Well, you probably won't trust me when I tell you I heard 270 creditors then - although that counts freelancers, particularly BattleTech freelancers, who aren't going to fight for their checks.

Actually (and I haven't seen the docos to confirm), I was under the impression this came from some of the documentation presented to the court on Friday. ie: "One of the creditors suing IMR", not just "one of the creditors" in general. Hopefully someone else can confirm that.

Is Wildfire one of the 3 creditors suing? I just know they had to make threats in order for CGL to stop Cthuhlutech.

Yes, they are.

They aren't asking to get paid ever? That seems unusual.

Or was that meant as, some of them aren't requiring payment now or near future? I wasn't sure if that was something new out there.

I think it means they have not yet begun withholding work until compensated.

AH, its my knowledge you have not done anything so unseemly as to be cast in anywhere near the same light as Frank.

I believe that means that there are 270 entities who are owed money, with nothing said as to when that debt is due, just that there is some balance outstanding. In regards to the the Battletech authors, it is my understanding that they are unwilling to take actions, such as withholding copyright on their material, to ensure they get paid. In fact, some actively resent Shadowrun authors who have done so.

I can understand that resentment. I mean, if one of the co-authors to a book I had content in withheld their material and slowed/stopped the book from being printed, that could ruffle a lot of feathers. My mindset would be if I was okay with it going to print before I was paid, everyone else should be, too. No one really likes the guy(s) on the team that rock the boat, regardless if they are right or wrong...

Without rehashing the entire BT Freelancer vs SR Freelancer meme, this isn't what they're talking about. Two different groups working on different projects (although I guess that has changed a bit lately). The friction is unrelated to someone being ticked about a project getting delayed by someone else.

Also, I don't THINK any of the SR Freelancers who didn't pull copyright got annoyed with those who did. People gotta do what they gotta do. I support that. Some of those folks were owed a lot more money from a lot farther back than I was.

Ok, so $750k wasn't stolen in one go, but what kind of company has enough liquid cash sitting in the bank that a $25k withdrawal can happen? Most companies (and people) with that much cash on hand would plow it into something less liquid like a CD or other investments. This sounds like there was money mismanagement going on even before there was embezzlement (alleged, allegedly, accused, etc, etc. Please assume whatever hedging words needed to be said were said in their correct place).

And weren't writers not getting paid during the time where there was enough cash on hand for these withdrawals to take place? Doesn't that make their failure to settle their accounts payable a bit of a crime (alleged, allegedly, accused, etc, etc...)?

Actually many companies use money market accounts for large amounts of cash, which traditionally earn some interest but are very liquid.

Yes, but can you make a $25k withdraw from a money market account? I think the graphs that were shown earlier were from a bank account, so LLC (person) would have had to sell off the money market account and then take the money if I understand it correctly. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Ahh...okay, will I can understand that as well, at least from my experience, in a corporate setting. I work with three different business lines and they each have their own product development teams, sales, service, etc. And some of them are managed much better than others. Some "get it" more than others. Some have really solid and efficient processes while others are a bit of a clusterfuck and its surprising they make any profit.

So, when the poorly managed business line screws something up, others feel resentful. While they are the other side of the house, we all are still under the same roof and we wonder why they can't just get their act together and play like the rest of us.

In any case, it sucks when you are a "good worker" and have to deal with even the indirect effects of something like this...

Just look at the release schedule over the last three years. The money that Coleman took out of the company could have been going to write and print more books, which would have made the company even more money. Perhaps enough to warrant building Twisted Mustache Manor.

To my knowledge, no. Failure to pay freelancers is a civil matter and not a crime. Failing to pay the IRS or misrepresenting taxable earnings, on the other hand, is a crime.

Do they have a contractual obligation to anyone such that actions that fail to bring the greatest company gain violate due diligence? They are private, but they have business relationships with groups like Posthuman Studios that were directly hurt by doing this, so they might be liable even if they somehow dodge embezzlement charges. Does anyone have a lawyer contact (or friend of a friend, nach) that might be able to verify or falsify that?

Not again another discussion of a law-related question.

Interestingly enough, it violates Washington state regulations governing LLCs for any member to withdraw money from an LLC if there are unpaid debts.

