Questions about selling an adventure/module.

Hi everyone i hope you are doing well, i just had a few questions about selling an adventure/module in the marketplace. Does the adventure/module have to be 100% original content? And by that i mean does all the artwork, backgrounds, music, tokens and the like and the like have to been my brain child. Or are you aloud to use the assets already offered by roll20?

They do not have to be your original content, but you must have permission to distribute everything in your module. This includes rules, art, music, story, etc. As an example, I am not a very creative person, but I am good at making high-quality Roll20 modules and cleaning up art assets from PDFs. I secured licenses with royalty agreements with publishers to distribute their adventure modules and other content on Roll20. If your story is original, but everything else is not, you have a few options: Rules: 5e and Pathfinder both have licenses you must follow to release content using their rule sets. Tokens:  There are several royalty free packages of fantasy stock art on DriveThruRPG. You can also look at Pixabay for CC0 content. Maps:  Again, you can look at DriveThruRPG. There are also a few programs that let you draw your own maps (and I believe give you permission to use the end product commercially). Music:  There are a few music options available. Incompetech has a royalty-free Creative Commons attribution license for almost all of his work. It even comes with a generator to properly write the attribution text. I hope that helps, and let me know if you have any other questions.

I understand everything loud and clear but the rules part. What type of rules are trademarked by wizards? 

If you want to release something that makes use of the 5e rules, you must abide by the current version of the Open Gaming License (OGL), include a copy in your work (done as a handout in Roll20), and only include material (including rules content) that has been released as OGL content. So none of the material from WotC books is available unless it is in the System Reference Document (SRD), your own original content, or what others have released as OGL content (which might only be a portion of the document they release). Realistically, if you only use the SRD, you have a subset of monsters, spells, and magic items to work with, and each class only has one subclass available.

If you were to include a creature in your module that wasn't available through a systems SRD/OGL document then you would have to have their specific permission to use it (thats my layman understanding of it). The same would go for a creature from the SRD but your module has the details of a spell that wasn't included in the SRD, that would be a no-go. Many of the artists who have packs available on Roll20 are open to potential collaboration on projects, they may even grant licence to use their existing art if asked and compensated somehow. It never hurts to ask :) edit:  ninja'd by Brian... who to be fair, has a much clearer idea of all this stuff ;)

Ziechael said: If you were to include a creature in your module that wasn't available through a systems SRD/OGL document then you would have to have their specific permission to use it (thats my layman understanding of it). The same would go for a creature from the SRD but your module has the details of a spell that wasn't included in the SRD, that would be a no-go. Many of the artists who have packs available on Roll20 are open to potential collaboration on projects, they may even grant licence to use their existing art if asked and compensated somehow. It never hurts to ask :) edit:  ninja'd by Brian... who to be fair, has a much clearer idea of all this stuff ;) But you bring up a good point. As I am converting War of the Burning Sky  (an awesome 3.5/4e adventure path), I have had to limit the NPC spells to those in the SRD (and the original spells created in the AP). NPC traits either appear in the SRD somewhere  (whether an NPC trait or a PC class option) or are original content.

But what is stopping me from just changing some aspects of the mechnics or rules to make it something that it "technicly" new?

Jacob I. said: But what is stopping me from just changing some aspects of the mechnics or rules to make it something that it "technicly" new? It gets into how much you want to risk a letter from lawyers. If you make something "different enough" you will likely be okay, but if you have any real concerns, you should seek legal advice and be open to changing parts if notified they are not in compliance. In general, do not copy anything directly unless it is part of a product covered by the OGL. Such a product will state what things have been made available for use. In the case of the SRD, all the rules content in that document is available to use in your own OGL product.