I kind of went through all the post here and didn’t seem like there were any updated or maintained Fan Sites.  Does anybody know of any that somehow didn’t find its way to this section?

I do not know the policy of this company, but are there limitations of guidelines listed that what a Fansite can and can’t have?

I was considering having an in-character blog to storytell their experience while existing in this world.  Does this breech any rules ?

I do not think that a Fan Site recounting your experiences is an issue at all. I’d only worry if you were re-prinitng any material from the official sources.
So if you had an In-Character blog about your experiences within, say, Milk Run, that would be ok as long as you didn’t throw the maps or stats for any baddies on the blog.
As long as it is self made fiction, that is all fine in my book.

Of Course, I don;t work for MSL, so they might have another take on it.
But since they specifically put up materials on the company homepage for Fan Sites, it would be silly (IMHO) to not allow you to do so!

Thank you for your input.  My vision here is only a text based blog about character whatever’s experience from day to day in the world.  It would include names of cities and characters he deals with, but no stats, images or maps.  Just text

Actually, while our group was still active, I encouraged my players to write character blogs for not only extra CDP credit but also as a means to explore your character’s personality more. (A rule of thumb is that a character’s personality won’t start getting realised until you’ve gained the first 20% of the total levels available.) You could even set up a MySpace profile for your character and blog from there (Blogging on Facebook is not as good as I find compared to Blogger, or LiveJournal for that matter. As least with LJ you have better luck making up fictitious places and dates, compared to MySpace and for Facebook, forget it. I had a devil of a time trying to set up a City of Heroes character blog and the system would back at using Paragon City, RI as a location.)

I think in the Downloads section, they still kept the fan kit and the sound kit and these are “free” to use. Anything beyond that, you will need to attain copyright permission but the MSL guys are pretty reasonable. The more sites out there, the more visibility and “hits” from search bots and thus, the more exposure AO will get.

I currently run the fan site (forums) for the dying company West End Games.  Since that company is being ran into the ground by an owner who cares little for its fans and his own company, I needed somewhere else to turn too.  While at Gencon 2009, I saw AO’s booth and gave it a try.  I regretably must say, the books actually sat in my luggage bag until about 2 weeks ago.  Not that I was not interested, just little time. I started to read through and wanted to give my attention toward it now. 

A game from WEG called Septimus which came out during Gencon 2009 was a complete disappointment as there was zero support from the company.  BUT with all this said, I started a blog called The Chronics of Greg Barr which assumed a character in the Septimus World and his struggle there.

I wanted to do a similiar thing with the storyline for AO.  But if I at some point will be ask to stop for exposing copyrighted material, then I will save everybody the headache now and not even start.  The only thing that will find its way into the blog is AO background information and whatever my mind creates up along with it.  I am not sure what the company will allow and not allow, what is copyrighted and such?

Magman - 22 March 2010 07:08 PM

....  BUT with all this said, I started a blog called The Chronics of Greg Barr which assumed a character in the Septimus World and his struggle there.

I wanted to do a similiar thing with the storyline for AO.  But if I at some point will be ask to stop for exposing copyrighted material, then I will save everybody the headache now and not even start.  The only thing that will find its way into the blog is AO background information and whatever my mind creates up along with it.  I am not sure what the company will allow and not allow, what is copyrighted and such?

Yes, I can certainly understand the hesitation with one of my previous games, MYST Online where fans were starting to create their own ages. Cyan Worlds, its developer, has been grappling with the legal question on fan-licensing and copyright permissions, especially with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which is one of the strongest pieces of legislation to protect artists’ material. And actually, if it wasn’t for that major studio’s legal department who didn’t double-check their sources first, AO wouldn’t have gotten as much attention as it had when they started pulling fans’ postings of the Van Mantra videos from YouTube, causing further confusion between “Cloverfield"s and “AO"s respective ARGs.

But I digress…

A blog of your own character and not one of the NPCs from AO is a good start to developing an adaptation of an existing work. I imagine your character won’t be quoting paragraphs from the AO Core Rulebook of its description of the areas he’s visiting; the creatures he’s encountering; or the equipment he’s using. I think there’s nothing wrong in making reference to the items, creatures and places and worse comes to worse, if you still feel uncomfortable using the same terms of reference that AO uses, then you can always call it something else as regionalism does play a part in language, especially in a PA setting/world. You can’t ever copyright an idea, only its direct expression of a work, based on that idea.

A good example is vampire fiction. Vampires are creatures of old mythology. You want to write a blog about a character who is a vampire on their struggles in a modern world. That’s a specific idea but Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles), Charlaine Harris (TrueBlood), or Tanya Huff (Bloodties) can’t stop you from writing about that idea/story concept. You can still go ahead and write about it as long as you don’t write about their characters and/or the specific situations in detail enough to be plagiarising their works. If your AO character writes a step-by-step account of his adventure through “MilkRun”, it’s an adaptation of that work but it wouldn’t be original enough. If he referenced however that trip to Farthington and had described briefly of his encounter then it’s not infringing on MSL’s copyright of AO’s material (However, I’d suggest putting a spoiler warning for those who still want to play the adventure.)

With that being said, I hope that helps as a guideline.

Thanks Myridean, it is always good to see people giving the new crop of players good advice.

I will probably do three and those can be a judging sample.  If it gets vetoed, then I know to stop.