#LehrerJam

Last year, mathematician and satirical musician Tom Lehrer made all of his songs and lyrics freely available via a dedicated website which contains the lyrics and sheet music, and some of Tom's witty introductions and intermissions as well.

These songs are wildly variable, covering an enormous range of genres, moods, and topics, from Be Prepared, a song about the Boy Scouts of America, through The Vatican Rag, a jolly ragtime song lampooning Catholicism, to The Elements Song, which "may prove useful to some of you some day, perhaps, in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances."

Tom Lehrer has never taken his musical work particularly seriously; see for example  where he says: "I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know; I could be making, oh, $3000 a year teaching." So, I guess, what better way to play with this enormous and wonderful resource than to turn it into indie games of all kinds.

So take lyrics, take music and midi-fy it, take some of the spoken introductions or intermissions, and take inspiration from Tom Lehrer to make your indie tabletop roleplaying game, or any other kind of game, and submit it here! Join the community and tell us about your creations! Use the hashtag #LehrerJam if you promote your game on Twitter!

For the record, here's the official statement from Tom Lehrer about this body of work:

DISCLAIMER STATEMENT
I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2000, hereby grant the following permission:
All the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else.
Some lyrics written by me to copyrighted music by others are included herein, but of course such music may not be used without permission of the copyright owners. (The translated songs may be found in their original languages on YouTube.)
The music of all the songs on this website that were written by me may also be downloaded and used as described above.
In other words, all the lyrics herein and all the music herein that was written by me should be treated as though they were in the public domain.
In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music and publish or perform their versions or parodies or distortions of these lyrics without fear of legal action.
(There is no legal way to unilaterally transfer a song into the public domain, so this disclaimer is intended as an end run around the copyright laws.)