Noble Knight has a copy of the Worlds of Wonder set

[threedeesix]

My first RPG system, The Fantasy Trip...

A favorite of mine. I had Steve Jackson sign mine at a convention. Everyone else was getting GURPS signed and he seemed genuinely surprised to see a copy.

Rod

[Atgxtg]

A favorite of mine. I had Steve Jackson sign mine at a convention. Everyone else was getting GURPS signed and he seemed genuinely surprised to see a copy.

Rod

Wish I still had my copy. In some ways I wish Steve would do a trimmed down version of GURPS to fix TFT's deficiencies. FTF is mostly good, with a few bugs that get annoying over time (like everyone ending up with 25 IQs to cover skills).

[fmitchell]

Nope. MRQ being OGL did not lead to OpenQuest, Legend, or RQ6.

[...] As mentioned companies don;t actually own RPG rules. Just the text they use to present them. So anybody can resurrect a dead game system. What they can't do is reprint it verbatim. You could do a rewrite of TFT or RQ or whatever tomorrow, if you wanted to.

[...] Things like OpenQuest come about, not because of OGL (you don't need OGL to do it), but because some fan wants to recreate and modify a favorite RPG.

Yes, someone can rewrite RPG rules completely from scratch. However, it's much easier to leverage someone else's work. It's hard to believe that the existence of Open Gaming Content didn't play a role in the existence of several projects/products:

• OpenQuest, based substantially the OGL MRQ1
  
• Cakebread and Walton jumping from closed MRQ2 to open OpenQuest,
  
• OGL licensing for Legend, after the controversy about MRQ2 not being OGL,
  
• FATE-based games not by Evil Hat, notably Bulldogs and (originally) Diaspora,
  
• various D6-based games, after West End Games, in its last gasp, re-released their new D6 line under the OGL,
  
• Pathfinder, Mongoose, Goodman, Green Ronin, and others doing D&D better than WotC had (or could),
  
• oh, and the entire Old School Renaissance, which derives from the D&D 3.5 SRD.
  

It looks like I was wrong about RQ6, in that it does not mention the OGL at all; I guess it's a clean room rewrite/refinement of Legend with names changed to remain legally distinct.

However, most individuals and indie publishers don't have a team of lawyers to tell them whether their work is actually legally distinct, nor the deep pockets if a current copyright holder tries to sue. Remember the drought between RuneQuest 3 and Mongoose's reimplementation of RuneQuest? Mongoose did the community a service by releasing their version as OGL so that it's no longer dependent on one publisher; no one else needs to do a clean room reimplementation unless they want to, and no one has to pay fees to release compatible adventures unless they want official branding.

Open licenses -- not necessarily OGL, which has its problems -- has and will continue to save good systems from obscurity or legal minefields.

[Atgxtg]

Yes, someone can rewrite RPG rules completely from scratch. However, it's much easier to leverage someone else's work. It's hard to believe that the existence of Open Gaming Content didn't play a role in the existence of several projects/products:

• OpenQuest, based substantially the OGL MRQ1

Which we could have gotten without MRQ.

Cakebread and Walton jumping from closed MRQ2 to open OpenQuest,

[soltakss]

One thing that is important regarding OGL is that it means that games need not die.

If Mongoose suddenly stopped producing Legend, for example, then I could quite legitimately produce a copy of the Legend rulebook and core supplements under the OGL - It even says that I can in the Legend rulebook. Then, I could produce a series of supplements based on the Legend OGL without any legal problems.

For me, this is a very good thing, as it means that we don't get stuck in the limboland that was RQ/BRP in the late Eighties and Nineties, where people could not produce supplements for fear of being sued or issued with a "cease and desist" order.

At least, that is how I see it in my own naive little world.