Annual Report 2024: Time for Summer
You’re getting your annual report early this year. There are some changes coming because of the Anno Magica.
For those not up to speed, Ars Magica is going to enter a new season later in the year, when Atlas Games crowdfunds the Definitive Edition. As part of that project, parts of the Ars Magica system will be released under something like the Share Alike 4.0 license. That frees up all sorts of fan work from needing seek permission before publication. There are already stirrings as the ancient beasts wake. David Chart is working on introductory material on Patreon and the other Ars Magica podcast, Arcane Connection, has returned from Twilight over on Podomatic. I’m not an insider on this process: I usually know substantially less than those of you who, for example, attend the Grand Tribunal convention, so book your tickets. Here’s what’s happening with Games From Folktales.
I’ve offered to pay some of the authors from the Ars Magica fansphere to write articles for GFF. Please don’t pitch me articles yet unless you are one of the authors I’ve contacted, but express interest if you like. In some cases it will be more of a cross-over situation where the audio resides here and the text is on the other author’s website. The nature of the experiment is complicated, but here’s a summary.
Games From Folktales works, currently, because it has a shoestring budget and I don’t charge for my work. Patreons chip in enough to keep the lights on. The downside is that when I’m working on a bigger project, like Magonomia or Venice, GFF sits on the back burner and sometimes goes silent. By asking other authors aboard, some of that workload shifts to them.
My hope is that Games From Folktales becomes a bit more like a fanzine. Most fanzines work on a subscription basis, and that doesn’t seem possible under share alike license. The cost base of the podcast is higher, so I’ll be begging for money harder at the end of each episode. I know people hate that sort of thing, so I’ll keep it short. Games From Folktales has a simpler URL now, gamesfromfolktales.com, which lets me direct people there more easily in other Ars Magica related publications. It removes the ads you used to see on the free site. Similarly there will be some sort of “tip jar” eventually.
The trial will be for two years, because that’s the cheapest way to pay for hosting. Even if all the authors write all of the stuff for this experiment, and I pay them all, and cover the new expenses, it is still covered by the gap that has opened up between what the Patreons, have been putting up and the cost of my hosting, so there’s no chance it will wreck everything. I can scale back to the shoestring budget if this fails.
In case you’d like to try this yourself, here are my numbers. My podcast host charges 5USD a month, my webhost charges 6AUD a month, and my domain registrar charges AUD 1.50, so that’s roughly AUD15. The Patreons currently chip in AUD22 a month, of which Patreon grabs roughly AUD2. The payment for articles, which is USD35 an article, is coming from money that’s been accruing due to the imbalance between the host cost and the Patreon input. I’d been putting it aside to make a Kickstarter for Venice, but I no longer think that’s a viable route. Aside from some I’m keeping for cover art and maps, this is how I’m using it.
At the moment I operate using the permission granted by Atlas Games in a couple of emails from before the podcast started. That explicitly includes permission to make money from the podcast. Now, as I say I’m not an insider, but if I was Atlas, I’d be very tempted to say “All previous permissions are superseded by the Share-Alike license”. That would stop, for example, someone borrowing one of my monsters without attribution and then finding out they’d put a poison pill into their work. I, personally, wouldn’t do anything about it, but it makes the whole thing tidier for everyone if Atlas has all external creators using the same permission.
That means I’ll need to check the Share Alike license to make sure that anything in process meets the new standard. For example, it may be that only 5th edition is covered, and that would mean some rewrites in Venice, because it references the Second Edition book “Order of Hermes”. Similarly if the Tremere name, which is a trademark that I presume is now owned by Paradox, is off the table, the huge dog that the Master of Games sends to say scathing things to the player characters when they displease him is going to need a new name.
There is also the question of what comes next. Until we see the license it’s best, in my opinion, to tidy up Venice then focus on material which is useful for new people. Much of that doesn’t make for good podcasting. As an example, we really need to write a concordance of the monsters which are within the license, but reading out what’s essentially a spreadsheet would be too dry to listen to. GFF will probably do something with the Cheshire and Devon material I’ve collected.
Upcoming episodes that are already scripted or recorded include your usual monster of the month, four accounts of demons from English witch trials, and a series based on the ballads of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The first of the guest authors is Angela Black, whose thoughts on Divine Methods and Powers is slated for 16 May.
Again, a special thanks to the Patreons for making this possible.