Open Gods

Open Gods is a push by One Bad Egg to create an open resource — a pantheon, complete with the attendant channel divinity powers — that other 4E publishers can make use of, at no cost.  One of our frustrations when working on our own products has been that none of the Player’s Handbook gods (nor the powers that come along for the ride) are available to us when writing up our own products.  Whether it’s a minor annoyance like a sample Paladin and its god to be mentioned in passing, or a bigger hurdle like a Cleric NPC for an adventure with all the fun power stuff, it came down to us needing to cook up our own pantheon if we wanted to smooth out the bumps.  We figure other publishers shouldn’t have to do that work if they don’t want to.

Here are the details!

Download the License and Material:

• Word Document
• PDF Document

The “Open Gods” License FAQ

What’s the deal?

Here’s the “lay” summary: We’re making it as easy as possible for other publishers to create products of their own based off of our Gods of the Shroud product. You can find it at http://www.onebadegg.com/egg/store/#OBE1005

Okay … why?

The GSL doesn’t let you refer to any of the gods from the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 4TH EDITION PLAYER’S HANDBOOK by name and, by extension, any of the feats or powers containing their names. This can be a real pain in the butt if you’re looking to create a new player race that’s excellent for building paladins or clerics or whatnot and you want to talk about sample characters and what gods they worship. But if you accept this license, you’ll be able to do that with our gods, no problem.

Do I have to pay anything to use this license?

Nope.

What material can I use?

Plenty—maybe too much to summarize here. But that said, you’ll have access to their names, aspects of their concepts, and the channel divinity powers they convey. Look at the Licensed Material section to see what we’re opening up.

How can I use it?

However you see fit as long as you follow the license. You can give your paladin NPC the flare of the gleaming eye channel divinity power; you can create an encounter at the temple of the Torchbearer; you can create map tiles for a ritual by followers of the Umbral Claw; you can do a book of evil cleric NPCs; you can create a product full of divine paragon paths for specific deities. Let your imagination run wild.

If I use your material, what do I have to do?

The license spells this out and is the authoritative answer on this, but it’s pretty simple. You have to do the two following things:

• In the copyright section of your document, put this there (has to be no smaller than 10pt Times New Roman):
  Gods of the Shroud material is ©2008 One Bad Egg, LLC and is used with permission, http://www.onebadegg.com/egg/gods

• In the body of your document, when you use some of our material, you need to reference the source in some way that’s clear and obvious. Examples include:
  “See Gods of the Shroud for more details about the Bone Witch.” or
  “Flare of the Gleaming Eye ability taken from One Bad Egg’s Gods of the Shroud.”

Convince me it’s a good idea.

Okay!

Collaboration between publishers is fun and good. We’re not just sharing our product with you—we’re sharing an audience, too (and you’ll be sharing with us, in turn). It’s our position here at the Egg that we’re going to create a stronger market for third-party 4th edition material by working together. In other words, we think it is a good idea to cross the streams.

But if that’s not enough for you, we’ll make our partnership with you literal rather than conceptual. If you create a product for sale on RPGNow that uses material from Gods of the Shroud, we’ll create a cross-publisher bundle with you that knocks $1 off the price of our Gods product in addition to whatever discount you choose to offer for yours (and you don’t have to offer a discount at all). In essence, we’re happy to take the “value hit” on making that bundle a good purchase—and like we said, it will be a real, visible way for us to combine our respective audiences.

And besides, it’s a pantheon of 13 interrelated gods that you didn’t have to do any work to create.

What else should I know?

If you pick up a copy of Gods of the Shroud to research this idea further, you’ll see that we fully embrace the idea of contradictory myths. That means that if you want to create your own set of mythic stories and backgrounds about our gods, that’s totally fine, and in fact we’ll regard it as strengthening our little pantheon here instead of weakening it.

And don’t be scared by that “of the Shroud” part. Yes, while the Shroud is a half-setting concept we’ve built several of our products around, these gods are not so tightly locked into it that you can’t easily transplant them into whatever setting your stuff is built around. Go nuts!