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The D&D gorgon is based on the creature as presented by Edward Topsell in his History of Four-Footed Beasts. The D&D catoblepas is based on the version that appears in Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony.

It's not actually cheesy, but the Conan the Barbarian score wears the jeweled crown of '80s fantasy soundtracks upon its troubled brow.

WotC just spent almost $150 million to purchase D&D Beyond. They have also hired expensive engineers to put together a state-of-the-art VTT. By the time the project is done, it might end up costing as much as they spent on D&D Beyond. They have announced to shareholders that they intend to...

There are no changes to OGL 1.0a itself, so in theory, they could try this again two weeks, two months, or two years down the line. However, WotC went after OGL 1.0a because they wanted to remove the 5.1 SRD from it. Putting the entire 5.1 SRD out under a license that they do not control sends...

It was clear that their attempt to revoke OGL 1.0a was to basically take the 5.1 SRD out of it. Now that they've put the entire 5.1 SRD out under a Creative Commons license, it removes their incentive to mess with OGL 1.0a.

I am happy that they backed down on OGL 1.0a. I am even happier that they have released the 5.1 SRD under a CC license, because it removes their incentive to attempt to de-authorize or otherwise revoke OGL 1.0a in the future. In this respect, they've exceeded my expectations. I'm not going to...

While the revived undead sorcerer Imhotep isn't a vampire in the 1932 Universal film The Mummy, he does come to believe that a woman from Cairo is the reincarnation of his long-lost love and uses his magical powers in an attempt to bring her under his sway. A young archeologist who is in love...

To add to what estar said, the way OGL 1.0a works is that a contributor designates some portion of their copyrighted work as Open Game Content, which prospective licensees can gain a license to use by satisfying a fairly simple set of requirements. It doesn't matter if the contributor is...

Right. If the ORC does its job, nobody will even know it's there, and the vast majority of people won't care. It's not like people are going to put a big ORC symbol on the front of their products or tout that it's licensed using ORC, because what will really be important will be what the...

In section 9, WotC asserts that it may publish new versions of the license, and then gives permission for licensees to use any authorized version of the license. Agreeing to and abiding by the OGL is still necessary for the licensee to secure a license to use the contributor's copyrighted work...

If you don't see an issue, then you don't know how OGL 1.0a works. It's not that a contributor designates their copyrighted work as Open Game Content and then other people automatically get to use it. It's that a contributor agrees to give someone who agrees to and abides by the terms of the...

There isn't really any mechanism for that. In the draft of license 1.2, there are no provisions for designating Open Game Content, designating Product Identity, or crediting works, all of which are required under OGL 1.0a. OGC and PI aren't even mentioned, let alone defined. The terms they...

I bet that's because Pathfinder is making use of the OGC presented in Tome of Horrors. If so, then they legally have to misspell it.

I am open to the possibility that I am incorrect here. The current 1.2 draft license deauthorizes 1.0a and then says that means that 1.0a ("or any prior version") can no longer be used to publish "SRD content". Is existing OGC that incorporates one or more existing SRDs (like Tome of Horrors...

The big thing is that I can no longer make use of the majority of existing Open Game Content if I want to create new products. As I pointed out in another thread, this means that I cannot use the monsters from the Tome of Horrors, which includes a lot of classic monsters from (A)D&D that...

The Tome of Horrors is a monster book that was published by Necromancer Games in the early days of 3e. It includes a lot of classic (A)D&D monsters that were released as OGC under 1.0a (or maybe 1.0) by special arrangement with WotC, and there are special instructions in Tome of Horrors for how...

If you publish OSR stuff, then you probably know that there are a lot of classic (A)D&D monsters that aren't in any SRD and became Open Game Content through the original Tome of Horrors monster book. A lot of OSR rules and adventures use them. If WotC revokes 1.0a, then they will no longer be...

To be fair, Chapterhouse Studios ended up with pro bono representation from Winston & Strawn, a high-powered white-shoe law firm that's like a century and a half old and may be bigger than Games Workshop. GW had a weak case to begin with in many respects (they hilariously claimed a copyright on...

The chromatic dragons were invented by Gary Gygax before D&D, and even before Chainmail. He wrote about them in a series of short (paragraph long) articles for a fanzine called Thangorodrim, which focused on Middle-Earth Diplomacy variants. The articles covered white, black, green, blue, and...

The very act of creating a new edition helps with that. It changes D&D from merely the latest edition of that weird game where you sit around the dining room table and play with books and funny dice, to One D&D, the evergreen final edition of the game that will be built around a...