Protection from Chaos

I had a rather unfortunate experience on the Gamma World Yahoo group over the past couple of days, and it inspired this article. I don’t want to drag you too much into the ridiculous argument, but I will do so to the extent that's necessary to understand the issues that were raised. Because there were a lot of arguments thrown out, this article, in addressing all of them, isn't particularly coherent. There's no theme common to all the subjects other than copyright law generally. Bear with me here. ...

As any of my gaming friends will tell you, I’m constantly finding ways to connect my dungeon crawl system to any conversation I’m having. Now, it’s taking over this article series. Lately, I’ve converted several Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventures to that 4th Edition D&D system. I've run C2: The Ghost Tower of Inverness three times, and more than one of my players has asked for a copy of the adventure so they could run it for their home group. Initially, I wasn’t able to oblige with Ghost Tower because what I made was too close for comfort as far as infringement was concerned. Distributing that could be actionable, and considering how vocal I've been about my conversions, I certainly wouldn't be able to convince Wizards of the Coast ("WotC") that I didn't do it. ...

In my last article, I briefly mentioned an incident in which I was watching “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” ...

Recently, Paizo was said to have issued a cease and desist letter ("C & D") to Obsidian Portal on account of a campaign on their website. Apparently, the campaign manager was including thumbnail images of Paizo’s item cards, a product sold by Paizo.
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Some recent events have inspired me to write this article. This is an important topic that’s relevant to many of my potential ...

Introduction

A post on a recent ENWorld thread expressed the notion that publishing D&D content without using the GSL was “not playing nice.” This couldn’t be further from the truth, and the reasoning is instructive for people looking to be published in every other gaming system, as there are no other licenses (of which I’m aware) like the GSL for any other game (other than the OGL, which was produced by the same company for a different edition of the same game, and outside the scope of this article). ...