I’ve been working on several licensing deals for Green Ronin for quite some time now. These have been cooking for between 6 months and 2 years. This summer several seemed agonizingly close to being cinched, but they never quite got there. It’s nice that we’ve finally been able to close these deals and start announcing them. In December we announced the Red Star license, based on Christian Gossett’s super cool comic. He’s basically mythologizing the Russian Revolution and the USSR, with layers of fantasy and funky tech on top. “Military Industrial Sorcery” conjures up all the right images. The extra bonus of this license is that the people behind the comic are gamers. That makes it all so much easier. They even published their own d20 book a couple of years back called Dramatis Personae. It’s nice that I don’t have to explain our weird hobby and why it is that I need to know the background of this or the underlying concepts of that.

Yesterday we finally announced the Black Company deal. We’ll be doing a big ass book based on Glen Cook’s ten-novel series. This one really goes back to my nerd roots. I picked up the Black Company, the first book in the series, the year it came out, 1984. Guess I was 14 at the time and in my first year of high school (shudder). Little did I know that 20 years later I’d get to publish the RPG adaptation. Now if only Glen Cook was also a gamer!

The only downside is that I won’t get to design either of these myself due to other commitments on different (but also insanely cool) projects. I will be involved in the plotting, planning, development, and all that, but I don’t have the design time. Still and all, these should be some fun books and I’m very happy that we’re doing them.