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NeoGeo
September 9th, 2010, 19:03
Or can I find ready made campaigns for 4e at all?
By ready made I mean with maps, story, NPC's, Skill Challenges, the works. I'd gladly pay too.
Just curious.

- NeoGeo

GunnarGreybeard
September 9th, 2010, 19:24
Campaigns/Adventure Modules need to be made/created by the users themselves inside FG.

NeoGeo
September 9th, 2010, 19:48
Yes. But they can then be shared with others if I am not mistaken?

Talen
September 9th, 2010, 22:33
If you're looking for 4e, EN World has their War of the Burning Sky campaign wich Eugene has converted to FG. If you buy the mod, the FG version is a free addtion. Hell, if you subsribe to EN World, the campaign is included with your subsecription. $3 now gets you the first 4? adventures in the campaign.

Griogre
September 9th, 2010, 22:36
Generally speaking, no they can't be shared because WotC has forbidden distribution of their intellectual property.

There are some loopholes, in that if you made an adventure that used all new monsters/npcs/traps/hazards it should be legal. If you look at the early Goodman Games "4E compatible" modules that is exactly what they did while using the OGL license.

Andugus
September 9th, 2010, 22:40
The Fantasy Grounds store offers commercial adventures by many well known publishers searchable by System, Publisher, and/or Product Type. With a little effort you may make adjustments to reflect your chosen game system.

Griogre shares my view upon 4th edition GSL. My interpretation is that no 4th edition adventure module is currently possible because Fantasy Grounds itself is not licensed by WoTC. Other areas of the GSL are less clear, with issues of interpretation surrounding the word "electronic" and "automatation".

Regardless of the above topic, welcome to online roleplaying with Fantasy Grounds!

EugeneZ
September 9th, 2010, 23:27
$3 now gets you the first 4? adventures in the campaign.

Five, actually, with the sixth coming soon! Eventually it'll be twelve. Plus a player's guide and a campaign guide.

Griogre
September 9th, 2010, 23:56
It's hard to get a better deal than the Burning Sky adventure path, for a few bucks you can get the adventure path and the FG modules.

If you are willing to pay for at least a month DDI subscription you can get the entire back catalog of 4E Dungeon adventures including the Scales of War adventure path. You'd have to do some work but it's very possible to just input the monsters and maps and run the adventures from the PDF.

Goodman Games also sells their 4E Dungeon Crawl adventures as PDFs (https://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?cPath=187 ).

WotC has H1 Keep on the Shadowfell up as a free download (https://www.wizards.com/dnd/TryDnD.aspx ) and you can get the first several Dungeons without a subscription IE Dungeon 155 (https://www.wizards.com/dnd/TOC.aspx?x=dnd/4new/dutoc/155 )

NeoGeo
September 10th, 2010, 08:58
I understand that IP violations are a very touchy subject on these forums, and I wasn't looking for links to illegal files or anything of the sort.
But are you saying that if I make my own campaign from scratch, but use monsters from the WotC MM, it would be illegal for me to distribute this campaign to others?

Tenian
September 10th, 2010, 23:05
The text and stat blocks included in the published WOTC monster manuals is the Intellectual Property of WOTC. You can not reproduce/redistribute it without expressed written permission of WOTC.

So yes, if you made a campaign that used WOTC monsters and posted it here, you would be infringing on their Intellectual Property.

EugeneZ
September 11th, 2010, 08:14
Just to be clear, this is only for 4e due to the new licensing system, which is far more restrictive than the OGL license used for 3/3.5e. The "SRD" system used for the old edition basically gave all the MM content and such to the customers to do what they wanted as long as they followed a few basic guidelines. I've noticed a lot of people assume the same is true of 4e, but it's like Tenian said -- WotC has locked down their license and now when you buy an MM, the stuff inside is only for you.

Tenian
September 11th, 2010, 23:41
Actually it's true for all editions :) The OGL is just the written permission which allows you to use some of the material.

EugeneZ
September 12th, 2010, 09:09
So yes, if you made a campaign that used WOTC monsters and posted it here, you would be infringing on their Intellectual Property.

I was clarifying this statement. It only applies to 4e, in general. Much of 3/3.5e is, in fact, not infringing if re-printed. Indeed, FG2 "reprints" it, in a sense.

halbert
September 25th, 2010, 21:54
@NeoGeo
Did you get a satifying answer to your previous question? We are seriously thinking about playing d4e with FG, but are worried about the need to hack all the campaign/monster/map data in to game, as I understand needs to be done. We have legally bought the complete D4E material and also have D&D Insider subscription. Is there a way to start playing right away? We would happiliy pay for it!

Tenian
September 25th, 2010, 22:58
My parser will take a lot of the raw mechanical data from DDI and convert it into FGII modules with minimal effort.

If you look around you'll find tutorials others have written on how to use it.

After that you'd minimally need maps and you could play.

Beyond that it comes down to what you as a DM need to effectively run the game. If you want to have read-aloud text, story entries, pre-built encounters, ect then you'll have to invest the time inputting them.

halbert
September 26th, 2010, 12:29
thanks for the quick reply. Will all the monsters from the D&D Insider Material also be converted by your parser? That would already help a lot.

But is there really no way to exchange Campaigns between users (such as the one in Xorn's nice Campaign Management Tutorial) without running into legacy issues?

ShadeRaven
September 27th, 2010, 19:58
The creatures can all be scraped from a D&D Insider subscription, yes.

As for sharing campaigns.... The only way I can see this being possible is if the campaign being shared was all user created with no Copyrighted Material in it.

Honestly, though, I don't see that as a big hurdle. For starters, if you have the creatures from DDI, powers, feats, items, etc., you have a lot of the work done already. From there, if you have an Adventure Path or just a single module (or series of singles) in mind, most have PDF versions and Image Files for maps and such. You could easily copy the maps over to your personal campaign directory (easy to make) and essentially be ready to run right then. All you would need is to pull up a map and share it in the game ... add in creatures from your DDI Scrape... and run your encounters. For the dialogue and other DM exposition, just read aloud as you would playing at a tabletop.

It's not quite as easy as having everything set up for you in a pre-made FG2 file, but it's still easy enough and improves with time and practice.

Eventually, you'll find that spending a handful of minutes pre-creating encounters to speed things up even more is well worth it.

Not the answer you want to hear, but I have been doing this (off and on) since 4E launched, and FG2 is well suited for running it. With all the tools out here to help us, plus the wonderful core material we get for 4E with FG2, the learning curve and amount of effort needed is as minimal as possible (unless you want to do more with it, then there's plenty of possibilities there, too).

halbert
September 27th, 2010, 21:01
Thanks for your input, everybody. I am quite amazed by the activeness of the comunity here - your response times really rock. Sound like we will give it a shot! I already got a license and started parsing the DDI stuff!

All the best!