The Final Open RPG Creator (ORC) License Is Here!

After several drafts and feedback rounds, Azora Law has announced the final version of the Open RPG Creative license. The license is now ready for use!

• ORC License FINAL
• ORC Answers & Explanations

The new license was created as a response to the 'OGL crisis' earlier this year, when Wizards of the Coast announced its intention to attempt to 'deauthorize' the Open Gaming License. While WotC eventually reversed course on that plan, and then released the core of Dungeons & Dragons 5E into Creative Commons, the ORC license--spearheaded by Paizo and Azora Law--forged ahead. This license is designed to be completely irrevocable.

Some features of the license:

• Mechanics are expressly made 'Licensed Material' (their term for 'open' content which can be freely used).
• Trademarks, lore, art etc. are 'Reserved Material' (not open and cannot be freely used) but can be designated by the creator as 'Expressly Designated Licensed Material' and shared.
• You don't have to include a copy of the license in your product, but you do need to include an 'ORC Notice' which notes attribution, reserved material, and expressly designated licensed material.

The license has been submitted to the US Library of Congress; this doesn't give them control over it in any way, it simply ensures that the original is safely and indisputably stored somewhere in case there's a dispute over the content of the license. Given that the license will no doubt be found in many places on the internet (including this thread), it's mainly a redundancy measure.

For my (and EN Publishing's part) we today added ORC to the OGL and CC licenses which the full What's OLD is NEW rules are released under at woinrules.com, and will be doing so with Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition shortly at a5esrd.com.

The ORC License and accompanying ORC AxE (Answers and Explanations) document are now final and ready to be used by game publishers large and small. The public commentary portion of this process is now complete, and there will be no further changes with one small exception. The final text of the ORC License and ORC AxE have been submitted to the Library of Congress for copyright registration. As soon as copyright registration issues, the ORC License and AxE will be updated solely by insertion of the US Copyright registration number, which we expect will be ready in about six months. In the meantime, publishers are free to begin using the ORC License right now. No other elements of this document will be changing in the future.

I am deeply grateful to the army of collaborators that gave us incredibly useful guidance in drafting and refining this and coming up with bugs and edge cases that made the final product vastly better could otherwise have been produced.

This license strives to create a system-agnostic, perpetual, incorruptible, and irrevocable open gaming license that provides a legal “safe harbor” for sharing rules mechanics and encourages collaboration and innovation in the tabletop gaming space. It is also company agnostic and no organization, company, law firm, or individual has the power or political influence to corrupt or bend this agreement to their need.

Ask Questions:

If you are at Gen Con, please come to SEM23ND240468 to ask me or one of the other key stakeholders your questions about the ORC license.

Get CLE Credits at Gen Con:

For the lawyers, the Indiana State Bar has requested I put together a CLE on Thursday of Gen Con. You should be able to take this for Continuing Legal Education credits in your state. Please reach out to me if you are interested.

Thank you for entrusting me to work on this for you and I hope it serves the gaming community and the best interests of gamers everywhere for decades to come.

(from Brian Lewis, Azora Law)

 

[ngenius]

Submitted to the US Library of Congress. An historic artifact now.

 

[Thanlis]

Submitted to the US Library of Congress. An historic artifact now.

To be fair, that’s just the copyright process. Lots of stuff gets copyrighted.

 

[doctorhook]

I’m excited by this, but I’m also not a lawyer or publisher, so most of the details are lost on me. It really seems like 5E going to Creative Commons took a lot of the impact out of this project, but choices and redundancy in the world of open gaming are probably still a good thing

 

[Incenjucar]

I'm quite excited about this. Competition drives innovation.

 

[GMMichael]

Help me out, since I'm only a rules lawyer. Can Pathfinder utilize this, given that it was already utilizing WotC's OGL? What about PF2?

I'm quite excited about this. Competition drives innovation.

Looks like cooperation to me. What does that do for innovation?

 

[Incenjucar]

Help me out, since I'm only a rules lawyer. Can Pathfinder utilize this, given that it was already utilizing WotC's OGL? What about PF2?


Looks like cooperation to me. What does that do for innovation?

Pathfinder is revising/remastering 2E for ORC.

ORC is competing with other licenses, creating a differentiator between RPGs that provides further competition. It being a friendly and cooperative competition doesn't change that they're competing for customer money and attention.

 

[Morrus]

Pathfinder is revising/remastering 2E for ORC.

ORC is competing with other licenses, creating a differentiator between RPGs that provides further competition. It being a friendly and cooperative competition doesn't change that they're competing for customer money and attention.

Licenses don’t compete for money. Nobody gets paid when you use the OGL, CC, or ORC. In fact, nobody even knows if you use them. And nobody owns ORC—it has been placed in the public domain.

 

[Incenjucar]

Licenses don’t compete for money. Nobody gets paid when you use the OGL, CC, or ORC. In fact, nobody even knows if you use them. And nobody owns ORC—it has been placed in the public domain.

Right, but they create differentiation between products which do generally make money. Licenses compete for usage and mindshare, which generally favors the goals of those who created the license, financial or otherwise, hence the OGL's previous value to WotC. If everyone uses ORC and nobody uses WotC's creative commons content that is likely to impact WotC's bottom line even though they don't make any money from it being used, because it likely means their brand is less attractive.

You know all this better than I do; I think there's been a communication failure on my part.

 

[timbannock]

It'll be interesting to see what SRDs will be the first to go with ORC licensing. What will set the baseline for the future?

As someone publishing under the OGL, the huge backlog of material is extremely helpful. It is also daunting and sometimes problematic, not only simply because WOTC could do something stupid with it in the future, but more often because publishers didn't correctly handle their Product Identity versus Open Content legal parts. (I know I messed up mine a couple times and had to fix it, so I'm by no means shaming people for that!)