I guess I just have a general comment or two to throw out here.
I understand the concerns about the limited descriptions in the SRD, but
I don't see how that is overly limiting in adventure design. Obviously
creating derivative works about mind flayer society, goals and ambitions
as most of us understand them from previous works, would be a bad thing
legally. But is that the sort of thing that a DM would want anyway. Many
of these creatures have been around along time and are fairly well
fleshed out by WoTC/TSR products or Dragon Magazine articles already. So
creature sourcebooks are pretty much out. As for adventures, aside from
the Mind Flayer city/outpost type deal, would it be that hard to work
around having to give a detailed description of the creature, something
like:
Script: You round a bend in the passage. Ahead lies an open
door, dim
Light spills forth from the room beyond.
DM: ok what are you guys doing?
Guys: going to look in the room quietly.
<Dice rolling>
Script: You hear the rustling of robes beyond the door as you
approach, ahead; an eerie shadow, like 4 tentacles grasping for you,
is cast upon the wall.
Ok, so you include your mind flayer SRD stat block and the DM looks the
stuff up in the MM.
Guys: "What's this thing look like?"
DM: looking at MM - "yadda yadda, purplish, 4 tentacles,
humanoid, and so on.
Guys: together "oh, it's a mind flayer!"
Obviously the next question is - what is my motivation for the mind
flayer being there? Well he works in the basement of the mad mage
yaddamagi, who was secretly trying to reverse engineer the Coronal's
secret recipe, but once the secret is discovered, the Mind Flayer plans
to slay yaddamagi and use the information to enslave chicken lovers
everywhere. So it's a dumb example, but I think it illustrates the
point.
Moving along, there are several MM type books either available or soon
to be available, many of them linked into campaign worlds. Wouldn't it
make since to use the SRD monsters as filler and highlight your own
stuff? If I'm going to go to the trouble to create original content
(monsters) for a campaign, why would I use the SRD stuff that most
gamers are familiar with already when I can put new and exciting stuff
(no offense WoTC) that is unique to my own setting and highlight that
material to sell more of my monster books? Isn't that a win/win? Enough
encounters to make the MM worth having and enough stuff to make my
monster book worth having. This brings me to illustrations, if I have
creatures from my own material in the adventure/source book, wouldn't it
make more sense to use my resources providing illustrations highlighting
those creatures rather then the SRD stuff? Drive my product a little
bit?
To sum it all up, there is a lot of material out on the MM stuff
already, a lot of it which is already intimately familiar to a large
portion of the players out there. I don't believe that not being able to
use more of the description/background information for the creatures in
the SRD means providing an inferior product to potential buyers. It
means that using that material will require a little more ingenuity in
describing the encounter and a bit more use of original monsters. Boils
down too, WoTC protects it's IP, you create content and maybe sell a
monster book or three along with a few monster specific supplements and
the players get more stuff to maim.
If I rambled please forgive me, it's been a long day and wading through
the 70+ posts regarding this has been a challenge. I'm not out to
dispute anybody's views on this, just present another view.
Thanks!
Dallas
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