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0 pointsthaumasiotes1y ago0 comments

That's an interesting list, and very short. Displacer beasts have always been around in D&D, but I'm not aware of why they'd be considered iconic. They are distinctive, panthers with tentacles coming out of their shoulders and a constantly-active illusion that obscures their location, making them appear to be a few feet to the side of where they are. In contrast, carrion crawlers are just giant centipedes with paralytic venom, though not to be confused with the unprotected monster "giant centipede".

Tanar'ri and baatezu are, even within full-copyright Official D&D materials, better known as "demons" and "devils", and I have a hard time imagining that any third-party material would want to use the protected names.

Beholders are iconic, and distinctive to D&D, and gauths are derivative of them. There are several other beholder-lites; why aren't spectators protected?

Illithids and mind flayers are the same thing, always fairly iconic and more so now that Baldur's Gate 3 is devoted to them, and githyanki and githzerai are part of the lore developed around them.

Yuan-ti are snake people. They're not distinctive at all; the film Conan the Barbarian has a villain who does a ritual to turn into a giant snake. The general concepts of snake people, snakier people, and evil snake gods are too popular and generic to be protected, but I guess you should call them something other than "yuan-ti".

(Fun side note: the name "yuan-ti" looks like it's obviously Chinese. You can find questions about this all over the Chinese internet, since there's no obvious way to assign meaning to the name. The answer appears to be that the guy who made up the name knew nothing about Chinese and it's all a big coincidence.)

Umber hulks are large insectoid creatures that burrow underground. I'm not sure why they're considered so important, but they're more distinctive than carrion crawlers.

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inhumantsar1y ago

just a guess but maybe it's a list of things that were featured prominently in products aimed at a wider audience, eg: movies like the recent one with Chris Pine and video games like BG3?

thaumasiotesOP1y ago

As best I recall, the recent movie involved a dragon and one or more liches. I think there was also a displacer beast, but it wasn't exactly significant in the film.

I'm not familiar with what products would have made umber hulks or yuan-ti prominent, but I can believe that they existed, particularly in the case of yuan-ti, which seem to have a lot of lore developed around them. A lot of lore in the present generally means a lot of products featuring them in the past. I'm just not sure how valuable it is to protect the name "yuan-ti" when the concept is so generic.

(The webcomic Rusty & Co. includes one character who is a snake person, named Yuan-Tiffany. She's a lamia, due to legal threats from Wizards of the Coast, but while the name of her species had to be changed, neither her character design ["snake person, no legs"; lamia nobles look like that too] nor her name was affected.)

Tanar'ri and baatezu are a weirder case, where the names are so worthless that even D&D itself prefers not to use them, and the concepts are obviously not subject to copyright or other protection. They originate in (or before) 1st edition D&D under the names "demons" and "devils", with no other name given, and a moral panic in the USA prompts TSR to rename those categories "tanar'ri" and "baatezu" in the second edition (without changing the monsters - having a monster called a "succubus", an evil spirit hailing from "the Abyss" who exists to lead mortals into evil by having sex with them, is fine; labeling that monster a "demon" is not). In third edition, they're back to being "demons" and "devils", with the names "tanar'ri" and "baatezu" being mentioned, but clearly positioned as obscure lore about the universe. And that's how it's been ever since.

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