Free League Publishing has officially announced its plan to develop two new Open Game Licenses.
Today, the Sweden-based tabletop gaming company Free League Publishing announced their plans to develop two new Open Game Licenses (OGL), each one related to the Year Zero Engine OGL and the upcoming Dragonbane fantasy RPG. In the company’s release, they said that the plans for both licenses were already in the works but that the Wizards of the Coast changes to their OGL had made them want to do it sooner.
Free League noted that their Year Zero Engine (YZE) license was based on the Wizards‘ OGL V1.0—as previous versions of the Wizards’ OGL have been deauthorized. The Free League CEO Tomas Härenstam shared their thoughts on the development of the two new OGLs, “It’s clear that it is high time for Free League to have an OGL that is fully our own.”
The planned YZE OGL was said to give access to creators to an irrevocable, worldwide, and royalty-free right to use the accompanying Year Zero Engine Standard Reference Document (YZE SRD) to freely publish roleplaying material, which includes their own games, based on the Year Zero Engine system. The YZE has been used in most of Free League’s RPGs in recent years that included games like Mutant: Year Zero, Coriolis, Tales From the Loop, Forbidden Lands, ALIEN, Vaesen, Blade Runner RPG—along with the impending The Walking Dead Universe RPG.
Additionally, Free League noted their plans to release a third-party license for the upcoming Kickstarter-driven Dragonbane RPG—an English version of Sweden’s RPG Drakar och Demoner. This would essentially allow creators to publish RPG supplements explicitly compatible with Dragonbane freely. So, the Dragonbane license would not have an SRD but would allow creators to create and share Dragonbane-compatible material without paying a royalty fee.
On a different note, Free League stated that their two product lines published under the current Wizards of the Coast OGL for The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying and Ruins of Symbaroum should not be fully affected. However, the company said they would continue to monitor how the situation progresses. Both of the new Free League OGLs are expected to be released in the next few weeks.
