A thought of writing

[eo2]

Hey everyone, I just have a few questions.
Firstly, I found wesnoth through sourceforge, and although I never played online, I really have enjoyed the campaigns. I am just starting my second time through UTBS, and I wanted to ask a few questions before I did anything drastic.
I really enjoyed the campaign, and I always thought that with some depth this could be something really enjoyable to read. As it is, the whole campaign is sort of surreal because the characters are not developed enough for the reader to understand their thought process.
If I were to write a novel and/or publish based off of the campaign, would this create any problems for me in terms of copyright?
And if there are no problems, does anyone have a list of all of the text in the campaign? It would save me a lot of time and help me understand what type of characters you guys were trying to create.

Thanks

[Raijer]

From what i know, Wesnoth is released under GPL v2, which should allow you to do anything as long as you give credits and you don't make any money with it (not sure about that part). Theorically, you're supposed to give the source code, but there isn't any for a novel...

I think that as long as you get permission from the campaign's author, you won't have any problem. Talking with him would also give you a better understanding of what he wanted to do (i hope he's still around though, i don't remember who the original author is)
For the campaign texts, a traductor should explain how to get them better than me, but you can also try going in the Wesnoth package and find them in the campaign code, though that's quite annoying to do.

[Crendgrim]

I do not know the actual answer, but I wanted to correct this: The GPL does allow you to make money from the licensed product. I do not know how exactly this would apply to a novel, though.

[iceiceice]

Additionally: As far as I know, the GPL does not explicitly require you to give credit to the original author either, that's simply common courtesy. (In contrast some of the the creative commons licenses explicitly require this.)

If I were to write a novel and/or publish based off of the campaign, would this create any problems for me in terms of copyright?

It would only create problems if you wanted to control the rights to distribute and make derivative works of your stuff. If you don't care about trying to stop someone who might do these things then there wouldn't be any problem. You can be confident in your own right to do these things, even if you can't contact the original author. (Note though that I am not a lawyer.)

And if there are no problems, does anyone have a list of all of the text in the campaign? It would save me a lot of time and help me understand what type of characters you guys were trying to create.

I think there are some wiki pages floating around that basically do this... like this one for instance CampaignDialogue:DM. I don't know how many of those there are though.

[eo2]

Thanks everyone!

I don't know how many of those there are though.

I found one for Utbs, so I will not need any help there. Thanks for the clarification on copyright, and I most certainly give credit to the original author. As for writing it, I will probably start once I finish the campaign. That might take a while. I can't say how accurate it will be to the wesnoth universe, but I will try. I'll try to post a temporary copy of it when I finish.

I also just finished Rise of Wesnoth, which was very good, but I think for now I will stick with Utbs. I feel like the character of Kalem could be expanded so much.

[Andrettin]

I think there are some wiki pages floating around that basically do this... like this one for instance CampaignDialogue:DM. I don't know how many of those there are though.

There is one for each mainline campaign IIRC. I've certainly seem those pages for most of them.