Wizard Wednesday Recap, 2021-08-04
Commercial Rights Discussion
Dotta: Previously we said that we might copy Larvalabs and do a commercial cap of 100K. But there are some issues with that, we understand people want to try and go big if they use commercial rights for their Wizard. So you will have commercial rights up to a $1 million cap, after that there are royalties, 50% to creators and 50% to the community. We haven't pinned down the royalty %. So you keep everything up to $1 million dollars of revenue, and then the royalties would kick in. This is the blanket rights. But you can contact us to negotiate a different rate, especially for derivative works that are really a totally different thing. I want to make sure wizard-holders can do things, but I don't want a big studio to buy up a set of wizards, create a big media property, and then we and the community get nothing from that. So we are trying to balance these factors.
O: WIth the people you have spoken with about a tv show or game, are they more likely to want to use wizards owned by FRWC, vs. wizards held by individuals?
dotta: We haven't granted a legal structure of rights to anyone. As the creators, it's our responsibility to publish a legal document with our lawyers so everything is up front. The big media companies are not thinking about the decentralized aspects at the moment. We want to keep the rights to negotiate on your behalf.
Elf: We want to be able to negotiate faster and get a better deal. If you see your wizard on screen, we want you to benefit from that. Most studios have been very interested in this idea, only one studio was skeptical, didn't really understand crypto. Another person was super interested. They said they had many people approach them about an NFT project, but they have no idea what NFTs are. Hollywood is still thinking in a centralized way. This person was impressed that we already had an NFT project and a background in this space.
Madotsuki: I understand the commercial rights, you want to prevent a big studio from taking advantage of our structure, while also allowing members of the community to use their character(s) in other projects. For example, I want to use Magus Devon in Avime and probably other projects in the future.
dotta: Yes, we want to balance these concerns.
Tom: Any announcement about music?
Elf: Yes, I have music on my checklist. We are actually talking to a professional musician about adding a musical element to the collection. Cannot say much more at this point. But something along the lines of every wizard being able to have their own theme song, something generative.
dotta: Regarding a question about commercial rights and shows - we just have to work it out with our lawyers. We have had requests from big projects who want to see the legal docs, but we don't have them yet. It's not a fast project, but we're working on having those docs ready.
The Hierarchy of NFT Needs
This refers to a tweet thread dotta put out this week.
dotta: I feel that stories and artwork are not my strong suit. In this community you can lean on others to create a story. A story can still be a part of your identity even if you didn't create it yourself.
Elf: Yes, dotta created this whole NFT hierarchy by himself.
dotta: It came out of conversations with this group, which helped bring the ideas together. I've been talking about NFTs with people in life in general. Some people still don't get it, to be honest. I have previous experience with smart contracts, but not NFTs, before FRWC. And it really helped me realize that it was more than just artwork. It has a more fundamental value than a lot of meme coins, for instance.
Elf: It's the aesthetic, narrative, identity, all in one. Raul Paol (sic) commented that social tokens will be more important than DeFi, and NFTs are part of that. The demographic for NFTs is not your typical crypto investor. It's for the generation that grew up on social media and video games. NFTs are going to bring the "normies", the "no-coiners" into crypto.
dotta: You can see the new people as people to dump on, but it's more than that. It is opening banking and financial instruments to everyone. Having your NFT and digital ownership is a special feeling when it happens.
O: I saw you've changed your PFP to wizards in the past month. How has that been?
dotta: Twitter is a place where ideas reign, I've done two Tweet storms since then and it's gotten good engagement. I don't plan to change it often.
Madotsuki: Even if you switch avatars, there is usually still some kind of throughline, showing different parts of you.
Elf's Thoughts On Lore and the Metanarrative of Forgotten Runes
Elf: I am working on it still, but will NOT go out in a grand blog post or similar info dump. No big tome with all the details. Several reasons for this - one is that we are in talks with producers in different mediums. These mediums have their different strengths, and we want to use them to tell the story. You will always see a wizard or wizards from the collection in the media. Many questions will be answered in due time in these other media expressions. We see so many of you writing stories and creating art for your wizards. So far it lives in Twitter and Discord, but we want the Book of Lore to help display these.
Book of Lore Update
dotta: The Book of Lore will allow you to attach artifact NFTs to the wizards. There is a mechanism by which the lore could be ordered as well. We recently deployed the alpha version of the contract (this morning). We are writing the design documents for the UI now. If you are a React or javascript dev and want to help with the UI, please reach out to me. We want to release the Book of Lore before the great burning, because that is an event that should be memorialized in it.
Elf: Some wizard-holders have expressed concern that they are not good artists/writers. But they shouldn't worry, because 1) we have a lot of artists that you can work with and 2) you may surprise yourself, and this is your chance to try it out in an anonymous fashion. I encourage you to take a stab at it.
dotta: My kids have started making paintings and sculptures of their wizards. There may also be community grants in the future, and your wizard may appear in a show regardless.
