Blog (A5E) A5ESRD: Core Rulebooks Now All Completed Making Biggest Open 5E SRD Available

We have finished uploading the full core rules (Adventurer’s Guide, Monstrous Menagerie, Trials & Treasures) to the Advanced 5th Edition System Reference Document. The rules content from these books is all released under the Open Gaming License, Creative Commons, and Open RPG Creative License. Third parties are able to use any of these licenses to access the full A5E ruleset and create their own compatible products.

The A5ESRD is the most complete 5E rules SRD available with over 1,200 pages of open content, which is nearly 3 times that contained in the core 5E SRD. It contains the full rules content of the game, and is a fully-featured, fully open, non-rescindible 5E SRD available under multiple licenses.

The next task will be Dungeon Delver’s Guide, after which we will start work on Gate Pass Gazette.

A5ESRD — Advanced 5E System Reference Document

a5esrd.com

 

[doctorhook]

Triumph! A critical success for this hobby!

 

[Nylanfs]

Okay, after digesting it for a bit more and re-reading the licenses and Legal Info section I have some questions.

And note I haven't been following the Level Up 5e stuff very closely so some of my points might seem very basic to those that have been following the project.

Levelup5e, and Advanced 5e both took the pure mechanics of 5e, and re-wrote the text describing those mechanics correct? This would give you copyright over the text in the A5ESRD. All well and good, you can then license this material under any number of licenses that you wish since you have the copyright.

WHY is your OGL Sec. 15 listing the following sources if that is the case? I have a feeling that this is a left-over copy & paste error.

System Reference Document. Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.; Authors Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, based on material by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.
System Reference Document 5.0 Copyright 2016, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.; Authors Mike Mearls, Jeremy Crawford, Chris Perkins, Rodney Thompson, Peter Lee, James Wyatt, Robert J. Schwalb, Bruce R. Cordell, Chris Sims, and Steve Townshend, based on original material by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Reference Document. © 2011, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Author: Paizo Publishing, LLC.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook. © 2009, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Author: Jason Bulmahn, based on material by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary. © 2009, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Author: Jason Bulmahn, based on material by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams.
Tome of Horrors. © 2002, Necromancer Games, Inc.; Authors: Scott Greene, with Clark Peterson, Erica Balsley, Kevin Baase, Casey Christofferson, Lance Hawvermale, Travis Hawvermale, Patrick Lawinger, and Bill Webb; Based on original content from TSR.

 

[lichmaster]

Outstanding work, guys!!

 

[Morrus]

Levelup5e, and Advanced 5e both took the pure mechanics of 5e, and re-wrote the text describing those mechanics correct?

We did a bit more than that.

 

[xiphumor]

Okay, after digesting it for a bit more and re-reading the licenses and Legal Info section I have some questions.

And note I haven't been following the Level Up 5e stuff very closely so some of my points might seem very basic to those that have been following the project.

Levelup5e, and Advanced 5e both took the pure mechanics of 5e, and re-wrote the text describing those mechanics correct? This would give you copyright over the text in the A5ESRD. All well and good, you can then license this material under any number of licenses that you wish since you have the copyright.

WHY is your OGL Sec. 15 listing the following sources if that is the case? I have a feeling that this is a left-over copy & paste error.

This seems like a better safe than sorry issue. There’s no disadvantage to listing these sources in Section 15, and a huge advantage: if anyone ever disagrees (incorrectly) about their copyright being protected original because they drew inspiration from several other places, they can just point them to the OGL Section 15 and shut down the conversation.

 

[doctorhook]

And note I haven't been following the Level Up 5e stuff very closely so some of my points might seem very basic to those that have been following the project.

Levelup5e, and Advanced 5e both took the pure mechanics of 5e, and re-wrote the text describing those mechanics correct?

No, it’s a pretty massive redo of 5E. There are new classes, almost every subclass is totally new, there are piles of mechanics in every class that are totally new in A5E. There are whole processes within character creation that have no analogue in 5E. The page count is, what, double, I think, (EDIT: Nope, quadruple!) compared to 5E’s core books—and most of that is crunch not fluff or worldbuilding.

A5E is basically a brand new game that happens to be compatible with 5E and uses similar themes.

EDIT: I thought I was overstating the scope of new content, but honestly I’m still understating them. A5E is HUGE, and virtually all of it is totally new.

 

[Morrus]

No, it’s a pretty massive redo of 5E.

Indeed. See 1,200 page SRD vs 300 page SRD!

 

[Nylanfs]

This seems like a better safe than sorry issue. There’s no disadvantage to listing these sources in Section 15, and a huge advantage: if anyone ever disagrees (incorrectly) about their copyright being protected original because they drew inspiration from several other places, they can just point them to the OGL Section 15 and shut down the conversation.

If this were a purely OGL product I would agree with you, but this is being offered under three different licenses. And the OGL and the ORC are "largely" incompatible with each other. They can be used in the same work, but you have to clearly delineate what is OGC (for the OGL), and what is Licensed Material (for the ORC).

If EN Publishing used other peoples copyrighted materials in their work, the A5ESRD, as is indicated by their Sec. 15 lines of the OGL. Then they can't release those same materials under another license, the CC-BY or the ORC. Because they don't have the original ownership of those materials.

Which is why I'm saying that the OGL Sec. 15 lines HAVE to be wrong (because EN Publishing re-wrote the copyrighted fluff for the mechanics).

Also @Morrus I noticed in the Legal information there's a typo. You state it's released under the OGL v1.01 and then you put in the v1.0a.

 

[Waller]

If EN Publishing used other peoples copyrighted materials in their work, the A5ESRD, as is indicated by their Sec. 15 lines of the OGL. Then they can't release those same materials under another license, the CC-BY or the ORC. Because they don't have the original ownership of those materials.

The OGL requires you to copy the full upstream s15 even if you don’t use content from those works. That’s why some Pathfinder 1E s15s are so long. It’s not that the book contains content from every one of those dozens of sources, it’s that you have to replicate the full s15 of any upstream source. So Bob’s Almanac of Striped Dragons might be included in that list even if the product has no striped dragons of any kind whatsoever.

 

[Larnievc]

View attachment 315644

We have finished uploading the full core rules (Adventurer’s Guide, Monstrous Menagerie, Trials & Treasures) to the Advanced 5th Edition System Reference Document. The rules content from these books is all released under the Open Gaming License, Creative Commons, and Open RPG Creative License. Third parties are able to use any of these licenses to access the full A5E ruleset and create their own compatible products.

The A5ESRD is the most complete 5E rules SRD available with over 1,200 pages of open content, which is nearly 3 times that contained in the core 5E SRD. It contains the full rules content of the game, and is a fully-featured, fully open, non-rescindible 5E SRD available under multiple licenses.

The next task will be Dungeon Delver’s Guide, after which we will start work on Gate Pass Gazette.

A5ESRD — Advanced 5E System Reference Document

a5esrd.com

Great news. And that’s a gorgeous pupper you have there