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The historical setting I would like the most would be one about India, from Vedic times to the Moghul Empire. This is an almost incredibly rich historical background that has rarely been used for roleplaying games, and it is one where more research than I am able and willing to do for one of my own set- tings would be necessary. A very similar case would be Persia, again a fascinating culture with a very rich history that has rarely been used as a roleplaying background. As for European history, I find it very interesting, but only few of it has not already "been roleplayed" in one system or another, and most of it is of the kind that I could research myself without too much effort if I wanted such a setting.

Most of the early roleplaying games also left much of the setting's details to the referee's and players' imagination, they provided only a basic framework. With many of the more recent games, the rules are comparatively slim, but the setting descriptions contain lots and lots of details, almost down to the colour of the underwear of the second cousin of the high priest's servant. In the early years, I considered games like Empire of the Petal Throne as ex- traordinarily "setting heavy", but compared to material like the most recent version of D&D's Forgotten Realms the early versions of the world of Tekumel seem almost "skeletal" in the amount of detail. The "fluff inflation" not only helps to sell supplement after supplement on sub- jects like the newest fashion at the Emperor's court, it also leads to a stran- ge kind of competition especially between younger players: You have to have the latest supplement about the bloodthirsty flying deep-sea krakens of New Guinea and to know the length of their tentacles for each sub-species - or you are not "in", no "real gamer".

I tried to find something, but without success. It seems that the fact that the take-off speed depends on the actual weight of the aircraft (fuel, car- go, weapons, passengers ...) makes people reluctant to give a specific ge- neral value that could be entered into a list. It could well be that you will have to look at the individual aircraft's flight manuals (those of older aircraft are often on the internet) to find reliable data. As for the F-104, there are several websites that offer the flight manual, some for money and others free. This is one of the free ones - but I do not know whether the download is indeed legal: http://myfiles-express.com/search.php?search=f%20104%20flight%20manual

True, but even in those countries which do honour US laws, the reaction varies between a stiff fine (I know of a case where someone had to pay 6,000,- Euros and went bankrupt) and a "Please do not do it again"-letter one can safely ignore. In the end, the only good way to do it remains to politely ask the IP owner, and the second best, more expensive and not really recommended way is to ask a specialized lawyer. The third way, just doing it, is much like a lottery where one risks to lose more than the price of the lottery ticket.

What I also hear quite often is that more than a few gamers prefer to learn to handle one good game very well instead of continuing to search for a po- tentially better one. A good example from over here is the fantasy roleplaying game "Das Schwar- ze Auge" (DSA). It is its own little universe, with meanwhile four editions, do- zens of supplements, a setting where each stone seems to be named and mapped and connected to a dozen historical events, and so on. It takes years to learn DSA well, more because of the setting than the rules, and once a player has learned the ropes and feels comfortably at home in Aventurien (the game's world), he becomes very unlikely to invest much time and money into another game, too - he likes DSA and is good at it, so why waste time on something else, and start again from "square one" ?

Ah, but ... I mean ... - ... I am an idiot ! :eek: Yep, that is obviously the best way to handle it, and with the conversion tool mentioned earlier all I have to do is copy & paste the dates for a num- ber of years. And while it is nice for me, as the referee, to know how the dates are arri- ved at, the players really do not need that knowledge, and other referees who use the setting will have to do their own research anyway, because I can not add an entire essay on "calendrics" to the setting (and could not write a good one in the first place). Thank you very much, sometimes I have the learning curve of a zombie and need an entire thread before the lights go on in my head ...

In many countries a trademark does not necessarily have to be registered, and what you describe could be seen as a case of "Passing Off" in some countries: Passing off - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A very nice idea, if I ever decide to start an apocalyptic event in my setting, I will borrow it. :thumb:

I am afraid this is almost impossible to answer with any certainty, mainly be- cause there are few such court cases and court decisions, and without such a precedent one can only guess how a court of a specific nation would de- cide. For example, the Creative Commons license was accepted as valid in court decisions in (if I remember it right) the Netherlands and Spain. Therefore there is a probability that courts in other EU countries would come to the same opinion, but this is only an "educated guess" - a court in, for example, Portugal or Bulgaria could see things quite differently, depending on the "fine print" of the national intellectual property laws, previous decisions in other intellectual property cases, and so on. In the end, no license that was not written according to the specific national law by someone who knows that law very well can offer a "guarantee", I think.

It does, in the USA. However, if you would try to use it as the core of a court case in a nation with a different intellectual property law, you could face a nasty surprise, especially if someone else has a valid license for the same material and has already used it to publish that material. If you wanted to find out about the consequences in a specific nation, you would probably have to start with something like this here: http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/ipworldwide/country.htm

Most licenses do not contain rules for translations of the material they cover into other languages or are not written in a "legalese" that would be accepted by the jurisdiction of the nation(s) into whose language the material is trans- lated. For example, many licenses written by companies in the USA are based upon the US copyright law, while Germany and many other European nations do not know such a copyright law at all, their legal protection system for intel- lectual property is based upon a very different view of intellectual property. Another problem is the fact that some publishers in various countries have paid money for the permission to translate or work with BRP systems, for example the publishers of Call of Cthulhu in Germany or of Hawkmoon in France, and some of these could react badly to someone who publishes very similar material for free, without a valid (see above) license. This is at least my understanding of the problems, but I am not a lawyer.

