What do you want first?

The bad news or the worse news?

It seems Chaosium and GenCon are having a spat. The official word from GenCon:

Unfortunately, we will have to keep all events for Chaosium products on hold until on-going negotiations between Chaosium and Gen Con LLC have been resolved. Events can be submitted, but they will not be marked as “Accepted for Consideration” until everything has been resolved. Badges and hotel arrangements will not be based on these Chaosium events.

This specifically affects any events for Chaosium-published products. It does not affect related games from other publishers (such as Call of Cthulhu d20) or the more general overall Lovecraft mythos.

I don't really know what this means, but I don't like the sound of it. It seems either GenCon is using this as leverage to force something out of Chaosium OR Chaosium is asserting some sort of rights over games run with their IP. Both options hurt the fans first and foremost. Whoever is responsible for this decision needs to own up and explain themselves.

(Thanks to theRPGsite member kregmosier for this item.)

In other depressing news Necromancer Games seems to be going under, and they are doing it in the same super-classy way that the story of Guardians of Order's demise broke: Somebody let it slip that Necromancer was going down, but the announcement was unauthorized and ahead of schedule. Now everyone is backpedaling, saying that the company isn't necessarily dead. Best of luck to everyone involved with Necromancer. Too bad it had to go down like this, especially so soon after someone involved with GoO pulled the exact same thing, twice. Here's the EN World thread on Necromancer's woes.