Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

I would like to request some Dungeon Fantasy books that use non-lawsuit historical books. For example, there could be a desert setting complete with a monotheistic god (who for lawsuit purposes) is not based on any real world god or religion (wink wink nod nod…). It could seem superficially like GURPS Arabian Nights but the god and religion and the monsters and cultures would be lawsuit free. Or maybe there could be something like GURPS Silk Road with cultures and religions that seem very similar to real world religions and cultures but from a legal standpoint they are not.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Just invent some names for the god/gods (if you want to avoid hurting someone sensibilities) and you are good to go.

All folklore is lawsuit free.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

I would like to see some books that have appropriate magic items, monsters, treasures, and classes that reflect the culture of the settings. A writer like Matt Rigsby would be great to have to do this sort of project. He could just Dungeon Fantasyize GURPS Silk Road. The pure historical books don’t give stats for monsters or magic items and so on.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

I think all GURPS historical books have the folklore and stats for many of the most iconic and known creatures and monsters.

The ones I have do at least.

GURPS Aranbian Nights have them, the gods may have a change of name (if you want to) but the creatures don't need that to be lawsuit free.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Nordlond has a lot of not-actually [historical period] areas, but they are mostly not filled in. But maybe Doug can be persuaded to release books for them. Stranger things have happened.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

I want a book about historical legal dramas. It worked for Iceland.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

And they're all available online. The challenge being that they're in Icelandic.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

That's why God gave us Google Translate.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

I meant for GURPS campaigns. We don't actually have very many rules for legal drama, a little in Mysteries, and a little in Social Engineering, and really nothing about period ones.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Contest of Skill - Public Speaking vs. Public Speaking. Each side gets to bring character witnesses - people who swear that their guy is in the right. Use the SSRT to determine bonus from character witnesses. Something like that?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

The ones here tended to involve spirited arguments featuring axes.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

You must be referring to the Old Testament God, the New Testament God was too caring and just to have created Google Translate....

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Religious myth and folklore aren't intellectual property, and nobody is going to "sue" SJG over publishing GURPS rules that treat a real-world religion or culture well (or poorly).

However, giving that sort of material a treatment that remains respectful to the source in a way that doesn't alienate and offend the real people who follow that belief structure is something that the gaming industry as a whole has failed horribly at in the past. Getting it right is hard*, getting it wrong is easy, and the consequences of getting it wrong are a PR nightmare. I'm really not surprised that the DF line and the DFRPG stick with the generic instead of trying to dance around that third rail.

*I think I did a good job with the work I've done for the Nordlond setting, but I'd seriously question the judgment of anyone who said I was the best choice to write 'Dungeon Fantasy RPG: Desert Adventures' with a true-to-life Middle Eastern flavor, for instance. At a minimum I'd want a consultant and a really good sensitivity reader, and even then I'd expect my efforts to be inadequate.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Amusingly enough, my Neveri horse archers were based on the nomadic peoples in and around Turkey, and to the east. I hired a Turkish artist. And the initial sketch I got back was a tall English looking woman trying to shoot a longbow from a modern racehorse*. It's hard to do right period. :-)


*We fixed it.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

And sometimes success is simply impossible (overconstrained). Gary Gygax was a devout Christian for example, and yet his attempts to include things from his own religion wound up turning off other Christians to such an extent that some of us/them straight-up prefer to just ignore everything Gygax wrote about religion and stick to pure speculative fantasy religions like the various Sorcerer-King cults from Dark Sun. (And my Baatezu and Tanar'ri are basically extraterrestrial munchkins who went crazy with magical and biological augmentations--they have a religion but it's not more "real" than anyone else's.)

You just can't win at this game. Someone is going to be repulsed by what you write.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

I'm not sure what you're getting at. You could always adapt sections of GURPS Banestorm and just change the names. Of course, there's the issue of how to handle clerics.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

OK, instead of lawsuits then write something that won’t offend those that live to be offended. For example, instead of Buddha there could be a prophet called the “enlightened one” which is of course not Buddha but extremely similar to Buddha.

