Trivia / Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

• Dueling Works: Paizo Publishing, the former publisher of Dragon magazine, created the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game largely as a result of Wizards of the Coast declaring that the Open Gaming License would not apply to Fourth Edition. Pathfinder's First Edition ended up both outselling 4E and lasting several years longer.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The Open Game License was replaced during 4E with the Game System License, which required anybody making third-party materials for 4E to stop publication of OGL-based 3E materials in the same product line (this term was later repealed), and explicitly stated that Hasbro could terminate the license and force content developers to destroy their inventory at any time. This alienated third-party developers from switching from 3E, and even prompted the creation of Pathfinder.
• What Could Have Been:
  • When designing 4th edition D&D, the designers decided they wanted to do a Shout-Out to Narnia and the intelligent animal fantasy concept. So originally, the Dragonborn race from 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons was originally supposed to be a race of non-anthropomorphic talking lions based on Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia. The idea was dropped because of questions of how they would handle equipment and they were at first altered into dragons (since they believed Dungeons & Dragons should actually have dragons as a playable race) and then later into humanoid dragons called Dragonborn. (Of course, they weren't called the Dragonborn in the original concept.)