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)

 

[Incenjucar]

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.

I don't think me trying to further clarify or argue to defend my prior statements is going to do anyone any good, so let's just assume I have been correctly identified as incorrect unless a "power of brands" discussion comes up elsewhere at which point it's worth going into whether it was a communication error or not. Plenty of folks with more experience in the space to opine, besides.

 

[kenmarable]

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.

Guess I was too brief. I was talking about downstream publishers. Products like adventures, settings, etc. for multiple game systems - some of which are OGL and some are ORC (or even other licenses). This is what I'm working on - adventures for D&D, PF (esp before Remastered), A5E, etc.

I agree, SRDs are ideal for first party/upstream publishers, but not really an option once you get downstream, unfortunately.

 

[robertsconley]

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.

No they are not . Your work would be released under the OGL. You would declare any ORC related content as product identity. That OGL product identity would be usable under the ORC license. Fulfilling the requirement that a downstream OGL user can’t use product identity unless they have a separate license to do so.

So what about the fact licensed material includes all game mechanics as stated in I definitions section e?

If you read to the end it state explicitly that licensed material doesn’t include third party reserved material. What is third party licensed material? That is section K. What is anything that is you use under license that is not owned or controlled by the author.

So you can mix ORC and OGL content in the same work even if the OGL content are mechanics. But the burden on the writer is to clearly designate which is which. Which ORC and the OGL make clear that you has to do.

 

[kenmarable]

No they are not . Your work would be released under the OGL. You would declare any ORC related content as product identity. That OGL product identity would be usable under the ORC license. Fulfilling the requirement that a downstream OGL user can’t use product identity unless they have a separate license to do so.

So what about the fact licensed material includes all game mechanics as stated in I definitions section e?

If you read to the end it state explicitly that licensed material doesn’t include third party reserved material. What is third party licensed material? That is section K. What is anything that is you use under license that is not owned or controlled by the author.

So you can mix ORC and OGL content in the same work even if the OGL content are mechanics. But the burden on the writer is to clearly designate which is which. Which ORC and the OGL make clear that you has to do.

Seeing as how so many 3pp's can't even manage a simple OGL Section 15 properly, this sounds like a trainwreck in the making of further downstream products poisoning the OGL and ORC wells with incorrectly mingled content.

Even if it is a legally viable hack (and I'd certainly get a lawyer's opinion of it, especially since the lawyers who wrote the license don't think that would work), I don't trust other 3pp's enough to go anywhere near something that overly convoluted in licensing. I want my content to be easily reused by others.

 

[Alzrius]

Nice of them to make a CLE for this, even if only Indiana lawyers (as far as I know) will be able to use it.

 

[robertsconley]

Seeing as how so many 3pp's can't even manage a simple OGL Section 15 properly, this sounds like a trainwreck in the making of further downstream products poisoning the OGL and ORC wells with incorrectly mingled content.

Given the track record of the OGL and clearly marking open content, I doubt this is going to something will cause a stink. Anybody making a stink about somebody reusing mechanics will socially find themselves on the wrong side of the argument.

poisoning the OGL and ORC wells with incorrectly mingled content.

My prediction is that 2nd generation ORC products will be just as uncommon as 2nd generation OGL products. That is products that don't just rely on one of the primary SRD (d20 SRD, 5e SRD) but also on a 3rd Party SRD. My Basic Rules for the Majestic Fantasy RPG is a 2nd Generation work as I used Swords & Wizardry as a base and S&W uses the d20srd as a base.

Also it will be interesting to see what the Orc licensed version of Pathfinder 2e will look like. Whether it has the entire package of terms and mechanics as the OGL version. If turns out they have only a few tweaks like dropping a few monsters and spells but still have class, level, armor class, hit points, etc that will be one thing. If they kept the general idea of those mechanics but renamed them completely then that will be another.

Also I think another issue going forward is the intermingling of CC-BY and ORC content. We are in the midst of a lag period that will take a year or two to resolve before we see a significant amount of ORC open content. In the meantime, people who care about open content have been using CC-BY quite a bit. The amount of OGL and CC-BY open content is going to mean that the use of the Third Party Reserved Content provisions of ORC is going to be common.

Even if it is a legally viable hack (and I'd certainly get a lawyer's opinion of it, especially since the lawyers who wrote the license don't think that would work), I don't trust other 3pp's enough to go anywhere near something that overly convoluted in licensing. I want my content to be easily reused by others.

I consulted with an attorney when I signed a license agreement with Judges Guild and planned to OGL content (rules). As well as asking questions about releasing open content as part of a Judges Guild licensed product. The general gist was that I was in the clear if I clearly segregated the two and only use my original IP in the open content. Which I did in my Majestic Wilderlands supplement. The first half were rules related material that was open content. And the names and concepts I referred to were my original IP. The second half is where I used the Judges Guild IP I license where I describe the Majestic Wilderlands.

As for the Wilderland of High Fantasy remakes I made under license, I had to opt for a minimal declaration of open content, monsters, magic items, etc, as those were licensed remakes of Judges Guild IP. Like the original there were sections of rules and tables that were 100% Judges Guild original IP so those were definitely product identity.

Finally, these licenses are supposed to be used by lay people without going through the expense of hiring attorneys.

The problem I find is folks deliberately deciding not to honor the spirit of these licenses. Mostly because they can't shake the need to own everything they write. As well as the need to control everything based on their writing. The only reason they were dealing with the OGL was because of the dominance of d20 (in the 2000s) and 5e(in the late 2010s) systems in the market.

Just like RPG systems can fix bad referees, open content licenses can't fix bad actors. can only defang them.

If an author goes into writing a product with the intent of being open then a lot of these problems don't happen. The different types open content will be marked clearly and the product will be designed with this in mind.

 

[beta-ray]

Did WotC actually announce "its intention to attempt to 'deauthorize' the Open Gaming License"? They might have, but I forgot.

 

[kenmarable]

Did WotC actually announce "its intention to attempt to 'deauthorize' the Open Gaming License"? They might have, but I forgot.

They never denied the leaks about it being a part of the draft OGL 1.1, and in the draft OGL 1.2 that they publicly released, it is specifically mentioned in there (bottom of the second page).

 

[Morrus]

Did WotC actually announce "its intention to attempt to 'deauthorize' the Open Gaming License"? They might have, but I forgot.

Yes. Repeatedly.

 

[darjr]

@Morrus I see that the A5E SRD is under three licenses? Can you talk a bit about why, and why ORC?

Do we claim use under just one of those? Do we need to navigate all three?