View From the Bushes

While I was at GenCon, one of the most popular/controversial booths was the one for the Valar Project. (Normally I would post a link but their site claims to be an 18+ site.) See, last year at this time, a guy by the name of Anthony Valterra worked for Wizards of the Coast and was in charge of (among other things) handling the OGL and D20 license. It is, of course, those two licenses which makes possible the kind of publishing that I and dozens of other D20 publishers engage in. Somewhere between then and now (I believe it was back around April of this year), good old Mister Valterra announced that he would be publishing, under the d20 license, a book entitled the Book of Erotic Fantasy.

Shortly thereafter, Anthony left WoTC and struck out on his own. Right off the bat, he seemed to be playing fast and loose with some of the restrictions of the licenses. For example, it's impermissible to claim direct compatibility with D&D. He put out a press release which said just that and claimed that press releases were somehow exempt. There were quite a few other things as well. Needless to say, because of the "adult" nature of the product he got a huge amount of press (more than my insanely unique system *grumble* but that's another subject). Somewhere in there, whether it was at the beginning or as things progressed, he and WoTC had a falling out, so much so that to all appearances WoTC went and changed the D20 license just to deal with the BoEF.

Essentially they added a clause covering "Community Standards of Decency," which essentially means that D20 products can not include violence and gore, sexual themes or prejudices. Needless to say this has generated quite a bit of discussion (one example can be found here.) One of the big arguments is that previously, with no review clause if something was objectionable, WoTC had no liability because there was no real connection between them and the content. Now that they have a review clause, if something is objectionable to someone and they didn't do something about it, suddenly they're brought into the loop. Overall the OGL and D20 licenses are endlessly fascinating and I fear I've reduced a very interesting topic to a minor dusting of the issues, but trust me, it's generated a firestorm.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross