On Flames and Publishing [long]

[Rodger Thorm<dqn@earthlink.net>]

I'd like to add my own little bit of perspective to the whole question about publishing DragonQuest related materials.  (And, I think I probably have a longer record than anyone else of doing so.  That doesn't make me an expert, but I can tell you how I've been handling the issue.)

The DragonQuest Newsletter started out when several DragonQuest fans found each other in some of the newsgroups (rec.games.frp.misc et al) and decided to create a shared resource devoted specifically to DragonQuest.  Articles were submitted to be shared with the whole DQ playing community.  The DragonQuest Newsletter never offered any payment (other than peer recognition) to authors who submitted material, and ownership has always remained with the author. 

The ownership statement we've had at the top of the DQN for a long time now reads: "All articles are copyrighted property of their respective
authors.   Reproducing or republishing an article, in whole or in part, in any other forum requires permission of the author or the moderator."  As much as possible, the original author is credited, and contact information (email address) is included for each article.

Most everything that has been run in the Newsletter has been submitted to us, so there is an explicit understanding that it is freely distributale.  The authors have given their material to us with that end in mind.

Only a couple times have I come across something elsewhere on the web (for example, some things have been posted in the WebRPG forum), and I've written to the author and asked for permission to run it in the DQN as well.   A large number of DQN readers don't regularly visit the WebRPG  forum.  I don't think that I've ever been turned down, either.

If Hasbro/WotC/TSR/SPI wrote to me tomorrow and wanted to issue a compilation of all past DQNs for sale, we'd have to get explicit permission from each author and work out payment before any article could be published.  But for a less commercial use, I think it's certainly possible to be more lenient.  I was contacted by some Australian players some years ago who wanted to print out copies of the DQN to hand out at a gaming convention (or maybe they were going to sell them for a nominal cost to cover copying costs).  In that instance, they contacted me, as moderator of the DQN, for permission to do this, which I was willing to grant.  They didn't go back to every individual author, and I think that was reasonable in that circumstance.  If anyone whose material was used thinks that granting this permission was wrong, then I appologize to them.

As far as John Corey's compilation project goes, he did contact me for permission to use my materials when he started setting things up, and I agreed to let him use the things I had written.  As far as I am concerned, that permission still stands.  And as far as keeping track of the permissions, I think that a reasonable and good faith effort is all that is required on John's part. 

I will admit that I had dreams of getting "Poor Brendan's Almanac" published when I started working on it in the late 80s, and it took some time for me to get comfortable with freely releasing it when I finally did publish it on the web.  But, I realized that I wasn't going to make any money from it.  And I wanted to share it with other people who would appreciate it (which is, at the core, I think why we all write: we want to share our ideas and know that others find them useful). 

If you still plan to go ahead with this project John, my recommendation would be that you post a message to a couple of the major DQ forums (I think that WebRPG and the DQN would cover most anyone who has written something that you would be using) and ask for current contact info for the authors you are looking for.  I think that identifying either the author (by name or pseudonym) or the title of the article should dredge up most of the people you want to contact.  If you have articles for which you do not have explicit permission, set those in a separate directory and keep trying, or keep them aside until you do contact the authors for explicit permission.  With the web, publishing is a fluid thing, and you can continue to revise and adjust the content constantly.

To answer John's original question, I don't think that the original idea of a shared base of knowledge is a bad one at all.  In part, I think the problem is one of officialness; there is no canon.  With SPI long gone and dead, there is no one to judge what is 'official' DQ and what is not, and some reluctance (my own included, it must be admitted) to publish based on that.