Plagiarism, and when it’s not

OK - I have been a victim of plagiarism, so you will never see me defending it!  A now dead but at the time vastly larger company than ours took ideas I had discussed with one of their authors and printed them.  I honestly don’t blame the company; I blame the author who apparently is now some college professor.  Well, those who can’t, teach.

But!  Even in our name (Legend Quest), we have been “plagiarized”. But we weren’t; at least I don’t think we’ve been.  At one time there was a “VR” game in the UK called Legend Quest where you shot cardboard cut-outs with a laser tag style gun (at least that’s how it was explained to me).  These cut-outs were goblins and dwarves, so we don’t think they stole our name, but it certainly possible they didn’t.  Then there was that crappy TV show - thank God they cancelled it!

But this is the point.  Can anything truly be original?  If we’re talking about a mission in a RPG, I don’t think so.  Even if you had a unique setting, some of the NPCs are going to resemble something else.  Even if you had a legitimately original plot (which many argue you can’t), are the treasure and the puzzles and the traps and the other challenges all new and unique?  Can’t be.

So why discuss this now?  Well, All About Carnivals has suggested mission plots that are not original.  It’s not like I looked somewhere else and transported their plot lines into the book, but I know some of them are reminiscent of movies I’ve seen, books I read, and honestly comic books.  For some crazy reason, Thor fighting the Circus of Crime and stealing some golden bull has been stuck in my mind my entire life.

Why am I willing to accept that not every similar idea is plagiarism?  A VERY long time ago - prior to August of 1992 - I was watching bad TV on a Saturday morning.  I watched the movie Valley of the Gwangi in the morning (like 9:00-11:00) and then, as I recall it, wrote the game The Forgotten Hunt in the afternoon.  I remember having the plot lines and whole bunch of stuff figured out, and only spending about an hour after dinner on it before I felt it was basically written.  Now I spent another year researching all the dinosaurs for it, but that’s a different blog post.

Oh, what’s The Forgotten Hunt you ask?  Well, it’s dinosaurs in the modern world RPG.  Then in August of 1992, I was at GENCON selling the bound edition of Legend Quest for the first time and someone started talking to me about Jurassic Park (the novel because the movie wasn’t out yet).  Part of me was crushed.  I knew I would be accused of plagiarizing the book.  I mean if you were going to plagiarize someone, you may as well go for the top of the spectrum with Crichton, but that’s not the point.

I did get the book and I read it only to find out that he was using cloning methods.  I had three alternatives, and suggested using all three:  aliens with a “return everything as it was” prime directive had removed dinos for study and were only now able to return them to Earth; some scientists were regressing birds along their evolutionary path and thus recreating dinos (which I still don’t think is similar to the novel!) in an effort to learn all he could about the genetics of long lived creatures; and another scientist had used drugs and some gene manipulation to increase the intelligence of reptiles - in so doing he created a new species of animals that closely resembled ornithopod.  Maybe they were ornithopods.

Anyway - Did I plagiarize Jurassic Park?  No.  There have been decades of modern dinosaur stories, including Journey to the Center of the World and The Lost World - which clearly had affected Crichton because he named Jurassic Park’s sequel after it.

Brass tacks - Hey, don’t plagiarize people.  Show more class.  But don’t think everything you do has to be completely unique.  There may not be any new plot lines out there.  Take something you like and put your own twists on it.  Make it your own - as we so often say!  But be calm when your see stuff that you may think you’ve seen before.  At least see if it has that original twist to it.  Oh, and check the copyrights!  Sometimes the person you thought was original is the copier.