TL DR - While there is some truth to the saying it's mostly hogwash, and should honestly not be mentioned nearly as often as it gets. Close, probably gets attempted sued at the very least, but might not be considered infringement in court. another TTRPG called D&D would probably be sued for trademark infringement, but a bar simply dubbed D&D that sometimes hosts TTRPGs? Prob fine. Unless such a company flies too close to the sun they're prob fine. Even though WotC probably has a trademark for it. There almost certainly are tons of those already in existence. Reversely as an example though you could simply create a business called D&D if it's not representing even a TTRPG system or anything related to it. If WotC trademarked "Ilithid" on its own in some fashion it would have sufficient novelty that it'd likely have strong protections.
Without either of those the trademark is not going to have any particularized trademark protections. However, for that to be relevant the mark must be actually trademarked, and the mark must be novel enough to warrant any special protections in the first place. Outright losing it, even without having fought to maintain it, is quite difficult, and only has a few quite extreme examples. Secondly, the issue of protecting your trademark is about weakening its protection, or generalising it. You do not need to exercise any meaningful control of your copyright content. So the matter of being able to use WotC IP is almost exclusively one of copyright, not trademark. The same goes for 99.998% of the content they put out. sure, WotC owns Ilithids, but that's via copyright, not via trademark. If it was mentioned and explained within the bounds and context that is relevant it would be helpful, but it's almost universally recited in places where it's not relevant, and the claims are directly harmful to the debate imo.įirstly, the primary content covered here is copyright, not trademark. that it killed any interest I had in pledging for Battle of the Bards, and Apotheosis won’t see another penny from me until and if they decide to clean up TRO and errata the shit that needs an errata. Thanks, I guess? Could you not have spent the time to provide actually balanced encounters? There’s a whole section of blatantly word-count-padding fluff that is real-world recipes of in-game dishes. They can’t decide on a single page whether or not they want to personify “death” or not, so across several paragraphs you get “death” and “Death.” Sometimes you get both in a single paragraph. You can’t get through the first chapter without encountering the first of several repeated instructions to the DM that amount to “this encounter will probably be too hard for your players, so just fudge the rolls so they can win.” That’s not verbatim, but it’s pretty damn close to being. It is so obvious that this thing did not go through an actual editor, although there’s an editor listed in the credits. My beef with TRO is purely in the polish of the published material (mechanical writing issues like punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and so forth) and in the lazy encounter building. The artwork is pretty great, and while I don’t dig the metal soundtrack, the orchestral version makes great background music while I work on my version of the game. Not great, not bad, but it is serviceable. A city of warlocks where you can actually rub elbows with your patron. The setting published in TRO is very good. And, IMO, both of those approaches are FINE and there’s nothing wrong with it. Or the other option is to be a source book, where you have a lore dump but not a lot of plot, because what you’re publishing should be inspiration for the DM, but not necessarily handhold them through major plot beats. Look, I expect a published campaign to either be a railroad, because you have plot that you want to share and you are relying on the DM to be able to be a DM and handle when the players go off the rails. I was talking about The Red Opera (the shockingly bad released product).