Skirmisher and OGL 1.1 and You

Wizards of the Coast is releasing a new version of the Open Game License, which has previously allowed third parties such as Skirmisher Publishing to create great D&D compatible products for years, free of cumbersome restrictions and terms. There are many excellent breakdowns on the consequences of Wizards of the Coast’s new Open Game License, so we will not be doing that here. This post is, rather, intended to make Skirmisher Publishing’s next steps as transparent as possible to our fans so that they can make their own educated decisions on how to respond to the changes.

The version of OGL 1.1 that we have seen is an unpublished leak of the document and is therefore still subject to change. OGL 1.1 as we’ve seen it is anti-competitive and anti-consumer and, in short, Skirmisher will not be publishing under it. Usurious requirements of product registration and revenue reporting disproportionately burden small publishers that would have to divert into bureaucratic bookkeeping limited resources that otherwise would have been applied to developing new products. And an irrevocable and perpetual license to pillage the intellectual property of any publications that are released under this license is simply untenable.

The biggest influence on whether this draft changes will come from the D&D community, so let them know how unhappy you are about this.

What Will Change

Immediately following the official release of OGL 1.1, if it remains in its current, leaked form, OGL 1.0a will be revoked as a license. Skirmisher will at that point be forced to suspend the sale of its licensed titles indefinitely or face potential legal repercussions. This means that more than 100 of our products, including our very first publications, “Experts” and “Warriors,” and our latest and greatest adventure module, “At the Shrine of Othrys,” will not be available to customers until we are able to remove OGL licensed content and re-release them in a system-free and/or alternatively-licensed form. There will be no new OGL-compatible products from Skirmisher, as we simply cannot sign over our intellectual property — most of which cross pollinates with our other non-OGL products — to WotC and give them permanent rights to reproduce it without compensating us.

What Will Stay the Same

If you already have a copy of one or more of our OGL products then you are in luck, as this licensing change cannot deprive you of those. In fact, if you were on the fence about one of these titles, this might be your last chance to pick up a copy.

Note that this only affects our D&D compatible titles, any of our products for different systems will remain unchanged. Skirmisher will continue to produce earnest and useful system free guides like “City Builder,” and we have big plans to expand our options of this sort.

What Will Come

Skirmisher has been in development with a pair of its own role playing game systems for the past several years and, fortuitously, they are now on the cusp of release. You can look forward to exciting games based on Swords of Infinity, a gritty low-fantasy percentile system that prioritizes letting players run with their creative problem solving while keeping the story tense and full of dramatic moments, and the Skirmish!RPG, an exciting 3d6 dice pool system that was grown from our namesake “Skirmish!” wargame rules and is perfect for epic stories and tactical play.

Conclusion

In short, this is a terrible direction for WotC to have taken with the OGL. Skirmisher grew up alongside D&D, producing fun supplements for many years and editions, and it is with heavy hearts that we will have to finally part ways with it. It is particularly sad that this is all happening, seemingly, with no real benefit to gamers or their hobby. This change to the OGL will limit creativity, limit sharing, limit options, limit diversity, and limit opportunities for gamers right when it seems like the hobby is about to boom with a new generation of players. It is hard to see what is coming as anything other than short-sighted, greedy, and reductive, and we sincerely hope that this leaked draft of OGL 1.1 remains just that — a draft from an outof-touch corporate structure scrambling to pad its bottom line but finally discarded because of the undue harm it will cause the industry and, inevitably, its own reputation.