I am a lazy GM and I rely a lot on published adventures. Particularly shorter ones: I get a lot of pleasure from tweaking and arranging them into a coherent narrative frame for a campaign.
I've been playing a long time and have a lot of material from old magazines that are no longer published (or no longer feature RPG content) such as White Dwarf, Imagine and Dungeon, mostly from the early 90's.
I have started to take some of my favourites and convert them to 5e. However, it seems a shame (as well as a demotivation factor) to do this just for me. I'd like to post them online for free, for others to use. Especially given the relative dearth of quality 5e material at the moment.
AFAIK this is illegal. Copyright still exists on these articles, although I'm unsure whether it belongs to author or publisher (or both). I can't forsee any way in which the rights holders would end up using or being able to profit from the material. But GW in particular has shown this is no barrier to being litigious.
Is there anything I can do to make this material available for free, without getting myself slapped with takedown notices or otherwise infringing copyright issues? Would it be enough to perhaps change cosmetic details like settings or names while leaving the core narrative intact? Ideally I'd like to credit the original author, but might that increase the chance of landing myself in hot water?
For clarification, what I was hoping to do was retain descriptive text, narrative and maps from the old adventures, but replace stat blocks with mentions of 5e creatures that can be found in the Monster Manual. Because the balance of encounters has changed, it's not as simple as replacing four 1e kobolds with four 5e kobolds. Not to mention more substantive changes to classes, races, skills and spells.
Best Answer
While I'm not a lawyer, I'd suspect that part of your liability here is determined by the method you do the 5e updates. Are you talking about republishing them, including maps and flavor text? If so, I'd be very cautious, especially given WotC's proclivity to shut down 3rd party resources for older versions of the game.
However, a simple listing of changes gives you a much larger footing here. Many of these changes should revolve around monster and trap changes, so I'm thinking something like
and etc.
While Wizards might still send you a cease and desist, it seems an awful lot less likely. The maps and original text are almost certainly under copyright, so I'd be extremely cautious about republishing them.