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Wizards of the Coast OGL 1.1 / Dungeons & Dragons Licensing Controversy - Tried to pull a sneaky on a bunch of rules lawyers?
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![r/DnD OGL u/Baroness_Ayesha • 9h Ssssssssssssssssssssssso, uh, there are some. Terms. In the now-Creative Commons 5e System Resource Document. & Th twitter.com winke Elven Tower Cartography @ElvenTower On page 254 of the 5.1 SRD that is now Creative Commons, there is this mention of: ELVEN TOWER aboleths beholders mind flayers slaadi So, these names are not "Product Identity" anymore. They are CC-BY, in the wild, and irrevocable. Download the PDF! Aberrations are utterly alien beings. Many of them have innate magical abilities drawn from the creature's alien mind rather than the mystical forces of the world. The quintessential aberrations are aboleths, beholders, mind flayers, and slaadi. 3:46 PM 27 Jan 23 Baroness_Ayesha OP. 9h So, yeah, Wizards just threw up the existing 5.1 SRD with no editing on a Creative Commons license. And they forgot to include any language specifying protected terms, and didn't include any language defining specific terms as still protected as Product Identity under the OGL. This. Um. Opens up a lot of Terms. Elven Tower covers a lot of them in their thread, but it includes "beholder", "mind flayer", "slaadi", "yugoloth", "Waterdeep", "Baldur's Gate", "owlbear", "sahuagin" (as a specific spelling), "umber hulk", "yuan-ti", and. um. "Strahd von Zarovich". Moreover, beholders, mind flayers and slaadi are specifically called out as Aberrations, "utterly alien beings; [m]any of them have innate magical abilities drawn from the creature's alien mind rather than the mystical forces of the world", yugoloths are Fiends, Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate are places with a road between them, "owlbear" can't be much other than an owlbear, and Strahd is specifically described as a Count and a vampire. If people are a little lost, beholders and mind flayers have been absurdly protected parts of the Dungeons & Dragons IP for upwards of half a century, now. TSR famously reserved some of their nastiest legal fights for this part of the IP, down to fighting like an angry tiger over there mere names, asserting that both were completely protected in a tabletop sense. Others, like yugoloths and slaadi (and, well, F------ Strahd), were just protected under standard work-for-hire copyright and were easily considered integral to the D&D IP and not allowed for open use. In the OGL version of the 5.1 SRD, all of these elements were specifically called out as Product Identity, identifying them as protected terms that were not part of the Open Gaming Content allowed for use. Creative Commons has similar carve-out language available, but the released version of the CC 5.1 SRD doesn't use it. These terms, along with whatever descriptions were attached, are now free to use under CC, even for commercial use. The use of the Creative Commons license here in general was pretty clearly meant as a bludgeon against Paizo and the ORC License, because there have been a minority hitting them with "well why not just use Creative Commons", and was more done out of cynical one-upsmanship than any real desire to make things more open and convenient for users and third party authors. But once again, it seems the current crop of lawyers and executives at WotC and Hasbro have no idea what's actually in their product, and just gave away terms for open use that had previously been the subjects of decades of intensely bitter legal battles. Now, it can't be Literally Strahd or Very Specifically An Illithid Mind Flayer, as those will still be protected expressions of the terms. But if you want Count Strahd von Zarovich, vampiric bartender, or a strange alien creature that flays minds and may involve tentacles and is called a "mind flayer", all you need do to cover yourself is include the CC attribution now. The terms are otherwise completely open for use when they weren't previously. So bravo, WotC. Full applause. Thank you for your service. Absolutely incredible work, lads Reply ↑ 117 ↓](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/list/002/525/018/f67.png "Backpedaled so hard they tripped and lost their marbles")
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