"Release from the OGL Vault" released on 5E SRD's CC anniversary!
January 27th of 2024, marks the first anniversary of the release of D&D 5E's SRD into the Creative Commons.
Today's release of the adventure Release from the Ogl Vault and its associated sub-releases Pentée City Gazetteer, and Guide to Vatseer Manor, is my creative processing of the OGL Crisis of December 2022 / Jan 2023. That was when Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast (WotC) set about invalidating their Open Gaming License (OGL), the rock on which a whole ecosystem of third-party publishing for D&D 5th edition has been built. That invalidation was in contradiction of every common-sense reading of the license terms as well as previous written statements of WotC to the effect that the OGL could not be invalidated.
This work is dedicated to all those persons at Wizards of the Coast who played a role in defusing the OGL Crisis by publishing the D&D 5th Edition system reference document (SRD) under a Creative Commons license, the CC BY 4.0 license, which allows everybody to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator, i.e., WotC. Some might argue that WotC and Hasbro, through their inept handling of the OGL Crisis, had no other way to resolve the crisis, but I disagree. It surely was an Augean task to make upper management take such an 180° turn. Hence, to everybody at WotC involved in making the release of the SRD 5.1 under Creative Commons happen: Thank You! This work is dedicated to you!
I am indebted to Dyson for his incredible generosity of making many of his maps available under a CC-BY license: all maps in this work are based on these fantastic "open maps."
Thanks are also due to those of Mastering Dungeons / Alphastream Mastering Dungeon / Alphastream Mastering Dungeons / Alphastream and of Sly Flourish, who responded to my occasional queries for feedback and advise while working on Release from the Ogl Vault.
Last, but not least, I want to express my gratitude to and highest respect for En Publishing, who picked up the SRD-ball dropped by WotC and ran with it: their A5E SRD, which is compatible with the 5th edition of "the world's greatest role-playing game" runs to over 1200 pages. Picking an SRD when developing for 5th edition has become a no-brainer!
Release from the Ogl Vault is already available from itcho.io, as are the Pentée City Gazetteer and the Guide to Vatseer Manor. It is also availabe from DriveThru RPG: Release from the Ogl Vault, the Pentée City Gazetteer, and the Guide to Vatseer Manor.
