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Why is the OGC crippled in "Underdark Adventure Guide&q

Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2003 8:54 am
by Vaxalon
I just got the Underdark Adventure Guide. It's a marvelous resource for a DM.

It's a terrible resource for a D20/OGL author.

The OGL in it is almost universally crippled. All of the names of the feats, prestige classes, monsters... they're all PI. This is odd, since the material is not part of a published setting.


Not only that, the open content declaration seems deliberately obscure. It has pages five through fifteen declared as OGL, with everything else closed except where there is derivation from the SRD. Of course, most of the "crunch" in this book is derived from the SRD, so it isn't actually as closed as it seems to be.

Can someone explain to me why this book was made this way?

The standard answer I hear to this question is, "So noone can steal our hard work." I don't understand this at all. It takes me about five seconds to think up a name for any of these things. Easy peasy.

I think it would have been a much more useful book if only the non-SRD based material in chapters three and four was declared closed content. To claim closed content over chapter two, which is full of SRD-based material, seems odd.

Posted: Fri Apr 16, 2004 12:26 pm
by Golem2176
I'm assuming you mean the Underdark book. I fso, then it is a Forgotten Realms product. Any books that have/has/will come out as a part of the Forgotten Realms product line, does not and ever will have any Open Content.

However, that should not stymie a creative mind. Read it, understand it, and then extrapolate what is there. You can take any one of the feats or other material, reword it enough (60%, I believe) to call it original, and then publish it.