# RPG a Day 2026 - 21: Charity tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] ![[RPG a Day 2026 - 21 - Charity (banner).jpg]] They say that charity starts at home, but I'm a great believer that Charity is a great stripper name. If she *were* at home, I probably wouldn't be spending my time writing about role-playing games most of the time. This is simply a fact of life. However, there are TRPG authors who love you and want you to be happy. By that, I mean that they are happy to have you make third-party content for their games without checking with them first, without doing anything but engaging in the broadest of acknowledgment. If you're thinking of sitting down and designing your own RPG: *don't*. Seriously, just don't. First, start by looking through all of the games that have open licenses and see if one of those suits your needs. If it does, you've already got a built-in audience and a community of creators who are welcome to work with you and already have a base interest in what you're doing. Make use of that. Don't reinvent the wheel for the 10,000th time if there's a perfectly good wheel out there. I have gone through my library and done a quick pass to grab a whole pile of games that have open licenses. If you don't find what you're looking for here, I can dig deeper. I promise. These authors are offering you charity, but I am not. I do this with a full expectation that you're going to make use of it. Create something of your own using one of these tool sets and tell me about it after the fact. ## Reading the Fine Print Quick guide to what "open" actually hands you — the short version of whether you can publish third-party material without permission, and for money. **Yes, you can publish it — and you can charge for it.** Every license in the list below lets you release third-party content commercially without asking permission. That's the whole point of open; the only real question is what the license demands in return. - **CC BY 4.0**: use, adapt, and sell freely; just credit the author. Your own additions can stay closed. - **CC BY-SA 4.0**: same as BY, plus a catch — anything you build from it must also be released under BY-SA. That copyleft keeps the chain open. - **OGL**: you may copy, modify, and sell the declared Open Game Content; you must pin the license, mark open content versus Product Identity, and keep any new open content usable under the OGL. - **Open RPG Creative License (ORC)**: a modern attribution-style license — commercial use is fine, no permission needed, no share-alike, but keep the license notice and credit attached. - **Dual (CC + OGL)**: the most permissive; pick whichever terms suit you. **About that "Unported."** A couple of the older licenses up top come stamped *Unported* — the 2.0- and 3.0-era Creative Commons versions. It's not a stricter tier; it just means they're the generic international text instead of a version adapted to one country's courts. Same attribution, same commercial freedom. Creative Commons retired the whole porting dance once 4.0 rolled around, so everything from 4.0 on is *unported* whether it bothers to say so or not. **The only real rules for all of them:** credit the author, and — for the -SA and OGL ones — let the content stay open so the next person gets the same deal you did. Permission and commercial use aren't the barrier; that's generosity the hobby doesn't always get credit for. ## The Good Stuff - **[[Ironsworn]]** / **[[Ironsworn - Starforged]]**: Creative Commons BY 4.0 I'm sure absolutely no one is shocked that this is on my list of open licensed games because I talk about it all the time. I've even published articles professionally based on the **Ironsworn** mechanics,[^1] making reference to **Ironsworn**, and taken my pay with a happy whistle. Creative Commons BY is one of the most permissive and most open licenses on this list. If you want to create a game based on your favorite media with the serial numbers filed off, I would say start here. Not only is this some of the best visual layout available in the hobby, but it's some of the best mechanics. You probably can't go wrong unless it really does something that is incompatible with your idea. Start here. - **[[Loner]]** / **[[Ensemble]]**: Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 I talk about **Loner** all the time, and you're probably tired of it by now, but I'm going to do it again. Once more, we are talking about the Creative Commons BY-SA. I know this sounds a little more restrictive, and it is, very slightly. The share-alike nature of the license just means that other people can end up referring to the work that you do in the same way. You can still make whatever you want and sell it for whatever you like, as long as you acknowledge the license to **Loner** at the front of the book and note that your book is also licensed the same way. You can make as much money as you want. The only catch is whatever you create adds to the hobby's pool of available references. It's a good gig if you can get it. - **[[Breathless]]**: CC BY 4.0 (Fari RPGs SRD) This one I don't talk about as much, even though I myself have written and published a book for it.