Source Mixing

Hello, and welcome to the Draconis Fantasy blog, my new blog for discussing various geek stuff, including tabletop roleplaying, as well as sci-fi and fantasy in various media.

What does the name Draconis Cosmic Fantasy refer to? It's in reference to a homebrew fantasy setting used in tabletop roleplaying I've been involved in since late 2009, though it had been around for four or five years before that.

While I might discuss that setting more in a later post, that's not what this first post is about. The majority of games played in this setting use systems for which the third-party licencing is through the Open Game Licence or OGL for short. That is what I'd like to talk about.

Introduced in 2000 by Wizards of the Coast as part of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the OGL is in my opinion, one of the best things that's ever happened to tabletop roleplaying. As the name suggests, it takes an open source approach to game mechanics, allowing the same game systems to be used by a wide variety of publishers, as well as allowing them to build off each others' work.

Of course, as there is a great deal of intellectual property involved in tabletop gaming. This is handled in the OGL by Product Identity, meaning material that other publishers are not allowed to use. In general, this includes things like the name of one's products, artwork, as well as settings, characters and storylines. It's not unheard of to declare other elements, such as specific creatures, spells, or character options as Product Identity as well, like Beholders or Illithids in Dungeons & Dragons.

Now, it's easy to forget that Product Identity restrictions only apply to publishers, not to GM's. Obviously there's nothing wrong with playing with resources from one publisher, or sticking to Open Game Content and your own creations, but at the same time, when you're privately running the games, and not publishing or doing organized play, there's nothing stopping you from fully utilizing works from every publisher as a resource for your games.

So, if you want to throw a Beholder (Dungeons & Dragons) at a party of Hobbits (Adventures in Middle-Earth) or a Balrog (Adventures in Middle-Earth again) at a party of anthropomorphic dogs, nothing's stopping you. That's the beauty of the OGL.