It's been a while!
Since Wizards of the Coast tried, briefly, to get rid of the Open Game License a couple of years ago, it's been in the back of my mind to put together a new version of Orcus that could be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license instead (and therefore be cross-compatible with the ORC license and any games like Pathfinder 2e released under that license).
As well as getting away from the fraught OGL, this move would also fix one big complaint about the original Orcus: it has a Section 15 of sources that's several pages long. Most of those sources had nothing to do with the game, they just got picked up from the sources I did use (
13th Age, Pathfinder 2e, Goodman Games' 4e adventures, etc).
I've been brainstorming character content on RPGnet, but in the meantime I wanted so share something probably more interesting for those with their own 4E hacks and variants in mind:
Orcus Basic Rules under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Version 0.1 -- a very rough draft!
Download
the PDF from GitHub.
You'll see that this is essentially the 5E SRD, revised to cover the Orcus/4E rules. In some ways it's unexciting -- we've seen it all before -- but on the other hand it's all you need to make your own hacks of 4E and its imitators or to play with existing 4E content.
And since it's Creative Commons licensed, it can plug into Pathfinder 2E and other ORC licensed content (provided what emerges is ALSO ORC licensed) or into the whole world of Creative Commons BY and BY-SA licensed content out there.
Let me know what you think -- is it missing anything important?
