This Weird Fear of Stealing
Negative self-talk and shame persist as I put together my first game zine
As I’ve been putting together The Roaring Age, my 1920’s Lovecraftian hack for Liminal Horror, I’ve been gently stymied by nagging feeling that I’m doing something wrong. Not in terms of design errors, but moral ones; that I am stealing someone else’s game, or copying.
To be clear, The Roaring Age is meant as a supplement and conversion guide. It is near-totally an original work, full of guidance, subsystems, additional rules, and alternative tables to be used in tandem with the Liminal Horror rulebook. Though, if I understanding the licensing correctly, I could largely copy in big chunks of the Liminal Horror rules under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, give copious credit where credit is due, and make an entirely stand-alone game. I don’t currently see this as my plan.
Even so, I keep thinking: “Is this bad? Am I copying? Am I going to get in trouble for publishing a bunch of rules for someone else’s game? Surely something must be wrong here.”
Liminal Horror itself is not just a Creative Commons work, but re-creates large swathes of another Creative Commons work, and onward and onward. Regarding my subject matter, 1920’s horror, my primary genre touchstone is an author who, for all of his faults, was an early pioneer in openly sharing his intellectual property. And I intend on The Roaring Age to share the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license as Liminal Horror. So in a technical and legal sense, I’m not “stealing” anything at all.
And yet this voice persists: You can’t copy that. You can’t put that out there, and if you do, and someone gives you a $2 tip on itch or whatever, that’ll be stealing — pirating, basically. Then, someone will feel wronged and accuse you.
So what the hell is going on here?
Part of this is good intentions: We all want to be good creative community members, give proper credit, and not sell other people’s work. But I suspect that even with best intentions and behavior, I will still have this corrosive worry nagging at me.
I know, at least, that fears like this are common. Diogo Nogueira, author of Primal Quest, host of Weird Games & Weirder People, and creator of just tons of cool shit, constantly cites Steal Like an Artist as a favorite inspirational creative text. Maybe it’s time I read it, if only to give me a little less shame.
Shame, by the way, is a possibly suspect in this equation. When I was a teen, or even a child, I would write a story or a song, then look down and smile proudly at my work, only to soon realize that I’d basically copied something I’d read, or seen, or heard, sometimes with no meaningful alteration. I would then feel ashamed, embarrassed. I can assure you, an 11-year-old can feel imposter syndrome. Perhaps this shame lingers, maybe some residue of the "wounded child” as late 20th century therapy culture would name it.
Another part of this is simple: I have not done this before. I made some item cards for Lilluputian that are neat, but I’ve not published a game text or module or adventure of any kind. Maybe I need to do this, and receive positive feedback (or maybe even negative feedback!) in order to be rid of this worry.
This is all to say that, in the end, I think making and releasing this hack will be something better than useful. It might actually be good for me.
Your situation with what you plan to contribute seems fine to me and not copyright. Don’t listen to those thoughts. Unfortunately there are some instances where people should trust these guilty feelings and they may be stealing something. There was recently a big deal about this in the OSR specifically with a very popular creator who disappeared off the face of the earth due to being caught. Rightly so.
It's not weird at all. It's less common than it should be, but that's not quite the same thing. Shame and impostor syndrome are two of those things that keep people honest. I'm not suggesting that they're the most helpful or healthy ways of doing it but, since I'm not a saint, I've never met one and don't believe in the concept of sanctity in any real sense, I suppose most of us are stuck with the more negative pricks and spurs. What is the opposite of shame? Shamelessness. What's the antonym of impostor syndrome? Probably the Dunning-Kruger effect. If I was minded to be cruel, I would say it's easier for folks who know nothing and have read nothing blithely to assume their output is dazzlingly original. It only gets harder the more you know and assimilate. Sure, if possessed to an excessive degree, reticence (for whatever reason) can be deeply damaging to creative output and, for the record, I've binned far more than I've ever made 'public' (even in the sense of running homebrew stuff for a group of players), so I get it. But, on balance, I'd rather have read as widely as I have been able to than be numbly secure in my ignorance, and be thought an emotional cripple than an asshole.