Gnoll Overseer Terms of Service

Last updated: 18 October 2026

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of Gnoll Overseer (the "Service"), an optional artificial intelligence (AI) chat assistant provided by Hyvän mielen pelit ry, operating in English as Sound Mind Games ("we", "us", or "our"). The Service is accessible through the GnollHack video game client and via our web interface at overseer.gnollhack.com.

By accessing or using Gnoll Overseer, you agree to be bound by these Terms, our Gnoll Overseer Privacy Policy, and our Overseer AI Providers disclosures. If you do not agree to these Terms, do not use the Service.

1. Plain-Language Summary

To make these Terms as easy to understand as possible, here is a summary of the core rules. The full legal terms below control in the event of any conflict, but in short:

• GnollHack Only: Gnoll Overseer exists solely to help you play and understand the game GnollHack. Do not use it as a general-purpose AI assistant for unrelated tasks (such as general coding, schoolwork, writing, or non-GnollHack questions).
• No Illegal Use: You must never use the Service for any illegal purpose or to generate unlawful, harmful, or abusive content.
• Fair Use Only — Do Not Drain Our Credits: We pay third-party AI providers for every message sent using our system models so that players can enjoy the assistant for free. Normal gameplay questions are welcome ("Fair Use"), but excessive, automated, or abusive usage designed or likely to exhaust our API credits or drive up our costs is strictly prohibited.
• We Can Suspend or Ban Abusive Accounts: If you break these rules, use the chat for non-GnollHack topics, act illegally, or abuse our API credits, we may rate-limit, suspend, or permanently ban your account at any time.
• AI Can Make Mistakes: AI responses are generated automatically and may be inaccurate. The Service is provided "as is" without warranties.

2. Eligibility and Account Responsibility

• Age Requirement: You must be at least 13 years of age (or the minimum age required by law in your country to consent to the use of online and AI services without parental approval) to use the Service. If you are under 18 (or the age of legal majority in your jurisdiction), you may use the Service only with the consent and supervision of a parent or legal guardian who agrees to these Terms.
• GnollHack Account: Accessing the Service requires a valid GnollHack account. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your login credentials and for all activity that occurs under your account. You may not share your account credentials with others or allow third parties to access the Service through your account.
• One Person, One Account for Quotas: You may not create or use multiple accounts to bypass rate limits, usage quotas, cooldowns, or account bans.

3. Permitted Use: Strictly Limited to GnollHack Assistance

Gnoll Overseer is a specialized companion service provided exclusively to assist players with GnollHack (including its gameplay mechanics, items, monsters, dungeons, strategy, lore, user interface, troubleshooting, and underlying NetHack heritage as it relates to GnollHack).

• Permitted Use: You may use the Service only to ask questions, analyze in-game snapshots, and receive assistance directly related to playing or understanding GnollHack.
• Prohibition on Unrelated Use: You are strictly prohibited from using Gnoll Overseer for any purpose other than GnollHack assistance. Prohibited off-topic uses include, without limitation:
  • Using the Service as a general-purpose chatbot, search engine, or productivity tool;
  • Generating, debugging, or translating software code unrelated to GnollHack;
  • Drafting essays, academic assignments, business emails, marketing copy, or creative writing unrelated to GnollHack;
  • Engaging in general roleplay, companionship chat, or open-ended conversation outside the context of GnollHack gameplay assistance; and
  • Seeking advice or information on non-GnollHack topics (such as mathematics, science, politics, current events, finance, medicine, or law).

4. Fair Use Policy and Protection of API Credits

As a non-profit organization, we fund system-provided AI models out of our own budget so that the GnollHack community can use Gnoll Overseer free of charge. Every prompt, attachment, tool call, and response processed by our system models consumes paid API credits from third-party providers.

4.1. Fair Use Permitted

Legitimate, human-paced use of the Service for genuine GnollHack gameplay assistance within reasonable volumes is permitted and encouraged ("Fair Use").

4.2. Prohibition on Excessive Use and Resource Exhaustion

You must not engage in excessive, unreasonable, or abusive use of the Service, whether intended to deplete our API credits, inflate our operating costs, degrade service performance, or otherwise burden our infrastructure. Specifically, you must not:

• Attempt Credit Exhaustion ("Denial-of-Wallet"): Intentionally or recklessly send high-volume, repetitive, or artificially inflated prompts, attachments, or conversation histories with the purpose or effect of consuming excessive tokens or exhausting our API credit balances;
• Use Automation or Bots: Access or query the Service through any automated means, including scripts, bots, crawlers, scrapers, macros, browser extensions, or unattended loops;
• Circumvent Quotas or Limits: Bypass, disable, or interfere with any rate limits, token limits, daily or monthly quotas, session limits, or concurrency restrictions implemented by the Service;
• Abuse Expensive Models or Features: Repeatedly invoke high-cost reasoning modes, web searches, or tool iterations for trivial, repetitive, or bad-faith queries; or
• Proxy or Resell Access: Route requests from other users, applications, or services through your GnollHack account.

