The Open RPG Creative License (ORC) will be created in order to support the industry in conjunction with fans and creators.
While Wizards of the Coast was still assembling its party, other leaders in the tabletop roleplaying games industry were studying the blade. As fans waited for the Hasbro-owned company to respond to the ongoing controversy over the Dungeons & Dragons Open Game License, Paizo announced it would be financially supporting an initiative to establish a new gaming license, dubbed the Open RPG Creative License, which will be known as the ORC.
Paizo does not intend to keep this license; nor will any of its partner presses who have agreed to support this license. Instead, Paizo and its team are ceding control to the Azora Law Group, whose co-founder worked on the OGL at Wizards of the Coast, and hope to establish a non-profit to steward the ORC. We sat down with Paizo president Jim Butler for an exclusive interview about the impact of the OGL and the partners involved in this new license. The age of the OGL is over. The time of the ORC has come.
Linda Codega, io9: How long has the ORC been in the works?
Jim Butler, Paizo president: We started moving in this direction years ago, with the development of the Second Edition of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Instead of basing that game on the specific mechanical expressions of System Reference Documents opened by the Open Gaming License, we started our new edition with a blank slate, decoupling our game mechanics from the copyrighted materials in prior SRDs in order to chart a new path.
We published Pathfinder Second Edition under the OGL because the OGL had—for more than 20 years—proven itself to be a safe harbor for publishers to collaborate and build off the work of one another, and we wanted to make sure that everyone in the community would be able to innovate off our designs.
The media controversy surrounding Wizards’ plans to change the OGL made it clear that any safe harbor that might have existed before was in jeopardy. We then started discussing our options with our attorneys at Azora Law and an ORC was born.
io9: Will the ORC be attached to any specific system reference documents or will it be a larger framework?
Butler: The Open RPG Creative license is envisioned as a broader framework, along the lines of GNU or Creative Commons, in which companies may independently deposit their own System Reference Documents. In that sense it is not tied to a single system or small set of systems (and, importantly, is not owned by a single RPG publisher).
