Re: Legality and WotC help with 3rdEd SJ

RPGNow.com has all of the Spelljammer books in PDF form for $5 each.. the
original Spelljammer boxed set counts as a single book.  I don't know if it
is direct scan or if they did any OCR on them as part of the scan however.

You can download the Electronic SKU Download (ESD) Conversion
Agreement<http://www.wizards.com/d20/files/ESDpolicy.rtf>which tells
you all you need to know about how to convert an old product. By
my reading, the process works that you can convert anything that is rules
directly into other rules that do the exact same thing. It was really
intended for converting adventures, so the example they give is that in an
adventure you need to convert a white dragon to a 3.X White dragon, no
taking liberties and making it a blue dragon.

For rules books like the Spelljammer core books, there would seem to be a
bit more liberty in how you transfer the rules over but you have to watch
out for Flavor text.

Doing the conversion through this document gives a little extra leway in
terms of using Trademarks that you wouldn't normally have access to.. such
as putting 'Spelljammer' and other trademarks (I'd tread carefully when
using MindFlayers however) onto your document. A strict interpretation of of
this does mean that you need to use the SRD in order to do your conversions.
That may mean that you should use the D20 Future ship rules but I'd be
inclinded to think that isn't really necessary.

Finally, keep in mind that doing this means everything you are creating is
Open Content using the OGL. I know some people have issues with open content
particularly for things they feel fall into the 'free use' category. On the
bright side, having something OGL makes it fairly easy for someone else to
take the document you created, strip out the IP and create/sell their own
boats in space suppliment for D20, True20, Castles and Crusades, Arcana
Evolved, or whatever.

Oh yeah, and no charging money for it.. but everyone knows that.

On 5/10/06, Dreamer <dreamer@??????.?????.??.uk> wrote:
>
> Someone said that it would be legal for us to do a 3rdEd version
> of SJ, and that WotC were quite happy with us doing this.
>
> Is there any chance that WotC would part with the machine-
> editable text of CoAS and LotV?
>
> Presumably they would need Jeff Grubb's permission, and maybe the
> other editors, so that we could hack around their text.
>
> Alternatively, if someone has a machine-editable text of CoAS and
> LotV, say that they have OCR'ed the published books, would WotC
> be happy with us using that as the basis of a 3rdEd SJ?
>
> And, assuming WotC are happy, does anyone have such a thing?
>
> There is a limit as to how much typing-in of rule books is a good
> idea, and the more that is done the greater risk of errors, that
> we wont spot.
>
>
> Regards.
>
> --
> Dreamer
> dreamer@??????.?????.??.uk
> http://www.romsys.demon.co.uk/
>
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