What this means for the Dungeoneer's Handbook

This means two interlinked things for the Dungeoneer's Handbook. Wait, three. [1] Three things for the future of the DHB.

First, it means that it's going to be way simpler for me if I just make this a personal project never intended for release. (Turns out that there's another reason this would be the simplest route for me, but that's nothing to do with DFRPG—see below.) However, pretending that I'm eventually going to show this to people who don't have me there as the DM to explain away the rough spots means I'm taking a more rigorous approach to the writing and design. So, in practice, regardless of whether I eventually aim for a public release, this first point doesn't change that pretending that I will in my own head improves the project.

Second, and this is interlinked with the third point, it means that I can't refer to Stunts and Powers that appear in DFRPG. This is mostly not a problem, since I don't need most of them to make a derivative work in a completely different setting. I can't use a Power like "Knight of the Cross", but I don't want to anyway. Dresdenverse bits like "Knight of the Cross" are exactly the sort of "special ability" that Product Identity was designed to protect, and the sort of thing that Evil Hat doesn't want to accidentally just hand away on Jim Butcher's behalf. Since I'm not using the Dresdenverse at all, this sort of thing doesn't pose a problem.

While I don't want to Dresdenverse concepts embodied by stunts and powers, there are generic stunts and powers that aren't unique to the Dresdenverse that I'd like to use. Things like Toughness, the supernatural ability for a creature to ignore a certain amount of stress unless you find its weakness, is a concept that predates DFRPG and appears in most fantasy RPGs. Werewolves who can't be hurt except by overwhelming damage (say, being hit by a truck), but are deathly susceptible to injuries dealt by silver, is exactly the sort of thing that Toughness and its higher-powered variants are perfect for representing. These are the sorts of things that I look at as useful Fate innovations that would be great to re-use.

Though they'd be great to re-use, the PI declaration in DFRPG does capture the names and descriptions of "special abilities" since those do fall under the definition of Product Identity in the OGL. So, I can't use the name of Toughness in a derivative like the DHB. I can't even refer to it in my own writeup for werewolves in the DHB, saying "look it up in your copy of DFRPG:YS," because the name itself is claimed as PI. This sort of thing is probably not what Evil Hat intended to cover with the blanket PI claim in DFRPG's OGL, but it would have been prohibitive to separate out such things as Open Game Content without getting into grey territory regarding Dresdenverse copyright. A blanket PI claim is the safe, responsible way to handle this kind of thing, even if it's inconvenient for me. In order to model werewolves and the like in the DHB, then, I have to write my own version of Toughness with a different name, or some other stunt/power that fills the same generic narrative concept of "unnaturally hard to hurt except with weakness X." This brings me to the related impact on the DHB:

Third, I have to make the Dungeoneer's Handbook a stand-alone product (should I hypothetically publish it). It would have been far easier for me to just say, "The DHB requires the use of The Dresden Files: Your Story from Evil Hat LLC" and not bother writing up my own special abilities that are already adequately provided by DFRPG. This would have been nice for me as it would save work, and actually I would have felt a bit happier saying "go buy DFRPG! You can't use this without it!" On the other hand, I realise that would have been more annoying for the hypothetical players who would end up flipping back and forth between the DHB and DFRPG books in order to make their character creation choices.

In some ways this is a blessing in disguise, though. It means that the (hypothetical) release edition of the Dungeoneer's Handbook will be a complete game unto itself, with no dependencies on third-party "core" books, and that's a better experience for the end reader and user. (I'm still going to say "Go buy DFRPG!" in a hypothetical DHB release though, because really yes yes read DFRPG.)

Of course that's not all

As I implied above, there's more in the way of such a hypothetical release. As it turns out, the DFRPG OGL isn't the stickiest bit of copyright that I'm running into as I write. If you recall, I'm aiming to use this as a handbook for a home Forgotten Realms campaign. As I write, I find that I'm embedding a lot of setting concepts from the Realms that there's no way could ever see the light of day without being infringing. I'm putting them in anyway because I want this stuff available for my players, but if I eventually turn the handbook into a releasable form it will mean a lot of text will have to be rewritten or outright stripped out.

For example, I have a template called Touched by Mystra. Right there in the name, I can't put that out in a product. However, something like that is necessary to reflect character options related to the way magic has changed in my Realms after the Avatar Crisis, and since it's directly tied to Mystra (and fiction matters in Fate) it's necessary to have that baked right into the template. For a home game that'll be fine, and in the meantime I'm just not worrying about it. It does mean that I'll be looking in two directions should I endeavour to sanitise the manuscript for publication: toward DFRPG to identify and remove/rewrite any Product Identity that we relied on for our home campaign, and toward the Forgotten Realms to remove (utterly) any references to Wizards' copyrighted game setting. [2]