I just thought I'd split out a separate thread for planning, so we can keep
Shade's memorial thread more for memories of him.
Good call. Here is a reply to a couple of posts there that should be done here:
I think we should clear that with his wife out of courtesy, but I can't see her saying no. She is extremely nice from the few interactions I've had with her.
The harder part would be getting WotC to agree to it. Doing the CC for free didn't seem to be a problem, but we would absolutely need some kind of licensing agreement to do it for cash.
I'm not thinking of something that is for cash. I'm thinking of something that is totally free, like Freyar said.
I was figuring that there could be something about the Creature Catalog in the back and it could mention Shade's work and invite people that enjoy the monsters to consider donating one or two dollars to Shade's college fund. You would need to clear that past Eric's wife, as it might be something that she likes or dislikes.
But if she was OK with the idea, and the conversions that are already free to view here were turned into free to download netbooks, everyone could get a full set of 3e monsters and a netbook could let everyone know what a great contribution Shade made to the project.
Shade's avatar is the deep dragon illustration from the 3e Monsters of Faerun book, so I don't think that's something we can use.
Thanks for the heads-up on that, although when I searched the
gallery, I saw that it was a Shadow Dragon rather than a Deep Dragon.
I might make it my Facebook "cover photo" for a while.
Well, if we didn't charge and just mentioned the memorial fund, would we need the licensing? But there are maybe other issues --- I don't think we've followed the OGL properly really, and I don't know what kind of agreement the CC has with WotC that allows us to convert all their old monsters.
The
ESD Conversion Agreement allows any fans to convert old D&D content (including monsters) to 3e rules. But there are restrictions above the OGL and the most important one is that you can not do it commercially, as you are using WotC's IP. WotC did the d20STL to help commercial reuse of the SRD, and the ESD Conversion Agreement to help fan projects.
From what I recall, as well as a copy of the OGL, you need some sort of legal blurb in the netbook. I
think Section 15 of the OGL has to have two copyright declarations (one for the original TSR source and another for the conversion). I
think the legal blurb that you put in there (as well as the OGL) is something to do with the content being WotC's IP. I think this takes the place of the normal OGC/PI declaration that OGL products have, and in this case you are stating that the converted content is WotC's IP and can not be reused as OGC.
Some publishers made independent agreements to gain permission to publish conversions of old TSR stuff, but with WotC about to move from 4e to 5e, I can't imagine them wanting to authorise any 3e material to be commercially published.
The netbooks are a good idea, but there are also some other pretty important matters. Shade was the only active moderator here as well as the only one loading the converted critters into the CC database. (As Cleon mentioned, there is still quite a backlog of those lingering in the homebrews forum, and I'm not sure if there is a list of the finished monsters awaiting upload). So we really need someone with moderator privileges (and help with conversions would be good too) to take care of that. Clearly, the easiest thing would be for BOZ to come back --- BOZ, what do you think? It seems like the consensus is that we should really finish converting everything to 3.5.
If the project is not abandoned (which would be awful) we are probably going to need a moderator who can edit some of the many to-do lists that were posted by Shade.
Boz coming back would work, but if he does not have the time to do it, I think that yourself and Echohawk have the right stuff to be moderators. You are both committed people that look after others and don't put your interests ahead of other people. I'm not on the moderator team (not here anyway - I'm a Junior Admin
at The Piazza now - which is one of the reasons I don't get here as much as I used to) so it isn't really the done thing for me to be telling ENWorld what to do, but this project really needs a moderator-in-residence and perhaps Boz can have a chat with ENWorld's mod team to see what they think would be the best thing for ENWorld to do.
There is no massive urgency for this. Once people get over the shock of Shade being gone, perhaps we can have a look at restarting one of the conversion threads. A backlog of uploads is going to be much less of a "problem" than a backlog of non-converted monsters that need TLC, uploads just really need a bit of time to get done and then they are done forever. The conversions themselves are the real work.
And we can think about netbooks and things too.
That would be brilliant (especially as I suspect that they could be a sort of living memorial to Shade). But again, it isn't urgent.
The first post in the
Current Conversion Requests thread has a list of creatures that are "Finished and Awaiting Upload to the CC", which is probably a good starting point. I can double check that against my own index of pending conversions, but that's currently six months or so out-of-date, so I really need a free weekend first to get properly up to speed with my monster indexing.
I'm surprised you managed to build your index in the first place. It must be one of the
Seven Wonders of Tabletop Gaming.
.
