I take it this was an old Daedelus Games product, back when FS was owned by them.

Is BfS ever going to be reprinted as some of the other supplements have? Or has most of the info in that book eventually filtered into supplements anyway.

If not its kinda sad to see all that FS info lost to new players, concidering it seems very hard to locate a used copy of the old Daedelus products (I lucked out with some Nexus stuff but no Feng Shui).

I don't think Atlas can re-publish it, because most of the rights would still belong to Daedalus and the various authors, I imagine. And since the majority of it includes write-ups of the heroic and nefarious characters (mostly from the card game), I don't believe it's been reprinted or filtered through any other channels since BfS.

Which is too bad, cuz it is, if I may say, a kick-ass book o' Good Stuff!

In the case of the core Feng Shui rules, the rights explicitly reverted to Robin, allowing him to license them to us. In the case of Thorns of the Lotus, which came out near the final implosion of Daedalus (and most of the original print run was destroyed by the storage facility, I'm given to understand, because of nonpayment of storage fees), there was only one author and he never got paid by Daedalus, so the rights were his to license to us (and even so it was hard to track him down -- we owe our thanks to Nicole Lindroos of Green Ronin for finding where he'd moved to in Japan, in fact).

So we made the choice to work out a deal to make Thorns available, given that it was a faction book (meaning the rights were relatively simple to nail down, and the utility for FS players was high), and leave the others for the collectors market while we focused on publishing original material.

Hope that someone can shed some light on these three and more.

I rather doubt this would be legal. A rewritten general description of the characters might be, though.

If there is no one to sue you, does it matter if it is legal or not?  And to prosecute on copywrite the offender has to be informed of his offense first.

So if any one ever jumped out of the wood work and said hey don't post that cause I own the rights to it, many problems would take care of themselves :)

I've really noticed a lot of people in rpgs are a little too jumpy when it comes to copy write issues.

Basically if you can't buy it from a publisher don't worry about it  Because no one would be loosing money and therefore won't sue to protect it.

And I'm not saying go ahead and post whole books, but if someone asks a question about an old out of print book...don't be too squeamish to respond, the men in black aren't going to haul you away.

I believe it does, yes. And it's not simply a matter of whether it's legal, but whether it's right.

We already face too many people who trample on our own intellectual property rights because we're not in a good position to sue them. (For example, unauthorized foreign translations.) I certainly don't want to turn around and offer the same treatment to someone else. It might please some fans, it might make us an extra buck, but it wouldn't make me feel good about myself.

> I've really noticed a lot of people in rpgs are a little too jumpy
> when it comes to copy write issues.

This may be because we depend on copyright for our livelihood! :-)

As a business that fundamentally depends on respect for intellectual property rights, to short-change those principles when it seems to suit us would, I believe, be short-sighted.

For example, we are NOT implementing any DRM schemes to inconvenience the customers who purchase our PDFs on RPGNow. And I don't WANT to implement any such technologies like that (let alone get into a "sue our fans, customers, and bystanders" crusade like the RIAA). We are instead relying on the good faith and honesty of our customers not to share those files illegally. As such, we should try to set a good example ourselves.

Good on you for wanting to set a good example, most people in our info-heavy age don't give a flying f**k about trampling other peoples toes.

I searched Alibris.com, a website for second-hand and hard to find books. I got a copy of BFS straight away for $12.95 plus shipping (which was $7.95 as i'm in England) and it turned up this morning, about two weeks after placing the order. Not bad at all. I have also used Alibris for some other books which are out of print in the UK and the service has been great. Of course if you use e-bay all the time and are happy bidding, go for it.

As for the book itself, hooray! Furious George and Orangutank! Homo Omega! The missing principle monks from Blood of the valiant! I am a happy GM. The 'missing items' from my books/knowledge were beggining to annoy the s**t out of me. Now i've caught up, time for new books!

When do we get 'Blowing up Hong Kong'?

Late August is the current plan. It's possible it might slip to early September, depending on how the workload works out this month.