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General Tabletop Discussion
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What monster names are public domain?
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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8928664" data-attributes="member: 6790260"><p>Yeah, Final Fantasy as a whole pokes a lot of holes in various things.</p><p></p><p>E.g., Bahamut as the good king of dragons. Never got sued despite that, and they've kept Bahamut as <em>some</em> kind of "king of dragons" or other super-powerful force with at least draconic <em>motifs</em> for essentially the whole series. FFXIV, for example, has Bahamut and Tiamat...who were a mated pair, and Bahamut was the eldest, and apparently wisest, of the children of Midgardsormr before he was slain by the twisted Allagan Empire long ago. Zero legal rustlings, even though this use is probably actually copyrightable by D&D!</p><p></p><p>I have personally chosen that, should I ever write a setting including dragon-y things, I will use my own name for the Bahamut-type god-king of good dragons. Not <em>just</em> to avoid any risk of issues, mind, but also because I like to make just a couple little tweaks to the formula.</p><p></p><p>Or for another example: Mindflayers! There's straight-up an A-Rank hunt (a world boss type monster) in FFXIV called "Mindflayer," and there's a minion you can get called a Minute Mindflayer. The latter even explicitly references "sucking out the brains of men" in its description! Yet not a single lawsuit. (Probably because WotC/Hasbro know that Japanese copyright law might not favor them, and a case establishing hard precedent against them would be extremely bad. Or it could be they just haven't noticed...but I find that a bit hard to believe.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8928664, member: 6790260"] Yeah, Final Fantasy as a whole pokes a lot of holes in various things. E.g., Bahamut as the good king of dragons. Never got sued despite that, and they've kept Bahamut as [I]some[/I] kind of "king of dragons" or other super-powerful force with at least draconic [I]motifs[/I] for essentially the whole series. FFXIV, for example, has Bahamut and Tiamat...who were a mated pair, and Bahamut was the eldest, and apparently wisest, of the children of Midgardsormr before he was slain by the twisted Allagan Empire long ago. Zero legal rustlings, even though this use is probably actually copyrightable by D&D! I have personally chosen that, should I ever write a setting including dragon-y things, I will use my own name for the Bahamut-type god-king of good dragons. Not [I]just[/I] to avoid any risk of issues, mind, but also because I like to make just a couple little tweaks to the formula. Or for another example: Mindflayers! There's straight-up an A-Rank hunt (a world boss type monster) in FFXIV called "Mindflayer," and there's a minion you can get called a Minute Mindflayer. The latter even explicitly references "sucking out the brains of men" in its description! Yet not a single lawsuit. (Probably because WotC/Hasbro know that Japanese copyright law might not favor them, and a case establishing hard precedent against them would be extremely bad. Or it could be they just haven't noticed...but I find that a bit hard to believe.) [/QUOTE]
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