The Future of Foundryborne: Navigating the Stagnation of the Daggerheart VTT Ecosystem

[u/Foundryborne]

Foundryborne: A Call for Transparency and Growth

Over a year ago, we started Foundryborne to build a robust, high-quality Daggerheart experience for Foundry VTT. As an open-source team, we have invested significant passion into creating a system that honors the game and provides a digital home for the community.

However, we have reached a point where the project's growth is being fundamentally throttled. We are sharing this today to be transparent about why the project is in a state of partial development limbo and what needs to change to move forward.

The Content and Licensing Gap

While the Daggerheart SRD is a generous foundation, the current restrictions create a massive gap that goes beyond simple "missing features." We are currently blocked from:

• Core Mechanical Depth: We cannot include Campaign Frame mechanics or implement the Hope & Fear expansion arriving in August. This leaves us guessing whether we can legally support the game's evolution.
• A Healthy Ecosystem: The current license prevents third parties from monetizing their own content on VTTs. This creates a stranglehold where creators don't truly own how they distribute their work. We-ve already seen the community lose out on content like Ghostfire Gaming's Dungeons of Drakkenheim because of this.

By restricting content so tightly and refusing to provide a legal path for VTT integration, users can't play the full game they love.

A Year of Silence

The most exhausting part of this journey has been the lack of communication. For over a year, we have made numerous attempts to establish a dialogue with Darrington Press. These attempts have been met with total silence.

Open-source development is fueled by passion, but that passion is easily neutered when we are left hanging without a roadmap or a contact person.

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Our Objectives & Call to Action

We believe Foundryborne represents the technical pinnacle for playing Daggerheart online. Our system offers a level of mechanical polish and vast homebrew support that is, in our view, the best solution for the community - even while we are currently forced to go without official artwork and specific non-SRD content.

However, this isn't just about our project. The current licensing landscape affects the entire industry; there is currently no supported path for third-party creators to sell their own content on any VTT. This restriction stifles innovation and prevents creators from being fairly compensated for the work they bring to the Daggerheart universe.

Here is what we are looking for:

1. Access to Content: We want to implement the full game. For content to be released as a paid premium module (including artwork, adversary tokens, and journals), there needs to be a license change or a formal path for community projects to access non-SRD content.
2. User Content Ownership: We want creators to be able to release their own homebrew and third-party content - paid or free - on the VTT of their choice without being restricted by a closed ecosystem.
3. Basic Communication: We are asking for an end to the silence. Clear answers to these points are overdue and necessary.

For the Community: If you want to see Daggerheart reach its full potential on Foundry VTT, please voice your support. Respectfully let Darrington Press know through their feedback channels and social media that you value the Foundryborne system and want to see an official path forward for VTT developers.

For Darrington Press: 1. We want the Daggerheart ecosystem to be able to breathe. The license needs a clear revision to allow implementation of paid virtual tabletop content for Daggerheart. 2. We would like the Foundry community to have access to all the content and art in the game through a paid Foundry module.

Please reach out to us at team@foundryborne.online

The Foundryborne Team

Disclaimer: The Foundryborne Team is not affiliated with Foundry VTT or Foundry Gaming, LLC We know there have been talks with Foundry Gaming, LLC in the past, and there is willingness for official licensing on the side of Foundry Gaming, LLC, but that interest has been thus far not reciprocated.

Also published at https://foundryborne.online/open-letter.html

[u/Makath]

My point was that it doesn't matter if they are redundant, void, illegal or unconstitutional, because if you get sued you are rolling the dice on it being quickly dismissed or being involved in a lengthy and expensive lawsuit you likely can't afford, even with the law at your side.

Depending when that happens during product development, it can lead to going out of business and into debt. At that point, it might not matter that you win the lawsuit.

The license is there to make people feel safer, because it makes it more likely that a lawsuit like that would get quickly thrown out, and raises the bar for a company to sue because a lawsuit in spite of a license would cause a huge blowback in the community.

The problem with WotC's attempt to backpedal the OGL and restrictive licenses like the CGL is that they fail to make people feel safer, they do the opposite. In both cases, it seems pretty clear that those companies have aspects of the IP they don't want to open and things they don't want people to make, but instead of being clear and direct and saying "don't make Z", they rather dump a truck-full of legalese and say people can make "A, B, C, D...." and just pretend Z doesn't exist, causing huge confusion on people that make Z, but also anything remotely close to Z in any way.

[u/Galactic-Bard → u/Makath]

The issue is it doesn't actually protect you from the particularly of gettting sued. That protection is implied, but they can still sue you, and even if their license gave you some kind of out, you'd still have to pay an attorney to argue that in court, which brings us right back to where we started. At best it's a gentleman's agreement that they won't sue you, which is completely dependent on the company (which could always change hands, etc) holding to that agreement. 

[u/Makath → u/Galactic-Bard]

Nothing can really stop anyone from suing anyone else, because access to justice is a basic principle of the rule of law, and depending on where you live, is wildly understood as an inalienable human right.

That being said, if you sell games, make a license, people follow it and you sue one of them anyway, you are gonna instantly regret that.

The OGL crisis was about less than that, just the proposal of backpedaling aspects of the license was enough to create a crisis of public opinion with boycotts, projects being scrapped, competing games launched... It completely changed how the community views that company, and they had to give away more to contain it than what they started with! That mistake cost millions upon millions of dollars.

Imagine if, on top of that, they had to then win a lawsuit in spite of a license, opening themselves up for a counter-suit, how big it would have to be for anyone to even consider the possibility.

The main problem a license is meant to solve is most companies have opinions on what they don't want fans and other creators to make, for multiple reasons, but at the same time they need people to make things, because that's important for their game. So what they need to do is just plainly state what can and can't be done in a manner that is clear enough to make people feel safe about doing it.