New death screen is very close to Magic: the Gathering art
issueid=2405 10-21-2013 11:15 PM
Junior Member
Number of reported issues by faradan: 19
New death screen is very close to Magic: the Gathering art

I'll start off by saying that even thinking about this is probably being unnecessarily cautious, and even if it's possible that there could be legal issues from this, most likely nobody will care. However it would be dumb to have problems come from something this minor, so I wanted to bring it to your attention.

When I saw the new death splash screen, my first thoughts were (1) it's a fantastic picture and (2) I'd seen it somewhere before. It turns out that it's visually very similar to an MTG card. Compare:

Death splash
Howling Mine

Even details like the spikes around the mouth appear the same. Is the similarity worth caring about? I leave that up to you.
Issue Details
Issue Number 2405
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category All
Status Not a Bug
Priority 10 - Lowest
Affected Version ADOM 1.2.0 pre 17
Fixed Version (none)
Milestone (none)
Users able to reproduce bug 0
Users unable to reproduce bug 0
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)




10-21-2013 11:31 PM
Ancient Member
The motif shared seems to be "huge human skull dungeon entrance lit by hellfire", which I don't think can be claimed in the whole by any one artist/trading card game publisher. I would say the two pieces are more than distinct enough; then again, my law credentials do not exist.

10-21-2013 11:35 PM
Ancient Member
Haha :D nicely spotted!

And there I was feeling all smart and original. Never seen that card, played magic once about ten years ago. No worries, they can't sue us because the composition and motif is similar, takes much more than that. I'd have to literally copy a larger fragment of that artwork and do a bad job of disguising it so that there's no doubt that I stole it. Otherwise anyone painting angels or dragons would be long out of business, buried under WoTC lawsuits :) Would be kinda fun to see WoTC and GW duke it out over stuff like Dwarves or Trolls though...

Back on topic: first time this kinda thing happens to me and I really feel kinda guilty for no apparent reason? :(

This can safely be closed.

10-22-2013 12:00 AM
Junior Member
Ok, I thought that would be true but I wanted to bring it up just in case. :) No knock against your work by the way -- like I said, it looks great.

10-22-2013 05:19 AM
jt jt is offline
Administrator
Closed.

10-22-2013 06:24 AM
Ancient Member
For Ravenmore:

I played a lot of MTG, I even own four of that exact card(very cool deck I made. Ppl not quittting, but they can't win) and the image didn't remind me of anything besides castle grayskull.

Even after reading 'Howling Mine' I was trying to figure out in my head which edition's art you were referring to. The art is in quite a different style and there are similarities in the constituents, but one can see that ADoM's one is original.

In my view the one is not inspired by the other.

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