rust

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

Yes and no. Some countries honor US copyright and trademark laws, and

some, even if they do not directly, will assist in persecution of people who

violate them.

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.

So I think today,a lot of gamers get into one line or another and that makes it all the harder to get them into another RPG. They end up choosing between a new RPG, or the latest supplement in a game that they are already into.

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" ?

If your setting covers only a few years (1920-1930), would it not be easier to simply write down what dates the important festivals occur on in each year, rather than try to explain how those dates are arrived at?

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 ...

But could you possibly claim your product is compatible with "MRQ"? I doubt anyone has trademarked that, despite the fact that most of the internet fanbase is calling it that.

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

... That kind of something?

A very nice idea, if I ever decide to start an apocalyptic event in my setting,

I will borrow it. :thumb:

What guarantees does the OGL have at all in European countries?

If there are issues with translations, does the OGL have any legal standing regarding any other section of the OGL?

Do other "open" license such as the GDL or Creative Commons license have the same issues (eg: outside of USA)?

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.

Doesn't the following section of the OGL count?

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

I do not understand why there are translation issues. Could someone please explain this.

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.

You mean like pre-crisis Superman silly?

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 ...

Uh, why can't you just alter the length of year?

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 hesitate between 'hurray' and 'uh oh'. What are your thoughts?

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.

What pseudo-century does your setting take place in?

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.

Are you submitting this for publication?

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.

You can avoid some of the mathematic problems in a fictional setting.

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.

I did just read a couple of Call of Cthulhu supplements, looking for inspiration

for my own settings, and was a little surprised by the amount of details in-

cluded with these settings, usually in the Appendix: Calendars, festivals, al-

phabets and scripts, typical names and proverbs ...

And now I wonder whether I should include all those details with my own set-

tings, too.

For example, the "fictional Arabic" Merasan setting could have a conversion

of the Gregorian and the Islamic Calendar, a list of the important Islamic holi-

days, the Arab and Persian alphabet, a list of common Merasani names, and

so on and on.

However, since the setting is based on the real world, such informations are

easily found in the Wikipedia and similar sources, and I am not sure that it

really would make sense to basically copy and paste them.

So, before I suffer an extreme case of "Appendicitis" and start to write the

"Mother of all Appendices" for my setting, I would like to know your opinions:

What does really make sense or is necessary ?

Thank you.

Nevertheless, the transcript is a recommended read!

Then we should perhaps use one such good example of an actual game, but

I still doubt that something like a thread with examples of actual games of

the forum's members would do much good.