Some news on Open D6

On the 25th the WEG Fan Forums organized a chat with West End Games owner Eric Gibson. Now the chat transcript is finally available, and I can give you some information on what was revealed during that chat.

As announced last year, the D6 System known from games like WEG’s Star Wars will be released as Open D6 under an open license. Until know it was a bit unsure what license Eric wants to use, but he spilled the beans in the chat:

[20:34] <@Grimace> Hellsreach, you’ve mentioned that Open D6 will use the OGL for potential publishers. Is this still the case? And if so, for those of use that don’t know about OGL, can you provide a brief ditty on what it will entail?

[20:35] <Hellsreach> Yes, OpenD6 will be OGL with the D6 Specific trademarks released under an STL, much the same way a 3e D20.

[20:35] <@Grimace> I’m completely unfamiliar with the way that worked. What does it mean if I want to publish something under Open D6?

[20:37] <Hellsreach> The Copyrights, rules and everything else will be freely available. It is a sharealike license meaning everything you publish under OpenD6 will be colvered under the OGL as well UNLESS you indetify it as Product Identity.

[20:37] <Rusviking> What type of freedom can we expect to have as far as system modifications?

[20:37] <Hellsreach> The trademarks for D6 And OpenD6 are PI for example.

[20:38] <Hellsreach> You have full and complete freedom. Unlike the D20 STL, there is not protected rules. The only thing the the STL with require is that you upload your OGL covered material to the OpenD6 website, thus we maintain a single unified archive of everything OpenD6.

[20:40] <@Grimace> Regarding the “OpenD6 website”, what all is going to be accepted on that? Can I just put up a single item, or does the stuff have to be fleshed out?

[20:40] <Hellsreach> There are a few small publishers that certainly plan to use OpenD6. In addition, I’ll soon submit a request to most other publishers to do the same.

[20:40] <Hellsreach> Obviously any publisher will want to gauge how OpenD6 is recieved by the fans before they commit resources.

[20:41] <Hellsreach> Concerning the website:

[20:41] <Hellsreach> The website’s primary purpose is to build and present the contents of the OpenD6 database.

[20:42] <Hellsreach> information will be submitted using a custom interface where you will be able to set up the specifics of your submission

So, the D6 system will become totally free under a modified OGL and any rules added by a third party has to be added to the Open D6 website, so that everyone has always full and free access to the rules. I like that. 🙂

Eric Gibson has also some interesting ideas for the website that will come in pretty handy for players and gamemasters:

[20:46] <Hellsreach> There is not plans to put out a full generic ruleset for OpenD6, but the ultimate goal is for the user to construct their own rulesets and have it packaged and exported as a PDF. There may be way (no promises) for OpenD6 to iterface with a POD printer such that a user can cunstruct their unique custom rulebook and have it printed just for them with a few clicks.

Wow! If you ask me that’s pretty cool. So imagine you are working on a fantasy campaign using the Open D6 rules. You go to the website and select all the rules you need in your world, download the rules as a single PDF, print it out and you can even give copies to your players. No need to buy expensive rulebooks. And everyone gets a personalized rulebook suited to his or her needs.

The first Open D6 product by WEG is planned for GenCon this year (which is in August, when I am not mistaken), so I am pretty sure the the OpenD6 site will be open to the public before August, but Eric Gibson also hinted at a text dump release of all the rules earlier:

[21:02] <Hellsreach> OpenD6 as planned is a lot of work to get it up and running, but I know not everyone can wait (and should not have to), so in the mean time I’ll be releasing a text dump of virtually all the information contained in the 5100 series of WEG books. That is: D6 Adventure, D6 Space, D6 Fantasy, and all there supplements.

[21:03] <Hellsreach> This is happening very, very soon as in, within 1 week.

There are of course a lot more details in the chat transcript that I didn’t post about, so, don’t hesitate to check out the chat transcript out yourself. And if I have the time I will format the chat transcript in a more reader-friendly fashion and post it here. Thanks to The Game Guy for hosting the chat in the first place!