Troll Lord Games

I'm a big fan of many of the old AD&D 2e settings such as Ravenloft, Planescape, and Spelljammer. I've been thinking of doing an "fan-conversion" of the settings to Castles & Crusades rules for a while. If I were to do an unofficial conversion, I'd like to release it as a pdf for other C&C gamers to download.

I know that there would be legal issues since all the settings are owned by WotC. But, if I were to simply put the bare bones class, monster, spell conversions (i.e. only the statistical information) etc. in the document and leave out all the setting and flavor information, would such a thing be a problem? It would probably fall in the 'grey area' since some of the terms may be copyrighted, but I have a hard time imagining that WotC would care too much for a small time fan conversion that doesn't include much setting info.

Any thoughts about the legality or plausibility of this? Would anyone be interested in helping with a fan conversion if I would do one?

There are fan conversions of earlier adventures to d20. Settings though will be far more difficult. Legally, stat blocks for creatures are not a problem so long as the creature is in Monsters & Treasure or has a stat block available in the Tome of Horrors for d20 that can serve as the basis for a conversion. Same thing with classes and spells. Creatures, classes and spells that are not in the SRD or Tome of Horrors may pose a problem. You may not be able to legally convert them and publish the conversions, even if nothing more than stat blocks since you may be violating the "authority to contribute" and possibly the "Product Identity" clauses of the OGL depending on the creature, class, or spell you're converting.

That said, is Hasbro going to bother? They may not as they are working on "5th edition". At the same time, whether they bother depends on how you distribute the PDF. For example, only within the last year or so has there been a central location where people can get the Dungeons & Dragons PDF in my signature (Zenopus Archives). Before that it was only available by clicking the link in signature or PMing me for it. This was by design because I didn't want to attract attention from Hasbro.

1) ask an attorney
2) if you leave out any obvious identifiers, it should be OK, but then it loses half the point
3) ask WotC... sometimes they say yes

As long as you share it privately and don't make it accessible to the general public it will be fine. So just don't put it up on a DL site where it can be found and DLed by anyone who puts "C&C conversion of setting XYZ" into a search engine. Use something you can control like Dropbox.

Plus as Serl says, ask WOTC. I have been shocked by how many times they have said "yes". I mean would you have ever thought they would allow Marvel Superheroes (let alone Marvel themselves OKing it) or Star Frontiers to be available for free on the internet? I wouldn't have.