Homages

Homages

With thousands of years to human history and entertainment, it's inevitable that some character ideas will have similarities to something that has come before. It's even possible you want to take a few elements from another source and include them as spice for your own character or theme design. We're sympathetic to this, and wish to outline some guidelines for what we feel is acceptable in this regard.

Overall: We want you to go for 'nods' or 'homages' to a source, not a nearly complete copy thereof. You are welcome to take elements from a cool thing that you think others would enjoy as well, but we want to see a good faith effort to make your character or theme distinct from what it's paying tribute to.

Disclosure: If you are intentionally taking inspiration from another source, please admit it to us in your app. The following hypothetical example would be a good way to handle it, "(Name here) rides a red motorcycle and uses a Chinese spear as a nod to Lu Bu from China's Three Kingdoms history, who was reported to ride a red horse and wield such a weapon. However, I've made efforts to ensure my character's personality is significantly different from Lu Bu!"

Theme Adaptations: Sometimes a theme isn't acceptable for application here, and would require too many changes to still fit. Maybe you want to explore a variation of another story's major themes. Making an original theme to work around these issues can be perfectly acceptable in many cases. However, your theme write-up needs to tell us about these things. Something like "(theme name) has some intentional similarities to the original Star Trek TV series. This theme is meant to use exploration of the unknown as a social commentary, encouraging tolerance and diversity much as Star Trek did. Characters from (theme) tend to use magic wands that kind of look like Phasers from the show, as a subtle nod to this inspiration." We'll probably be okay with that.