soltakss said:
He doesn't think that the OGL will stand up to a serious legal challenge in the courts, as non-D20 implementations are outside the scope, from what I have seen.
Back around 2000, WoTC sponsored the creation of the independent Open Gaming Foundation to support non-D20 use of the OGL. Indeed, Ryan Dancey from WoTC was the chair of the foundation for a couple of years. The website is still extant, but the mailing list is long dead:
http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/
It's worth reading the sections of the
Official OGL FAQ from Wizards dealing with trademark compatibility. The reason there was a separate d20 Trademark Licence was to give publishers the right to claim a degree of compatibility with D&D - by default, the OGL is a "universal" licenses; you need a separate Compatibility licence to claim compatibility with a specific trademarked game system.
In the case of Legend, Mongoose, released the entire contents of the Legend Core Rulebook and all of the XXXXX of Legend books as Open Game Content. This includes Pirates of Legend, Samurai of Legend, Gladiators of Legend, the Arcania of Legend books, etc. It explicitly DOES NOT include anything from the Elric product line, the Xoth product line, the Deus Vult product line, or the Sheoloth product line*. Land of Ice and Snow is a special case - it contains a small amount of OGC, but most of it is closed.
To use the Legend OGC, you must comply with the terms of the Open Game License - which means that you need to attach a copy of the licence to your work and update Section 15 to list ALL of the works that you used Open Game Content from. You also need to clearly identify what parts of your work are designated as Open Game Content and which parts are Product Identity. It's considered good form to give at least some Open Game Content of your own back to the community.
If you want to indicate compatibility with the Legend game system and use the Legend logo on your work, you need to comply with the Compatibility license offered by Mongoose. This was available at
http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/pdf/leglogopack.zip but it seems to have gone AWOL. A copy is still available from the Internet Archive at
https://web.archive.org/web/20160403203216/http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/pdf/leglogopack.zip. The full text of the Compatibility Licence was:
Legend Compatible Logo
The entire text of the Legend RPG is designated Open Game Content, as is the entire text of all books in this line with plain colour covers and the words ‘… of Legend’ in their title.
By using any Open Content material in any of these books, you also have permission to freely use the Legend Compatible logo on any publication or web site where this Open Content is used or modified. The Legend Compatible logo may be re-sized but may not otherwise be altered in any way.
Legend, the text of Legend rulebooks, the Legend logo and the Legend Compatible logo remain Copyright Mongoose Publishing 2011.
Any and all artwork included in Legend rulebooks is specifically not designated as Open Content, and may not be used without written permission from Mongoose Publishing.
In legal terms, this appears to be a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use the logo. It is very permissive compared to other compatibility licences out there.
* There are a couple of minor things in one of the Sheoloth books that I wrote here on the forums and released as OGC, but that's the only exception I'm aware of. The author asked me for permission to include them anyway, so it's all good
