Note, this is a 2024 update to a ruleset whose previous version was released under Creative Commons (CC-BY-4.0).
Also, this is the SRD - the "genericized" version of the rules, that includes all the core game systems but omits content and references to official lore. (e.g. the SRD has a spell called "Mage’s Private Sanctum", which is mechanically the same as the main ruleset's "Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum".)
If I understand correctly, they only own copyrights for the lore, not the names and appearance. Also product identity so they can't be used by other tabletops, but other media can use them.
For example, the game Demon's Souls have Mind Flayers, they are called Mind Flayers and look the part. I doubt From Soft and/or Sony are paying royalties for such minor enemy.
I think this case is different from the Beholder which seemingly they own complete rights since they made Tibia change their Beholder to something distinct.
> For example, the game Demon's Souls have Mind Flayers, they are called Mind Flayers and look the part. I doubt From Soft and/or Sony are paying royalties for such minor enemy.
Do they behave like mind flayers? Mind flayers have always been known for their ability to instantly kill a player by using a special attack that extracts his brain; that kind of prevents them from being "minor enemies".
They have an attack which stuns the player, followed up by a grab attack which looks a lot like them trying to bite(?) your head across a few seconds, doing immense damage.
I haven’t played demon souls but if they’re like the other mindflayer equivalents that fromsoft has made for their other games (the lanterns from bloodborne come to mind or the Elden ring dlc insta kill madness guys) they absolutely do instantly kill players with some mind based shenanigans.
That's an interesting list, and very short. Displacer beasts have always been around in D&D, but I'm not aware of why they'd be considered iconic. They are distinctive, panthers with tentacles coming out of their shoulders and a constantly-active illusion that obscures their location, making them appear to be a few feet to the side of where they are. In contrast, carrion crawlers are just giant centipedes with paralytic venom, though not to be confused with the unprotected monster "giant centipede".
Tanar'ri and baatezu are, even within full-copyright Official D&D materials, better known as "demons" and "devils", and I have a hard time imagining that any third-party material would want to use the protected names.
Beholders are iconic, and distinctive to D&D, and gauths are derivative of them. There are several other beholder-lites; why aren't spectators protected?
Illithids and mind flayers are the same thing, always fairly iconic and more so now that Baldur's Gate 3 is devoted to them, and githyanki and githzerai are part of the lore developed around them.
Yuan-ti are snake people. They're not distinctive at all; the film Conan the Barbarian has a villain who does a ritual to turn into a giant snake. The general concepts of snake people, snakier people, and evil snake gods are too popular and generic to be protected, but I guess you should call them something other than "yuan-ti".
(Fun side note: the name "yuan-ti" looks like it's obviously Chinese. You can find questions about this all over the Chinese internet, since there's no obvious way to assign meaning to the name. The answer appears to be that the guy who made up the name knew nothing about Chinese and it's all a big coincidence.)
Umber hulks are large insectoid creatures that burrow underground. I'm not sure why they're considered so important, but they're more distinctive than carrion crawlers.
just a guess but maybe it's a list of things that were featured prominently in products aimed at a wider audience, eg: movies like the recent one with Chris Pine and video games like BG3?
As best I recall, the recent movie involved a dragon and one or more liches. I think there was also a displacer beast, but it wasn't exactly significant in the film.
I'm not familiar with what products would have made umber hulks or yuan-ti prominent, but I can believe that they existed, particularly in the case of yuan-ti, which seem to have a lot of lore developed around them. A lot of lore in the present generally means a lot of products featuring them in the past. I'm just not sure how valuable it is to protect the name "yuan-ti" when the concept is so generic.
(The webcomic Rusty & Co. includes one character who is a snake person, named Yuan-Tiffany. She's a lamia, due to legal threats from Wizards of the Coast, but while the name of her species had to be changed, neither her character design ["snake person, no legs"; lamia nobles look like that too] nor her name was affected.)