4.3. Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

If you configure the Service to use your own personal third-party AI API key ("BYOK"), token generation costs for requests made using that key are billed directly to your account with that third-party provider. However, all other provisions of these Terms — including the prohibition on illegal use, the prohibition on server infrastructure abuse, and all content safety rules — continue to apply in full.

5. Prohibition on Illegal Use and Acceptable Conduct

You may use the Service only for lawful purposes and in accordance with these Terms. You agree not to use the Service:

• For Any Illegal Purpose: In any way that violates any applicable federal, state, local, or international law or regulation (including, without limitation, the laws of the United States, the European Union, Finland, and the jurisdiction in which you reside);
• For Harmful or Dangerous Activities: To generate, promote, facilitate, or request content involving child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSAE), suicide or self-harm encouragement, cyberattacks, malware creation, illegal weapons, violence, terrorism, harassment, doxxing, or fraud;
• To Infringe Rights: To upload, transmit, or generate content that infringes upon any copyright, trademark, trade secret, privacy right, or other intellectual property or proprietary right of any party;
• To Attack or Manipulate the Service (Prompt Injection and Jailbreaking): To perform adversarial attacks against the AI or our servers, including prompt injection, jailbreaking, attempting to override or extract hidden system prompts, manipulating tool-calling functions to access unauthorized files or network resources, or attempting to bypass content safety filters;
• To Compromise Security: To upload files or inputs containing viruses, trojans, worms, malicious markup, or other harmful code, or to probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service or its underlying server infrastructure; or
• To Violate Third-Party AI Provider Policies: In any manner that contravenes the terms of service, usage policies, or safety guidelines of the third-party AI providers that power the Service (OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google), which are linked in Overseer AI Providers.

6. Monitoring, Enforcement, and Right to Ban Users

We reserve the full right to protect the integrity, legality, and financial sustainability of the Service.

• Right to Restrict, Suspend, or Ban: We may, in our sole and absolute discretion, with or without prior notice or warning, rate-limit, restrict, suspend, or permanently ban your access to Gnoll Overseer or terminate your GnollHack account entirely if we reasonably believe that you have:
  • Used the Service for any illegal purpose or in violation of applicable law;
  • Used the Service for topics or tasks other than GnollHack assistance;
  • Engaged in excessive or abusive usage that wastes API credits, threatens our budget, or exceeds Fair Use;
  • Attempted to jailbreak, manipulate, or attack the Service; or
  • Otherwise violated any provision of these Terms.
• Automated and Manual Controls: We may impose, modify, or lower token quotas, rate limits, model availability, or feature access at any time, either globally or for specific accounts, to manage API costs and prevent abuse.
• Abuse Review: While your conversations are private to your account during normal operation as described in the Gnoll Overseer Privacy Policy, you acknowledge and agree that our authorized administrators and automated systems may monitor token consumption metrics, error logs, safety filter triggers, and, where abuse, illegal activity, or a Terms violation is suspected or reported, review the relevant session metadata and prompts to investigate and enforce these Terms.
• No Compensation Upon Termination: Because the Service is provided free of charge, you are not entitled to any refund, credit, or compensation of any kind if your access to the Service or your GnollHack account is limited, suspended, or banned.

7. Nature of AI Output and Disclaimers

• Probabilistic and Fallible Output: Gnoll Overseer uses generative artificial intelligence models operated by third-party providers. AI systems generate responses probabilistically and may produce information that is inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, or entirely fabricated ("hallucinations"), even when searching game data or documentation. We do not warrant or guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any response provided by the Service.
• No Professional Advice: All outputs from the Service are provided strictly for video game entertainment and informational assistance regarding GnollHack. Nothing generated by the Service constitutes legal, medical, psychological, financial, or other professional advice. You must not rely on the Service for any real-world decision-making.
• Third-Party Processing: As detailed in Overseer AI Providers and the Gnoll Overseer Privacy Policy, your prompts, conversation history, and attached game context are transmitted to third-party AI providers (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google) to generate responses. We are not responsible for the independent acts, omissions, downtime, or policy changes of those third-party providers.

