When Moritz Mehlem wrote to me asking whether I'd be interested in a German translation of Labyrinth Lord, I was thinking the usual thing. I've been contacted by various parties interested in translating Labyrinth Lord, parties representing five languages to date, and most disappear in the ether. It's a lot of damn hard work writing this stuff, tedious, and takes time. It's no wonder people are enthusiastic at first but then at some point realize the scope and abandon it.
Well, I should have known better than to even briefly entertain the idea that the Germans would do the same. Some of you may know that Moritz writes material for Labyrinth Lord, published with my good friends at Brave Halfling Publishing. He assembled a team of like-minded people and had the Labyrinth Lord rules translated in a matter of just several weeks. We set a goal of making the book available at a major gaming convention in Germany (Moritz, maybe you could step in with a link, and a link to your interview?), which occured in April. We really came down to the wire in getting this layed out, edited, and books ordered in time. There were moments when I was kind of freaking out (which may have been partly because I was still in India at the time) but through everything Moritz was always calm and optimistic.
We did it. Moritz was able to present Labyrinth Lord for the first time at this convention, along with a great array of Brave Halfling products in German. He sold a very respectable print run there, and after now fixing some errata the Labyrinth Lord German translation is now available to all. It will enter the "psuedo-distribution" plan that makes it available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other online vendors that are hooked into this system. We may work out other things as well. Right now I'm offering it at a very low price, but come April 1st it will have to be raised to meet distribution prices.
This is a significant development for the Old-School Renaissance. Until now, development of Labyrinth Lord products has largely been limited to the US and the English language (with one very notable exception). But now I think only time will tell what might happen since the retro-clone phenomenon has started to spread to other countries. The revival is only beginning.
...and now a shout out to the translators who worked so hard...
...Thorsten Gresser, Moritz Mehlem, Clem Carlos Schermann, Alex Schröder, Marcus Sollmann und Jörg Theobald...
Guys, I hope we can share a few pints some time!
11 comments:
This is great news!
Das ist ja wunderbar! Ich wuensche Ihnen viel Glueck beim neues Übernahme!
That is awesome. Congratulations! Next stop, Mutant Future!
Ausgescheichtnet!
Thanks for the Kudos, Dan! I guess here in Germany will be (and stay) the most prominent Retro-Clone as Mentzer-D&D is the first version of the game we got here and LL is quite close to it. AD&D 1E exists in German, but it has never be a success and most of us over here don't even know that other editions of D&D existed before the end of 1983. So there are people here who are interested in OSRIC or S&W, but LL will always mean "I'm home!" to us mid-thirties guys in the German RPG community.
Here's the link to the interview: http://dorptv.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/rpc-2009-brave-halfling-publishing/
Great news! now we would the Spanish one...
You just need 6 translators and 5 weeks - then you have 3 proof-readers check everything. Finally bully Dan into layouting it - AND THERE YOU ARE!
Also thanx to Dan for the cance to translate! It was a great honor to edited this cool game and a great fun to sell at the RPC! Maybe it is possible to translate Mutant Future also, Moritz just wrote a little szenario for my fanzine ;)
Very cool; and an interesting video, Moritz!
Oh, man! I was damn nervous and I think you can see it. But it's not as terrible as I had thought initially.
Looked like a good interview to me, and the little bits of German that I understood seemed to support that. These things are always nerve wracking, though. Well done!
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