[^2] I really like **Breathless** as a set of mechanics. It's super lightweight. It uses all of the little dice that you've got in your polyhedral set, which means that you don't feel like you've wasted money. It makes good use of increasing pressure as you use skills and traits, which distributes attention around a group naturally. It's good stuff. Again, the Creative Commons license is doing the heavy lifting of letting you build whatever you want. - **[[Fate Core System]]**: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) + Open Game License I'm going to be open with you. It's *not* my favorite manifestation of the **[[Fudge]]** lineup. That's actually **Fudge**. I don't see any reason to gild the lily. It does have a rather large following. It also has a Creative Commons license that provides a wide latitude for third-party creators to do what they do best: make stuff. I think it's kind of interesting that, as far as I can tell, the license terms haven't been upgraded since the last version of Creative Commons. This is only of interest to people who are seriously into free software or are just hardcore license nerds. There are a few of us out here. If you're looking for a very broad installed base and you like the quirks of the **Fate Core** system, this might be a good thing to look into, but make sure that you're okay with the quirks. - **[[Basic Role Playing]]**: OGL for the 2020 SRD, then ORC for the 2023 Universal Game Engine (moved over time, not dual-licensed) This one is kind of important to note, especially for our Japanese audience, where **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** is *massive*. The licensing terms for BRP are important in the West, because that's where you can actually *use* them. The licensing terms for BRP and derivative works *in Japan* are made of electric crazy.[^3] I'm not sure that I'm even vaguely qualified to comment on it, even with the assistance of my AI augmented hounds. Even in the US, it's worth noting that **Call of Cthulhu** itself is not under the BRP SRD licensing terms, just the core mechanical system of BRP. On the positive side, at least they moved from that really annoying, pain-in-the-ass OGL licensing to ORC. If you've never studied the history of the OGL, there's an entire article to be written for that absolute, complete, self-destructive idiocy on the part of Wizards of the Coast, which should come as a shock to no one. All that aside, BRP is perfectly fine if you want something percentile-based and probably crunchier than it needs to be. If you remember **[[RuneQuest]]**, there you go. - **[[Gumshoe]]**: Open Game License + Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) This is another game that has come up repeatedly in the last several articles, so it's good to get to talk about the licensing for it because it does have an open license. You can create whatever you want to for it, and you even have your choice of licenses that are live now. If you really hated yourself, go with the Open Game License, which would let you open your rules separately from your setting, if that was the sort of thing you were inclined to do. But in almost every way, it's completely inferior to the Creative Commons license you could also choose from for the exact same SRD. At some point, I will have to go through and put together an article on why the OGL is so bad. Seriously, the reasons are as numerous as scars on a flagellant. I'm sure somebody else has already written a better one. - **[[Keep Talking!]]**: CC BY-SA 4.0 I know you've never heard of this. I had never heard of this until a couple of months ago myself. Is it a full system? No. It's literally just a really good architecture for building and doing NPC dialogue in solo games, one of the hardest things to work out. Imagine dynamically building a sort of dialogue tree like you find in a video game. That's essentially what you have here. I think it's terribly underused, which is why I'm thrilled that it has a Creative Commons license. I feel like this is something you might think about doing as a weekend project for your favorite game. Just go in and customize some tables, create some topic oracles, and then just turn the crank. Put that out there for other people to enjoy. I only haven't because I'm lazy. Creative Commons lets you think about doing that sort of thing and be rewarded for it. - **[[Boundless]]**: Open RPG Creative License (ORC) **Boundless** is another one of those super lightweight, straightforward systems you can port something that you love to in a weekend. It won't be super crunchy, and it certainly won't be a 300-page doorstopper unless you really get carried away with the setting. The ORC license came about as a direct consequence of people realizing the terms of the OGL were absolutely horrific. Wizards was going to happily change the ground you were standing on if you decided to go with it anytime they wanted to. Suddenly, people remembered that licenses were just agreements that people decided to abide by, and that they could create their own. Enter ORC, which is great because it's attribution only. Keep the license notice and the credit attached, and you're good to go. Do that in the colophon of the book, and people probably won't even notice it unless they are, again, serious license geeks. It's interesting that **Boundless** and **Breathless** are from the same company. They are not the same set of mechanics, which makes it doubly interesting. - **[[Fear and Panic]]**: Creative Commons BY 4.0 I always forget this game exists, which is *terrible* because I should have included