To promote the upcoming Elsweyr expansion of the MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online, Bethesda released a free tabletop adventure. However, this had to be taken offline due to plagiarism allegations.
What did Bethesda release? For promotional purposes, a short English-language tabletop adventure was released for free as a PDF. In this adventure, players must protect a caravan traveling through the desert of Elsweyr that is transporting a valuable statue.
The adventure is intended as a prelude to the Elsweyr addon for the MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online.
Unmistakable Similarities
What happened next? The rules of the adventure are based on an open-source version of the D&D system, which is completely legal and legitimate. However, there were numerous complaints that this adventure closely resembles a tabletop module from Dungeons & Dragons. In “The Black Road” from 2016, players also escort a caravan through the desert.
That alone might not have been the decisive point, but many elements in the modules are very similar:
- It involves four wagons in the caravan.
- One of the wagons carries food, one water and medicine, one weapons, and one the statue.
- The caravan travels in two shifts.
- The description of the scene is almost identical with some exchanged words or rearranged sentences.
What else is similar? In the D&D version, it says excerpted in English:
“There’s nothing like the desert to make people feel small and insignificant. In every direction, huge dunes roll across the landscape, and an even bigger sky looms above. The oasis of Vuerthyl is a motley collection of sun-bleached tents in the vast Anauroch desert.”
The Elsweyr version begins like this:
“Nothing beats the desert to make people feel small and unimportant. In every direction enormous dunes roll across the landscape, and an even larger empty air skies above it. The oasis on the border between Cyrodiil and Elsweyr is a colorful collection of sun-drenched tents in the vast desert of Elsweyr.”
Even the encounters with the monsters play out very similarly, except that the creatures themselves were exchanged. In the D&D module, goblins attack the caravan; in the Elsweyr adventure, it is bandits.
The adventure module has been removed
Who created the D&D module? The original adventure was written by
Paige Leitman and Ben Heisler for the 5th edition of D&D. The one for The Elder Scrolls Online was written by Karrym Herbar. According to Bethesda, the ESO module was written by the “friends at Bethesda Netherlands.”
This is what came of the Pen&Paper module for ESO: Author Paige Leitman saw the adventure and said:
“Hey, The Elder Scrolls Online, would you please inform your legal department? That is REALLY not cool.”
Bethesda then quickly took the adventure offline. Investigations are now to be conducted to see what happened here and from whom the “plagiarism” actually originated.
