The Netbooks of AD&D are in Hell
In the mid-nineties, before anyone sold you a PDF, players built Dungeons & Dragons together on Usenet and in FTP folders. They wrote netbooks: free, fan-made collections of monsters, spells, classes, kits and worlds, passed hand to hand across the early internet. I kept one of the biggest collections of them, the Netbooks of AD&D page, on my account at Teleport, a Portland internet provider.
In 1994, TSR, the company that owned D&D, came online and decided that fan material was a threat. It told FTP sites to take the netbooks down and pointed everyone at its own approved servers, places much of the internet couldn't even reach. Almost every other netbook archive lived on a university server, and the universities didn't argue. One threatening letter from TSR's lawyers and they pulled the sites. Mine was on a commercial provider, so it stayed up, and for a while the Netbooks of AD&D page was the only place left on the internet where you could find them.
In July 1995 they came for the last one. TSR's lawyers went over my head, straight to my internet provider. I posted to rec.games.frp.misc that I was the keeper of the Netbooks of AD&D page and that the cowards of T$R should have come to me directly. The newsgroup caught fire. When a reader asked TSR exactly what was wrong with my site, their representative pointed to scanned TSR artwork and refused to name anything else. Reader after reader asked the same question: why shut down an entire library over a few files?
So the netbooks went to hell. On my new site, The Morpheus Pages, the archive sat behind a locked gate: you whispered to Charon the ferryman (by email) and, if you had the gold, he sent you the key. AOL and CompuServe users, I decided, had their own private hells to wallow in.
Two years later Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and threw out the old fan policy. In 2000 they went further and released the d20 System under the Open Game License. Its architect, Ryan Dancey, said TSR had been far too aggressive and had alienated its own fans. I'm proud that the fight we picked in 1995 was part of what changed their minds.
This is the new MorpheusPages. The netbooks are coming back out of hell, restored and readable, with notes for the games people play today. The first vault is open.
- 1994 TSR comes online and tells fan FTP sites to remove D&D material. In September it licenses a single "approved" server.
- 1994–95 Universities take down their netbook archives after letters from TSR's lawyers. The Netbooks of AD&D page becomes the only place left to find them.
- July 1995 TSR's lawyers pressure Teleport, and the Netbooks of AD&D page comes down. Usenet erupts.
- 1996–97 The netbooks live on in "Hell" at dreamworld.com/~morpheus. Email Charon for the key.
- 1997 Wizards of the Coast buys TSR, and the fan policy is reversed that September.
- 2000 The d20 System and the Open Game License open the game to everyone.
- Today MorpheusPages reopens the vaults.