*note I am making a general statement after reading the publicly available statutes published on the State of Washington's website, and make no claims as to the bearing of said statutes to any thing factual or fictional...

Now that's interesting. What does the law propose as punishment for transgression of that law? And would that be a reason to get Loren L. oleman out of that company's operations?

It really seems to me to be sibling rivalry. The SR guys think the BT guys get preferential treatment, the BT guys think the SR guys get preferential treatment, the Leviathans guys just want to sit at the table with everyone else....

Well...hurry up and get Leviathans out! My group is chomping at the bit for it!

Well, no. The SR people know that BattleTech gets the love and attention, because the head honchos like Randall Bills love BattleTech and wouldn't know Shadowrun from a hole in the ground. Which is also demonstrable by the general shrinking of the freelancer pool over time and the high turn-over on SR line developers.

Payment-wise, Shadowrun freelancers have (relatively recently) been getting paid and paid more promptly because they've been raising a stink about it and withholding copyright. This means there is the perception, at least in some cases, that some monies which would have gone to pay BattleTech writers or others was going to pay Shadowrun people instead (and indeed, the idea that some SR writers are being paid "out of turn" than others who wait patiently). Which is why Jason accused me of being greedy.

Without commenting on the general SR vs. BT issue: Randall works his ass off for everything Catalyst does and has ever done, including Shadowrun. Was his understanding of the game and setting as deep as Rob or Peter? No; but he brought a bunch of other stuff to the table.

I'll take your word for it, you worked with him closer and longer than I had to.

Would Randall Bills need to know anything about Shadowrun? I mean thats what you hire people for in theory when your that high up. The head office doesn't need to know anything about packet management on the router they just have to hire a Network Admin/Engineer to handle it.

I know, but I needed a hook for the Tormante/Eisner/Topps info

Considering some of the stuff that's come rolling downhill from that direction? It wouldn't hurt. The Time of the Three Assistant-Developers comes to mind, when Randall was pretty much in direct control of the line (as I recall); and the original draft of the Corruption master plot arc, which I believe was handed down from Loren.

Keep in mind I cannot speak with any authority on that end of the business, I was only a lowly freelancer and it was a rare day when I even got an e-mail from Randall or anyone above the SR line developer.

Yes, and he does. Randall's job included managing the SR line developer, and he's involved in product conception and development. He doesn't have to know all the details but he needs a pretty decent idea of the big picture. Randall was typically very good at saying "I don't know everything about this, not enough to help make the right decision: can you give me the background on this and why it's like that?"

I will say that in my entire time writing for Shadowrun, I was not aware of any animosity between the BT and SR writers or developers. I had little contact with the BT writers, but I didn't write for that game, so that made sense. If any of the BT writers did SR writing while I was working on Shadowrun, I knew them as Shadowrun writers.

This whole idea of bad blood between those two camps is something I've only heard of recently. Personally, I'm not convinced it's as prevalent or deep as it is portrayed here, and what does exist is probably the result of tough choices writers on both sides of that fence have had to make recently because of a situation outside their control.

And I will back AH up that I also saw some really ridiculous SR plot concepts come rolling down from somewhere up in management. But I treated those like I treated every other proposal for SR; if I was interested in the idea, I pitched to write for it. If I wasn't interested in the idea, I said my piece about why I didn't think it was a good idea to the devs and writers and then I avoided it. If it ends up in print anyway, then the fans will react to it. And they may totally disagree with my feelings, that's life.

As a writer, I felt that I only attached my name to something that I wanted to work on. Even if that has had hits and misses (my name is on Year of the Comet, after all ).

I agree, which, having dealt with writers and developers on all sides, made me think of a sibling rivalry more than a dislike or worse. Three years ago, it was more "SR guys? The guys with the weird hair who aren't Ken'." when you talked to a BT guy.

What you're thinking of is a publicly traded company, where CEOs are usually or at least supposedly beholden to maximizing the return to the stock holders. A private company is under no such restriction, other than whatever agreements might exist between partners.

