BBC is making a Victorian-era War of the Worlds

[Bronshtein]

Okay - Copyright on written works is 70 years after the author's death.

Kwakkers is right - Wells died 1946 - his works just came out of copyright.

You can't 'renew' it.

Just a point though - not applicable to film but you can't take a 2000 edition of Wells books and photocopy them and resell - that has a 25 year separate typographical right - you could type it out by hand and publish in a different format but that publishers version is copyright even after the 70 year period expires.

Yep, Trademarks are a whole different bundle of fish and are a complete bastard, (you can renew these). Good luck with working them out because there are lawyers in the States in particular who rely on people getting this wrong in order to be able to tell paupers like Donald Trump to get off their lawn.

[Australian Dawn]

If that's the case then the owners of Wells' IPs have done a truly terrible job growing and protecting the property.

In recent years I'd started to come around, against my better judgement, to viewing the long periods of protection provided by copyright laws as perhaps not so bad a thing (at least for the dominant cultures in the US, UK and places with money and massive consumer bases at any rate) based mainly on the recent successes of old IPs in mainstream culture under the ownership and stewardship of companies like Disney, who seem willing to invest a lot of money and effort in developing their IPs.

But I see now that if the European copyright to H.G.Wells work is still valid after so ridiculously long a time, and the decisions of whoever owns the IP to his work (and not just disinterest and mistrust by developers and audiences of adaptions of his work due to an unfortunate string of poor adaptions and changes in popular tastes in entertainment, as I had previously put it down to) are what has resulted in the appalling and/or generic crap we've seen based off these stories in the mainstream media being the only big budget, mainstream media representations of his work, then the IP laws have really damaged Wells works and world culture.

[Australian Dawn]

I've been looking to build WotW armies for HotT*** for ages. There's nothing I've found that matches Wells' vision. Yet.


***Holy Acronyms, Batman!

Are you planning on adapting the rules or using a Sci-fi version or just using the regular rules?

Are you planning to use the Martians against other generic HotTs armies or following the story?

I would think the size, scale and asymmetrical nature of the battles and forces involved would make playing it by the Wells story with HotTs difficult, most HotTs games I've seen with Tripods take a more generic approach and go more by the general style of the Martians in the story rather than try and stick to the actual details of the book.

I also find Wells description of the Tripods hard to visualise, the descriptions give a vivid impression and some distinct details (they move quite oddly too IIRC, almost spinning like tops, which I have never seen represented in any interpretation) but it's hard to put it all together into a consistent whole, and I think they are open to a variety of interpretations.

[kawasaki]

Steady on, this is HotT we're talking about! You may be over-thinking it.

The Martians are obvious enough. There are fighting, flying and handling machines. And a once-mentioned-in-not-much-detail embankment machine.

The fighting machines could be knights, I suppose. The flying machines would be flyers/airboats, handling machines behemoths, and no-one's going to miss the embankment machine perhaps.

The humans are going to be shooters/hordes/artillery. A hero. A cleric?

[Australian Dawn]

I've been looking to build WotW armies for HotT*** for ages. There's nothing I've found that matches Wells' vision. Yet.


***Holy Acronyms, Batman!

From this comment I thought you must be pretty firmly set on authenticity and was interested in what you had in mind.

The HotTs book has Alien vs. Human army lists of course, but they are fairly generic.

But yeah, that's HotTs for you, best not to stress the small stuff.

[kawasaki]

That's what I like about HotT, anything can be what you want it to be .

I've got Jason and the Argonauts and opponents on the go at the minute. It's a good enough excuse to field a god (Zeus) and a behemoth (Talos), with harpies, skeleton warriors, centaurs and shit

And to be frank, HotT is the only sort of fantasy/sci fi I can be bothered with. Everything else is historical. I don't have time to be painting fahsands of orcs.

[Australian Dawn]

That's what I like about HotT, anything can be what you want it to be .

I've got Jason and the Argonauts and opponents on the go at the minute. It's a good enough excuse to field a god (Zeus) and a behemoth (Talos), with harpies, skeleton warriors, centaurs and shit

And to be frank, HotT is the only sort of fantasy/sci fi I can be bothered with. Everything else is historical. I don't have time to be painting fahsands of orcs.

The HotTs rules for simulating masses of orcs and things like that with the replacing hordes rules are great.
It's clever and economical and can represent so many things, I wish other rules sets would pick up on the idea.
I keep finding myself trying to adapt summoning and raise dead spells in other rules to simulate it.
It's like video game respawning for the table top.
If a flexible rules set like Chipco's Fantasy rules! or Dragon Rampant that lets you stat out your characters and units let you add this as an ability I'd be a happy gamer.


I was thinking about who I'd like to see try to do an adaption of War of the Worlds for TV if it was up to me, and was surprised to realise the people I'd most like to see have a crack at making it, or at least realising the background and the period setting, are the people who make the Murdoch Mysteries.

They do such a consistently good job, season after season, of realising the time period and setting for that series, which must be very difficult and expensive, but the costumes, sets, CGI, acting, locations, everything about the setting and background, are so seamlessly and unobtrusively done, yet give such a good feel of the time and place without being over the top or cliché, that I think they'd be the perfect people to take on creating the setting for this project.

No overly dramatic OTT Penny Dreadful style dramatics, no gothic Dark and stormy night or eternally dark and foggy London streets, no exaggerated emphasis on decadence and corruption, or filth and squalor, no blatant pushing of modern day agendas, just a naturalistic, straight take on the period without ignoring or overemphasising the social situation of the time.
No rewriting history or delving into social issues unrelated to the story, just give us as true and honest a depiction of the time and place the story is set in as posible, so that they can concentrate on telling the tale Wells wrote, and get that right for once, and I'll be happy.
The Murdoch people might be able to create a setting that would allow that IMHO.

[Derek H]

If a flexible rules set like Chipco's Fantasy rules! or Dragon Rampant that lets you stat out your characters and units let you add this as an ability I'd be a happy gamer.

You can add any ability you like with house rules.

[Australian Dawn]

If a flexible rules set like Chipco's Fantasy rules! or Dragon Rampant that lets you stat out your characters and units let you add this as an ability I'd be a happy gamer.

You can add any ability you like with house rules.

I wouldn't know how to balance a potentially game breaking ability like that, or how to work out the point cost for it.

[Jakar Nilson]

No overly dramatic OTT Penny Dreadful style dramatics, no gothic Dark and stormy night or eternally dark and foggy London streets, no exaggerated emphasis on decadence and corruption, or filth and squalor, no blatant pushing of modern day agendas, just a naturalistic, straight take on the period without ignoring or overemphasising the social situation of the time.
No rewriting history or delving into social issues unrelated to the story, just give us as true and honest a depiction of the time and place the story is set in as posible, so that they can concentrate on telling the tale Wells wrote, and get that right for once, and I'll be happy.
The Murdoch people might be able to create a setting that would allow that IMHO.

Not so sure. The last season of Murdoch clearly jumped the shark. Lots of overly dramatic style dramatics, plenty of blatant pushing of modern day agendas, time-travelling musicians. And someone please watch the Lovecraft episode so that I know I am not alone in my suffering...