More like "silly" as in "how my silly brain works". When I am working on a science fiction setting, I love to play around with natural sciences and technology, but in "Call of Cthulhu mode" it is all about history, theology and the social sciences, my brain then simply refuses to deal with natural sciences and technology, except perhaps a bit of geogra- phy to alter some real world maps. Somehow my brain seems to believe that my suspension of disbelief would break down the very moment a Ctulhu setting comes in touch with a natural science or mathematics ...

You are doubtless right, and thank you very much for the calculation - but it somehow "feels wrong" to move the entire planet (silly, I know ). However, the idea may come handy for another setting I am thinking about, something more science fiction.

I may well be completely wrong, but my first thought was "Warhammer 40 k - the Inquisition". If it really goes in that direction, instead of something a bit more "historical", I am prepared to forego the experience ...

Thank you. The classic Call of Cthulhu era, about 1920 - but I have also started to con- tinue the setting timelines towards Cthulhu Now, about 1990 +. The entire thing started when I was disappointed by the roleplaying opportu- nities of our real world in 1920, even the most remote and exotic locations did not quite offer what I wanted for my games. I began to change maps, histories and thelike of various small real world na- tions, but this soon led to a couple of internal contradictions, and in the end I decided to "delete" the real nations and replace them with purely fictional ones.

1978. I am obviously old. :eek:

Thank you very much for your offer. Unfortunately my settings' world is out Earth, only the nations described in the settings are fictional (e.g. San Ignacio replaces El Salvador, Merasan replaces a part of the United Arab Emirates, Trukpa replaces Bhutan, and so on). But thanks to the conversion tool mentioned above, I think the calendar pro- blem is now far more easy to handle.

You are of course right. The problem is, even if the players will never bother to look at a calendar, I as the referee should have an idea how that *#*'#* thing works, when the important religious holidays are, and so on. Well, at least I have meanwhile discovered a website with a very good calen- dar conversion tool, so the main problem is solved. URDU CALENDAR - ISLAMIC - GREGORIAN

[A couple of hours later ... ] Hiss ... russst hatess nasssty calendarsss thingiesss ... :mad:

While I will probably not contribute to the Shared World (language and lazi- ness ... ), I look forward to using it as a part of my Call of Cthulhu set- tings' Dreamlands. For this purpose it is not really important whether and how the various re- gions / worlds of the "Shared World Multiverse" are connected to form one world that avoids contradictions, each of the regions / worlds can exist in its own right with its own special properties. Therefore I tend to see the Shared World more as a kind of a "network" of more or less unique regions / worlds, probably with a number of more or less unreliable methods to move between its parts. Some of the parts can be close to each other and share certain properties, others may be "further out" and have less in common with the "core", con- taining even other genres (e.g. steampunk instead of fantasy), and the re- lations between the parts may also change over time, increasing or reducing the similarities. The "mechanism" behind all this should probably remain undefined and unde- scribed, so that each of the "users" of the Shared World can decide for him- self how he wants to handle this during a specific campaign (and remains free to change this during another campaign).

The knights of the Teutonic Order ruled doubtless quite heavy handed in the Baltic, as almost always when a smaller group attempts to subjugate a much bigger local population. However, their Crusade was more or less an invasion, occupation and finally conquest, it did not really have the genocidal streak of crusades against Christian heretics, as for example the often incredibly brutal Albigensian Cru- sade. I have no doubt that there were a number of rather "evil" and only very few "saintly" knights of the Teutonic Order, and far more land-hungry adventu- rers than knights with a truly religious motivation, but I think that all in all they behaved just like any other conquering military force of their time.

No, at least not in a commercial sense. I usually put my settings into the download section of the Fundus Ludi, my German "home forum", for other users to use as they please. Therefore the material does not need to have a professional quality, but I do of course want it to be good enough to be downloaded and used.

Unfortunately I managed to paint myself into a corner - my settings are fictio- nal states of the real world, everything else is our real world in about 1920, so changing the solar year's length would most probably destroy my historical timeline. I think I will make the calendar a small chapter ("The Year in Merasan"), with a short explanation, the Merasani names of days and months (the Arabic ones are unplayable, e.g. "yawm ath-thulaathaa"), a description of the important holidays and festivals, and one or two conversions of specific years (1921 and 1922, probably).

Thank you very much. I have just realized that I will not be able to avoid the somewhat tricky ca- lendar problem if I want to mention and describe the holidays and festivals of my Merasan setting. These days have fixed dates in the Islamic Calendar, but the Islamic Calen- dar has a different length than our Gregorian Calendar, so these days "wan- der" through our calendar without a fixed date there - in order to tell when they occur, I have to use the Islamic Calendar. Ah, well, just another can of mathematical worms ...

Thank you very much, it does help a lot.