In the case of a multi-partner LLC, there is supposed to be an agreement between the partners about how money can be drawn from the company by the partners. Very likely LLC (the person) was in violation of that agreement. Since it's a private contract, the other people who are a part of the contract would be the ones to make the decision of how to handle the situation.

In terms of law, I believe the federal law that came closest to this, the 'denial of honest work' statute, was struck down today by SCOTUS as being too vague of a law.

They would have legal issues with partners that they had contracts with, though it sounds like in the case of Posthuman, both sides have managed to terminate the existing contract to mutual satisfaction. In the case of WildFire there seems to be a bit more friction, though there had been some indication that an agreement was reached prior to the bankruptcy lawsuit. The exact timing of the bankruptcy filing and the agreement is unclear to us, the public, whether the work on the filing took place before the supposed agreement, or after. Apparently Catalyst contends that an agreement was reached which left both parties satisfied, which could invalidate that part of the bankruptcy claim. We'll see.

There could well be other state laws like Tiger Eyes cited. Without knowing the details of that particular law, and since this is a speculation thread, it could well be the case that IMR has chosen the wording and actions that they have to avoid potential fines that would be directed at the company, not at the problem owner.

This may be a hollow line of inquiry, but what's the deal with Lady Macbet- ..er Coleman?
I remember her as being one of the majority owners along with L. L.

Is she a full-on silent partner? Is she the type to ignore or encourage the kind of cash-grab money antics we've seen evidenced?

I liked YotC.



If the outcome is that IMR/CGL folds, then Topps has to find a studio again, and if they don't fold Shadowrun can get back to schedule? But if they don't lose their lawsuits then the actual writers are getting screwed, and if they do then the writers have no idea who might be managing it next or when it will be being published?

well, even if CGL wins (which they could apparently have done just by paying off the debtor with the lowest amount, which was something like 2-3 grand iirc), that doesn't mean they don't owe their debtors money anymore, it just means that they don't have to liquidate the company to pay their debts immediately.

and also, i don't recall if the third debtor in the suit was a writer offhand, but i know for sure two of them were not (one was sandstorm, one was one of CGL's employee's dad or something like that...)

and in any case, the writers are screwed if and only if CGL either goes bankrupt and other organisations get first dibs (which is likely to happen if CGL does go bankrupt), or does not go bankrupt and still doesn't pay their writers (which could happen, though recent events have included at least some of the writers getting paid for their work; ideally, this wouldn't even be a concern, but obviously it was happening before, so it would in fact be unreasonable to rule out the possibility of it happening again)

one other thing, if it isn't published yet, the stuff that has already written may or may not be published by the new company. once it's published, it becomes part of the shadowrun property, but until then, it would be bound only by a contract between the writer and CGL (if CGL ceases to exist, i presume the contract would be dissolved. if CGL loses the two licenses but continues to exist, it might be a grey area... but probably if it can be shown that CGL has no intent to ever pay the writers for their work, which would be the case for something that CGL has no ability to publish, it would revert back to the writers. or at least, i would hope that's how it works. IANAL, however. in the extremely unlikely case that CGL pays the writers for their work before publishing, and then loses the license, then hell will probably have frozen over and all kinds of crazy stuff will happen.

You mean WildFire there, not Sandstorm.

The three debtors in the bankruptcy case are WildFire, creators of C-tech; a former employee's father who had set up a line of credit for IMR, but his son has left IMR and started up Sandstorm; and an individual who most likely was involved in setting up the Catalyst web store, based on the area of expertise indicated by his resume.

All three of these debtors appear to be connected by the former employee, which is possibly the reason that those are the three companies involved in the filing. No other debtors have joined in the lawsuit yet.

So, three debtors, all connected to a founder of Sandstorm, are trying to dissolve IMR, current license holder of SR and BT and former licensee or distributoe (?) of licenses now with Sandstorm. With no official statement to my knowledge that they are NOT bidding on the licenses, a successful case would poise them to replace IMR.

Perfect SR corporate intrigue ...

