It never stops being hilarious to me that someone at WotC thinks the carrion crawler is a monster worth special protection. I can't remember ever using dungeon caterpillars, and I've been DMing since 1E.
It never stops being hilarious to me that someone at WotC thinks the carrion crawler is a monster worth special protection. I can't remember ever using dungeon caterpillars, and I've been DMing since 1E.
It's a list of things WotC thought at one time they might be able to protect. It's not a list of things they are sure they can protect (there is no such list), and it's not a list of things they think are necessarily important.
They are probably wrong with the carrion crawler. It is too similar to real world insects, and the name is too descriptive, for them to have much of a chance. But it's really all bluff. How important are carrion crawlers to you that you want to give all you money to a lawyer over?
For those of us who started with the Mentzer basic red box, the carrion crawler was quite likely to be the first monster you ever encountered.
I'm not sure if the BECMI version had 8 attacks or not, but it was an "interesting" choice for the first encounter to give to a bunch of 1st level PCs and their novice players (and a novice DM, in my case).
Almost off-topic. All animals from the real life, and dinosaurs+megafaun from Prehistory should be in the SRD as open licence.
* Isn't it funny and ironic? Some D&D creatures are based in kaijus figure toys as monsters from Ultraman action-live show. Somebody could say those D&D monsters are plagiarism of that Japanese franchise.
Based on a hasty count and looking only at the main names on this page, I get 58% public domain names, 42% not. There are quite a few monsters that are composites of two words (hook horrors, water weirds) that I've counted as not public domain because that combination of words didn't describe a monster before D&D. I'm probably being overly conservative in counting things as not public domain when I had doubts.
Again... this was a very quick, poorly researched count, looking only at the top-level names on the list, but here's my working, so everyone can nitpick
Based on a hasty count and looking only at the main names on this page, I get 58% public domain names, 42% not. There are quite a few monsters that are composites of two words (hook horrors, water weirds) that I've counted as not public domain because that combination of words didn't describe a monster before D&D. I'm probably being overly conservative in counting things as not public domain when I had doubts.
Again... this was a very quick, poorly researched count, looking only at the top-level names on the list, but here's my working, so everyone can nitpick
I have no idea how I misfiled the poor pegasus, but I'm not convinced about the couatl. The name coatl is public domain, but the couatl spelling seems to be D&D specific.
Based on a hasty count and looking only at the main names on this page, I get 58% public domain names, 42% not. There are quite a few monsters that are composites of two words (hook horrors, water weirds) that I've counted as not public domain because that combination of words didn't describe a monster before D&D. I'm probably being overly conservative in counting things as not public domain when I had doubts.
Again... this was a very quick, poorly researched count, looking only at the top-level names on the list, but here's my working, so everyone can nitpick
Carrion Crawler is one of the specifically claimed Product Identities in the OGL 1.0a SRD v5.1, so I would question that being in the public domain. It's a pretty weak name, but it's probably protected.
Couatl is the Aztec name for a day of the week, also meaning serpent or twin.
Death knight as a name is a little... dubious as copyrightable, IMO. Blizzard has used the term in Warcraft.
Demons and devils are public domain, but the anti-satanic panic 2e AD&D names are protected. Some names like Balor are somewhat questionable, since they're literally knock-offs of Balrogs. Treant is similarly a knock-off Ent.
Kenku not public domain, but they're literally tengu from Japanese myth.
Pegasus is pubic domain. It's the name of the winged horse from the Greek myth of Perseus.
A lot of the names are very minimally creative. I'm not sure how much protection they could get. Shadow dragon, faerie dragon, water weird, pseudodragon, shield guardian, purple worm, rust monster, shambling mound, invisible stalker. Some of them might stand up, but as names they're not particularly more creative than "red dragon". If the name is just an adjective and a generic monster name, that makes it harder. Vermithrax Pejorative? Oh yeah, that's creative. Shivan Dragon? Yes, sure. Shadow dragon? Eh....
Heroes of Might and Magic has death knights as well.
Pathfinder uses Graveknight instead.
In some cases, I think it is the name + concept that is copyrightable. I don't think WotC could stop you having a carrion crawler under general copyright law (despite them claiming it as product identity - it's another matter if you are using the OGL, of course) since it's a fairly generic name, provided it was sufficiently a different take on the monster.
However, in most cases the name isn't worth much without the concept behind it.
Also, they claimed Githyanki as product identity in the 3rd edition Monster Manual, but the actual word comes from a George RR Martin story (where it had a very, very brief description, along the lines of "psionic assassin"), so it's not as if WotC are 100% accurate in identifying their own IP either.
I have no idea how I misfiled the poor pegasus, but I'm not convinced about the couatl. The name coatl is public domain, but the couatl spelling seems to be D&D specific.
Is that even a thing you can do? They're the same damn thing, D&D just slapped an extra vowel on it for some unknown reason.
Edit: It's just an alternative spelling (and romanization at that), and it's the one Pathfinder uses too. IANAL but I really doubt they can pull that out of the public domain.
Not at all. That said, if I was going to pretend that they were important, as WotC has done, I would actually put in the effort to make them more interesting.
For instance, if carrion crawlers are the larval form of something, do they pupate? And afterwards, what do they become? Crawlers being the lower-danger warnings that further into the dungeon that there are higher level doom moths, whose wing markings paralyze their prey with fear and whose whispery vocalizations cause psychic damage, that's interesting in a way that ordinary dungeon caterpillars are not.
For those of us who started with the Mentzer basic red box, the carrion crawler was quite likely to be the first monster you ever encountered.
I'm not sure if the BECMI version had 8 attacks or not, but it was an "interesting" choice for the first encounter to give to a bunch of 1st level PCs and their novice players (and a novice DM, in my case).
Not at all. That said, if I was going to pretend that they were important, as WotC has done, I would actually put in the effort to make them more interesting.