On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Clark Peterson wrote:
> Alec-
>
> What have I left out that you would include?
Actually looking at it this morning when i'm more awake then I was last
night, I think you and others have pointed to the one troubling spot - the
reuse of content from CC, CC2 & R&R. I think Faust & Sixten's suggestions
are as good or better than anything I can come up with. The only thing I
didn't like was Sixten's use of the word derived; it's my understanding
that Clark is actually taking material directly from the previous books
which is different from deriving from earlier material.
Part of the problem is that your re-using content from early OGC
publications which obviously hadn't had the time to develop the clarity of
designation you are now achieving. This is always going to be something
publishers are going to need to work out - how to reuse material from
other OGL publications which had different methods of designating OGC &
PI. At least in your case you have the advantage of either being the
copyright holder (both CC & RR) or directly involved in the work (I don't
own CC2, so don't know the copyright on it). If you are the copyright
holder on all the material Clark, I'd suggest just making a very clear
designation of what is OGC & what is PI in the new product. Technically
you could even change what is OGC (only by adding tho, not subtracting)
and what is PI, and you don't even need to reference the other works at
all. But I fully understand the desire to reference the other works as
well as not wanting to change the designations at all.
Not having the current work in hand, I'd say the question becomes just
what material your using from those other books. If it's just the names &
stat blocks, then it's relatively easy to simply list the names and say
they are PI. If your using the description, etc. then it becomes more
tricky. I do think you need some type of statement that at least gives a
generally guideline as to what parts of the material taken from the three
earlier books are OGC as opposed to PI or normal copyright (which I'd
guess you've now changed to PI in this modules - something you can do as
the copyright holder). Perhaps if you took some of the current language
and added a statement that told what parts of the items from CC, CC2 & RR
are OGC. For CC this would be easy since you could just state that the
stat blocks are open and the rest of any creature used is PI. For RR, it
would depend on what exactly is being used, since that book had a slightly
different OGC designation. And I don't know for CC2.
But I'm still somewhat leery of requiring a person to go to an outside
source to identify the OGC & PI elements of something. Even tho I do
think if someone wants to use the items from CC, CC2 or RR that you use in
Tower of the Rainbow Mage, they really should be going back to the
original source. But we all know that somewhere down the road this either
isn't going to happen or perhaps not even be a possibility for the person.
OK, after all that rambling (and I jumped back and forth some, so if I
repeated or contradicted myself above, I apologize). Here's a crack at
some language for the CC, CC2 & RR content. It actually includes both an
OGC & PI designation, and it'll make the legal notice longer, but I can't
think of another way of doing it which doesn't just rely on requiring a
person to actually have the three books.
X: The following listed content is taken from the Creature Collection, the
Creature Collection 2: Dark Menagerie, or Relics & Rituals, all published
by Sword & Sorcery Studios and used with specific permission. This
content is designated as Product Identity except for that material listed
after the item which is noted as Open Game Content. {insert the list of
the content being used, with the notation of what is OGC}
Here's an example of how an item would appear in the list then (taken at
random from CC or RR, since I don't know what exactly is being used):
Land Worm: The stat block and description of combat are OGC.
Declaration of Death: The stat block and explanation of spell effects are
OGC.
Obviously this results in the type of long list you're trying to avoid.
But for the OGC & PI to be clear for someone just having your modules, I
think this would work.
> I think it is up to us to collectively work to make the "model" for
> future use. Thanks for everyone's help.
And thank you for posting your designation and seeking the collective
effort to improve it.
alec
_______________________________________________
Ogf-l mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
