As far as the internet knows, it was a creative invention by the OG DnD, namely Terry Kuntz. I haven’t seen anything that contradicts that, so it’s certainly possible. Maybe a merging of medusa with a few other concepts (some floating sphere thing from some sci fi / fantasy of the era?)
Or equally likely it was an interpretation of something one of their kids drew…
I don’t mean to shit on D&D either by drawing attention to the Jack Vance connections. Everybody is inspired by and lifts bits from the things that they truly love. I feel like the stuff in D&D that goes back to Vance, as opposed to Tolkien, are the things that I love about D&D - the weird stuff that makes it interesting.
Anytime I compare it to Vance it’s meant as a huge compliment.
As for Beholders, original creation is a possibility, but it also has always felt like another cheap plastic toy monster waiting to be discovered
Vance is great and I’d also be happy if they were influenced by him.
This one?
When describing a noncopyrightable game mechanic, I might do it in a dry, noncopyrightable way, or I might do it in a creative, copyrightable way.
and later:
The exact lines of copyrightability are going to vary from game to game and even page to page. For now, it suffices to say that there is a lot of text in a roleplaying game that can be shared without infringing copyright, and there’s also text that will have copyright attached to it.
These two statements are the crux of what I was trying to express. The statement “the SRD is probably not copyrightable” is very likely incorrect, there is probably at least some part of the SRD that passes that bar, even if 99.9% doesn’t.
Somehow I have an image of a Ray Harryhausen stop-action Beholder lurking in the back on my mind.
I was thinking that too, about the severed gorgon’s head in Clash of the Titans, but that’s 81. Of course, Big Trouble in little China does have a straight up stop motion beholder in it, but again, long after beholders in D&D
Wizards of the Coast changes course, gamers win
…for now…
CC is irrevocable, unlike OGL.
They could publish changes to any material that they just CC licenced, with those changes under a new licence, but they can’t pull that CC-BY away from us.
Once something has been released as Creative Commons, that’s it. It can’t be revoked.
Hasbro were always on a course for a hiding in this, as the software industry has a LOT of court-tested precedence about revocability/non-revocability of Open licenses. Had Hasbro tried to continue, big IT companies with VERY deep pockets would have stepped in with their lawyers.
ETA to correct wrong terminology
I don’t understand what you mean. The SRD wasn’t released under a CC license until very recently. The plan was to revoke the old OGL so that anything subsequently released related to content covered by the old OGL would have to either be covered by the new OGL or it wasn’t covered by the OGL at all, see you in court. I’m pretty sure the deep pocketed IT orgs and publishers would get sweetheart deals carved out (like Critical Role almost certainly did), the goal was to nail the Paizos and Roll20s out of profitability (and profit off of smaller content creators who published under the OGL).
Sorry, I said Creative Commons when I meant Open license (in the second instance).
I’ve edited the comment to make it more clear what I meant
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