A while back I listened to my favorite podcast System Mastery talk about Xcrawl and there was one bit about the setting that interested me but by the sounds of it wasn’t really addressed in depth in the setting: copyrighted spells.

The idea was that some wizard had figure out that they could effectively put a copyright on their spell by making the material component a $50 bill that would be teleported into their personal vault. The wizard thus became obscenely rich because of the usefulness of said spell.

But that made me think: what other stuff can you get in a setting where spells are subject to copyright?

Cheap bootleg spells! They are much more affordable but they don’t quite work as well as the genuine article.

Generic brand spells! Once a spell’s patent has expired everyone can make a variation of that spell! Your wizard emporium might be full of different variants of Mel’s Acid Arrow.

Groups of fucking nerd Wizards developing creative commons spells and getting into huge wizard nerd fights over which version of a spell is the best one!

As I was discussing this with my friends we got lots of really great ideas which I will be posting under the name and tag “Industrial Might and Magic.”