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Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:I thought they already had *a* License on the Hobbitt, judging by Battle Of Five Armies.

Perhaps they need not shell out on it at all? I have no idea how licenses work though!

That's the "book licence" from Tolkien Ents that I was referring to. They don't, as far as I know, have a "film" licence for the Hobbit .... yet. The "film" licence for LotR refers to the Weta Digital and New Line imagery - so the way Elves dress, the way Trolls look etc. Models based on images from the films and the use of names used in the films (Aragorn, Bilbo, etc., etc.). The Book licence of course only covers licenced names from the books (LotR and the Hobbit) that are not already covered by the film licence (Smaug, Beater and Biter, Scouring of the Shire, Tom Bombadil, etc.) So GW are already licenced to produce a wargame based on the written events of the Hobbit but would not be able to use any imagery that New Line/Weta created without a "film licence".

So we can have a game based around Bilbo's treck to the Lonely Mountain, but the protagonists would not have to look too much like the images from the film otherwise they would be in trouble with New Line. Unless or until they paid New Line for the privilege of using the designs that they create.

Convoluted I agree. But there you are.

In the early days of the book licence there were all sorts of issues. New Line objected to the mixing of the two licences in the same product. So the "Shadow and Flame" suppplement that came out in 2003 was a "book only" property - and the dwarf models for instance had round shields, whereas the shields lying around Moria in the film were all square. Also with the Scouring of the Shire supplement in 2005, they had to refer to "Sharkey" and "Worm" and hide their faces to get around any confusion between book imagery and film imagery (which included the names "Saruman" and "Grima Wormtongue" as well as the likenesses of Christopher Lee and Brad Durouf (Sp?) in their film costumes).

When you consider the legal complexities and complications, the Perrys and Brian Nelson did an amazing job in treading that fine line between getting something that fit in with the film imagery without impinging on the film licence properties - as GW were forbidden from taking something created by New Line and altering it too much (by for instance placing in out of context within a non-film scene with non-film characters). Eventually New Line dropped that stipulation, and so as well as permitting the conversions of models with WFB/40k parts alongside LotR parts, it was permitted that supplement books could contain both GW-created "Book" imagery and New Line-created "film" imagery. If they hadn't dropped that stipulation then (for instance) the Harad supplement they released last year would not have come out as it mixes film imagery (Corsairs, foot Haradrim and Mumakil) with book imagery (mounted Haradrim, Half-trolls, named Corsairs and troops of Far Harad) in the same photographs!

But I digress...

JohnHwangDD wrote:It's coming out this weekend, right before the Stoma & Shadowsword.

Correction - it was *previewed* starting this weekend, with the actual release in April.