Releasing Forge of Foes Material under a Creative Commons License!
9 months ago
– Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 09:16:41 AM
First off, thank you all for the fantastic support for The Lazy DM’s Forge of Foes! We couldn’t be more excited about what we have in store for this book.
Like everyone, we were riveted to the whole OGL situation at the beginning of the year, and were extremely happy to see the 5e System Reference Document released into the Creative Commons. Many other publishers followed suit, releasing more of their material under various open licenses.
While we don’t have stretch goals for this project, one of the things we’ve all talked about was releasing material from this book into the Creative Commons as well. Our intent is to offer up some of the key concepts and mechanics from the book to help other publishers benefit from our work, and to use these ideas and concepts to create their own material.
Thus, once we’ve released Forge of Foes, we’re going to release parts of it in our own Forge of Foes SRD under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0). This means anyone can use the material we release in the FoF SRD in their products, digital tools, or interpretive dance performances as long as they attribute it to us and to Forge of Foes (details on how to do so will be included in the FoF SRD).
Right now, these are the things we’re considering releasing under the FoF SRD. It’s not a complete list, and we won’t know for sure what’ll be in it until we’re done with the book, but here’s what we’re thinking we’ll include so far:
- The Monster Statistics by CR table in the Quick Monster Builder
- The instructions for using the above
- The Common Monster Type Templates in the Quick Monster Builder section
- The Common Monster Powers found in the Quick Monster Builder
- The Common Reskinnable Monsters list in the Reskinning Monsters section
- The Spell Effects list in the Reskinning Monsters section
- The Fifteen Engaging Environments list in Building Engaging Environments
- Material from the Lazy Tricks for Running Monsters section
- Material from the Monster Abilities and Theater of the Mind section
- Material from the Building Legendary Monsters section
- Material from the Running Minions and Hordes section
- Material from the Dice Rolling Options section
- The general-use stat blocks from the section of the same name
- Material from the Monsters by Adventure Location section
- Material from the Combat Encounter Checklist section
- Material from the Lazy Encounter Benchmark section
The above can change, of course, as the book continues to go through final development and editing. But we’re definitely interested in offering material to help other publishers build off of our work.
What aren’t we including? Much of the guidance and advice we’ve written won’t be released under the CC. That’s really our words for our book. The ideas, of course, can certainly inspire other products, and we’re hoping the material we do release under the CC helps build off of that inspiration. We’re including a solid list of monster powers and monster type templates, but not all of them. Our goal is to give enough to be directly useful and to help creators build their own awesome character powers and monster-type abilities.
We’re extremely excited to offer this material up to the RPG community under an extremely permissive license, allowing our work go beyond the three of us and strengthen the entire hobby. And we can do this because of the fantastic support you’ve given us.
Thank you again,
Teos, Scott, and Mike