Kenzer & Company

Kenzer & Company (KenzerCo) is a Waukegan, Illinois based publisher of comic books, role-playing games, board games, card games, and miniature games.

They are known for the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting and for their own HackMaster and Aces & Eights: Shattered Frontier role-playing games (RPGs). Perhaps their best known product is the Knights of the Dinner Table (KoDT) magazine, which is a monthly publication that is part comic book and part RPG magazine. KenzerCo's line of comics now includes spinoffs such as Knights of the Dinner Table Illustrated and Spacehack, licensed comics in the Dungeons & Dragons line, and the fantasy literature magazine Black Gate. Other products include the Fairy Meat miniatures game, the Fuzzy Knights web strips, the Monty Python and the Holy Grail card game and board games such as Dwarven Dig, Elemental, and The Great Space Race.[1]

History

In the early 1990s, David Kenzer, a law student, was playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons regularly with five friends, including Brian Jelkey and Steve Johansson. In the spring of 1993, the group decided to start up a company in order to publish AD&D adventures. Kenzer filled out the paperwork to incorporate the company, and put "Kenzer and Company" as a placeholder for the company name.

Unlicensed supplements and trademark issues

Studying Intellectual Property law at the time, Kenzer was sure that the company could produce non-licensed material for AD&D without TSR's approval. Their first project, published in 1994, was the AD&D-compatible adventure The Kingdom of Kalamar.[3] The adventure was marked "suitable for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" printed on the back cover, and included the disclaimer text "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a registered trademark of TSR Hobbies, Inc. Use of this trademark is NOT sanctioned by the holder."[3] This source book was a completely unlicensed product, and although TSR (the then-owner of the Dungeons & Dragons trademark) had a precedent of threatening legal action against similar supplements, Kenzer & Company was never threatened.[4]

With the launch of Dungeons & Dragons’s 3rd edition, Wizards of the Coast made the d20 System available under the Open Game License (OGL) and d20 Trademark License. Under these licenses, authors are free to use the d20 System when writing games and game supplements.[5] Shortly after Wizards of the Coast announced the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons, they announced jointly with Kenzer & Company that Kenzer had acquired a license to produce official Dungeons & Dragons material, using the Kalamar setting exclusively.

With the release of the fourth edition, Wizards of the Coast introduced its Game System License, which represented a significant restriction compared with the very open policies embodied by the OGL. In response, Kenzer & Company launched an updated version of Kingdoms of Kalamar compatible with the 4th-edition version of Dungeons & Dragons that did not conform to the new GSL for approved use, instead releasing the campaign setting as an unlicensed supplement, similar to the original publication. The Dungeons & Dragons trademark is used in accordance with US law under a concept called nominative use – the book merely says that it is for use with the new version. David Kenzer is named as an expert in copyright law.[6]

location city	Waukegan, Illinois
location country	United States
key people	David Kenzer Brian Jelke Jolly R. Blackburn Steve Johansson Jennifer Kenzer Mark Plemmons
industry	Role-playing, card games, board games and miniature wargaming publisher
products	HackMaster, Aces & Eights: Shattered Frontier, Kingdoms of Kalamar role-playing games and Knights of the Dinner Table magazine
homepage	www.kenzerco.com

History

Unlicensed supplements and trademark issues

Notable employees

Awards

See also

External links

References