D101 Post-OGL Fiasco

This is where D101 Games stands after the fun and games of Wizard of the Coast’s announcements about the future of the Open Gaming License back in January. Short version, WoTC lost all trust in the 1.0a OGL that they’ve put their name to for the last twenty years, in a series of disastrous leaks and posts, before saying the 1.0a OGL will remain in place and releasing the current 5th Edition SRD that has 400 pages of D&D material, under the Creative Commons license.

D20 Games

We’ll have three branches of Fantasy d20.

An OSR branch will continue to be released under the OGL 1.0a, so that Crypts and Things, The Sorcerer Under the Mountain. – our OSR fantasy games and adventure modules (e.g. Road to Hell and a trio of adventures for TSUtM soon to be released) based on Swords and Wizardry will continue to be OGL 1.0a. This may change next year when Swords and Wizardry get its own OGL. From what I see, this will be a simple case of swooping out the WoTC OGL for the new S&W OGL, and doing a small number of changes necessary to comply with the new license.

A 5th edition branch currently has the standalone version of the Sorcerer Under the Mountain and will be joined shortly by Ruinous Jungles, Fire from Below and the Curse of the Emerald Swan. This is safe under the OGL1.0a, but I’ll be releasing these under the Creative Commons, which means I save a whole 2 pages 🙂

Beyond Dread Portals. This is our upcoming Fantasy game, which was originally built of the S&W SRD, hence 1.0a OGL, but its author Paul Mitchener went through the entire document and made it his own last month when the OGL fiasco blew up. So there is zero content from the S&W SRD now. There may be a SRD called Portals and Dragons (get it? :D), which will either be a stretch goal for the Kickstarter to fund BDP itself in April or a thing on its own in Q4 of this year.

Of the three branches, the Portals and Dragons branch will probably be the one that we will put most of our energy into going forward for D20 games. Simply put, I’ve had the most fun playing BDP recently. I’m already designing a Sci-Fi game heavily inspired by the Borderlands series of PC games (with a dash of Fallout and Doom) using this game engine.

D100 Games

Instead of the OGL, I’m using Creative Commons to release content via the OQ SRD. The full OpenQuest rulebooks and all its supplements and spin-offs won’t be released under the OGL in the future, or even need a copy of the OGL in them (read this full post on Openquest.com if you are interested in the reasons why).

If you’ve been following me closely over the last couple of years, you’ll know I’ve got plans for a lighter D100 game to power Skyraiders of the Floating Realms. Still, now that the licensing issues are now cut and dry, and I’ve done a lighter and more concise version of OpenQuest – called SimpleQuest, it doesn’t make sense to do yet another D100 game. In fact, it makes my head spin, never mind prospective customers 😀

Indie Games

I’ve decided to go so quickly with Creative Commons for the D20 and D100 games during January’s OGL fiasco because we’ve used it effortlessly and painlessly with previous Indie releases. Fate for our Fortune-based games (Hunters of Alexandria and the Hollow West) and for Worlds of Wordplay, we used CC licensing. If I were to do an SRD for Monkey, I’d go straight to CC in a heartbeat.

Published by

Newt

Games Designer, Publisher, Web Developer, Dad.

Leave a Reply