More Than 1500 Publishers Sign On to The ORC License
Yesterday Paizo announced that more than 1,500 tabletop RPG publishers have pledged their support for the forthcoming ORC License.
Open Gaming catapults to the forefront of the community this week. Following WotC’s announcement of their new OGL 1.2 alongside plans to release a portion of the rules as Creative Commons content, while revoking the OGL 1.0a, Paizo published a statement to the effect that over the last week, a growing alliance of publishers has banded together around the ORC.
The ORC is the Open RPG Creative License. If you’ve somehow missed the news, the ORC will be a system-neutral, non-profit-operated creative license that should provide a path for publishers to share rules and mechanics while encouraging innovation.
Many prominent names in the industry have signed on. Including EN World, virtual tabletop giant Roll 20, and more. Read on for a larger list.
The ORC License Alliance
Per Paizo’s statement, work has already begun on the license. And a significant portion of the community has rallied around them:
“Over the course of the last week, more than 1,500 tabletop RPG publishers, from household names going back to the dawn of the hobby to single proprietors just starting out with their first digital release, have joined together to pledge their support for the development of a universal system-neutral open license that provides a legal “safe harbor” for sharing rules mechanics and encourages innovation and collaboration in the tabletop gaming space.
The alliance is gathered. Work has begun.”
Accompanying the statement, Paizo published a list of some of the organizations already pledged to the ORC license. There are many companies here, and indeed, some are old RPG publishers. Others are small hobbyists. But big or small, the license seems aimed at all:
“Each is crucial to the effort’s success. The list below is but a representative sample of participating publishers from a huge variety of market segments with a huge variety of perspectives. But we all agree on one thing.
We are all in this together.”
ORC Supporters
Here’s a small sampling of the folks who have signed on to the ORC:
- Alchemy RPG
- Arcane Minis
- Atlas Games
- Autarch
- Azora Law
- Black Book Editions
- Bombshell Miniatures
- BRW Games
- Chaosium
- Cze & Peku
- Demiplane
- DMDave
- The DM Lair
- Elderbrain
- EN Publishing
- Epic Miniatures
- Evil Genius Games
- Expeditious Retreat Press
- Fantasy Grounds
- Fat Dragon Games
- Forgotten Adventures
- Foundry VTT
- Free RPG Day
- Frog God Games
- Gale Force 9
- Game On Tabletop
- Giochi Uniti
- Goodman Games
- Green Ronin
- The Griffon’s Saddlebag
- Iron GM Games
- Know Direction
- Kobold Press
- Lazy Wolf Studios
- Legendary Games
- Lone Wolf Development
- Loot Tavern
- Louis Porter Jr. Designs
- Mad Cartographer
- Minotaur Games
- Mongoose Publishing
- MonkeyDM
- Monte Cook Games
- MT Black
- Necromancer Games
- Nord Games
- Open Gaming, Inc.
- Paizo Inc.
- Paradigm Concepts
- Pelgrane Press
- Pinnacle Entertainment Group
- Raging Swan Press
- Rogue Games
- Rogue Genius Games
- Roll 20
- Roll for Combat
- Sly Flourish
- Tom Cartos
- Troll Lord Games
- Ulisses Spiele
And Paizo pledges that we’ll be hearing “a lot more” in the coming days.
What do you think of the “ORC Alliance”?
