I'm working on Project Silverymoon and there is no way we will be able to make our site OGL compliant because, like your project, it relies on its ties to established FR TMs and its use with Dungeons and Dragons. I don't know what we will do if we can't have our fansite. After crying like babbies we will probably change a few key names... "Silverorb: Moonstone of the North!" (for example) and hope people know what we are referring to.
I'll bring this up to the project list and see what they think. There is a WotC guy on the project, and I doubt he would be wasting his time if he thought all of his work would be for nothing. He's not from the legal department, but it is a positive sign that fan sites are not in complete danger of extinction. Additionally, WotC recently asked for people on DND-L to vote on an official Dragonlance fan site. Again, not proof that they won't come down hard on fan sites in the future but a sign that they are still tollerated.
Maggie
----- Original Message ----- From: Andrew Crossett Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 3:14 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Open_Gaming] Forgotten Realms fan sites under OGL
Regarding the Treyvan MUX site, Clark Peterson wrote:
>>>I suspect the site is being run under the current Internet Use policy
from WotC which
we have been told will most likely be suspended when the d20 SRD is
released (according to Ryan).
[...]
Problems is, as I see it, they are expecting future use of the site which
will be dificult when the current Internet Use policy is revoked in favor
of the OGL/d20 licenses.<<<
To which Ryan Dancey replied:
>>>this is exactly the kind of cleanup work I'm planning on spending the
summer on - going around to all these places and trying to help them
understand how to use the licenses, or if they don't want to, letting them
know that they're not in the safe harbor...<<<
To which Faustus von Goethe replied:
>>>Ouch! Lets get the SRD official before the Pogroms start. Just a
personal preference. Thanks.<<<
Being relatively new to the list, this is the first I've heard that WotC's
quite liberal Internet Use policy is going to be revoked in favor of
OGL/d20 licenses.
While it should be relatively easy to make a generic D&D fan site compliant
with the licenses, I'd like to know where all the setting-specific sites
stand (particularly the Forgotten Realms ones), especially since I've been
working long and hard on one of my own that I was hoping to put up after
the new FR hardback comes out in June.
My project (completely unofficial, free and nonprofit) is an expansion for
Ixinos, the "island of the Amazons" in the Forgotten Realms briefly
mentioned in a couple of 2nd edition FR products (_Gold & Glory_ and _The
Vilhon Reach_). About 99.9% of it is all-original work, but it does make
reference to "named" spells and to some locations and "famous" NPCs in the
FR setting.
More importantly, it is unavoidably tied to the Forgotten Realms setting,
which is product identity ("product line name") under the OGL. This means
that, unless WotC releases the FR and its characters, locations,
"storyline", "thematic elements", "concepts", etc. as open material, it
will be impossible to legally maintain any FR fan site, including mine.
AFAIK, WotC has not yet released a list of which product identity terms it
will restrict from use under the license. As it currently stands, it looks
to me like *all* of the spell names in the PHB and *all* of the monster
names in the MM are by default technically off-limits (at least as far as
they are associated with their stats), since these are all product identity
under paragraph 1(e) of the OGL, and WotC has not officially (publicly)
released any of them as "open content". WotC must have informally declared
some of them fair game, since I don't think the folks at Sword &
Sorcery/Necromancer Games would be too pleased at having to take all of
their products off the market if WotC comes out with a Restricted Terms &
Phrases list that puts "wererats" and "magic missile" on the restricted list.
So...does anyone have any insights as to what might become of
setting-specific fan sites and nonprofit projects when the Internet Policy
axe comes down? FR fans have an extremely active and creative community on
the Net, with the product of literally thousands of hours of work currently
available. If these sites are all forced to "genericize" (impossible or
pointless in most cases) or be taken down, I can predict that a "pogrom" is
how most webmasters will see it. At least back in the bad old days of the
pre-WotC TSR Internet Crackdown, the webmasters didn't have an official,
permissive Internet Policy to claim protection under...taking that
protection away and not replacing it with something workable will cause the
kind of uproar that frankly, I don't want to see again (anyone remember the
Legendary "Morpheus Incident", which provoked what I believe to be the
longest continuous flame war in Usenet history?)
Andrew Crossett
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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