been away for a while and was wondering about the state of VTES

Is VTES alive again, or is there a roadmap to new vtes printings? I thought a group was going to try and get the rights to start makling and printing the old and new cards, did that happen?

Just wondering "what the dillio".

Thank you, and hope everyone is doing well!

Heya!

At present, V:TES is not back in print in card form. There was an attempt by OneBookshelf.com (also known as DriveThruRPG.com) to get V:TES back in print via print-on-demand. That effort stalled. Recently, Fantasy Flight Games was in negotiations to get the licenses to make V:TES, but pulled out. It is to my understanding that OneBookshelf.com is in continuing negotiations for the licenses, but no update or progress has been reported.

In the meantime, the V:EKN is creating .pdf-only sets which are tournament legal. One downloads the files, makes color printouts, then cuts out the cards and puts them into card sleeves. The first was Danse Macabre, a small Sabbat-themed set which was released last year:

vekn.net/vampire-elder-kindred-network/246-danse-macabre

There is an as-yet-unnamed Independents-themed set in the late stages of playtest, and is due to be released in October. You can follow the progress of its development in the Designers' Diary:

vekn.net/designers-diary

I hope this helps!

Cool, thank you very much for the info!!

BenPeal wrote:

At present, V:TES is not back in print in card form. There was an attempt by OneBookshelf.com (also known as DriveThruRPG.com) to get V:TES back in print via print-on-demand. That effort stalled. Recently, Fantasy Flight Games was in negotiations to get the licenses to make V:TES, but pulled out. It is to my understanding that OneBookshelf.com is in continuing negotiations for the licenses, but no update or progress has been reported.

Is it known (and can it be made public, if so) who holds what rights?

For example, do the rights in the design (layout, icons, background wallpaper, card backs) rest with WW or WotC(*), or both? Does commercially exploiting the Vampire: The Eternal Struggle trademark require permission from WotC or WW? Does printing old cards first created by WotC require permission from WotC or WW? Do we know where the rights to card art reside - with WotC, with WW, or with the artists (probably some of each?)?


My bigger question is basically along the lines of: is there anything that could be printed if only WW agreed? For example, if the card backs dropped the Deckmaster trademark(**) (which presumably resides with WotC), could WW grant sufficient permission to print new cards (not PoD-ing old cards), using the V:TES trademark, with the WW-style layout? If necessary, salami-slice a few other things off - say, losing the green and brown backs (less exciting these days, when a deck using V:EKN cards must be sleeved), losing the tri-snake logo etc. Or are there some absolute blockers that would require WotC permission?



(*) Which basically means CCP or Hasbro, I guess, but people should know what I mean by WW and WotC.

(**) By which I mean the trademark only, nothing to do with the patent. Trademarks, patents, and copyright are totally different things.

It is to my understanding that the particulars of who holds which trademarks, patents, and copyrights are known - Steve Wieck of OneBookshelf.com is involved in this, after all. However, I don't know the extent to which the particulars are known to us ("us" being "Design Team, V:EKN ICs, and players"), nor do I personally have any useful familiarity with them. It is also to my understanding that a feasibility study was conducted for the very things you've outlined, and that they were deemed unfeasible.

BenPeal wrote:

Recently, Fantasy Flight Games was in negotiations to get the licenses to make V:TES, but pulled out.

Wow, that could have been interesting. When were the negotiations going on? Really too bad they pulled out