!!!!!!GURPS Ghostbusters!!!!!!

[Kuroshima]

Took a look at it, and I must say that it probably does all the kind of things that the online policy goes agaist:

• Copyright violations: It reproduces parts of many copyrighted materials, both GURPS related, and Ghostbusters related
• Art violations: Copyrighted stills and paintings are used without permission.
• Trade Dress: Uses the GURPS 4th ed trade dress
• Trademarks: Uses trademarks without permission

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm really perplexed by this. I've been asked about it in a private message, on the ground that I'm listed as an author. I don't see my name when I go to Grom's Web page. Is it on the download? I'm not planning to download the thing; call me paranoid if you like, but I don't download things that look dodgy, and this looks dodgy.

In any case, if it is, it's a blatant and implausible fraud. Not only do I do all my GURPS writing for Steve Jackson Games, who pay me for it (and this is not a Steve Jackson Games project), but also I didn't much like the movie, I have never played the original RPG for it, and I have a long list of things I'd like to work on that appeal to me more.

Bill Stoddard

It probably means that it used text from GURPS Fantasy. Here's an extract from the next to last page (reflowed for forum usage, but not spellchecked)

In 2006, I began research for a new campaign. The group had decided on Ghostbusters as our next best option for a game scenariot. I found a gently used copy of Ghostbusters International on eBay (the original game was too pricey). I was disappointed with the game which was very basic. There was some good information on setting up adventures, but not enough “crunchy stuff” for a GURPS game.

I bought GURPS Horror as soon as I laid eyes on it. The book proved to be too horror oriented for a humorous campaign, although it did have some good ideas about setting up the campaign. My search continued.

Web searches turned up Ghostbusters – Who Ya Gonna Call?, a d20 based rule book in PDF format. I printed and quickly read it. It had some good crunchy data on the Ghostbusters’ equipment and some background info on the movies and cartoon. There was a good section on alternate dimensions too. It was added to my collectio. With the deadline for my game approaching, I lacked enough detail to run a serious game for my players.

I searched the Internet for other GURPS players who might have played a Ghostbusters scenario, and were sharing their game notes with the world. I stumbled upon the GURPS All-Star Jam 2004 with it’s chapter “Ghost Breaking”. This was exactly what I needed, and just in time! I supplied my players with photocopies of relevant pages and we began to generate characters as I hastily cobbled together our first adventure.

The initial games went off without a hitch. It was a big pain to reference things in my dog-eared, and heavily bookmarked pages. I began to consolidate my rules into a more cohesive binder, including house rules that were developed for situations that weren't addressed by the scattered array of rule books. As the binder began to resemble a rough book, I digitized germane pages from my four books – so that I wouldn't have to carry six books and a thick binder anymore.

After playing Ghostbusters for almost a year, I decided I would create an authentic looking GURPS world book to hold the accumulated bits in my binder, and give bound copies to my players for Christmas. I worked up drawings and scammed artwork from any source. In November our gaming came to a halt as real life intruded into our game time. I devoted myself to completing the book. November turned into December, and so on. Eventually I added parts from the GURPS Fantasy, since the advice was just as sound for Ghostbusters games as it had been for my Conan campaign.

The hard copy books are finished and my players love them. They have cajoled me into sharing this effort with the world, although I am loathe to do so since it contains the copyrighted work of others – some of it
heavily edited – in addition to the chapters I wrote myself. Given time, I would have rewritten all of it, but I'm too busy with other things now.

I have credited the authors and artists (when I could find out who they were) because I sincerely hope that everyone who uses this book will go out and buy their stuff too. I’ll post this once and then I’m done. I
wouldn’t mind hearing what people think of the book. I frequent www.gbfans.com and the UseNet group, rec.games.frp.gurps if anyone wants to leave word on what they liked or would have done differently.

Lothar Wotan Yot

Bellow that you can see the thumbnails for the following covers:

• Ghostbusters International (Aaron Allston, Douglas Kaufman)
• GURPS Horror (Kenneth Hite)
• Ghostbusters (Michael Tresca, Fritz Baugh)
• All-star Jam 2004 (Kenneth Hite)
• GURPS Fantasy (William H. Stoddard)

Now, I haven't read it, but on a cursory look, it's a very professional looking fan-book. A lot of effort went into making it (though it seems that not so much went into spell-checking it).

[zorg]

Originally Posted by kmunoz

Your name is on it (along with a few others); I "downloaded" it to the extent that it viewed in my browser.

Yes, I clicked on "view in browser," too.

It looks just like a standard GURPS 4e book, down to the formatting.

So convincingly, in fact, that I thought I had missed a release at first.

[PK]

That fanbook is egregiously in violation of our online policy, specifically the bits about, "Copyrighted text (like game rules and vignette text) may not be used without special permission of Steve Jackson Games," and, "This permission does NOT extend to copying our trade dress. In general, if you make your material look like a SJ Games product, it's over the line."

The fact that it includes huge swaths of text copied from existing GURPS books (and from other copyrighted books, such as the Ghostbusters RPG) also makes this document illegal to share -- it's a clear copyright violation.

Grom, please stop distributing that file immediately -- remove it from your Google Docs and do not put it up on any other website. (Failure to do so means we have to go through the hassle of actual legal action, and no one wants that -- so please just remove it immediately.)