Dredd is dead, well, maybe.

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Primarch
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Dredd is dead, well, maybe.

Post by Primarch » Sun Oct 30, 2016 12:10 am

Well, it looks as though Mongoose, the company behind the Judge Dredd Minis Game is giving up on it. After 4 years from starting the JD Kickstarter, they have announced that they won't be extending the license.
As some of you have noted, we have passed on the 2000AD licence - however, this does not affect the Kickstarter projects in any way. You will all get the miniatures you are after.

All the miniatures have been sculpted/prototyped, and are now with the casters (Warlord and Ainsty) to be cast up - we are expecting Ainsty to finish the Pat Wagons, well, any time now, and Warlord are predicting early next year to complete their metals.

As soon as the last Pat Wagons are with us, we will do an update that lists everything that has been sent out thus far, so you can run your own checklists and find out if anything has gone awry in the post - anything that has gone missing will be replaced immediately if we have it in stock, or early next year with Warlord's last castings if not.

We have removed the Judge Dredd miniatures from our web site, as we have several out of stock items already. However, they are still available from Warlord, and will continue to be so until the end of November (with a good discount too!)
Warlord is pretty much out of stock already (having sold it at a 50% discount), so until whoever picked up the license announces what they plan to do with it, don't expect much support beyond the last handful of KS backed releases.
Not that this should bother most of us, Dredd was already pretty easy to proxy for and the rules were complete, so nothing is stopping anyone from playing.

I wish I could say that this was a shock, but this being Mongoose, the maximize-sales-then-run approach was always on the cards.

I wrote this back in July 2013
Primarch wrote:Mongoose had a history of poor quality products (their D&D books were awful) and never really supporting their product lines.
Still, as everyone knows, you can never kill Judge Dredd. Hopefully the new license holders will do a good job with it. There are no guarantees that they will use the same rules or continue production of the minis, that would take a new deal between Mongoose and the new licensees, which hasn't been mentioned. We will have to wait and see who is running things.

Personally, my money is on the guys behind the Batman Minis Game.
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Re: Dredd is dead, well, maybe.

Post by Lovejoy » Sun Oct 30, 2016 2:08 am

So. Farewell then, JDMG! Sort of.

I knew that the Warlord was ceasing involvement, because they told me in an email about a year ago that they were phasing out their side of things. They said that Dredd competed with their other sci fi interests. At the time, this was basically Antares only - not really the same kind of game at all, so this explanation didn't quite ring true to me. More likely that sales were poor, as such a niche background finds it hard to garner new gamers. The people buying and reading 2000AD are a loyal core, but they are all in their 30s and 40s now. They don't change in numbers much. The proportion of those who actually game, must be pretty tiny. For younger people, I think it's easier sometimes to get into a game with new, limited background from the ground up.

I didn't really expect, even though I'd been warned about how Mongoose operate, that they would pass on the license - after all, they had actually had it for more than 10 years, and had made a Dredd rpg, as well as other incarnations of the JD Minis game. Not quite as uncommitted as it first seems, so I was hopeful that they'd keep producing the game themselves - but there you go. The way they have dropped the news - no warning - is shabby, putting it kindly. I snapped up the last bits I was after (although I don't have the not-exactly-necessary-or-pretty Manta Prowl Tank), so I'm good.

Mongoose don't rule out on their forums that some of the stuff may be available again..."but not from us". So, a possibility that someone else may be having a crack at something down the line. Personally I did want a couple of the Pat-Wagons, as modeled on the Block Mania story line. We shall see.

None of this is a massive problem for Mr Spevna and myself (as main cheerleaders for this), as we plan to keep playing the game into our dotage over here in Japan. I'm sure others with gangs who play will be dipping in from time to time too. Gorkamorka, Necromunda etc are still alive from community support, despite being officially dead. Also, as Prim has said, the only real difficulty in finding minis for the game is the availability of Judges - which Foundry do a very nice, if limited range of anyway. The pdf is still free, so give it a crack if you're inclined.
I would probably play a Dredd game even if the rules were shonky, but I really think that it's a great ruleset which everyone should try out.
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Re: Dredd is dead, well, maybe.

Post by me_in_japan » Sun Oct 30, 2016 1:17 pm

not really a major problem, I reckon. As has been mentioned already we can all whip up a gang of some kind easily enough, with the iconic judges being the only tricky thing to proxy, and since lovejoy has a stack of them, all is good. I had just bought a biker to join my gang at the end of the last game I played, and she is currently sitting, unpainted on my painty table. Here's hoping she can take out some steenking jujjez some time soon :twisted:
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Re: Dredd is dead, well, maybe.

Post by AndrewGPaul » Wed Nov 02, 2016 10:17 pm

Wargames Foundry are still producing their 2000 AD miniatures, which include some Judges, too.

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Re: Dredd is dead, well, maybe.

Post by Spevna » Thu Nov 03, 2016 12:21 am

LONG LIVE DREDD!

Puppetwars do some nice "not Dredd" heads that would go very well with the plastic chronoscope future soldiers to give you a kind of Karl Urban looking Dredd.

Gangs can be made out of literally anything you want.

The rules as are very playable and can incorporate or account for most things you can consider.

While there are some "poor quality" minis amongst the range, the rules themselves are top notch and will give anything out there a run for its money .
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Re: Dredd is dead, well, maybe.

Post by Lovejoy » Thu Nov 03, 2016 4:32 am

What they said.
I probably ought to update the Dredd Thread when there's time - there were new releases and developments even before the thing was canned that I didn't link to or mention, it really has been a while.
A list of manufacturers/suppliers from which to source gangs, now that the minis are in limbo/dead, might be useful to somebody out there, might have a crack at that.
If you ever put in an order to Puppetwars Spev, I'll certainly be grabbing some of these heads. I think they'd work perfectly with a lot of things, especially liked the mantic bodies that I saw kitbashed with those.
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