Anon,
Since you have removed your character submission, there is no way I can comment specifically on what issue was raised by our Character Approver. Our CA staff is more than willing to work with players to work out such conflicts, though since your submission has been effectively deleted, it is exceedingly difficult to comment further. I do, however, believe you misunderstand a rather important distinction, which I will attempt to clarify below.
As you may or may not be aware, the Neverwinter Nights game, created by Bioware, provides a rather open license to use their platform to make derivative works, host servers and even extend their platform through content and other means with one simple but important limitation. No one using the NWN can charge or accept any payment for playing on game servers running NWN, nor can anyone charge to give players an in-game advantage. In essence, their license has produced a very open sort of community, with a vast collection of systems, content and other derived work based on or for use with the NWN platform, and all of this is provided free for the taking by anyone who wants to use it for their own NWN implementation.
Though NWN has served us very well for many years, it has long been the goal of Leanthar, creator of Layonara, to produce an MMO based on Layonara's intellectual property (IP). While work is progressing on the MMO, we also continue to maintain the NWN game servers for our community, and while the NWN-based Layonara continues to operate, so too does Layonara's story and lore continue to grow.
Regarding character submissions in general, we are very careful here on people taking IP from other copyrighted and published works for the simple reason that anyone's character could conceivably become part of a long-term
published work associated with Layonara that may be copyrighted. Clearly, if we included something of another author, company or publisher which was not duly credited, authorized and licensed, we could be in some serious trouble. And so, for characters, who could "live" beyond the lifespan of the incarnation of Layonara based on NWN and into the MMO incarnation and perhaps beyond, we seek to prevent any such conflicts at the outset.
The music pack is, in part, taken from content made available on the
Neverwinter Nights Vault, as are the basis of quite a few of our systems. We are not claiming these songs are ours, save for a few of them which are truly custom works, nor are we attempting to use them in any copyrighted sense without permission. What we
are saying is that the music in that pack was utilized in the creation of areas in our game world, and as such, for the full experience, these songs are necessary. Absolutely
none of these songs which we do not rightfully own or which are not properly licensed will be part of any long-term, custom work derived from Layonara IP. They are not part of our IP, nor do we claim them to be.
The portraits are a combination of resources available on the Neverwinter Nights Vault and submissions from our community. They
are not produced by Layonara, we
do not claim them as our own and neither will we include them, in any way, shape or form, in any published works under our name unless the right to use these images or derivatives thereof has been obtained from the rightful copyright owners. These portraits are personalized placeholders, provided by members or our community to other members of our community for convenience and to help enhance their experiences while gaming here.
Though you didn't ever touch on it, I might as well mention, for completeness, that within the game world itself, we have things that are based on IP owned by other entities, such as "Drow", "Duergar" and other such things. Why? Because they're part of the NWN game platform. As long as we continue to use NWN and provide this game world to everyone free of charge, we are within our rights to do so. Bioware's license grants this to us.
The players who play here and the characters they portray have a very real chance to become part of Layonara's story and published works. This has already happened to a very significant degree, in fact. Their in-game portraits are completely irrelevant to such longevity, but their stories are another matter. As such, we cannot have anyone who's back story or name is taken from or derived from any other published work for reasons that should be quite obvious.
Having said all this, if any of the copyright holders of any content used within the NWN version of this game world takes exception to the presence of such content in this non-commercial, not-for-profit endeavor, then we would naturally remove it as efficiently as possible. It is, after all, a simple thing to delete an image. It is not a simple thing to excise a character's story, which evolves by the day, of a back-story upon which the character is founded.
There is no hypocrisy in what was requested of you by our Character Approver team. The music we have in-game and the portraits people use in-game are not part of our long-term works. The characters and their stories are, or can be, and in many cases they have already become so.
However, it is of course your choice if you do not wish to continue your association with Layonara. I sincerely wish you well and the best of luck, and I truly hope you find a game world that is a good fit for you and your character concepts.
