Desslock’s Weekly Article

Desslock has written up his weekly RPG article once again, talking mainly about the possibility of Neverwinter Nights using the D20 system and this year’s Game of the Year awards at GameSpy and GameSpot. Here’s a taste:

Wizards made a lot of stuff from D&D freely available for use under the D20 licence, including the D&D character classes, skills, feats, etc. You can get details about what’s “free” here. But what you can’t use, for free, are anything that’s defined as “Product Identity”, which is generally all the “content” that we’d expect in a D&D game: references to the forgotten realms world, places, characters, as well as all of the spells and magic items that have been created for D&D by Wizards (and its predecessors), so a D20 game wouldn’t be able to use any of that D&D content — a lot of D&D fans would be pretty disappointed if Neverwinter Nights didn’t include those things. Similarly, a D20 game would have to use non-D&D monsters, since most D&D monsters are protected by copyright (as Product Identity, and just under the general copyright relating to the Monster Manual).

Additionally, he has posted an interesting link on where you can buy a replica of the “One Ring” from Lord of the Rings. If you have $300 to blow, click here.