Bethesda investigates accusations of plagiarism with his Elsweyr board game

If you were hoping to get a head start on your Elsweyr adventures by playing the paper version of the Elder Scrolls game, you may have to wait a little longer. Dungeons & Dragons writer Paige Leitman has launched a charge of plagiarism against the company, thanks in part to a tweet about a PnP campaign led by a group from Bethesda Netherlands. Leitman compares his original D & D adventure in 2016, "The Black Road", to the employee-driven campaign.

"Hey, Elder Scrolls Online, could you please inform your legal team?" Leitman said in a Facebook post now deleted. "It's REALLY not cool."

To be fair, Reddit has an article that says it was a fun game played internally by employees of Bethesda Netherlands and that it had never been designed to be an "official" publication ( Thank you Dragnelus!):

The only official thing about this is that someone at TESOnline has heard of some employees of Bethesda NL playing a modified one-shot DnD 5th, he thought that it was cool and l & # 39; 39, shared. The guy who "created" it (by simply changing the label of an existing campaign) probably did not expect it to sort of out of his circle of players. I mean, the link was a Dropbox folder. Bethesda did not spend time and resources, then "published" an RPG claiming that it was theirs. TESOnline's Twitter account manager thought he was sharing something cool. Of course it's embarrassing, but that's about it all.

ArsTechnica has several examples comparing the work of D & D with the Elsweyr board game, including excerpts from a presentation by Leitman that shows more than a few word-for-word comparisons between his original work and the Elsweyr game. Here is an example:

Some sections change the text a little or some names have been changed, but otherwise, much of the text is a word-for-word copy. In fact, an NPC name is exactly the same.

Bethesda has since fired all gambling resources pending his inquiry into Bethesda Netherlands where he was produced. For her part, Leitman is looking for excuses, although she does not make any other statements for the moment. "We made enough noise and the good people probably have noticed it now and I will see what they do," she wrote.

We shot an earlier shared ESO RPG adventure while we searched for the source. Thank you to those who have had concerns.

– The Elder Scrolls Online (@TESOnline) May 8, 2019

We will keep you informed of the evolution of history.

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Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr will be launched in June.