How to Make a Fate Game with Creative Commons (CC-BY)

For our primary open license option, we will be making use of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Use of this license will simply require that you make a clear statement (we’ll give you the text) that your game is based on our material. Unlike some other Creative Commons options, this is not “viral”—you don’t have to make your derived content open at all. We think it’s awesome if you do, though, because a) we did, and b) it means you’re contributing something back to the community that made Fate possible in the first place.

Our advice: This is the easiest option to implement and understand. For each SRD you use, you must include a small attribution bloc on your copyright page. The attribution bloc is given at the top of each SRD, so it’s an easy copy & paste. It lays no claim to your work, and you’re not obligated to make your derived work open as well, it just requires you to give credit as specified.

A GUIDE TO USING THE FATE SRDS WITH CREATIVE COMMONS

This is aimed at designers, writers, and publishers who’d like to build on the Creative Commons release of the Fate Core System and Fate Accelerated Edition System Reference Documents. From here on in, we’ll just call them “the SRDs”.

The most important thing to understand if you’re new to Creative Commons licenses is that we’ve chosen the most liberal one possible. In particular, the license we chose isn’t viral, which means you don’t have to license those works under a Creative Commons license if you don’t want to! We think this is important because there are good reasons not to use an open license; our experience working with the Dresden Files and other licensed properties tells us that.

Copying

The first right you have under the Creative Commons Attribution license is a straight-up copy of the SRDs. If you do this, just remember to include the original copyright notice found in those documents, and don’t add any kind of copy protection.

Translations and Non-US Works

A translation counts as a new work, so the next section will tell you everything you need to know about that. It might be useful for you to know that the Creative Commons Attribution Unported license was written using the terminology of the Berne Convention and various WIPO Copyright treaties, so you shouldn’t run into any problems if you’re publishing in a jurisdiction other than the United States.

Creating New Works

You have the right to create new works of any kind derived from the SRDs.

What License Should I Use?

We hope you use a Creative Commons license where it makes sense, because we think that will benefit the Fate community, but it’s completely up to you.

If you do decide to use a Creative Commons license, you can use any of them. If you want to use a viral Creative Commons license, so that people who build on your work must also release their work under the same license, you can do that. (That’s not our preference nor our recommendation, as it can make things like licensed IP games contractually impossible, but it’s up to you.)

On the other hand, if you’re working with someone else’s intellectual property and they’re not comfortable about releasing it under any sort of open license, that’s cool too.

Requirements

The biggest requirement for anything you do based on our work is attribution; you must give us credit for our work. The next section goes into detail on how you should do that.

Second, you can’t imply or state that Evil Hat is endorsing or sponsoring you unless we’ve made a special arrangement with you. Don’t use our logo or the Fate logo without talking to us first. There is a Powered by Fate logo you can use very easily, though; look for that elsewhere on the site (Fate-SRD.com).

Finally, you can’t use the SRDs to make something which would be prejudicial to Evil Hat’s honor or reputation. (That’s exactly how the legal license puts it!) We’re not sure how you’d do that, but don’t.

That’s all the legal stuff. As always, if you’re unsure about exactly what to do or if you’re investing a lot of money in publishing something based on our work, think about talking to a lawyer.

This isn’t a legal requirement, but we’d love it if you let us know what you were doing with Fate and maybe passed along a few copies — digital ones would be fine. Drop us an email at feedback@evilhat.com if you want to reach out.

Attribution

So, how do you give us credit for our work?

This is really simple. Wherever you put your own copyright, add the following text:

This work is based on Fate Core System and Fate Accelerated Edition (found at https://www.faterpg.com/), products of Evil Hat Productions, LLC, developed, authored, and edited by Leonard Balsera, Brian Engard, Jeremy Keller, Ryan Macklin, Mike Olson, Clark Valentine, Amanda Valentine, Fred Hicks, and Rob Donoghue, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

This work is based on Fate Condensed (found at https://www.faterpg.com/), a product of Evil Hat Productions, LLC, developed, authored, and edited by PK Sullivan, Lara Turner, Fred Hicks, Richard Bellingham, Robert Hanz, and Sophie Lagacé, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license..

All the text has to be the same size as the rest of your copyright section — that’s one of the license requirements. (This text is different if you’re also using the Fate System Toolkit material — you’ll find the text you need to include for that in its system reference document, above.)

If you’re publishing electronically, you can make “Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license” a link to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ and “Fate Core System” a link to https://www.faterpg.com/, instead of printing the URLs separately.

Using the CC-Licensed Fate Core SRD with the OGL

The first thing to remember here is that you don’t need to do it. We released the Fate Core SRD under both licenses, so if you want to release your work under the OGL, you can derive it from the OGL version. The two versions are identical except for the license.

But if you wanted to do it, you could. For the purposes of creating a work that is licensed under the Open Game License and which derives from the Creative Commons Fate SRD, we grant permission to attribute our work by adding the following paragraph to Section 15 of your work’s copy of the Open Game License:

Fate Core System and Fate Accelerated Edition © 2013 by Evil Hat Productions LLC. Developed, authored, and edited by Leonard Balsera, Brian Engard, Jeremy Keller, Ryan Macklin, Mike Olson, Clark Valentine, Amanda Valentine, Fred Hicks, and Rob Donoghue.

This works for us because we’re giving you explicit permission to handle attribution that way. Don’t assume that any other Creative Commons material can be used the same way.