OSR OSR News Roundup

[Fenris-77]

When we were opening up the grove in back of the Concord UU Saturday morning, some sweet salamander were spotted under rocks around the space. I think they might have been these guys.

My favorites (which might be newts) are the bright orange ones with blue spots.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I suspect that a deep read of DTRPG would turn up a veritable cornucopia of copyright infringement, some purposeful, most probably done in ignorance.

Heck, there's probably good copyright policing business to be done on Kickstarter.

 

[Fenris-77]

Heck, there's probably good copyright policing business to be done on Kickstarter.

Lots of little things, like which fonts are usable in commercial products. I follow those guidelines (now that I know how they work), but I know lots of people don't. It is what it is.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Lots of little things, like which fonts are usable in commercial products. I follow those guidelines (now that I know how they work), but I know lots of people don't. It is what it is.

Kickstarter also has the wild-to-me phenomenon of people deciding every few months that WotC doesn't care about trademarks like "Fiend Folio" or "The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga." None of them seem to make it to publication with the name, but given their weird defensiveness about it, they seem to genuinely think it's something they could legally do until presumably getting a scary letter from Renton.

Ditto people using Nintendo IP, etc.

 

[Fenris-77]

Kickstarter also has the wild-to-me phenomenon of people deciding every few months that WotC doesn't care about trademarks like "Fiend Folio" or "The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga." None of them seem to make it to publication with the name, but given their weird defensiveness about it, they seem to genuinely think it's something they could legally do until presumably getting a scary letter from Renton.

Ditto people using Nintendo IP, etc.

Yup, some people are just using whatever they like and daring the CR holders to do something. Or they're too dumb to realize they're doing the wrong thing. One of those. Or a combo. There are so many products there's no easy way to police it. We haven't even talked about using art you don't have the rights to.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Over the weekend, someone on the Shadowdark Facebook Group talked about publishing Shadowdark remakes of full Pathfinder adventure paths (this wasn't the Shadowfinder folks, for the record) and then deflated when they found out Paizo would forbid it without a license.

My dude, if you are really pumped up about an existing adventure path, make your own that captures all of the stuff you liked about the original. It's frankly only marginally less work and you will end up with something different, just because your passions won't be the exact same ones as the Paizo authors.

And lots of enjoyable stuff is derivative. Terry Brooks started off basically rewriting Lord of the Rings and ended up winning a World Fantasy Award lifetime achievement award.

So weird.