Just some clarification regarding the rules (also will begin work on updating sheet and leaderboard in a bit):
I forgot to answer this question last night:
Some things, like hobbits from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings or beholders from Dungeons and Dragons, have become very generalized in fantasy or RPG tropes. Those are still technically copyrighted forms of media.
For things like those, that started out from one specific media but ended up becoming more of a general concept, I won’t award points unless it’s a reference to a specific depiction of it from some media (for example, the beholder in Realm doesn’t quite look the same as the beholder from D&D, so it might not be a reference specifically to D&D and just be using a well-known fantasy enemy. But maybe there is something out there that looks strikingly similar to the RotMG beholder that influence might have been taken from? Who knows). I think this is more or less consistent with how I’ve been giving out points, but if there’s an inconsistency somewhere in the point system let me know.
I changed my mind on this, I think I will count references such like that for points. The leaderboard has been retroactively updated.
Another question that was asked not in the thread, paraphrased: "Since Belladonna and deadly nightshade counted as a reference, what about things like lamps in RotMG referencing lamps IRL for example?"
My answer to that is that "trivial" references to real life objects aren't counted.
As an example, sand in the Realm is technically referencing sand in real life. But it's a trivial reference. It doesn't serve as cool trivia, it doesn't play with the concept of sand, it's just literally the real-life concept of sand but applied to RotMG to serve as a ground tile because they needed something there.
However, the deadly nightshade plant in real life was not made by Dr. Terrible, nor does it fire its berries at you or summon insta-pop buds. It draws ideas from the deadly nightshade plant in real life, but it's not a 1:1 translation.
There's also the subjective meter of how obscure something is. Pretty much everyone knows what sand is. Not everyone has heard of the deadly nightshade.
This is a bit hard to describe but hopefully you get the gist, I wasn't expecting people to dig at the edge cases so much but that's alright.
ok @IYN is getting entered into the leaderboard whether he wants to be there or not ,