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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 3855807" data-attributes="member: 10201">Maybe. You've mixed up a bunch of things there. First of all, aboleths don't appear in the D20SRD. So you definitely can't write anything about them using the WotC OGL. Secondly, you can potentially write about anything that anyone has published, without using the WotC OGL. That includes material that has been released under the terms of the WotC OGL. The license doesn't supersede normal copyright--it piggybacks on it. What WotC's OGL does do is spell out some very specific ways in which you can re-use [some of] the material, despite it violating normal copyright. However, if you choose to make a work based on someone else's work without any sort of explicit license, you're now in very fuzzy territory where copyright is concerned. It might or might not be legal. To get back to the quoted example: you *probably* can write something about kobolds--even D&D-style kobolds--and publish it, so long as you don't copy any text from someone else's work. Witness the multitude of fantasy novels that are clearly based on D&D concepts. Copyright protects text, not ideas. (Or, used to. The concept of "character copyright" has stretched this a fair bit, and is, IMHO, a really poor idea, since trademark could already protect individual characters.) But you probably can't write something about aboleths or illithids without permission, because WotC will probably claim [and be able to defend] trademark over the names/creatures.As for including the WotC OGL on forum posts: that depends. If you want people to be able to reuse the content of your posts, that would be one way. But just to make the posts in the first place? Probably not. As some have said, it's likely that any such posts would be deemed to fall under the Fair Use exception to copyright, should it ever go to court, and thus have no need of the WotC OGL (or any other explicit license, since there's the implicit permission of Fair Use).Finally, both my answer here and several posts before have made a serious logical flaw: assuming that just because such a thing exists, it must be legal, is not a good idea. The answer to "why does X exist and use/not use the OGL?" might well be "because the party being infringed doesn't know about it/doesn't have the financial means to pursue a legal case/doesn't care about the infringement/misunderstands the license terms/misunderstands copyright/is in the process of doing something about it behind the scenes" or any number of other reasons.</blockquote>

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