Nocturnal Media has purchased West End Games (WEG), makers of the first Star Wars RPG as well as Paranoia and Torg.

Stewart Wieck, owner of Nocturnal Media, shared information on the acquisition of WEG in a blog post on Nocturnal Media’s website.  Wieck was co-founder of White Wolf Publishing and helped create its flagship World of Darkness games, then sat on the board of directors of CCP for a time after its acquisition of White Wolf.  He founded Nocturnal in 2010. 

The first project will be a new edition of Greg Costikyan’s 1984 classic Web & Starship. The asymmetrical game is for three players, who build the game from the ground up. The new game will include higher quality components and new tools to ease play, including a chart of star distances to replace the need for a range finder. The game will be funded with an upcoming Kickstarter campaign later this month.

Founded in 1974 as a wargames publisher, West End Games came to prominence in the early 1980s as a roleplaying game industry innovator after released the Paranoia RPG. It acquired several licensed RPG titles, including Ghostbusters and Star Wars, as well as original titles like Torg, while also producing adventure board games for licensors including Star Trek. The company’s streamlined D6 system became an industry staple.

The company entered bankruptcy in the late 1990s and was acquired by a Humanoids subsidiary in 1999. It began releasing new material (see “Metabarons RPG Debuts”) and licensing the D6 Systems (see “Humanoids Licenses West End Games Systems”).  The company was again sold in 2003 (see “Humanoids Sells West End Games”).

New owner Eric J. Gibson revived the D6 system (see “West End Games Is Back in Business”) and put the system into the Open Gaming License in 2003.The company also released the new game Septimus  by Bill Coffin in 2007 (see “West End Games to Release 'Septimus'”). In the last few years the company has been mostly dormant.

"I am thrilled to see Stewart bring the D6 family of games to new heights, and to new fans," saidl Coffin. "I know Septimus fans will be excited by this news, and I hope this will be the start of big new things for D6 science fiction gaming."

Plans for the D6 System are still in development, but the long out of print core rulebooks for the D6 system (D6 Adventure, D6 Fantasy and D6 Space) will soon have print-on-demand (POD) versions available on DriveThruRPG.com. A POD version of Septimus will follow shortly thereafter.