Every time I think I understand all aspects of the d20/OGL, a new wrinkle
crops up.
Anyway, onward to my questions:
I have the (mis)fortune to edit an electronic magazine and we are gearing
up to run d20 and OGC material. However the magazine tries to cover a
broad range of gamers including some who do not care at all about
role-playing. Currently this means that articles get divided up by type,
so there are Editorials, Review, General, plus various system-specific
sections. All the article titles and an explanatory blurb appear on the
front page but there is a clear division between article groups.
(See http://www.guildcompanion.com for a clear example)
[Now The Guild Companion *does* have agreements with various publishers to
publish derivative materials for their systems and I double-check
specific articles anyway. So I think we escape from some of the problems
attached to using d20 & OGL by virtue of those permissions.]
I can foresee two additional sections appearing in The Guild Companion -
"Open Gaming Content" - articles under the OGL which don't want to or
can't use the d20 System trademark.
(I'm currently sitting on a short article which replaces "exclusive
skills" with "restricted-class skills" (pay 4 skill points for former
exclusive skills) If I'm lucky, I'll think of a form of words that rescues
this article so that it can say "For use with d20 System" because it's a
bit meaningless without some such indication.)
"d20 System" - articles under OGL and d20STL. (The first three of them are
also in various editorial intrays)
So is it permissible for The Guild Companion to simply add new sections to
our front page? Or does the whole issue suffer from the strictest
limitations of any individual article, e.g. if we have any d20 articles,
we can't publish in the same issue any OGC articles which cannot abide by
d20STL restrictions, *even if the two articles are unrelated*?
Do we have to include a copy of the OGL appended to every OGL article or
can we simply refer to a standard gold copy held on the server? The D20
Guide indicates that each web page can be a Covered Product. So I believe
we need an OGL per article.
Of course this really brings into question the idea that a whole issue of
a webzine represents a "work" in itself ...
Regards,
Nicholas
Nicholas HM Caldwell
General Editor for The Guild Companion
http://www.guildcompanion.com/
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