Save The REH House
If you play this game, please try to give something to save the historical home of the man who made it possible. I’m a member of the Howard Foundation and this is not a scam. They are good people and fine scholars and preservationists. Let’s help out to preserve this piece of the history of the man who gave us our favorite Cimmerian. Thank you.
Crazy to think that there are companies who control the IP worth more money than I can spend in multiple lifetimes but to save physical history, people barely scrapping by are trying to save it.
R.E. Howard’s house is a national landmark and is in no danger of being lost.
Why are you asking for help to “save” it?
You could actually go to the linked site and read it to get your answer.
Key words there, “worth more money.” Having value is not the same thing as having capital.
The target funding goal is $100,000. Even though Funcom is worth ~$130 million, I highly doubt they would be capable of donating that much, even if they wanted to.
Getting 20,000 people to donate $5 is a more realistic ask than for Funcom to donate $100,000.
They could maybe donate a few thousand. A lot of companies do make charitable donations in the $5-10 thousand range, but even if Funcom gave $10,000, you still need other sources to cover the remaining $90,000.
FC isn’t the only company associated with the IP though, there are multiple and one worth billions and you know that. If we put aside the constructs of earmarking, those invested in the ladder of companies could outright meet the goal without it being a drop in the bucket of their worth.
Edit: but that’s just ridiculous thinking on my part, especially in consideration of the recent layoffs 
Tencent couldn’t care less about REH’s house and you know that.
Exactly.
And that is heartbreaking. What an awful world we actually live in.
Taking the risk of making myself unpopular:
REH’s legacy are his stories and ideas, not a wooden house he lived in. If society had to decide between conserving his stories or his house, it should decide to keep the stories, not the house. If people want to spend money on the latter - do so, it’s your money. But if we preserved every house as a museum where anybody of “importance” lived, there’d be no space for the living in the long run.
Tencent… I don’t know if they deserve to be defended. But it wouldn’t be their obligation to preserve the house. Funcom pays or paid money for the IP, and the ones who got the money - Howard’s heirs - could decide to use that windfall to preserve their ancestor’s legacy. Exactly that happened, according to the foundation’s website, to restore the house in the first place. Question is: What has changed?
Soon, the flow of money will stop, because the copyright will run out, as it has for several of the stories already. But before looking at Funcom/Tencent, one should look at the heirs and ask how they used the money they got for selling/licensing the copyright they inherited.
If they gave something of use or value in return, I would have no problem contributing. If they would speak to Funcom on behalf of the players, I would consider it. If Funcom gave some Spell Orbs (from the Age of Sorcery Battle Pass) or made them available in the game via the Bazaar for sale, I would buy them. They could donate the funds.
I agree. The house is not his works.
Besides, the ownership of the house belonged to his parents, not him.
Also, R. E. Howard died without any heirs.
The T-shaped white frame home was built c.1919, by Mr. and Mrs. J.M.Coffman. Dr. Isaac M. Howard and his wife Hester Ervin Howard bought it shortly thereafter and moved in with their son, Robert. The sun porch was converted into a bedroom for their son, and a new porch and bathroom were built onto the home by Dr. Howard. in 1936, Robert E. Howard committed suicide in his 1935 Chevrolet sedan in the driveway using a .380 Browning pistol. [4] His father later sold the house in 1944 to Mrs. Nancy Elizabeth Grisham.[5]
There’s nothing wrong to what you say and i personally wouldn’t care what will happen to my house after my death. But my name is a different story, everyone wants to be remembered. (yet i have done nothing about it so i will die free 
).
But what’s very beautiful here is how people give immortality to an artist. It’s very beautiful to see positive actions for people, efforts of altruism and free volunteer in effort to “give back”, anything, in the memory of the person that became your “friend” almost a century after his death.
I embrace the effort of these people and i wish them success.
Without children, but not without heirs.
It’s a weird chain of events, and I think it’s a reasonable position to say that these events were not what REH wanted. Anyhow, there are heirs, who seem to have come into this possession more through luck than through Howard’s wishes or even their own efforts. They did apparently sell all rights to Paradox, now Cabinet Entertainment, now owned by Tencent. I don’t know what the rights were sold for, but well, probably not for a wet handshake.
Yes, of course. It’s a valiant effort.
It makes me sad to see people here basically saying it’s no big deal and not our problem. The house is a piece of history and a museum to a writer who gave us an incredibly popular pop culture icon. Howard’s short life was tragic and the volume of his writing for the few years he had is astonishing. Sure some of it was campy and some of it definitely a product of the time and the audience he was writing for. And while I love the Conan stories what honestly made me fall in love with Howard himself was his poetry. And the depth of his historical knowledge and deep love of history. Considering this was a young man in Texas in the 1930s without the entire history of the world at his fingertips via keyboard, what he knew was amazing. And the love he had for it was rare and beautiful, then and now. His home, that little physical piece of him, and the educational opportunities it affords those who treasure his work, is worth saving.
That is all.
REH had left documentation of what he wanted to happen to his writings. His estate was left to Lindsey Tyson.
This was for some reason rejected by a judge who awarded a man REH did not get along with at all (and who was the prime witness to his death, having even predicted it) control of his works. Also fascinating how Otis Kline shifted loyalties so easily…
For those who enjoy these sorts of things, there are many many interesting little tidbits around Howard’s legacy. But who cares to dredge thru that ancient dus-
Oh, wait, we are discussing this person’s former home, so obviously there is some interest in dusty old things.
Yeah, as I said, what happened probably was not what Howard wanted.
Hard to say what would have happened if Lindsey Tyson got the rights. Apparently, he wasn’t all that interested in Howards works and/or horrified by his suicide. Maybe REH’s works might have been forgotten. Maybe the rights wouldn’t have landed with Paradox and Funcom/Tencent, but with Eletronic Arts - an artist’s rendition of that outcome can be seen here. Or he might have put everything to the public domain, and we’d have much more REH content.
Kafka ordered his works to be destroyed. Overall, we seem to happy that his wish wasn’t respected. But it’s still a bit sad.
Anyhow, I hope the heirs didn’t spend all the money on booze and anchovy pizza.
By the time he discovered he was the designated heir, he was too emotionally distraught by Howard’s death to contest Isaac’s claim. Always amusing when the primary witness to a death also usurps the estate and attempts to suppress the will.
But yes, by the time Tyson discovered the matter, he had little desire to enter a legal battle.
We definitely wouldn’t have had the Sprague or DeCamp entries. Perhaps little else would have happened with it. Who can say?
But for anyone else out there, ensure that your successors know who they are before the event happens.