Megaversal TTRPGs

Back in the day (and even now), Palladium Books was known in the industry as a difficult company. In particular, they had a reputation for being extremely litigious and protective of their copyrights. On one occasion, they sued a then-obscure game publisher for The Primal Order, a neat little roleplaying game about gods and religions that included conversion rules for Palladium's own game system. Despite the fact that game rules are not, in fact, subject to copyright at all, the expensive settlement of this lawsuit nearly forced that publisher into bankruptcy, forcing its owner to switch his efforts into putting out a new game that could make lots and lots of money. Palladium won the battle and received its pound of flesh, but the publisher, owner, and new game were Wizards of the Coast, Peter Adkison, and Magic: The Gathering. The rest, as they say, is (obscure) history (for nerds).

So why Krugatch? The Krugatch are a made-up faction of alien-lovers, splintered from the Invid-beaten remnants of the made-up EBSIS communist super-state, in a game based on an anime that had nothing to do with Macross but got squashed together with it to create Robotech, an intellectual property that Palladium is no longer allowed to publish. Does Palladium Books "own" Krugatch? Capitalist boot-lickers would say "yes, of course, intellectual property, blah blah blah."

But this is the Federated frontier; out here, Krugatch has no owner.

So this (and future Krugatch threads) are for ribs and rants against Palladium Books from we who still love and play their games anyway, regardless of who has what licensing deal, who's allowed to publish what about which intellectual property, and all that other bourgeois hogwash that gets in the way of creativity and fun.