This isn't quite accurate. If they win their lawsuit it doesn't exempt them from any debts, even the ones claimed by the people filing the suit against them, unless they manage to prove that one or more of those debtors don't have a valid claim. Changes in how IMR handles the company finances and oversight from Topps are presumably there to make sure that the money IMR has or makes goes to the production of new product and paying off debts owed. So even if IMR wins the bankruptcy suit, the freelancers and other people they might owe money to should be getting de-screwed.

If they lose the bankruptcy filing, then presumably IMR's assets will be frozen and liquidated to pay off as many debts as possible, which may or may not cover what they owe. What happened with the license after that would be up to Topps. They could take it in-house, and hire former IMR people to continue things much like they were. There was also speculation that Sandstorm may have been bidding to get the licenses. Those seem like the two strongest possibilities at the moment, but there might have been other parties interested. The time frame would be unknown. Topps does seem to be deliberate in their decision making on this sort of thing.

Personally, I think it's more likely that it's a matter of "hey, I want to get my money out of IMR and I have the phone number of these people who IMR also owes money".

There are some who believe there was a deeper conspiracy, but in this case, coincidence and mismanagement on IMR's side also explain the situation and events quite well.

The filing was also originally timed so that it could potentially result in a court decision prior to the renewal of the BT/SR license, indicating some belief that the renewal might not happen, which would have pretty much shut the company down.

That was more run inspiration than conspiracy theory

Oh yeah, you could definitely turn it into some sort of Shadowrun adventure or campaign. Get the runners stuck between three companies each of which has its own devious plan that involves screwing one or both of the others.

right. even when you've read all the threads, it still gets confusing due to sheer mass of information sometimes =S

So the damage to the writers is more of a problem with cash flows for those with published materials that haven't been paid, and worry that their work won't be published (and therefore not paid) due to the chaos of ownership? But no writers are worried about their Intellectual Properties managing to wander off in the legal gray zones and no longer being theirs while still not getting paid?

Here's some new meat to chew on:

Catalyst Game Labs Secures License Extension For Shadowrun And BattleTech
http://catalystgamelabs.com/2010/06/25/cat...and-battletech/

So now we know that the announcement was about a short term extension, and not the long term renewal. Someone is sure to spin this even harder than IMR already has, but it's clear that Topps isn't ready to hand over the licenses for another three years.

Luckily we're now in a pretty good spot, thanks to a lot of folks, including Frank Trollman. It seems that he's been sending in the 'correct numbers' to Topps. Since the numbers he sent in matched with the ones we gave Topps, it only helped our case with them.

Wow that got posted while I was catching up since my last post. (Wow, was that 7 pages of crazy or what? I definitely don't want to get back into that unproductive spin cycle again, but I'm glad guys like hermit and cabral, just to name two examples, were able to understand what I was getting at.)

Thanks for bringing that up, but how exactly does this announcement say it's a short term extension? You don't know anything, you're just assuming what you want to hear. Here's what the announcement actually says...



That doesn't say anything about how long the license is for. Almost all of it is boiler-plate happy corp speak. All it tells you is that there's an extension of the licenses for an unspecified length of time.

I still doubt it's for a short length of time though given the fact they were running under an operational extension before. Going through negotiations for license extension for a short period when an extension is already in place sounds redundant to me, but I don't know what the contract says, so for all I know it could have been necessary to do that.



Really now? That's a nugget of information that just begs for more to be told. XD

He must be spinning in the grave he dug for IMR...

If they had signed on for three years, don't you think it would have said so? This is basically backing their current situation, operating for a short term beyond the original agreed to period, with a contract. Standard practice. It is not a long term contract, as Randall stated that was still under negotiation.

So the license is still in play. The fact that Topps isn't willing to sign a three year yet is just a stronger sign that IMR's position might not be that great. But a collapsing IMR at the bargaining table is better for Topps than a corpse.

Not a lot more to add. He had someone feeding him the numbers from our books, I would guess he was assuming we'd lie to Topps. When we gave them the straight picture and he gave them the same info, it really helped our rep feel good about us being forthright with what mistakes had been made, where we were and where we are going. Despite what some of the rumors may say, we are operating on a (somewhat) normal production schedule, not some last-minute cash grab. We're in a hole we dug ourselves into, but we are on our way to climbing out. Now go enjoy some of my lovely writing in 6WA.