"Warmaster Chaos + Battle report" Topic

" A busyt week getting the Chaos army ready for battle. I've still a few more units to paint but can field at least 1500 points now…"

Main Battle at Craig´s Wargaming Blog

link

Armand

Great game. Armies where cheap also.
A sure fire way for GW to drop it.

Glad you enjoyed it…

Armand

GW are casting metal in some quantity again.

So, it's possible, with the old world finally out, that they may do a warmaster rerelease.

I'm not sure where the rules ownership lies, as I think warlords epic is based on it?

Either way, GW are seeing success with simply casting old figures, which is basically free money.

A warmaster rerelease would be also, even if they had to cobble some rules together.

I believe the figures are popular and some rare, like the later releases, bretonians and skaven (I think they did skaven) and lizardmen (I think?).

Thanks

Armand

I'm not sure where the rules ownership lies, as I think warlords epic is based on it?

I don't think that the GW have sold the copyrights to the original product anywhere.

Rule mechanisms (on general level) are not protected by IP legislation, so it is possible to borrow ideas from other games – and there have been a number of historical games that have lifted some ideas from Warmaster.

It's more like, did GW ever own them?

I think Rick wrote it and I think he may have been involved in the Warlord release.

If so, then GW couldn't just rerelease the rules with out his ok.

It may be like Warhammer ancient battles, where it wasn't a proper GW game, they just published it, if that's even right. It sounded like GW wee not very keen on it.

I don't have my copy of the original Warmaster rulebook at hand, but I am quite sure that it states "Copyright Games Workshop 2000" or something to that effect. Rick was at the time employed by GW and designed the game as part of his work, so the copyright would have contractually transferred over to GW.

The original Warhammer Ancient Battles was published. with a permission by GW, by a company put together by the authors (Perry twins, Rick Priestley, Nigel Stillman). However, a few years later GW ended up taking over that company.

I don't have my copy of the original Warmaster rulebook at hand, but I am quite sure that it states "Copyright Games Workshop 2000" or something to that effect.

I checked it later last year, and it states "Copyright Games Workshop Ltd 2000" so pretty close. So GW own the copyright and can re-release it if they feel it would be sufficiently profitable.

As for Rick Priestley, he has been involved in a number of rulesets published by Warlord Games, and from what I have heard some of these have employed game mechanisms similar to the Warmaster rules.