The OSRIC Story

You may know that OSRIC is a system reference document for 1e (first edition). For legal reasons, I can't connect OSRIC with the actual name of 1e, but most readers will know what I mean when I say it's the first edition of a sword and sorcery fantasy role playing game written by Gary Gygax.

I started the OSRIC project in late 2005, joined almost immediately by Stuart Marshall (known on the net as "Papers and Paychecks"). After I'd written 75,000 words or so, I was hit with a downswing in the cycles of my bipolar disorder and prepared to give up the project. Stuart offered to finish it for me, and I handed it over to him in toto. The basic idea of OSRIC is to make the rules of 1e generally available for use in publications. Although it is legal for anyone to use the rules of another person's game, it is not legal to use their descriptions of those rules, or "derivative material" from the descriptions of those rules, or to refer to the trademarked name of those rules. With all those pitfalls, it's obviously a major project to publish anything using RPG rules written by someone else, even if the rules themselves technically can't be copyrighted.

However, since the original rules aren't in print, with copies becoming daily more expensive (although still cheap at this point), I decided to try and create an open source version of the underlying rules. This wouldn't have been possible without the existence of the Open Game License published by Wizards of the Coast, which opened up a lot of the legal "grey area" of things that might or might not have been copyrightable. The goal was to give publishers a joint "name" for the game, a jointly available rules reference, and eventually to get the rule book back into mainstream distribution channels again.

Fortunately, Stuart stepped in when I despaired of ever meeting these goals, and did a fantastic job of completing the book, polishing it, editing it, and releasing it to the world. It's been an enormous success; in its first three weeks after release both Gary Gygax and Sean Reynolds had made comments about it. OSRIC is now one of the top 42 downloads of all time at RPGnow.com. A huge number of resources for OSRIC have already been published - and the release date was only June 30, 2006.

Although at the moment I'm playing Call of Cthulhu again rather than 1e, I'm still watching OSRIC's progress with considerable awe, and hoping it continues to grow.

Here's the download location (free download): OSRIC