Tanar'ri and baatezu are a weirder case, where the names are so worthless that even D&D itself prefers not to use them, and the concepts are obviously not subject to copyright or other protection. They originate in (or before) 1st edition D&D under the names "demons" and "devils", with no other name given, and a moral panic in the USA prompts TSR to rename those categories "tanar'ri" and "baatezu" in the second edition (without changing the monsters - having a monster called a "succubus", an evil spirit hailing from "the Abyss" who exists to lead mortals into evil by having sex with them, is fine; labeling that monster a "demon" is not). In third edition, they're back to being "demons" and "devils", with the names "tanar'ri" and "baatezu" being mentioned, but clearly positioned as obscure lore about the universe. And that's how it's been ever since.
To be clear, this is just the 5.2 SRD, not any of the core books. 5.1 SRD is currently creative commons too.
What's more interesting to me is that they're going to review the older edition SRDs, with an aim to releasing those under Creative Commons too, after SRD 5.2 is out.
WOTC lost a lot of good will with trying to copyright OGL stuff last January. I'm glad this led to Paizo taking opportunity to divest itself with the pathfinder "2.1" remaster which I think strengthens their game with some of the other tweaks.
"a Creative Commons licence" is meaningless since it includes things like -NC-ND which are basically useless to the commons. I wish people would stop using that phrase. At least the article mentions the concrete license: CC-BY-4.0
It's always been possible, as long as you don't use the D&D IP.
So the underlying rules are fine, but having monsters like mindflayers, spells like "magic missile" or "melf's acid arrow", locations like Baldurs Gade, Waterdeep etc are all verboten.
Magic missile is probably generic enough - lots of non-D&D works include a magic missile (both with that name and with similar properties). Similarly, a lot of D&D lore is just repackaged fairytales so you can easily have a setting that is not quite unlike D&D but doesn't use any of their IP.
Bit murky with Wizards of the Coast buying TSR and making Baldur's Gate Magic sets.
If it's not generic, was Wizards of the Coast stealing from TSR when it used D&D's Counterspell as the name of a Magic card? Before buying TSR, to be clear.
"Fireball" should be generic. Plenty of prior art on those, I should think.
Yeah I realise now that Magic Missile was a bad example. But it actually illustrates how murky this business is, because /in some cases/ things are deemed IP, and some things are not. It's not easy to tell whether some D&D artifact is part of the SRD or not, without reading the whole thing.
I was for example surprised to learn that Mind Flayers are protected, like the whole race and all it's properties. Dwarves and elves are not. I think anything Underdark, including Deep Gnomes, Duergar and Drow are also protected. There are probably certain magical items that are also protected, like the Immovable Rod, or Ring of Feather Fall, etc.
For home games none of this matters of course. But I'm certain it's going to be problematic for players that want to stream their play sessions, creators of other media like games or boardgames that want to make something D&D-adjacent-but-not-such-that-it-awakens-the-dragon and so on.
Another poster pointed out that a lot of it likely has to do with iconic images from media that had broader appeal than the main RPG. Things like Baldur's Gate, the Drzzt novels, etc.
Also, for things like "Dwarves and elves", that'd be a bold move on their part. As so much of the original D&D was poached from a variety of sources (see Appendix N [1]) they need to be careful if trying to claim those.
I mean, the SRD is pretty plain - there's a list at the beginning of stuff that is asserted not to be Open Content, and Underdark and Mind Flayers are on it, and in contrast the open content part includes names and stats for all the other races and items you mentioned. So it's pretty unmistakably fine to use those things, themselves, however one likes.
But obviously there's also a second layer where you can't publish your own novel about, say, the intricate details Drow matriarchal society, that aren't in the SRD and came from WotC novels and sourcebooks. Presumably it's a bit like with Sherlock Holmes, where the character himself is out of copyright but certain lore details added in later books are still covered.
Also, this is the SRD - the "genericized" version of the rules, that includes all the core game systems but omits content and references to official lore. (e.g. the SRD has a spell called "Mage’s Private Sanctum", which is mechanically the same as the main ruleset's "Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum".)