If ICE had dropped the license when their debt had been paid off they could have survived with RoleMaster and Silent Death, which did make a small profit. ICE was able to pay off their debt a few years ago with the Middle Earth CCG, which sold quite well before the market collapsed. They lost a lot of the profits doing the Middle Earth Quest books, which they didn't have a license for (they got the license from a book publisher that thought it had the license, then ICE printed thousands of books before it found out it didn't have the license, then the ME book licensee didn't grant ICE permission to go ahead and sell their books). But four years ago ICE had no significant debts and was in good position to lose Middle Earth.

Tolkein Enterprises doesn't yet have the rights to all the MERP manuscripts. But if ICE (now in bankruptcy) can't sell enough assets to pay off its debt to TE, all their remaining assets go to TE. So TE gets MERP, RoleMaster, Silent Death and everything else, to do with as they wish. The Silent Death rights are in negotiation with another company. RoleMaster may be also but it's not as popular. But other than that ICE has very little usable assets. They own a huge amount of MERP material but not the right to publish and sell it.

As to the future of MERP, someone will probably get the license to publish RPG books. It is unlikely that we'll ever see detailed MERP books again, as those are relatively small sellers. Lots of intro books with mass appeal a la D&D, since the licensee will have a huge license fee to pay off. In my opinion it's a sad situation, but that happens.

After the seminar I went back to our room. Dave and Little Chris convinced me to play Fluxx, published by Looney Labs. Fluxx is a simple game, the object being to collect Keeper cards in some combination to satisfy a Goal card. There are different Goal cards, mostly requiring two cards to win (such as "Chocolate Milk -- to win you need Chocolate and Milk"). There are New Rule cards (lots of them) that change the specific mechanics of the rules: draw more cards, play more cards, can only have so many cards in your hand, can only have so many Keepers on the table, hidden Keepers, one or two others. And there are Action cards that allow you to steal Keepers, kill New Rules, force hidden Keepers out and so forth.

It's a fast playing game with the rules constantly changing. On one turn you could be drawing four cards and playing all four cards, then by the next turn drawing two cards and only playing one card and discarding the other. It's a relatively fun game but very random. There is a little bit of strategy involved but the situation changes so quickly (and the Goal changes almost constantly) that keeping cards in your hand or on the table is not something you can count on. I think it would make a good drinking game, but personally there's not enough "control your own fate" for me.

At 16:00 I went downstairs to play a miniature game. It was some space combat game set in the Deep Space 9 universe, Federation vs Jem Hadar. Unfortunately I lost enthusiasm when I got there. I guess I'm getting old and less tolerant of people. There are certain fairly obnoxious people who play the miniature games at DunDraCon (or watch them) and I don't want to deal with them anymore. The general games it's less of a problem (though there are still obnoxious players, chances are they're not the same people year after year). But in the miniatures section it's the same people over and over since there are only a handful of miniature games.

Went back to the room and played another game of Fluxx. Then I read the Red Alert! rules while Dave beat Chris at Fluxx a couple of times (Chris didn't win any Fluxx games that day). I have four Red Alert! starter packs: one each of Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Ferengi (and based on the product numbers, there are probably multiple of Federation and maybe Klingon and Romulan, or a lot of races are represented). Each starter pack comes with a sheet for the ship, a (random?) race sheet (with four disks), two sheets of counters, a scenario sheet, and three random sheets. I got a big Cardassian ship and a couple of random Cardassian sheets in the random distribution, so I had five ships and a half dozen scenarios.

(continued)