eyeheartawk
#1 Enworld Jerk™
Surprising no one they never responded.Yeah, you gotta wonder about the legal advice they received on this one.
I'm pretty sure you can't use the parts of the OGL you like to serve your own purposes to create derivative content from and then say literally all the non traditionally understood product identity aspects (items, feats, races etc) or not open content.
EDIT: I really was curious so I sent their support email the following message:
Hi there,
Flipping through Arcana of the Ancients and on the first page I see your OGL statement. Are you seriously claiming "...new rules, classes, items, virtues, bakcgrounds..." as excluded from open gaming content because they are product identity? That's literally what open gaming content is. To my reading, your interpretation is you get to use previously made open gaming content to derive new content from but nobody can do that with your new rule content. I don't think you can do that? And even if you could I'm pretty sure that really flies in the spirit of the whole idea. Anyway, I'll doubt you'll respond to this but I just wanted to let you know that some of us do pay attention to stuff like this. I will certainly remember this when trying to determine if I'm buying any future product from you.
We'll see where this goes, but nowhere I suspect. It really does burn me that a dude who built his entire livelihood around publishing things using the OGL (where would Ptolus be without it?) turns around and does this.
It's really dissapointing to see this behavior from people who've built their careers and business on open gaming content. Content derived from literal decades of prior work and then to give nothing back. That's absolutely parasitic.
As has been pointed out before, I doubt they can enforce their little walled garden entries considering how the OGL is written. If it wasn't worth litigating on either end before Wizard's imploded the OGL, it certainly isn't worth litigating now that the OGL is being abandoned chunk by chunk.
Still though, it be poop.