it in the discussion of sanity and related ideas from the **[[RPGaDay 2026 - 16 - Composure|Composure]]** article earlier this month. It should have been included in part because I think it is a superior drop-in replacement for BRP if you want to do **Call of Cthulhu**. Sure, it's still percentile-based, and I have all the problems in the world with percentile-based systems. But overall, if we're honest, I think it does a better job of using **Fear and Panic** as elements that the player can tap into during gameplay than most other games. Want to rip it off for your own uses in your game? Go ahead. Put the attribution on it. You don't even have to have a share-alike license on it. Write it up, publish it, give credit where it's due, link the license. You're good to go. Sell a million copies, make $1 billion. Hell, if you can get even 10% of the current global **Call of Cthulhu** fandom to jump on board, you're going to be wallowing in it. See to it, fancy lad. - **[[Wushu]]**: Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 2.0) I shouldn't even have to tell you this. Go to the **Wushu** base page and look at all the references to it in all of my articles over the last several years. Yet in all that time, I've never seen a third party actually take up the game and release something based on it. I suppose cynically I should note that I haven't either, so I can't really cast aspersions on anyone for it. It just seems like a missed opportunity across the board. I have a lot of games in the library that are about narrative action, but this seems like it would be a great core for somebody who wants to play games online. They would want a mechanical system that is super light, super fast, and doesn't have a whole lot of overhead to track. Creative Commons, it's waiting for you. - **[[WaRP System SRD]]**: Open Game License Once upon a time, way back in prehistory, the slot in my personal consciousness that is currently occupied by **Wushu** used to be occupied by **Over the Edge**. OTE was the progenitor, in a sense, of the **WaRP** system. I can probably run something off the top of my head using this core set of mechanics. Unfortunately, that also means that the publisher probably has some sort of legal claim to my memory because the SRD is licensed using the OGL. I am not happy about this. I cannot wholeheartedly suggest that you use it as a core for your new publishing project. Eventually, we had to hit something I couldn't recommend and I'm disappointed that this is the one. They can't all be winners. ## Exeunt That actually was a lot more material than I thought I had to put out on this subject, but I'm glad that I had this opportunity to. Drawing attention to the open licensing available in indie gaming right now seems like something that should be done a lot more often. "Back in the day," hashing out what eventually became a broader understanding of licensing in this hobby was something we did because it didn't exist yet. We thought it was a good idea for people to be comfortable to do what they do naturally: create semi-derivative works of game systems that they love. Doing so means that more people are making more material that they have a personal stake in. That means that they want to do a better job. That means that they get better products out the door. If you are the original publisher of that game, that sells more copies *of* the game. It's a win-win-win situation, but only if you have the guts to put it out there in front of the audience and let them take a swing at making things that don't immediately and directly profit you. You have to be able to take the long-term view and not get bogged down in the short-term view. That's really hard for some people, and it's particularly hard for some corporate entities, as pained as it makes me to say. I hope your eyes haven't glazed over too much, and I hope you're hanging in there with me until the end of the month when RPG a Day 2026 is over. I think you know that you can depend on me to bring something new in along the way. Probably something you never expected. Check out some of these games. Seriously, it's worth it. [^1]: That was the piece I did for **Mad Scribe Magazine**, generating horror scenarios on the fly with the **[[Ironsworn]]** engine — see **[[Do I Sign My Own Madness|Do I Sign My Own Madness?]]** for more. [^2]: That's **[[Running Breathless]]**, if you're really curious and want to see what's going on with it. It probably needs another structural pass in order to make it printable as hardback through Lulu, and that's on my to-do list. But instead I'm doing stuff like writing this article. Madness. [^3]: What Japan does instead: there's no open license. There's a guideline (二次創作ガイドライン), and you're asking permission. Free fan scenarios are fine, but the moment you want money you're filing for their *Small Publisher Limited License* (SPLL). Streaming gets its own contract on top. Everything carries their mandatory credit line, and don't imply it's official — there's no fair use to fall back on, so it's all forms and their goodwill. Same engine, but "open" there means "open a form." It's understating the case to say that for someone used to Western IP law, this is an absolute pain in the ass. And moreover, I think it's actively bad for the gaming hobby in Japan. But I also think some portions of the hobby are starting to figure that out.