Building maps for existing (published) settings

[Eilathen]

So it is illegal to show my interpretation of an existing world? Even if it is clearly labeled as such (aka fanwork) and is not going to make the artist any money?

If so, thats just screwed up. Nobody should be able to bar me from doing that. It is kind of like "freedom of speech".

And you did get that i didn't single out WotC, right? I just took up the example from above.

[Mark Oliva]

So it is illegal to show my interpretation of an existing world? Even if it is clearly labeled as such (aka fanwork) and is not going to make the artist any money?
If so, thats just screwed up. Nobody should be able to bar me from doing that. It is kind of like "freedom of speech".

Whether it's legal or not isn't completely clear. If the owner of the intellectual property that you're using allows you to use it, you certainly can. But things like the Forgotten Realms and Eberron belong to Wizards of the Coast (R). This material is copyrighted. You can't simply make your own maps of things in these worlds and publish them without permission of the copyright holder. WotC owns these things and has legal protection under copyright law.

And you did get that i didn't single out WotC, right?

Yup. I wanted to make clear that I wasn't going after WotC either.

About a dozen years ago, WotC released a policy that specifically allowed what you want to do as long as it was legitimate, non-commercial fan material. That policy was rescinded later by WotC. It was replaced by a less liberal policy. When I was moderator of the German language Forgotten Realms Mailing List (no longer exists), WotC informed me that we could post fan made maps of the FR only if no official geographical names appeared on the maps. List members could make maps, for instance, of the Sword Coast and place a dot on the map to show where Waterdeep is, but the names Sword Coast and Waterdeep could not appear on the maps.

I asked WotC several times by E-Mail if there was a new policy statement available for fan made products, but I never received a reply. I never found a successor statement on the WotC web site either. I have no idea whether there is one today.

In those days our project group had just finished the Northern Journey campaign for the Realms (now available free at Candlekeep) and we were working on a sequel to be called In the Land of the Lich Lords for the FR. We discussed this issue and the lack of a clear-cut policy statement with our attorney, and he strongly advised us to drop the whole thing.

We did just that. That was in 2005. At that time, we stopped writing for and using WotC products and started creating our own open gaming, open source content instead. I have no idea what WotC's positions on fan-created material are today.