Just have to say I'm amazed at WOTC. Every time they start doing something right, ...they manage to screw it up royally.
According to Margaret Weis WOTC replaced her editor Liz Schuh (Who has been with WOTC since 1995, and has been the head of publishing and licensing for about as long as anyone can remember) and replaced her with uhhh...
Nic Kelman.
"In or about June 2020, Defendant changed the editorial and oversight team assigned to the new Dragonlance trilogy, removing Liz Schuh and Hilary Ross and replacing them with Nic Kelman and Paul Morrissey. Mr. Kelman, who was and remains Defendant’s Head of Story and Entertainment, was a controversial choice. As recently as 2019, his own publication as author of the sexually explicit novel, “Girls: A Paean” was subject to ongoing public discussions of whether his work contained or promoted misogyny and pedophilia."I have no additional comments on these allegations as I haven't read
Girls: A Paean. I will say a cursory examination reveals he is not currently, nor has been an RPG gamer. He was a writer up until the time WOTC hired him and was previously known for his screenplay
"Generis" that was sold to Steven Spielberg back in 2011. No clue what the movie is about, Generis though is a latin word for
"Of another kind". His other screenplays include
"The Outpost" (not the 2020 movie about Afghanistan) and
"Emergence" which was picked up by Roland Emmerich and Centropolis Entertainment and is currently in pre-production hell meaning the movie script has been set aside as the producer and entertainment company have chosen to actively work on other projects (
Midway, by Centropolis Entertainment which was released earlier this year) and Roland Emmerich is currently working on
Moonfall scheduled for a 2021 release. Details of
Emergence are scarce, but it is said to be a new take on the classic alien invasion story with
"hot-button science elements". Roland Emmerichs' other movies that he worked on since 2013 include "
Independence Day: Resurgence(2016) ", and
"Stonewall" which was released in 2015.
Nic has been mired in some controversy especially over the last year, after some of the Magic:The Gathering existing storylines were retconned to omit a major Lesbian character that has been a part of the Magic universe since 2010, so he really pissed off the LGBT fans and others over at WOTC. Then caved to a petition over on change.org
https://www.change.org/p/wizards-of-the-coast-wotc-revert-greg-weisman-and-nic-kelman-s-retcon-that-erased-chandra-s-pansexualityPaul Morissey is the new Publishing lead for Wizards of the Coast joining WOTC just this January. Before that he was a freelance comic author for DC comics and was the co-writer for the
Teen-Titans:Go comic series, and worked for
Blizzard Entertainment as an Editor for a couple years from June 2018-November 2019, so
Overwatch, Starcraft, Diablo, and World of Warcraft. Before that he worked for
Archaia Entertainment LLC, working
Mousegard: Legends of the Guard, and in the early 2000's worked for
TokyoPop in L.A. bringing Manga to the western masses. You can find him over at Twitter as
@Pauliewog.
These two replaced
Liz Schuh and
Hilary Ross, and then proceeded to kill the planned re-release of
Dragonlance, including a new novel trilogy, along with maybe some new D&D adventures and managed to piss off a pair of well established multi-million dollar earning literary and RPG award winning authors.
Ooopsie.What I'm not seeing from WOTC or Hasbro is the new
shiney that would replace
Dragonlance. I'll wager right now though, these two new managers don't actually have anything to offer in place of that, making this insult especially egregious. Will be very interested to see how this develops. WOTC sued for
Breach of Contract,
ouch!In the meanwhile, for those of you interested, here is a downloadable pdf of the complaint filed by
Margaret Weiss and
Tracy Hickman, so you can save a copy for yourself to review later and to ensure that corporate shills, shysters, other liars and backbiters are not able to later conceal the truth with like a gag order or something similar...
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7245020/Weis.pdfBest reading for today for me! I'd be really surprised if
Hasbro had anything to do with this train wreck. They have been enjoying that MTG and D&D has been so successful since the release of 5e since about 2017 or so...