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)

 

[mamba]

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?

PF: no, PF2: no, that is why they are reworking it now, to get rid of the OGL parts so the new 'edition' can be fully covered by ORC

 

[mamba]

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.

If they release D&D content under ORC, I doubt WotC cares. What matters is what RPG the product is for, not which license it uses (apart from being closed vs OGL / CC / ORC)

 

[MonsterEnvy]

I don’t think there is anything stopping someone from releasing stuff under multiple different licenses.

 

[kenmarable]

I don’t think there is anything stopping someone from releasing stuff under multiple different licenses.

Correct. They just have to VERY careful about what sources they use if they are reusing content. For example, I’m planning on releasing multiple versions of the stuff I’m working on for different licenses & games. But I need to triple check not to mingle OGL and ORC content. If it’s a standalone game, however, then that is much easier to do.

 

[Morrus]

You know all this better than I do;

I do. With respect, I disagree with everything you said.

 

[Morrus]

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?

Paizo spearheaded this.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Correct. They just have to VERY careful about what sources they use if they are reusing content. For example, I’m planning on releasing multiple versions of the stuff I’m working on for different licenses & games. But I need to triple check not to mingle OGL and ORC content. If it’s a standalone game, however, then that is much easier to do.

Could you not mingle as well?

 

[Morrus]

. But I need to triple check not to mingle OGL and ORC content. If it’s a standalone game, however, then that is much easier to do.

Just make a (SRD) document with the stuff you want to release and make that OGL, CC, and ORC. If it's not in hour SRD it's not open.That's what we did.

 

[kenmarable]

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.

As others have said, other publishers not using the CC-BY 5e license has no impact whatsoever on WotC's bottom line. However, I think you might be saying something more like lack of use of WotC's CC-BY content is an indirect barometer for how robust the third party market is which is an indirect barometer for how WotC is doing. IF that is indeed what you are saying, then maaaaaybe there is some correlation there but there are far better, less indirect ways to us to tell how WotC and D&D is doing. So it's not a really useful indicator at all.

 

[kenmarable]

Could you not mingle as well?

No, you cannot mingle them. I wish you could, but there's no legal way to do that. If you use another publisher's OGL content, you cannot publish it under ORC. Same if you use another publisher's ORC content, you cannot publish it under the OGL. As a downstream publisher, the licenses are incompatible.