Thursday, August 12, 2010

This will not end well

I like to keep an eye on the OSR movement since I like the spirit of what is going on, I love many of the products and most of the people involved are also very cool.

But this is something that will not end well at all.


http://www.diecastgamesinc.com/ADD-Adventures_c2.htm

I also saw this at Gen Con and wondered at first if this was an old TSR book that never saw the light of day or something new.
This issue here of course is using a trademark, "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" which is specifically prohibited by the OGL.

There are more discussions going about here:



Even people that don't like new D&D or WotC see this as a bad move.

There are a lot of problems with this, mostly effecting the OSR publishers wishing to reach out to new audiences.

This is one to keep an eye on.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Did I get it right. This is a third party supplement, but they decided to rip AD&D logo to use?

That's pretty lame.

Joshua Sherrer said...

It's not lame it's stupid. For years those that have made clones have done so with the ultimate respect to WOTC's IP. Now, some guy does this and doesn't think about how it will reflect on those who played by the rules.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Josh, I think Thaumiel was referring to this new module as lame. So you are agreeing.

Joshua Sherrer said...

I never read the module and likely won't given it's dubious nature; so I can't comment on the content.

I may have misread Thaumiel as I took him to be saying using the AD&D logo was lame.

Anonymous said...

The only one this will reflect badly upon is the one who made it. If you have used the license correctly you will not be affected. If you did not use the license but are operating within the law, you will not be affected. WotC will not suddenly turn against the entirety of the old school publishing world because one guy did something wrong. That's not how it works, so maybe we can just calm down and stop with the "sky is falling" stuff, hmm?

And by the way, he did not use the AD&D logo, he used the trademark name AD&D. The logo would have had the dragon ampersand, etc.