This year, I've started getting back into Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). I haven't played much of the 5th edition game, so channels like the Dungeon Dudes on YouTube have been a godsend. They’ve helped me brush up on classes, spells and general rules. I like the Dungeon Dudes a lot. They seem like nice guys who create helpful YouTube content.
However, I went on to listen to the podcast version of their livestream game, Dungeons of Drakkenheim, and although I've been enjoying it, something doesn’t sit quite right. The setting is eerily familiar. It's Mordheim with barely a lick of paint.
What's Mordheim?
Mordheim is a classic Games Workshop (GW) game from 1999. It's dead now, in that it isn't officially supported anymore, but there's a thriving community of people who still play. Some people say it’s the finest game GW ever made.
As a tabletop skirmish game, Mordheim allows each player to control a small roster of miniatures drawn from one of several factions. These are controlled individually,rather than in units as in Warhammer Fantasy and other games. Battles are fought in a ruined city setting - the city of Mordheim, near the border with Ostermark. Dice rolls affect the outcome of attacks (amongst other things).
Why is the city in ruins? The lore states that it was hit by a twin-tailed comet, the impact of which sent chunks of a green crystalline substance called wyrdstone flying everywhere. One of the objectives of the game is to collect wyrdstone.
It's worth mentioning that one of the factions fighting over the city ruins are the skaven - a race of rat men. These guys have a lot of lore in various Warhammer books and a very particular way of speaking. Here's a description of their language, Queekish, from a Warhammer Wiki page:
"Skaven dialogue is often littered with a hodgepodge of rapid squeaks and trills. Queekish words are short, clipped, and often repeated several times in a row..." (emphasis mine, yes-yes)
How is that similar to Drakkenheim?
Drakkenheim is a city in the kingdom of Westemär. It was hit by a falling star, and now there are shards of this purplish crystalline substance called delerium all over. Several factions are fighting in the ruins of the city, including ratlings - a race of ratfolk. One of the first ratlings we meet, the Rat Prince, speaks in a particular style with lots of repeated words. Yes, yes, yes?
I've probably missed something (maybe a lot of things), but the connection is pretty obvious.
Is Drakkenheim inspired by anything else?
Yup. One other thing I noticed was the mention of 'octarine' - the colour of magic in Terry Pratchett's Discworld universe. It’s mentioned with relation to delerium and its magic several times. On Reddit, people also cited Frostgrave and Fallout as possible sources of inspiration.
Apparently, Monty Martin, one of the co-creators of Drakkenheim, has explicitly mentioned Mordheim too.
But isn't all art inspired by other stuff?
Oh yeah. Totally. You can’t create in a vacuum. But it's a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism, and that line can actually be pretty hard to define.
Take Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. Those are loaded with obvious references to other things. The one that stands out to me is the duel between The Bride and On-Ren Ishii in a Japanese garden in the snow. That it was inspired by Lady Snowblood is obvious, and I’ve read (here) that Tarantino encouraged the cast to watch the DVD.
When Tarantino does it, words like 'pastiche' and 'homage' get bandied around. And don't get me wrong, I love Kill Bill. I think Tarantino handles it well, so it doesn't come off feeling like a lazy copy or a ripoff. But there's no denying that Tarantino draws a lot on other sources.
Is Drakkenheim being similar to Mordheim a problem?
If this was a home game of D&D that wasn't making money, I'd say no. Perfectly fine. The problem for me is that this is a commercial venture and has been from the start. Episodes of the stream are sponsored, and the Dungeon Dudes have a Patreon, merch store, Kickstarter, and books through Ghostfire Gaming.
GW haven't come after them – maybe because Mordheim isn't a current title in their range – but it's something that's still mentioned in the lore. Their recent Warhammer: The Old World re-release of Warhammer Fantasy has a section on it in the rulebook.
The problem is that GW, despite their own games borrowing extensively from other sources, are very protective of their IP. It isn’t out of the realms of possibility that GW will release a new version of Mordheim someday. And when that happens, the Dungeon Dudes could find a cease-and-desist letter on their doormat.
Is it copyright / IP infringement?
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say one way or another with any certainty – that may be for a court to decide sometime in the future – but as a writer and a gamer, I do find it all a little uncomfortable.
I wish the Dungeon Dudes well, as I don't think they’ve done anything with ill intent. But GW is a large organisation with a lot of lawyers. Who knows what will happen.