Mindflayer and the SRD

[G.A. Donis]

I was looking through the SRD to do some cut and paste monster information for a game and was suprised to not find the mindflayer in the SRD. I looked online in several places that host the SRD and none of them have it. Evidently mindflayers are WotC intellectual property? What makes mindflayers different from the other monsters in the SRD?

Just curious

 

[BOZ]

yes, WotC has grabbed the mind flayer, beholder, and one other that doesn't come to the mind at the moment as IP and taken them out of the SRD. as to why, we can only guess. it has something to do with the "iconic D&D monster" thing. dragons and giants, being common in world mythology cannot truly be IP'ed, so they went for the next best ones.

 

[demiurge1138]

Mind flayers were created explicitly by E. Gary Gygax, as opposed to being based on real-life mythology. Hence, IP, and also why beholders, yuan-ti, carrion crawlers, etc aren't OGL compitable.

Demiurge out.

 

[Alzrius]

Mind flayers were created explicitly by E. Gary Gygax, as opposed to being based on real-life mythology.

Apparently, just basing them on H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu was good enough to make illithids WotC IP (come on, even Dragon #324 admitted it).

 

[BOZ]

i think they just grabbed a few of their favorites that weren't taken directly from mythology. not really any rhyme or reason beyond that; they just took out enough to "protect their property" but keep the SRD useful.

 

[andargor]

i think they just grabbed a few of their favorites that weren't taken directly from mythology. not really any rhyme or reason beyond that; they just took out enough to "protect their property" but keep the SRD useful.

My DM thinks that the SRD is "totally useless" since he can't find those monsters using a search function. Oh, and we are in a campaign where Slaadi are a recurring theme...

I won't open the "why the heck can't I buy the electronic version of the MM, MM2 and MM3 or get it for free when I buy the book" can of worms. (And I'm not talking PCGen, I'm talking full text, as in RTF or Word)

Andargor