Originally posted by Ryan
> Ryan, is this an oversight or is it intentional?
When preparing the monster sections of the SRD, I tried to remove all specific physical descriptions of the creatures. I did that because it would be very hard for a publisher to understand the difference between creating a derivative work based on WotC's illustration, and creating a derivative work based on a physical description. The former is a copyright infringement, the latter would be standard use of the OGL.
The SRD is drafted with an eye towards making it as easy as possible to tell a publisher "if you use what's in the SRD and ignore D&D, you >will< comply with the OGL, and the d20 System Trademark License, and won't infringe WotC's copyrights or trademarks".
Thus, if you want to create illustrations for creatures in the SRD, you need to create them from whole cloth, not by starting with the description in the Monster Manual. For most creatures, that's neither hard to do, nor very time consuming. For a handful, it's both. For most of the creatures, the illustrations you're likely to create will be recognizable to the average gamer, because those monsters are drawn from myth and legend and have commonly accepted forms and shapes. For the handful that don't, you are a bit out of luck. (Although, as I said before, they could be black-boxed. If you started with someone who had never seen an illustration of a Mind-Flayer, and gave them the SRD
description, and they gave you back an illustration of an octopus-headed humanoid, you'd be in the clear, since your work was not derivative of WotC's copyright).
> Is it the INTENT of WOTC to maintain character copyright over
> the physical descriptions of these creatures?
Here's the problem. WotC doesn't know what creatures are original to D&D, what creatures have names from myth or legend that are original D&D "versions" that are so unique as to consititute a whole new copyright, and what creatures are public domain. Various people in the company (and in TSR) have rendered their opinions on the matter in the past, and
they're almost all wrong - the reason is that TSR did not have a system for tracking the design inspirations for D&D and thus cannot rely on the memories of the people who are still on staff, or the assumptions prior staff members may have made about the copyrights. (exmple: "drow" was claimed by TSR as a copyright for a long time, until someone did the research to present independent, earlier usages of the term to refer to
"dark elves" that significantly predate D&D. That work done, the public domain character of "drow" has been firmly established; however, there are lots of people who work or have worked on the D&D business in some capacity that don't know it, and still assume that what they were told (that TSR "owned" "drow") was true. When they state that "fact", they're not lying or trying to decieve anyone, they're just passing along a knowledge-base of conventional wisdom that happens to be riddled with errors.)
As a part of preparing for 3rd Edition, we took a hard look at some of the core monsters in the D&D beastiary, and selected several of them to undergo a substantial visual reconcepting. The effort was made to end up with illustrations of the creatures that could not easily be duplicated without referencing WotC's illustrations; so that in turn we could generate licensing fees from selling the rights to those images to action figure manufacturers, computer game companies, etc. That list includes most of the popular and common monsters. Having done that work, WotC is unwilling to simply give it all away for free.
My standpoint is that illustrations are not game rules, or material that uses those rules, and therefore the control of derivative works for the illustrations of D&D falls outside the scope I perceive to be critical for the success of the Open Gaming movement. That viewpoint, combined with the strategy of leveraging the "new look" D&D monsters (that I helped craft) guided my choices when redacting the Monster Manual into SRD format.
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