I've been working with Issaries to help them explain their Publication policy to the masses. While I am not an official spokesman, I am fairly knowledgeable on the policy.
On the Issaries website is a lot more info, including an FAQ and other explanatory documents that may help you, and anyone else more fully understand the policy.
Let me start by saying you can write or draw, anything you want. You will always be the owner of it and retain copyright. What you personally do is not what the policy is all about. The policy ONLY comes into play when you want to publish, distribute, or sell whatever you create that is based on their trademarks and copyrights.
If you do not publish anything Gloranthan there is very little from the policy that applies to your efforts. They ask that you acknowledge their Trademark of the word Runequest with a simple blurb on your homepage.
If you want to publish something (which includes putting something on a website) that is DERIVATIVE of what Issaries has published, then Issaries has the right to prevent you from doing so, even if no money is invloved in the publication. By all means, redraw all the maps you want and use them in your campaign, but publishing them can only be done with permission from Issaries.
The same applies to you publishing someone else's derivative material. You are the publisher, so you are the one in violation of the policy. Without trying to insinuate any criminal intent on your part, it would be like you selling stolen goods. You didn't steal them, but you know they are stolen.
Issaries isn't trying to steal anything, especially someone's copyright, but they do, under most country's laws, have the right to stop you from publishing works based on their intellectual property without their permission.
As a non-Gloranthan example: You can't write a Harry Potter book, using all of the characters, etc. and legally publish it. If you had a Harry Potter website with such stories on it it's pretty safe to say that you could very well get a "cease and desist" letter from JK Rowling's lawyers.
As for the pornography, slander, etc. stuff: Issaries is trying to protect their trademarks. They don't want Glorantha to become known as "that porno game world" based on other people's stuff.
The policy wasn't written by some "freaked out" lawyer. It was written by a small company that is trying to protect its intellectual property in a tough marketplace. They understand the economics at stake here.
I like some of the licensing models found on the creative commons website. In many respects, Issaries policy follows many of their principles in terms of the "Attribution", "Non-commercial" and "No-derivative works" models.
That's my take on this,
Rick Meints
www.glorantha.info
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