I don't care for some of the core tropes of Eclipse Phase (downloading/transferring consciousness without the explicit presence of some kind of mechanic to explain continuity, like a soul), but I absolutely love what Posthuman Studios have done. I like to point to this project a lot when talking about gaming philanthropy and openness.

This is exactly what I'll be doing with Icar. Keep the PDF free and provide a book for those people who need the physical copy at the gaming table or to read.

It's worth mentioning that Posthuman Studios is one of the top gaming business out there. Not in size, but in acumen, in accordance to our time. They quite good and hard worker of course, but they mainly embrace their customers and treat them with respect.

The Creative Common is just one aspect of that.

I've loved Eclipse Phase ever since I found out about it. I'm really glad they decided to to release the game in the way they did. It's an encouraging sign that the game has been as successful as it has. I hope that more publishers take a page from their book and release games under a Creative Commons license. Gamers are going to remix a publisher's game anyway, so the publisher might as well support their efforts.

I like the idea, and I see it as an alternate way of dealing with things than the OGL or GSL. After all, people will always be talking about games, making houserules, posting monster and characters, etc. It's been around since the old mimeographed gaming fanzines. But in the 21st century, it's something that needs to be encouraged if you want your game to thrive.

@modro – that's an issue to explore in posthumanist works. Is a copy of somebody's brain the same as the original? What about the changes that happen as it lives in a new form? You might want to read David Brin's Kiln People – it explicitly posits a soul and they have developed a technology that copies it into clay golems that only last for a day, but you can upload the memories back into the original. It would be interesting to play in that world.

I wonder why they didn't release the material under the OGL.

Yamir, we didn't use the OGL for a variety of reasons:

* Years after its release, people are still super confused as to what OGL means and how it relates or doesn't relate to the (no longer active) d20 System Trademark License. Not to mention being confused about how to actually use the license for its intended purposes!

* For marketing purposes, OGL is strongly tied to d20/D&D.

* The OGL was built around games, while Creative Commons was built around wider media needs.

Man, a lot of people just can't get past the downloading thing. I guess if you believe we'd all be inert husks without souls, it's challenging. But if I can suspend my disbelief to play a paladin whose god is real in D&D, I'd hope the religious types could manage the opposite for our game. 😉

And thanks for the post, Mike. I'm happy to report that not only is CC a viable model for Posthuman — they pay their freelancers on time, too.

I hadn't been playing RPGs for about ten years until I saw Eclipse Phase's artwork on 4chan. I heard about the concept and the game's release under Creative Commons. So I immediately downloaded the pdf and loved what I saw. I ordered it through Amazon because I couldn't play such a great game and not give some money to the creators. I'm now two weeks in.

My point is that Creative Commons works. Had the art been copyrighted and pulled from 4chan, I might never have heard about EP in the first place.

Brock, that's a great comment to hear. Thanks for sharing it. 🙂

(Just to be clear though, we still do own the copyright on all Eclipse Phase art/text/etc … we just choose to share the content, not the copyright, with everyone, under the terms of the CC license.)