkness' violates most of the new rules." There are further details about this change, which only affects "any work carrying the d20 logo", over at GamingReport.com.

Randar the Lava Liza writes "Wizards of the Coast have released the 3.5 Edition System Reference Document. Essentially it's the three core rulebooks in RTF format. This includes the 3.5 Edition Player's Handbook, 3.5 Edition Dungeon Master's Guide and 3.5 Edition Monster Manual. All of these are released under their Open Gaming License. You can also read a very interesting review of 3.5 Edition by Monte Cook, one of the original creators of 3rd Edition D&D. He goes into detail on a number of the changes in this new edition."

WorselWorsel writes "The new edition of the seminal Dungeons & Dragons paper-RPG comes out this Friday and d20zines.com has this review. This is the first new edition of D&D since Hasbro acquired Wizards of the Coast. The last edition came out almost two years ago, and this time around the prices of three core books are up by $10 each. Since these are partially incompatible with older 3rd edition books, WotC is printing/making downloadable a short booklet explaining some changes." In addition to being a product review, it's a good overview of what's changed since 3rd edition, and really helps one decide if the changes are important enough to rebuy the core rulebooks.

ChrisDolan writes "The folks who benevolently dictate the creation of PCGen, a D20 character generator tool (e.g. for D&D), are going to start charging for downloads of data files. This comes after a long series of talks with Wizards of the Coast. The PCGen code will continue to be LGPL, but some of the data files (a separate download) will be more encumbered than just OGL (Open Gaming License). The specific data files that will cost are ones that were never released under OGL and have WotC IP in them. Details on the Code Monkeys site." PCGen is a nifty app, but all this stuff annoys me. I bought all the 3rd ed books already after all... it seems stingy to charge users twice.

Abies writes "During last year or so, quite a lot of people were fired from WotC - current owners of the D&D line. A few days ago, _most_ of big names out there had to quit - including Skip Williams and Jeff Grubb. Official WotC press info, Enworld news about that and a Monte Cook thread contain some more detailed info. Do you think it will spell an end to D&D ? After something which seemed to be a ressurection of old-time RPG, Hasbro seems to kill the biggest RPG company out there. Will OGL and the D20 license be enough to preserve the genre ?"

Updates from the field on Google access in the People's Republic of China, Lance Bass's space-shot (shot down), the gaming ban in Greece, recording artists and Internet music downloads, and more. Read on for the details.

Please confirm, over. After reports that the People's Republic of China was blocking access to Google, an anonymous reader writes: "I'm working in China, and for the last 3 days Google and some other sites were not accessible. But since even sending SMS to europe didn't work I don't think it was censoring, more like routing problems of some sort. Anyway, Google is back and reports of slashdot blocking are also overrated :)"

Cradle of Democracy, or Regular Cradle? Many readers have written to point out that, just like they promised to in March, the government of Greece has gone ahead and banned electronic games. xlurker, for instance, writes "In an unbelievable move the Greek government has banned all public play of computer games with enactment of law 3037/2002. An english translation of it can be read here. This has been reported in the Greek newspaper Kathimerini and recently confirmed in detail at the German Heise site (Google translation). The law encompasses all appliances that play games, as ludicrous this sounds, it spans from cells ph ones and computers to gameboys and consoles. Greek internet cafes are protesting and international gaming events are being cancelled and relocate d. The bill was passed as a last ditch effort by the government to combat gambling. Thousands of Greek citizens have protested the blanket anti-gaming law. Online petitions can be found here and at the Greek Net Cafe site."

Welcome to your new email account. In addition to the Bayesian spam filter for Qmail mentioned in a previous Slashback, an anonymous reader writes "An article here talked about using statistical methods to classify spam (and perhaps other mail) automatically. A real implementation of this has been released (currently beta) here that acts as a POP3 proxy and works with any mail client. It inserts an X-Text-Classification: header in each mail message containing a classification of the mail into any of a number of classes that the user defines. The code is mostly Perl and an LGPL library so although the current version is for Windows it will work on other platforms and the author is asking for suggestions and testers."

Yes, I'd like to be paid in unlucky-pop-star weights, please. 21mhz writes "Reuters reports: Russia's space agency has scrapped 'N Sync singer Lance Bass's plans to join an October space mission after the U.S. pop star failed to meet payment deadlines. More details from AP. The guys that do real stuff at ISS will get an extra cargo package the weight of the unlucky pop singer."

