If you’ve been following the tabletop publishing space since the "OGL Crisis" of 2023, you probably have a mental model that looks like this: OGL is the old, broken thing; ORC is the new, better thing. Wizards of the Coast tried to pull the rug, the community revolted, a better license appeared, and we all moved on.
That’s a decent summary of the drama, but it's a terrible guide for actually publishing a book.
The part people miss is that moving from the Open Game License (OGL) to the Open RPG Creative (ORC) License isn't just a matter of swapping logos on the back cover. It’s a sequence. And if you get the sequence wrong, you’re not "opening" your world: you’re just muddling your ownership of it.
We’re navigating this right now with Mithril Destiny and our world, Gandurion. Here is why we are intentionally publishing under a 25-year-old license first.
The ORC license is the destination. It’s held in trust, it’s irrevocable, and it’s designed so no single company can ever pull a 2023-style reversal. It’s the right way to build a community-driven world.
But here is the puzzle: How do you establish that a world is yours before you give it away?
If I’m building on Pathfinder 1e rules, which are OGL content, my work already exists within the OGL framework. That isn't a bug; it's just the legal reality of the stack. But within that framework, I need a "legal record of ownership" for the stuff I actually invented: the names, the factions, the lore.
In the OGL, that mechanism is called Product Identity (PI).
The instinct for a lot of open-source-minded creators is to just declare everything ORC from day one. The philosophy is "it belongs to the community."
The problem is that without a prior record of ownership, the "gift" is messy. You need a dated, published document that says: "These characters, this world name, and these specific locations belong to Mithril Destiny."
Once that is established on the record, the move to ORC becomes clean.
If you skip Step 1, you aren't just being generous; you're making your world legally fragile.
Concretely, here is our pipeline:
The delay isn't because we're reluctant to share. It's because in infrastructure, whether it's code or law, structure is what makes openness durable.
I’ve written before about how tabletop licensing mirrors the history of open-source software. There is a massive difference between "throwing code in a public folder" and "releasing code under a permissive, structured license."
One is a mess. The other is a foundation.
By using the OGL to establish ownership before using the ORC to grant it, we’re making sure Gandurion survives us in a way that can be trusted, traced, and built upon. It’s more steps, but it’s the only way to do it right.
As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM
Mithril Destiny is our Pathfinder 1e publishing imprint. Emberbound is available at patreon.com/mithrildestiny, and the open layer of Gandurion surfaces free at thecrazygm.com.
