Uncertain Gaming Licence 1.0a?

Wow, such sound and fury in our neck of the hobby. Many people are legit concerned about where this leaves the third-party publishing space. I’ll leave that to other forums.

However, it WAS my intent, in roughly two or three weeks, to launch a new product into the OSE space. It was going to be a book of 172 characters, with just enough interesting background to make them unique, and stats to let you play with them right away. Each will be statted out more like a PC than an NPC, with enough information to hand them to a new player as a pre-gen, or make them an interesting hireling, or whatever you want.

With nearly 200 of them, it becomes a real resource.

These were also going to come as 3.5×5″ cards, just like those I made for the Old-School Solos project:

That’s A Lot of Past Tense?

Yeah.

Here’s the thing, though. It may be much ado about nothing. WotC might leave OSR products alone and say “anything that’s before SRD5.1 we really don’t care. Have at it.” They might change direction entirely.

Or they might say “we’re taking our toys and going home.”

So plans had to change. And quickly.

What Now?

I still want to fully support Gavin, the 3pp community, and the fun, fast system(s) of which OSE is one. But even Necrotic Gnome and fish much larger than me are revamping plans.

So here’s what I’m going to do.

Worlds Without Number is Kevin Crawford’s fantasy RPG. It seems to occupy a nice space between the super-streamlined OSE and the … much heavier? … games such as Fifth Edition and Pathfinder.

It’s not published under the OGL at all. Kevin has more or less said “don’t muck with my IP, and the mechanics are not copyrightable,” and he doesn’t have the time or inclination to make a fuss if that’s what you’re doing. So there’s a vector that way. It’s also got a spiffy but slim skill and background system which will go very nicely with the material I have prepared already for this product. So that’s to the good.

Furthermore, if you look at the front of my card, it would be hard pressed to conclude that my product needs the OGL at all. MAYBE THAC0, but that’s an acronym and a single word, not part of a trademark. So that’s fine. Nothing else is other than either strict mechanics or my own property (the descriptions).

So I’m going to do a Both/And here.

I’m going to develop the product with both OSE and WWN in mind. A notional pledge will get you both PDFs right up until the point where someone says “you can’t do that” and makes it stick.

For physical, I think the cards can stay OSE and stay as-is. They’d be an add-on anyway, though of course for “just click once” I’d have them as part of a pledge. You’ll get to choose between book options (unless the OSE one has to go away because Evil is sweeping the land, etc).

But I think given how little exposure I feel (gulp) I have due to the nature of the product, I can charge forward. Look for a “follow me” link in a week or so, maybe.

Fire Sale?

Until then, as a bit of a “just in case…” I’ve got all of my D&Derived stuff on sale on my Shopify store at 33% off retail. If you missed this Kickstarter or if you want to check out my other items…first read the blog post below, then check out my store, if you would!

Another Fire Sale – 33% off my OGL-linked products

I intend to support whatever Gavin does – he’s just been That Cool in encouraging me to play in his sandbox. Until I know what he’s doing, I have to forge onward, and I’d appreciate any wind in my sails I can get from those who backed or were interested in this campaign.

Onward!

Too Much Panic?

Maybe. Some lawyerly folks I trust a lot are giving very skeptical eyes to where WotC is standing now. So with any luck, this will settle out fine, and all will continue on before, especially in the “before SRD 5.1” space. I hope this is the case. If it isn’t, I cannot just sit around and wait, so I plan for the bad-to-worst, hope for the best, and tuck my chin.