Topic: To the campaign team: my fiction contest submission

[Demonslayer]

Hello everybody,

The creators of D&D have recently started a competition where people can submit adventures they wrote. A friend of mine and myself are planning on entering a few stories, and for one cooperative story we'd like to use the story I submitted for the campaign fiction contest a while back.
Naturally we'll not be using any GW terms, but I'd like to ask whether you'd mind us writing a story based on the background you created?

If you have any objections, we'll see whether we can alter the story, or we'll drop the idea entirely.

[General Helstrom]

I'll ask the scriveners what they think. How official is this contest?

[Demonslayer]

Well, if the story is chosen, there might be a freelance job as adventure writer in it... So I guess it's very official.

[General Helstrom]

Are you sure you wouldn't be better off submitting something you wrote, then? Suppose you win and land the job, you don't honestly expect the campaign team to keep feeding you great storylines, do you

If you're merely talking about having a story along the lines of the WOS, then that would be quite OK, I suppose. It's not like we copyrighted the concept of three provinces/kingdoms making war over over a fourth. Just take it easy on the details, I don't think the organizers will take kindly to you submitting an obvious rip-off!

[Demonslayer]

Agreed. It's not my intention to write something actually from the campaign background. It's basically an entirely new setting, just with the whole idea of some evil guy double-crossing everybody in it.

It's just that I'm kind of writing the same story again, and seeing that I've written the first one based on the campaign background, I'm worried there will be problems.
I'm basically using the storyline I made up again, but, well, I'm just worried about the "again" part...
And technically, I've written the story for this site. Now I'm passing the idea on to another. Is that a problem with you guys?

(next time I'll work alone... make up my own storylines... all that "oooooh I liked that storyline you wrote earlier, let's do that again!" from my colleague isn't helping ... )

[Kernschatten]

@Demonslayer: Give us a link to the competition guidelines. I'd like to at least read them before I even consider the thought.

[Demonslayer]

Here's the link.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20050930b

And again, I'd like to point out, that I'm not going to write it if you have any problems with it...

[General Helstrom]

Waaaait... You're talking about your own fiction entry? The Iron of Zurhafen? Seeing how as you wrote it, there's no reason why you couldn't re-use it for this D&D contest. The only worry for the campaign team is the broader War of Ostermark Succession storyline, characters, events, &tc. - basically everything that was published as official campaign material. As long as you stay clear of that, you won't hear a peep out of me.

[Demonslayer]

I see   . Rest assured, the entire campaign background won't be used... It's probably going to be on a seperate continent with three warring countries (not neccesarily human), having nothing to do with warhammer in the first place.
I just wanted to make sure... I really don't have any knowledge concerning copyrights, trademarks, plagiarising (spelling?) etc...

If you want to I could post the story here first (once it's finished), just to be on the safe side...