Merch, Events, and Collabs
Elf: A lot of options on the tables, from basic to elaborate. Should be more to announce next week. We may have hot pink goat-head briefs :) We are talking to a gallery in Venice Beach about doing a wizard art show. So if you live in LA, you could visit, and if you don't, it may come to a closer location in the future.
dotta: We did a survey asking where wizard-holders live. Answer if possible, because it helps us decide where to hold real-world events.
Regarding collabs, bread and Madotsuki are working on a new NFT project. You receive a set of attributes, and you can trade these attributes and ultimately do a fusion mint to create the final character. Any wizard should for sure check it out.
I have been talking with Pixelboy from the pixelglyphs project. Pixelglyphs will use ENS to build a system, which uses NFTs as a decentralized avatar profile. I am in talks to potentially include wizards in that project.
Additional Team Updates (and Cult Content Shout-outs)
- Elf: Shout-outs to Magus Tumbaj and Wise Sam the Viper for their contributions in the art channel. Also Sharkchild's collaboration on the awesome Orbus artwork.
- Elf: Also youngwhizzie with the awesome animated background, and Lorepunk's poems continue to be great. A few other great contributions as well. Trying to share and retweet as many of these as possible, ping us if we missed you.
- dotta: Question about format needed for Book of Lore inclusion - you will be able to fit any NFT in the Book of Lore.
- Elf: I have nearly finished drawing all the angles of the wizard heads for the sprite sheet turnarounds. The grand plan for this, is to allow your wizards to be used in our eventual metaverse, as well as other people's metaverses. I will be sharing progress as it comes along.
- Forgotten Souls: Elf and Dotta have fully designed the numerology and risk/reward system. Elf will warn you again, "one should NOT be too eager to deal out death and judgement."
Ask Me Anything (AMA)
ZayLaSoul: dotta, what's with the muppet character? where does it come from?
dotta: I love the muppets so much, and I actually create Jim Henson style puppets out of foam. I'm not really a puppeteer, but I like to build them. At a deeper level, I like that you can take these materials, you work with it, and you create life out of it. I also like needle-felting, where you take fluff balls of wool, you take a needle, and you push the wool in the needle. The barbed needle causes the fibers to tangle with one another. You can search it on pinterest. Muppets use a special felt, you can tell that it has an extra sparkle to it. And there's only one manufacturer left that creates this felt, in Pennsylvania. With needle-felting, you shape this wool into muppet-like characters. This process is sort of like the concept of the wizards as well.
Elf: I think needle-felting projects are awesome, although I haven't done it myself. I also like crocheting, actually cross-stitch, as well. If anybody out there can cross-stitch my wizard, I would buy that.
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zaylasoul: Where does elf come from, and what's with the tiger girl?
Elf: Elf is based on my real name. The elf girl was an artwork I did before the wizards.
dotta: In real life, Elf is a huge animal lover. I've seen a picture of him holding a baby fawn. Not sure where he found it, haha. Also pictures with lizards, furbabies, bats. So animals appear in his art due to his affinity for wildlife.
Elf: I used to live in Costa Rica and loved to hike out in nature and see the wildlife.
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dotta: First off, O thanks so much for your work moderating the Discord over the past however many weeks.
O: Well, I've really enjoyed the project, maintaining the air of mystery allows the community to fill the gaps. My question - I was wondering about the spritesheets, after the turnaround, what comes next. Left-right, other directions?
Elf: Yes, walking all around. I have a day job so it's been going slower than I'd like. But I just handed in my notice to my job to work on FRWC full-time. But yes, your wizard will be able to walk in all directions. We did work with a pixel artist on the walkcycles, but unfortunately we weren't totally happy with it. I need to finish these turnarounds first, and then give that to other artists to work on more poses, so that they have the proper context.
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O: Thinking far ahead, I'm not sure it's well known what's going on with Forgotten Runes and the long-term vision. People in the know have heard about it in your AMAs a bit, but what can be done to help people understand what is going on with Forgotten Runes?
dotta: We do need to make the website better. At the very least, we want more documentation on the website about the mission, projects in progress, what is means to own a wizard, how to get help in the community. You do have to be a super-fan to know all there is to know at the moment.
Elf: I agree, we need to be way better at communicating to non-wizards what Forgotten Runes is all about. We need to organize all the info out there into our website.
O: I appreciate that you want to have free space for wizard creation, but there's certainly space to provide a framework or scaffolding to provide guidance.
Elf: There's two types of information, the secretive bucket, and the info we need to publish far and wide. Like around the walkcycles, murals, galleries, Forgotten Souls, Book of Lore. For lore and backstories, I don't want to spell it out in a straight-forward way.
dotta: When I look at our roadmap, it's very incomplete compared to what we actually have in the works.