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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hudarklord" data-source="post: 969420" data-attributes="member: 10932">Actually, unless the descriptive part is merely commentary (say, on how good Southern food tastes to the author in the summertime), then even the descriptive parts of the task itself may not be copyrightable.HOWEVER, one thing that may be copyrightable is the selection of facts.  If you went through and rewrote the spells in the PHB by "filing off" the names and the descriptions, but WotC noted that you had included 100% of their spell concepts and gamespeak blocks from those spells, then you could be guilty of copyright infringement still if a court rules (and it would) that some creativity was involved in selecting which types of spell concepts to include in the manuscript.Similarly, even if spell names are not copyrightable, if you kept all the spell names in the same order, but punted the descriptions and gamespeak blocks entirely and redid them, you'd be guilty of copyright infringement for reusing all the names as a collection.Just a side comment worth noting.  Some things that look copyrightable aren't.  You can, in fact, verbatim copy somebody's description of how to employ a game mechanic if there is only one, or a small handful, of ways to describe the mechanic in practice.  The doctrine of merger says that when something unprotectable (a concept) merges with otherwise protectable content (a description), and there aren't a lot of different ways to convey the unprotected item, then the whole is unprotected.Similarly, you can likely not copyright many of the instructions in a recipe.However, you can copyright the formatting, organization, and selection of otherwise unprotectable items, so long as the formatting, organization, and selection was in some way inobvious, novel, or at the very least, subject to some active decision making on your part as an author.Lee</blockquote>

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