A List of Good RPG Licenses

A List of Good RPG Licenses
July 16th, 2023
A List of Good RPG Licenses
This page will document a list of licenses that we think are a good fit for an RPG author who wants to respect and support free/libre and open gaming. Please note this is not legal advice, and we are not lawyers.

Defining Free, Libre, and Open Gaming
To know what we’re even talking about, a little history matters. These all have their roots in two movements: The Free Software movement, and the Open-Source Initiative. They’re similar, but not the same. These two movements inspired others, such as the Free Culture movement which led to the creation of the Creative Commons project. Likewise the Open Gaming Movement, which is specific to tabletop gaming, grew out of the same millieu.

It’s a good idea to learn more about all of those movements – they’ve all played important roles in shaping our lives today. But to keep this simple, the main takeaway is that there’s a bit of a split between movements calling themselves “open”, and those calling themselves “free” and/or “libre.” We’ll define our terms with these differences in mind, and maintain two separate lists – open licenses, and free/libre licenses.

Free and Libre
To get it out of the way right now, libre is free. These two words are entirely interchangeable, think libre as in liberty. People sometimes prefer libre because it makes it more clear that we’re talking specifically about freedom, not merely free of cost (gratis). These libre movements assert that regarding software and media in general, we should have the rights to use(for any purpose), study, make copies, make modifications, share, distribute, and even sell a given creative work. People who advocate for this libre way of life generally believe that there is no valid space for proprietary licenses anywhere. For this reason they will tend to prefer more strict licenses that grant all of the aforementioned freedoms, but which require all derivatives to be published with compatible licenses only. Collectively we call these licenses Copyleft licenses, because what they do is take copyright law and essentially turn it against itself.

If you think that restrictive copyrights and licensing cannot coexist with these values of freedom, copyleft may be for you.

Open
Open movements are similar to libre ones – they generally want software and media to have all those same freedoms, but they permit circumstances where more restrictive copyright models may exist. Because of this, they’ll often use licenses that are even more permissive than copyleft ones, allowing all of those same freedoms, but also allowing anyone to sell derivatives that take those freedoms away.

Licenses
The licenses you choose for your own project depend on whether you’re making software, or some other form of media; and whether you think copyleft models or more permissive models are right for you. If you’re serious about your work, please also consider consulting with a lawyer before you commit to anything.

We believe that a good license is one that is actively maintained by real legal experts who work in the specialty of intellectual property law, and are ones that come from nonprofit organizations whose very goals are to ensure the preservation of freedom and openness that we listed previously (use, study, copy, modify, distribute, sell).

Open Licenses.
Most Media: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). As an rpg creator, this is likely the choice you want for your license. If you’re looking to do things similar to other publishers, you can release your SRD with this license, and then publish your core rulebook and all other materials under whichever licenses you think are best for you.
Software: Apache 2.0 license. A software license. This choice is a bit of a challenge. There are a lot of “lax” licenses out there. We went with this one because it’s recommended by the FSF.
Libre Licenses
Most Media: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). CC BY-SA is a copyleft license, like the GPL. It’s good for anything other than software – potentially rulebooks and System Reference Documents, for example. Creative Commons has a great history of protecting our information rights by ensuring that we have a robust media commons that we can all benefit from. It’s another well-established license.
Software: GNU General Public License (GPL). This is a copyleft license specifically written for software, though you can use it for things other than software as long as you clearly define what “source code” is. If you’re making software and you want to make sure that both your version, and any modified versions will always be free, this is the license to use. The Free Software Foundation are the original protectors of software freedom. They’ve been doing it for a long time, and the GPL is well-tested.
Why Not Other Licenses?
This page is a currently a rough draft, and very much subject to change. More dialogue needs to happen, particularly from parties who are most informed on this subject matter. For now this list is being kept small, and we will try to be careful about additions, as well as establishing more detailed and precise criteria to base the list on. For instance, we know now that any worthwhile license must explicitly state that it’s irrevocable if we want to avoid another OGL mess in the future.

What about product identity and Open Game License?
Some people have expressed concerns or even an outright rejection of licenses like Creative Commons, because they want a license that’s more like the OGL in defining a separate “product identity” that the author can keep under more restrictive terms. The thing is, the Open Game License and all of it’s variants have never been real open licenses. The entire structure of the Product Identity is anti-open. When you look at one of these licenses, and compare the full text of everything that’s considered Product Identity to what’s supposed to be open – all that’s left is game mechanics, which (more or less) aren’t protected by Copyright in the first place.

For any authors who want to publish with some content open, and other materials restricted: You can release the open content in one set of documents under either the CC BY license (lax), or the CC BY SA license if you want to make sure all derivatives are also kept on an open license. Then just publish your closed content in a different set of documents using whichever licenses you want to. Exemplars of this model include Ironsworn, FATE, and Dungeon World.

It’s worth noting that open or libre content does not have to be given away for free. You can use an open license, even commit your work to the public domain, and still sell it.

The OGL has never been a good option for both fans and authors alike, and it’s time to retire it and move on.

What About a New License?
If that’s what anyone wants to do, go for it. Understand though that there is an existing history of problems associated with new licenses, as well as proliferation of too many licenses. What the current OGL situation shows us is that we should be using tools that are well-tested, written by people who specialize in this, and whose primary goal is the protection and preservation of freedom and openness. If an expert in intellectual property law published a new kind of Open Game License Two Point Zero tomorrow, it might have promise, but as a precaution this project would still want to give that license time to be put to the test and see how it works out before recommending it.

Closing
If this project interests you, please get involved. Open discussions, file bug reports, make contributions, everything is appreciated.