Saturday, 6 February, 2010

The premier magic point system for d20 spellcasting!

Magic defines fantasy. It is the magical that makes a normal story into a fantasy that delights listeners, readers, and gamers by making all the impossibilities we can imagine become real. Dreams of magic can make even the most mundane day something to cherish, like a poem evoking the charm of the everyday world.
But sometimes, just like poems, magic can become stale and clichéd. Through repeated exposure, its novelty can wear off, and certainly, thirty years of magic missiles and fingers of death have been enough to render many fantasy gamers jaded. At its core, saying, “My love is a dove,” in a poem is as trite as, “I cast detect magic.”

Elements of Magic opens the world of magic to you, letting you create almost any type of magic-user you’d like. Magic is an artform, like poetry, and any good poet is never content to merely recite the works of others.

Elements of Magic is modular, able to fit whatever role you want it to play. It can be added to an existing campaign that already has wizards, sorcerers, clerics, and druids, perhaps representing another, higher sort of magic, or it can wholly replace the existing magic system, providing a whole new feel to your fantasy gaming. You will need a d20/OGL core rulebook to use these rules, but this book will let you ignore the old, clichéd spells presented in those books, and create your own works of magical art.

Elements of Magic eliminates the spell memorization and preparation system entirely, replacing it with something bold, new and flexible. This book uses a spell list and magic point system, allowing you to build spells modularly, and letting you decide what the mechanics actually mean.

Elements of Magic is a rules module designed to replace the "fire and forget" spell system of the d20 Core Rules. The d20 spell system, while balanced and usable, is not flexible enough to model the magic users from most fantasy books and movies. Few wizards have ever memorized or prepared a spell, and even fewer forget them immediately afterwards. In Elements of Magic, each character has only a single spellcasting level, no matter how many types of magic she learns in her career. The Elements of Magic gives characters many times the options of the standard d20 rules. Individual spells are replaced by spell lists. Instead of learning a fireball spell, for example, a mage could learn the Evoke Fire spell list, which is very flexible as to its usage and appearance. Nor is the mage limited to fire evocations – with 20 elements to choose from, she could learn Evoke Lightning to stun and damage your foes, Transform Light to make them evaporate into a dim glow, or even exotic combinations of spell lists, such as Create Force/Drain Time, to lock them in a bubble of stasis. It would take thousands of standard spells to duplicate the effects of the spell lists in this 94-page book.

This is the revised edition of the best-selling and critically acclaimed sourcebook from EN Publishing!
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As the result of some illuminating discussions, I believe I now understand the crux of why some people have taken offense at our message to Privateer Press. I'd like to publicly address what appears to have happened – due to the complexities involved, a bit of explanation is called for.

First of all, I'm not a lawyer. I don't even pretend to play one on TV. I'm a software developer that also has to deal with business matters for a tiny company. Like many others, I don't always consult our attorneys on the text of every message before it is sent. The message to Privateer was not vetted by our attorney, and I didn't recognize a critical language issue in the message, which led to a major problem.

Last week, we sent a message to Privateer Press, in which we sought their assistance in addressing both abuse and misuse of our Army Builder trademark on their forum. Since Privateer owns the forum, contacting Privateer was the proper course of action. Specifically, there were two issues concerning the use of our trademark on the forum that we sought to address.

First, there were multiple references to tools that used our trademark in their official name. For example, one such tool was officially named the "Warmachine/Hordes Army Builder". Such tools represent an infringement on our registered trademark, and we're within our rights to seek help from a forum's owner in addressing such cases.

Second, there were instances where our trademark was used in a generic manner on Privateer's forum, such as "I'm looking for an army builder to do X". These posts represent an improper use of our trademark, but they are not an infringement. As such, we cannot reasonably expect assistance in addressing these uses, and we did not expect to have Privateer alter or remove them from the forum. We sought to educate the public as to the fact that "Army Builder" is a trademark, i.e., a proper adjective which modifies a noun, as in the "Army Builder® roster construction tool".

Referring to roster construction tools generally as "army builders" is improper, and if we fail to speak up about it, our trademark could become generic. Perhaps worse, we could potentially have to seek a future injunction against someone for unwittingly infringing upon our trademark. More importantly to Privateer players, awareness of the trademark would hopefully avoid its future use in fan-created tools, which would in turn avoid the need for us to seek removal of such tools.

The core problem was that, in the message to Privateer, I used the term "improper" in a few places where I should have been using the term "infringing". This transformed a perfectly acceptable request for Privateer to address the few infringing uses of our trademark (i.e. people using the name Army Builder in their own tool names) into a wildly unreasonable request to address merely improper use of our trademark. Not being a lawyer, I didn't catch that pivotal distinction when writing the message.

So why wasn't this problem recognized more quickly after there was public reaction? The intent had been for infringing uses of our mark to be addressed, and that's what I believed we had actually done. I even posted as much in a number of places discussing this issue, including on Privateer's own forum (prior to the thread being deleted). Consequently, I didn't notice the terminology error until now.

There were a few additional errors in the message due to misunderstandings on my part, for example, using the term "dilute" to refer to a loss of trademark distinctiveness, never meaning to imply a cause for action under the Trademark Dilution Act, and citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act directly, when what was appropriate was to simply make an analogy to it. I also believe, in retrospect, that the language I used was unnecessarily stern. However, the core problem was using the term "improper" instead of "infringing".

Unfortunately, the interpretation that was clearly visible to others just didn't register in my brain, since I was stuck on what I thought I'd written and not what I actually wrote.

So, to everyone who took offense at the message, I sincerely apologize for this gaffe. It was an honest mistake, which turned a reasonable request into a very unreasonable one. I truly hope that this clears these matters up for anyone who took offense and that from here on we can keep any fighting confined to our respective gaming tables. I also hope that this explanation enables Privateer to understand that what we sought was a significantly more measured response than what they perceived as required.

Sincerely,
Rob Bowes
Lone Wolf Development
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