D&D will release its 2024 ruleset under a Creative Commons licence(dicebreaker.com) |
D&D will release its 2024 ruleset under a Creative Commons licence(dicebreaker.com) |
Also, this is the SRD - the "genericized" version of the rules, that includes all the core game systems but omits content and references to official lore. (e.g. the SRD has a spell called "Mage’s Private Sanctum", which is mechanically the same as the main ruleset's "Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum".)
beholder, gauth, carrion crawler, tanar’ri, baatezu, displacer beast, githyanki, githzerai, mind flayer, illithid, umber hulk, yuan-ti
If I understand correctly, they only own copyrights for the lore, not the names and appearance. Also product identity so they can't be used by other tabletops, but other media can use them. For example, the game Demon's Souls have Mind Flayers, they are called Mind Flayers and look the part. I doubt From Soft and/or Sony are paying royalties for such minor enemy.
I think this case is different from the Beholder which seemingly they own complete rights since they made Tibia change their Beholder to something distinct.
Tanar'ri and baatezu are, even within full-copyright Official D&D materials, better known as "demons" and "devils", and I have a hard time imagining that any third-party material would want to use the protected names.
Beholders are iconic, and distinctive to D&D, and gauths are derivative of them. There are several other beholder-lites; why aren't spectators protected?
Illithids and mind flayers are the same thing, always fairly iconic and more so now that Baldur's Gate 3 is devoted to them, and githyanki and githzerai are part of the lore developed around them.
Yuan-ti are snake people. They're not distinctive at all; the film Conan the Barbarian has a villain who does a ritual to turn into a giant snake. The general concepts of snake people, snakier people, and evil snake gods are too popular and generic to be protected, but I guess you should call them something other than "yuan-ti".
(Fun side note: the name "yuan-ti" looks like it's obviously Chinese. You can find questions about this all over the Chinese internet, since there's no obvious way to assign meaning to the name. The answer appears to be that the guy who made up the name knew nothing about Chinese and it's all a big coincidence.)
Umber hulks are large insectoid creatures that burrow underground. I'm not sure why they're considered so important, but they're more distinctive than carrion crawlers.
What's more interesting to me is that they're going to review the older edition SRDs, with an aim to releasing those under Creative Commons too, after SRD 5.2 is out.
Positive news.
And when they sent Pinkertons to intimidate someone at their home after they leaked an unreleased card set.
https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/trading-card-game/new...
So the underlying rules are fine, but having monsters like mindflayers, spells like "magic missile" or "melf's acid arrow", locations like Baldurs Gade, Waterdeep etc are all verboten.
Bit murky with Wizards of the Coast buying TSR and making Baldur's Gate Magic sets.
If it's not generic, was Wizards of the Coast stealing from TSR when it used D&D's Counterspell as the name of a Magic card? Before buying TSR, to be clear.
"Fireball" should be generic. Plenty of prior art on those, I should think.
Kidding, a little bit.
[0] https://media.wizards.com/2023/downloads/dnd/SRD_CC_v5.1.pdf
I'm not familiar with what products would have made umber hulks or yuan-ti prominent, but I can believe that they existed, particularly in the case of yuan-ti, which seem to have a lot of lore developed around them. A lot of lore in the present generally means a lot of products featuring them in the past. I'm just not sure how valuable it is to protect the name "yuan-ti" when the concept is so generic.
(The webcomic Rusty & Co. includes one character who is a snake person, named Yuan-Tiffany. She's a lamia, due to legal threats from Wizards of the Coast, but while the name of her species had to be changed, neither her character design ["snake person, no legs"; lamia nobles look like that too] nor her name was affected.)
Tanar'ri and baatezu are a weirder case, where the names are so worthless that even D&D itself prefers not to use them, and the concepts are obviously not subject to copyright or other protection. They originate in (or before) 1st edition D&D under the names "demons" and "devils", with no other name given, and a moral panic in the USA prompts TSR to rename those categories "tanar'ri" and "baatezu" in the second edition (without changing the monsters - having a monster called a "succubus", an evil spirit hailing from "the Abyss" who exists to lead mortals into evil by having sex with them, is fine; labeling that monster a "demon" is not). In third edition, they're back to being "demons" and "devils", with the names "tanar'ri" and "baatezu" being mentioned, but clearly positioned as obscure lore about the universe. And that's how it's been ever since.
Do they behave like mind flayers? Mind flayers have always been known for their ability to instantly kill a player by using a special attack that extracts his brain; that kind of prevents them from being "minor enemies".
I think it's probably intended to be that, yes.
I was for example surprised to learn that Mind Flayers are protected, like the whole race and all it's properties. Dwarves and elves are not. I think anything Underdark, including Deep Gnomes, Duergar and Drow are also protected. There are probably certain magical items that are also protected, like the Immovable Rod, or Ring of Feather Fall, etc.
For home games none of this matters of course. But I'm certain it's going to be problematic for players that want to stream their play sessions, creators of other media like games or boardgames that want to make something D&D-adjacent-but-not-such-that-it-awakens-the-dragon and so on.
Also, for things like "Dwarves and elves", that'd be a bold move on their part. As so much of the original D&D was poached from a variety of sources (see Appendix N [1]) they need to be careful if trying to claim those.
But obviously there's also a second layer where you can't publish your own novel about, say, the intricate details Drow matriarchal society, that aren't in the SRD and came from WotC novels and sourcebooks. Presumably it's a bit like with Sherlock Holmes, where the character himself is out of copyright but certain lore details added in later books are still covered.