Like everybody else in the Open Gaming community, we at EN Publishing have been scrambling to understand what WotC's leaked plans mean for us as a company, and how best to proceed forward. We feel a deep responsibility not only to our customers, creator community, freelancers, and employees, but also to the wider Open Gaming community. We have been publishing under the OGL for over 20 years, supporting and expanding the game we love.
At present, we do not know how this will all play out. Whatever happens, it is clear that we cannot operate in an environment where our very existence lies at the whim of another company, and so we are taking steps to secure the core of our business in the future. To this end we are looking into the practicalities of a two-pronged approach.
1) We will be investing more heavily in What's OLD is NEW, our in-house lifepath/d6 dice-pool system, beginning with a new starter set. This will be available to third party creators under the most open, non-revocable license* we can find.
2) We have begun investigating the possibility of 'de-OGL-ifying' Level Up: Advanced 5E. This is a big task, but we have a head-start in that in A5E we rewrote every word of the 5E SRD (and expanded it greatly), with only names (spells, classes, etc.) remaining the same. There are legal nuances to this, so we can't go into too much detail, but rest assured we will make sure we are covering ourselves. Again, we will make this available under the most open, non-revocable license* we can find.
We are at very early stages with both of these projects, and the exact approach -- or even viability -- is yet to be determined, whether that is via Kickstarter or some other method. We will keep you posted.
What about projects we currently have planned? Level Up's To Save A Kingdom and Voidrunner's Codex, as well as our new starter set, are well along the development path. If we can still release them under the OGL v1 as planned, we will. Otherwise, we will try our best to figure out some other way to get those products to you.
We don't know what the future holds for Open Gaming, but we at EN Publishing are committed to it. Open Gaming was essential to D&D 3E's growth in the early 2000s; it has been a large part of 5E's popularity; and it has supported a massive community of amazing, talented creators and indie publishers, amongst whom we are proud to be counted.
