Russ “Morrus” Morrissey

Interestingly, apparently Firefly was based on a Traveller campaign.

Yeah, yeah. I think from what I understand, Mark Miller was concerned about legacy and succession is the word he used. Sure. And obviously they've worked together for a long time and there's trust between them and obviously they trust Mongoose to take good care of his baby, as it were. So, yeah. And they didn't actually want to announce this either.

The reason they had to is because the news, the original suggestion was that Mark wanted it not to be announced until he had died. Oh, wow. Not that there's any suggestion that he's ill or anything. I don't know if he is or not.

Yeah, yeah. Touched words, yeah. Which they were quite happy about, because they'd been talking about this for years. They signed the contracts in January of this year.

And then the suggestion was, you know, the chances of keeping this secret for, you know, decades, or however long it is before Mark Miller passes, were slim. So they decided, okay, in that case, we'll announce it in 2027 on Traveller's 50th anniversary. But part of the process is there's a lot of third-party publishers and they had to be informed.

And because this was happening, because people were being told, people who were licensing Traveller in various ways, not just the game, but anyone who was licensing Traveller for Mark, for Mark Miller, whether they were doing art or this or whatever they were doing, had to be informed that Mongoose was taking over and they would no longer be licensing it from him, they'd be licensing it from Mongoose.

And that turns out to be quite a few people. It became really clear that the news was going to become public. There'd be just too many people knowing about it at that point. And so they decided to announce it now.

Yeah. Traveller, massive influence on why what's all this new system. Traveller came up with, invented the life path system, character creation system, which I like immensely. Yes. And it was also famous for you're able to die during character creation.

Right, well, we've got some Dungeon World news.

That's also changing ownership. vaguely know about this but not enough to actually say so it has been purchased by luke crane so luke crane you would know from burning wheel and mouse guard and was also head of community at kickstarter for some years so the game has been purchased from the original creators adam I never know how to say this last name. Kerbal, is it? Kerbal, Kerbal. K-O-E-B-E-L.

And Sage Latara. Okay, yeah. And there was some accusations of sort of like poor behaviour on the parts of Adam Kerbal.

I believe so, yeah. I believe that's what it was.

Yeah, well, there was a little bit more controversy later, so then... Crane was currently head of community at Kickstarter, was at the time head of community at Kickstarter, and attempted a Kickstarter campaign for something called The Perfect RPG. And this is a couple of years ago, like 2020, 2021, something like that.

And one of the creators on there was Adam Kerbel, which there was a big old backlash about that. And that resulted in Crane having to resign from his job at Kickstarter.

Right. So this is like three years later and now Crane is now purchasing the very popular Dungeon World from Kerbal and Laftora along with another business partner. I don't know who that is. And they're making a new edition of the game.

I'm assuming that the original creators are not going to be involved. I've got no information either way. I'm assuming not.

Synchronised shrugging, yeah. That sounds like an amazing sport. I can't wait to watch that. Could be worse, could be broken. Yeah, so that's the news, basically. Cool. That is the news.

It's Powered by the Apocalypse, isn't it? Dungeon World. Yeah. I haven't played Dungeon World, but I've played Powered by the Apocalypse, various Powered by the Apocalypse games.

It's a story game. Yeah. It relies on tropes.

Yeah.