And Lo, eleven shall have been selected, and it is so. AmateurHuman writes "After two delays, Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, have announced that the first stage of the New Fantasy Setting Search is completed. Eleven out of 11,000 entries were selected. Good job to those lucky eleven!"

Slashdot is not responsible for the content of external links. ttyp writes "We've all seen Janis Ian's opinions about P2P and the RIAA but, man, does Prince take it to a new level! Check out the artist's commentary A Nation of Thieves wherein Prince wonders, 'How long, however, b4 a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, 2 leave the system 4 good? How long b4 a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and r careful not 2 get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long b4 a critical mass of art lovers get 2gether 2 provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the xisting system artistically irrelevant?' Also check out the links to other commentaries on this page."

Well, this is not really in Slashdot's main focus, but heck, it's a rare nerd who hasn't at least dabbled in D&D. Wizards of the Coast is looking to build a new campaign world, along the lines of Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms, and they're offering cash prizes. Their document (.doc file; Abiword reads it; try here if that link doesn't work) sums up the contest. Comments in this thread suggest they're looking for medieval fantasy settings. Show some writing flair and creative ability and take home enough cash to buy literally dozens of lead figurines AND a few new D30's... Update: 06/07 20:38 GMT by M : WOTC has the contest on their site now.

The Free Software and Open Source movement is infectious. While the software industry has been rocked by Linux and the GPL, the ideology is flowing over into other industries, as well. The D20 System is the stand-alone game system behind the long-awaited Third Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Wizards of the Coast VP Ryan Dancey is on a mission to release the system as an open standard, and bring the Open Gaming movement to the forefront of the market.

In a quick question-and-answer session on the Wizards of the Coast website, Ryan goes into the bits and pieces of his idea, paying homage to Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement as the basis for his crusade. He makes it rather clear that people will be able to write their own modules and game systems using the D20 System, and sell them on their own, without permission from Wizards of the Coast.

Like computers and caffeine, Dungeons and Dragons is a geek staple. The chances are good that geeks who aren't 'clued in' to the Free Software movement may get their first impression from reading a paragraph about it in a RPG manual. For the system to arrive on store shelves, though, it needs support from individual stores and distributors. The good thing is that they're excited about this, too. I recently spoke to Tony Kautz at Bridgetown Hobbies and Games, an RPG shop located in Portland, Oregon.

Slashdot: What was your first impression of the 'opening' of the D20 System?

Tony: I think it is a really good idea. The reason why Second Edition and Second Edition Revised did well is because they were based on the First Edition, which had a lot of resource material available. When they change the rules to the D20 system from the one they're using currently, a lot of their previous statistics won't be usable. Now that they've opened it up for other people to make supplements using their rule system, it'll make resource material a lot more available and a lot less expensive, because they'll have to compete with competitors with their own rule system.

Slashdot: Do you think that your store would carry D20-compatible modules and home-grown games using the system?

Tony:Yeah. We'll probably carry just about anybody that we can get a hold of. Some companies are too small to use distributorships, and so they have to do direct, like via mail order or online, but everybody else we will. We're pretty open to any manufacturer that comes along.

If you build it, they will come. One of the key reasons that Dungeons and Dragons is so popular is because you're limited only by your imagination. Experienced gamers thrive on being able to make their own choices and doing things their own way. Sounds like Linux system administration 101, doesn't it?

Needless to say, Open Source software developers think that the extension of the Open Source ideology into different industries is a fantastic idea. Downtime developer Justin Wheeler shares his thoughts with us: "The whole concept of keeping things open is the way most business should have been from the beginning. Imagine if Einstein kept the theory of relativity private? We'd not be able to work on it, or build on it. When thoughts are kept within a small group/society, others don't have a chance to work on them. If everyone has a chance to help at it, the company may find something that they missed. Companies often fear they're going to lose money if they give out their trade secrets. If Coke gave away their recipe, do you honestly think I'm going to brew up my own batch of Coke when I'm thirsty?"

Cooperation and a Laissez-Faire approach from Wizards of the Coast may make the D20 System the most popular approach to Open Gaming the world has ever seen. Until the boxes hit the store shelves, we'll just have to wait and see how successful Ryan Dancey is in promoting the ideals of Free Software and Open Source in the RPG arena.