Sharrukin's Palace

There’s been a serious mess evolving in the indie-creator space over the fate of Wizards of the Coast’s Open Gaming License (OGL). It appears, due to leaked language from the upcoming new version of the license, that not only is it going to be more restrictive in the future, there’s a good chance that older versions of it are going to be revoked or de-authorized in some fashion. This has a lot of independent publishers and creators in a bind. The OGL is over twenty years old at this point, and a lot of publishers, a lot of livelihoods, have been founded upon it.

I’m fortunate in that I’ve never had anything published specifically under the OGL, and my plans moving forward are only minimally affected by any changes to that license. So I’m not going to offer any opinion about the potential change, other than to hope that my fellow indie creators can weather the storm. This post is just a note about where I think my own work may be affected by what’s about to happen.

First off, Architect of Worlds will be completely unaffected. That book is game-system-independent to begin with, and doesn’t rely on anything but my personal research and game-design work. I don’t expect any change in when that book gets released – later this year, exactly when depending on how long it takes me to to edit and lay out the final version.

One of my long-term projects probably will be affected by what Wizards is doing, if only indirectly. The Human Destiny space-opera setting was tentatively going to be my next big tabletop project after Architect was released. My plan was to release it as a Cepheus Engine product . . . but the problem is that Cepheus Engine relies on the previous version of the OGL and derives from the Mongoose Press edition of Traveller. If that version of the OGL goes away, the status of Cepheus Engine becomes uncertain even if Mongoose takes no hostile action against it.

As I understand it, the major Cepheus Engine publishers (Samardan Press, Independence Games, and so on) are already aware of the potential issue and are rapidly developing contingency plans. By the time I’m ready to start working on something other than Architect, the dust may very well have settled and there will be a way-forward for Human Destiny as a Cepheus Engine product as planned. I’m not going to fret about it, since there’s nothing I can do except wait patiently for the outcome.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking hard about releasing another tabletop setting – based on my Danassos setting, with the working title of Fourth Millennium – as a Cypher System product under the open license offered by Monte Cook Games. If worse comes to worst, that may move to the front of my queue, or I may consider moving Human Destiny to that venue as well.

For now, though, I’m just watching developments and putting off making any decisions until I see how things shake out. It’s important to remember that no one has actually seen the new version of the OGL yet. This may be a tempest in a teapot . . . although given a lifetime’s experience with how corporate entities deal with stakeholders who don’t actually own shares of stock, I’m not sanguine.