Sounds like you don't have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. That would explain things.

I think there's a little case of the pot calling the kettle black (and gothic punk!).

Anyone else remember the amazing similarities between The Crow and White Wolf's "Risen" character types? I mean, they seriously might as well have just come out and said, that it was based completely on the comics (and, later, the film). Instead, The Crow only gets a passing mention in their "suitably themed and characterful works" chapter at the end of each book (along with music they like, etc, etc).

Close. Actually, AD&D vampires can be killed by stabbing them through the heart with a wooden stake, cutting off their head, and sticking holy wafers in their mouth. I think if you just stake them, it only immobilizes them until the stake is removed. But without any called shot rules (although most AD&D DMs have some kind of house rule for that), it is only really applicable when you find one in its coffin. Also, in AD&D, vampires are pre-"gothy cool"; they are undead monsters, plain and simple (although the Ravenloft setting/Van Richten's Guide introduced a lot of variants, which might include the odd non-evil vampire or so - I don't have that supplement, so I don't know).

Actually, I kind of find the AD&D old-school undead monster vampires refreshing after all of the angsty, whining, gothy White Wolf spew.

This is going to sound like paranoid, egotistical ranting but you can live with that

One of the things that really scares/irritates me about this is that it could serve to actually turn young writers (like me!) away from the genre. I mean, if White Wolf is going to sue Sony for what should really be public property (seriously, out of all that list I don't think any of it was invented by White Wolf except some of the names) what chance does an aspiring writer have? Especially if they're looking to make a career out of what is still a popular genre.

Somebody says something around the line of "Imagination is the art of hiding your sources of inspiration."

Slovotsky's Law #1 - Originality is just undetected plagairism.

Thanks for the post Adam, always good to go to the source.

I think AD&D vamps it's not wood that does it, they regenerate damage unless "cleansed by fire, or sunlight.

What the firk ding blast ever happened to "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants?"

I mean, take William Gibson. Everything he used comes from somewhere else, from Turing to Huxley to Phillip K. Dick, but it was his style that makes his books so good, moreso than any truly original idea in them.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/

Red the news, scan the comic! *g*

Penny Arcade's take on it.

Edit: Dang. Didn't read to the end of the thread so I didn't see Sarge's post. Well, my post is better since it links straight to the comic.

*shrug*

The first thing I did when I saw the trailer was roll my eyes, thinking "oh, another pretty-goth flick"

The second thing I did was ask the person sitting next to me why "Vee's" were warring against "a fungus with a symbiotic relationship to algae."

The third thing was, of course, to duck.

Ms. collins being the only whitewolf writer whose work ive read, i certainly was surprised not to see her credited at the end of this film. I also thought that Selena seemed to be a carbon copy of the way Lucita has been depicted, but I think the points regarding the use of Abominations is the winner of this case

The vampire/werewolf crossbreed is a whitewolf invention, and they specifically termed it Abomination. for it to be then duplicated exactly in the movie makes me believe that whitewolf's case has alot more merit than people think.

Having read throught the 64 page filing...I think Sony would be wise to settle this out of court. I have a feeling that White Wolf is going to be posting a very hefty profit for 2004.

All the best...
John

If you do even a little research into the Occult type stuff, spcefically vampires. I found White Wolf lifted everything from folklore. I played White Wolf games well before WoD, and everything in the V:TM book seemed lifted from folk lore, hell the books are filled with song lyrics and book quotes. I have not found anything about "Abominations" in the folk lore, I haven't looked for it either.

A lot of the points in the compliant seem to have merit, until you see that almost everything White Wolf has on vampires and were wolves, and most of the other stuff, changlings, mummies, wriaths and mages, are completely based on lore that has been around for hundreds of years.

I have a feeling Sony will settle, or buy out White Wolf

And as for the "werewolves" in the commercials, the ones running on the walls, I thought were gargoyles or something, some sort of demons. I didn't thing werewolves. But to be honest, I did think the promo had a very V:TM feel when I seen it. But I think White Wolf should take what they can get and run away happy.

Heh.

Ann Rice didn't sue White Wolf, because White Wolf was/is a penniless RPG-company. In an interview with a danish RPG-magazine, Mark-Rein Hagen flat out admitted that the inspiration for V:tM was Ann Rice's books. He also said that he off course couldn't admit to that in the US.


Adhoc

Just bothered to download the trailer, looks like a kick ass action packed movie with lots of effects and a thin story. But I'm sure it will be worth a ticket anyway.

sammiel, there was an Image Comics crossover (Ballistic / Wetworks) that had a crossbred vampire/werewolf. their take on it was quite different from WW's.

admittedly, Ballistic/Wetworks came after WoD--but "first" doesn't necessarily mean "only", when you're talking about inspiration. the thing that strikes me about the listed points of the lawsuit are that--as Gabe and Tycho so elegantly pointed out--most of 'em could be applied to Anne Rice's novels as well.

Mrs. Rice is still pissing blood from those last couple of books she wrote. I swear, once she did Memnoch the Devil, everything went straight to Hell. Sure, the vampire Armand was okay, but Tales of the Body Thief? Jaysis Abortus...