In any case, I think there is a place between the extremes of pure historical background and gonzo fantasy background. This could be like Nordland but include the rest of the Earth. I still say GURPS Silk Road should be the background setting and then add a lot of cool fantasy things that are appropriate to the area where it is set. I like Nordland but I feel Norse settings have already been done so I would like a more exotic setting.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

What's stopping you from using an existing setting like Dark Sun? It has tons of callbacks to real world cultures.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

And then I talked you into adding vicious sharp-toothed halflings to that particular mix, which I'm honestly still pretty pleased with.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

"Don't offend the perpetually offended"? That's unpossible.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Probably a more involved system with steps if you are going to do a whole St. Ives as Perry Mason campaign.

Well yeah, which is why I immediately thought that particular historical lawsuit book might be pretty cool.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

I think we already have that - Nordlond.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

As long as we're talking religion in games, I'm curious as to why you used the Norse names for the gods in the D&D version of Hall of Judgment (Tyr) but filed off the serial numbers for the DF version and Hand of Asgard.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

The Dungeon Fantasy RPG is “generic.” The various domains fit well into almost any pantheon. I wanted it useful to the maximum number of folks.

I don’t think it takes much to realize the Allfather is Odin, the warden is Heimdall, and Skadi is the snow queen. But as archetypes I was hoping more would find it usable.

I do my best to try and make as much of the work portable as possible for those who have no interest in Vikings or Norse mythology. Having a firm setting allows me to hang a lot of lore on what we do, but I understand it’s not everyone’s bag.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Fair enough, Douglas. I find the Norse names add flavour but it was easy enough unfiling the serial numbers.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Yeah. GURPS is a mixed bag with respect to fans. Enough that after an initial surge of interest because “yay 3PP!” I’m legit having trouble earning enough backers to fund projects.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

This is so demoralizing. Based on what I see on the GURPS discord and other online fora, GURPS seems to be growing in popularity. Anyone who buys your work can attest to its quality. Art! Real art! Nordlondr Folk, Hand of Asgard, and Delvers to Grow are, as far as I'm concerned, core DFRPG books. And, of course, Fantastic Dungeon Grappling is actually included in the DFRPG boxed set.

I remain hopeful that the market will shift in your favor.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

And a somewhat less cluttered layout. And a large body of setting/adventure content to play in. GB is putting out products and styles of product which GURPS needs, and it's disappointing that they're not selling as well as they deserve.

TL;DR: BUY DOUG'S STUFF.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

It might be more the content than anything else? Like how did Crypt of Krysuvik do compared to the last few Kickstarters?



I'll admit I only backed the Bestiary, the Bestiary Expansions, and the Artifacts and Legends because I'm backing you. Not because I expect to ever use those books...

I tend to make my own monsters and magic before I ever start looking elsewhere for inspiration or to use them in a campaign. But I want to see GB hold fast in the market and not dry up and blow away.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

It doesn't seem hard to imagine that GURPS could be growing without having much impact on Kickstarters. Kickstarter is not a natural fit for the buy-on-demand retail market and especially not for a newcomer to a game system (as opposed to simply buying on DriveThroughRPG or Amazon).

I will confess that the ONLY things I have ever backed on Kickstarter are Nordlond stuff, and that figuring out how do so (and what I was buying and when it would arrive) was a significant learning curve and something I did only because of forums posts here on Pyramid--which I was only familiar with because of my previous GURPS experience back in the day.

It's not a stretch at all for me to imagine that the timelag between someone picking up DFRPG or GURPS and deciding to buy stuff through Kickstarter could easily be 1-5 years.

It would be interesting to know whether SJG print-on-demand Amazon titles have seen an uptick recently though. As Dalin said, there's a lot of DFRPG newcomers on the Discord server lately.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

I guess I would like a sort of fake Earth that is really similar to Earth but where there are no problems with people getting offended. I think a setting that is like the early Renaissance would be perfect. The Age of Exploration would be a great setting for Dungeon Fantasy for me. I would enjoy a setting with interesting cultures instead of just the standard Dungeon Fantasy tavern and town.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Somebody is always gonna get offended.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Is there a courtroom drama in one of the adventures?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

There’s judicial combat. That should be dramatic.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Non-Lawsuit Historical Books
 

Earlier posters have already pointed out that folklore is free of copyright. But I just wanted to point out that there are a number of translations of these tales from around the turn of the 20th century, so all public domain by now, while the really famous one by Richard F. Burton (no, not that Richard Burton) was published in 1888, so also free from copyright. In fact, it's available in Project Gutenberg. If you want a Thousand Nights and A Night of flavor, then have at it.