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Okay, now what?
Mar. 24th, 2008 12:30 pmOff and on I've been working on a minor project. This project started with the planes named in Open Game Content (the SRD and the Tome of Horrors in particular) and drew logical inferences from them, explaining how various parts of the sources implied certain things about what planes existed. Names for various planes were occasionally drawn from non-specialized reference works (the 1911 Roget's in particular). A handful of planar traits were then assigned to the planes, alignment in the case of the Outer Planes, physical to the Inner Planes, based on these inferences and deductions. Other than that, there is nothing in the way of description or gaming detail or any of the rest; this is a pure derivation document.
My intent was to release this whole document to the world under the Open Game License 1.0a, so that publishers could use it as a common set of planes for their works. (In particular, I was planning to do a more detailed guide to the planes, and include this file as an appendix to describe how I developed many of the planes.)
Well, as a result of the nature of the sources (the Tome of Horrors in particular), the planes listed in this document
map reasonably closely to the list in, say, the 1987 Manual of the Planes or the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition Dungeon Master's Guide. And, of course, being familiar with those works, my derivation was not clean-room reverse engineering. It is possible that my opinions as to what were logical extrapolations may well have been influenced by knowing what various TSR authors did. So, not being a lawyer, it seems to me possible that this file, in the interpretation of the courts, would be considered not to be derived from Open Game Content alone, but of other Hasbro/WotC material that constitutes closed content. In that case, I would not legally be able to release it under the Open Game License.
So now I'm trying to figure out what to do with the file. Anybody have advice?
My intent was to release this whole document to the world under the Open Game License 1.0a, so that publishers could use it as a common set of planes for their works. (In particular, I was planning to do a more detailed guide to the planes, and include this file as an appendix to describe how I developed many of the planes.)
Well, as a result of the nature of the sources (the Tome of Horrors in particular), the planes listed in this document
map reasonably closely to the list in, say, the 1987 Manual of the Planes or the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition Dungeon Master's Guide. And, of course, being familiar with those works, my derivation was not clean-room reverse engineering. It is possible that my opinions as to what were logical extrapolations may well have been influenced by knowing what various TSR authors did. So, not being a lawyer, it seems to me possible that this file, in the interpretation of the courts, would be considered not to be derived from Open Game Content alone, but of other Hasbro/WotC material that constitutes closed content. In that case, I would not legally be able to release it under the Open Game License.
So now I'm trying to figure out what to do with the file. Anybody have advice?
