Win Up to $2K In Chaosium's Design Challenge

A total of over $10,000 in cash prizes is being offered by Call of Cthulhu publisher Chaosium as part of it's Basic Roleplaying Design Challenge.

New and upcoming creators are invited to submit a pitch, budget, outline, market analyses, and selling points of a proposed news game using BRP, the Basic Roleplaying game engine, as well as a draft of the game and any art. The entrants retain ownership of their work and are free to publish their game themselves.

Up to 10 people will be shortlisted and win $500 each. Of these 3 winners will win another $2,000.

Submission close on May 31st.

 

[Anon Adderlan]

After reading both the ORC license and FAQ I'm apparently completely wrong, as it requires an explicit license statement:

III. Required Notice. The grant of this ORC License to You is expressly conditioned on You including the notice statements described in subsections (a)–(d) below in a reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Used the Licensed Material:​

So the original IP holder can add to their work however they please, but any third party would have to license all their mechanics under the ORC. Unless they don't include the required notice, in which case they just need to make sure their mechanical implementations don't violate copyright. But if the contest requires the resulting game to be released under the ORC, then claiming the designers retain all rights is somewhat disingenuous.

 

[Michael O'Brien]

But if the contest requires the resulting game to be released under the ORC, then claiming the designers retain all rights is somewhat disingenuous.

As the BRP Design Challenge announcement clearly states: All entrants retain ownership of their work in its entirety. Chaosium does not require the signing over of rights of any kind in order to enter the BRP Design Challenge.

Participants in the BRP Design Challenge retain all rights to their own creations, whether they ultimately choose to go ahead with publication or not. We've made that emphatically clear because there are some RPG writing competitions out there that require entrants to sign away the rights to their work, merely for the privilege of submitting an entry. Not so with the BRP Design Challenge.

 

[Autumnal]

Adjusting to new licenses always takes me a while Just to see whether I’m envisioning the cosmic all correctly this time: doing a game with percentile stats or 1-20 skills and skills would be outside the scope of the ORC in this case, yes? I think it would, but since I’d like to be wrong, checking.

 

[Michael O'Brien]

Adjusting to new licenses always takes me a while Just to see whether I’m envisioning the cosmic all correctly this time: doing a game with percentile stats or 1-20 skills and skills would be outside the scope of the ORC in this case, yes? I think it would, but since I’d like to be wrong, checking.

We've released BRP under the the Open RPG Creative (ORC) license so it is available royalty-free for personal and commercial use. The scope of the ORC license itself covers all manner of games - d100, d20, dice pools, whatever, even board games.

For the BRP Design Challenge specifically, entrants need to base their games off the Basic Roleplaying rules engine, which is d100. Percentage stats are fine, that's a variation on BRP. Where you said "1-20 skills" though, did you mean 1-20 levels? If so, no - "levels" as a game mechanic (e.g. D&D) are not part of BRP.

 

[Autumnal]

Sorry for being unclear. I was thinking of Pendragon skills, not anything D&D.

 

[Michael O'Brien]

Sorry for being unclear. I was thinking of Pendragon skills, not anything D&D.

Yes, Pendragon-like skills derive from BRP, so all good.

 

[Autumnal]

Okay, thank you very much! And apologies for any Spot Obvious failings on my part.