Seriously though, Rice fucked herself out of any hope when she gave out the vampires' "origin" in QUeen of the Damned; and WW was very careful not to follow her books to the T (no glassy-nails, no tanning in sunlight for uber-vampires, no real pyrokinesis 'cept for the Tremere, and they call that Creo Ignem or the Lure of Flames).

Actually Queen of the Damned gave WW the break they needed. In that Rice says vampires came from demons inhabiting mortals in the days of egypt. WW goes back further saying that vampirism is the "Mark of Caine" that God put on the son of Adam, really getting back before egypt, and pushing it further to show how Vampires have manipulated world history (Carthage, 100 years war etc) while Rice's vamps are just content to sit back and observe and try to stay relevant.

As long as it doesn't extend the release date, I'm happy

-- Dashifen --

WW is hardly penniless; they've had one of the best-selling games for over 10 years now. Compared to Sony, they're small fry. Compared to most game companies, they're quite large.

This "illusion" is interesting. I know and agree with why FASA and TSR and all the rest avoid cursing and explicit, graphic comments in their books, but WW goes out of it's way to f*** and S*** and f*** and b**** and all the rest, talking about Giovani and incestuous etc. I know they are giving it the "edge" but wonder why they felt they could/should do it when so many other game corps avoid that like the plague.

They do it because they are like those pathetic 80's metal bands. They want to be the "cool stuff your mom doesn't want you to have". So - oooh! swearing! blasphemy! naughty bits! After all, these are the same pathetic, goth-geek losers who put up a fake fundie website bashing their new game in a peurile attempt to get some cheap heel heat for it (Look, kids! You can play demons! Your mom will really freak!). I don't mind mature themes or dark games, but I have never gotten into White Wolf at all. Maybe because I think controversy should be real, not contrived to make a game look "cool".

Yeah, I get the same impression.

They don't overdo swaring or blaspheming. They use it in IC talk, where it is appropiate. I like it.

And, although I'm sligthly under pressure now, with getting my Mage stuff together, I /like/ the idea of ending a game-line. It's... Yeah, cool.

I think Motorfire has the nail under the hammer on this one.

The whole idea of werewolves and vampires existing in the same fiction and disliking each other has a long tradition well before White Wolf developed an RPG on the premise.

It would be like WizKids trying to sue someone for making a sword-and-sorcery flick like "Excalibur" or even "Lord of the Rings".

Now, if Margaret Weis decided to sue a movie company because they were doing a film about a world overrun with dragons and they used steel for currency...that's a little more specific than "vampires and werewolves disliking each other."

I am curious as to the "sixty points of similarity" they mention and just how unique they happen to be.

-Siege

Siege - those sixty points are in the PDF file I posted a link to a few days ago.

And most of us read. Some points are good, some are crap. But the plan in court is just overwhelm Sony. If it has to defend each point, even the bad ones it is a greater mass for them to respond to than just the good ones.

That could possibly backfire, though. The Sony lawyers could hold a bunch of the frivolous ones up to ridicule, and the few "good" ones could get ignored in the face of all of the frivolous ones. Of course, this is far more likely to get settled out of court. Even if Sony is in the right, it might still be cheaper for them to settle.

Adhoc: Great movie, great satire - and it hits right on target. That is what those bands were like (minus the "bizarre gardening accidents, of course).

Heck, I remember a '90's episode of Tales From the Crypt which featued a vampire/werewolf rivalry.

Now, as the son of a lawyer, I know what I am talking about when I say I don't have a clue about the legal ramifications and copyright issues relevant to this case or a likely outcome! I do suspect someone on the WW staff or family of one of the WW staff is a lawyer.

Have you ever read through a law suit? The masses of paperwork is stupifying. I've seen suits where someone is sueing the owner of a property we hold the mortgage on, something minor like, I kid you not, tripping on the sidewalk in from of the building, and the first 18 pages is defining who and what and where everything is. It's litterally that far in before you find out what happened that the suit is happening.

I'd hate to think how thick this puppy is.

I've never read through a lawsuit, but I work for a roofing company and I've read through the paperwork for foreclosures on a few of our customers' houses that we get notified about. It's the same way, they take half of the "book" worth of paper jus to make sure everyone knows exactly where the property is, what it's boundaries are, etc. And they can never say "Mr. X", they say "Mr. X, any spouse, descendant, business, contractor, unnamed heirs or other unknown or unnamed entities whom may have claim upon said property" every single time they would normally just say the owner's name.. it gets rather tedious. I bet if you could get something in legalese in a .doc file and do a search/replace and replace all that BS with plain english they would be half as long...

Bingo!

[url=http://thedarkcity.org/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=55&t=440&st=0]The Great
Justin explains all![/url]

edit: what the hell?

http://thedarkcity.org/forum/index.php?act...f=55&t=440&st=0

Perhaps the 'missing' "www." *?*

xtheenth edit: Belive me... I tried to make it work, too.

The White Wolf Update Press Release from Sept. 10.

::badly crayons arcanum in.:: /

That reminds me of the technocracy sourcebook.

Somethings along the lines of:
"Use #2 pencils. And if your ST tells you, to fill a dot, you fill it out clear and completely. This is an order." *ggg*