Since this came up earlier in a discussion between Alec and myself, and was bugging me, I thought I'd mention the OGC/PI declarations for spells in R&R. Basically, it runs down like this:
- The spells are Open Game Content, except for the flavor description the precedes the actual mechanics of the spell. - The spell names are PI, and obviously a number of them contain proper nouns that are PI in their own right. - A license is granted to the public to use the names of the spells, but only to refer to the spells "of the same name" and in no other way. You must then include a notice that they are Clark's PI. With respect to that earlier conversation, this license does not explicitly state that the spells' mechanics must remain unchanged. Even the "spell of the same name" phrasing is in an example, and is probably not normative. (In practice, of course, using the name for an altered version of the spell seems confusing and silly.) More interesting to me, though, is how this applies to reusing the spells. I'll divide the spell names into three categories: proper names, creative names, and patterned names. Proper names include terms which are themselves PI, and should clearly have the benefit of PI; spells like Dolomar's Limited Liquification and Enkili's Prank and part of the Scarred Lands setting. Creative names are the non-obvious names, especially where they have some flair: Sacred Journey, Nethergaze, Cold Snap. Patterned names are those spell names that follow some established naming convention of existing spells: minor shadow conjuration, call aquatic humanoid, shade evocation. Reusing these last spells seems sort of awkward. The names, and the spells themselves, seem like extrapolations of the existing spells, rather than part of the fabric of the Scarred Lands. Not agreeing to the extra license means not reusing the name, but other names probably do not match the naming conventions that players would expect. I don't really know where I'm going with this rambling discourse. The issue came up for my while considering what one might do if one was trying to reproduce the spells (or a class like the penumbral lord that uses them) in a purely OGL context. Would you try to rename them? Just agree to the extra license? For that matter, I also wonder why the spell names were made PI in the first place, rather than just protecting the other names that might appear in spell names. (Mind you, I'm not saying SSS has sinned, I'm just wondering what the goals were in doing this.) Sixten _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