8. Intellectual Property and User Content

• Your Inputs and Outputs: As between you and us, and to the extent permitted by applicable law and the terms of the underlying third-party AI providers, you retain any rights you hold in the original prompts and game snapshots you submit to the Service ("Inputs"), and we claim no ownership over the responses generated for you by the Service ("Outputs"). Due to the nature of machine learning, Outputs may not be unique across users.
• License to Operate the Service: By submitting Inputs to the Service, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, process, transmit (including to third-party AI providers), and display your Inputs and Outputs solely as necessary to provide, secure, maintain, and enforce the Service in accordance with our Gnoll Overseer Privacy Policy.
• Our Intellectual Property: The GnollHack name, the Gnoll Overseer name and branding, the Service interface, system prompts, knowledge base articles, and wiki content remain the exclusive property of Hyvän mielen pelit ry and its licensors.

9. Service Availability and Modifications

Gnoll Overseer is an optional, complimentary feature. We reserve the right to modify, update, pause, restrict, or permanently discontinue the Service (or any specific AI model, provider, or feature within the Service) at any time, temporarily or permanently, with or without notice, and without any liability to you.

10. Disclaimer of Warranties

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE SERVICE AND ALL AI-GENERATED OUTPUTS ARE PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY. HYVÄN MIELEN PELIT RY EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, ACCURACY, QUIET ENJOYMENT, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, ERROR-FREE, OR FREE OF HARMFUL COMPONENTS, OR THAT ANY AI OUTPUT WILL BE ACCURATE, SAFE, OR RELIABLE.

11. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW:

• Exclusion of Indirect Damages: IN NO EVENT SHALL HYVÄN MIELEN PELIT RY, ITS BOARD MEMBERS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, VOLUNTEERS, CONTRIBUTORS, OR AFFILIATES BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, DATA, GOODWILL, OR GAME PROGRESS, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR ACCESS TO OR USE OF (OR INABILITY TO ACCESS OR USE) THE SERVICE OR ANY AI OUTPUT, WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STATUTE, OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
• Cap on Total Liability: IN NO EVENT SHALL OUR AGGREGATE LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE TOTAL AMOUNT PAID BY YOU TO US SPECIFICALLY FOR ACCESS TO THE GNOLL OVERSEER SERVICE IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) TEN UNITED STATES DOLLARS (USD 10.00).

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation or exclusion of liability for incidental or consequential damages. Accordingly, some of the limitations in Sections 10 and 11 may not apply to you to the extent prohibited by mandatory applicable law.

12. Indemnification

To the maximum extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Hyvän mielen pelit ry, its officers, board members, volunteers, contributors, and affiliates from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees and API provider charges or penalties) arising from or related to: (a) your access to or use of the Service; (b) your violation of any provision of these Terms, including excessive or abusive API credit consumption; (c) your violation of any applicable law or the rights of any third party; or (d) any Inputs you submit to the Service.

13. Governing Law, Dispute Resolution, and International Use

• Global Service with United States and Finnish Legal Framework: The Service is operated by Hyvän mielen pelit ry (a non-profit association registered in Finland) and hosted on server infrastructure located in the United States for a global audience.
• Governing Law: If you reside in the United States, these Terms and any dispute arising out of or relating to the Service shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the federal laws of the United States and the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to its conflict of law principles. If you reside outside the United States, these Terms shall be governed by the laws of Finland, without regard to conflict of law principles, except that if you are a consumer residing in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction with mandatory consumer protection laws, nothing in these Terms deprives you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence.
• Informal Resolution First: Before initiating any formal legal proceeding, you agree to contact us at gnollhack@hyvanmielenpelit.fi and provide a written description of the dispute and your account username so that both parties may attempt in good faith to resolve the matter informally for at least thirty (30) days.
• Export and Sanctions Compliance: You represent and warrant that you are not located in a country that is subject to a United States Government or European Union embargo, and that you are not listed on any United States Government or European Union list of prohibited or restricted parties.

14. General Provisions

• Changes to These Terms: We may revise these Terms from time to time. When we make changes, we will update the "Last Updated" date at the top of this page. Your continued use of the Service after the updated Terms are posted constitutes your acceptance of the revised Terms.
• Severability: If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable by a court of competent jurisdiction, that provision shall be enforced to the maximum extent permissible and the remaining provisions of these Terms shall remain in full force and effect.
• No Waiver: Our failure or delay in exercising any right, power, or remedy under these Terms (such as not immediately banning an account upon a violation) shall not operate as a waiver of that or any other right.
• Entire Agreement: These Terms, together with the Gnoll Overseer Privacy Policy, Overseer AI Providers, and GnollHack Account Privacy Policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding your use of the Gnoll Overseer Service.

15. Contact Information

If you have any questions about these Terms of Service, please contact us at:

• Organization: Hyvän mielen pelit ry (Sound Mind Games)
• Email: gnollhack@hyvanmielenpelit.fi