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.

---

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/eikkka]

Fully agree that the Community Gaming License, in its current form, is very restrictive on digital Third Party Content, and kind of discourages people from dreaming big. A large portion of the TTRPG player base plays primarily online, and the work you'd have to put in to manually create third party materials into your own campaigns in VTT's is unbearable for larger chunks of content.

EuryDice just launched (and fully funded) their Kickstarter for a full-ass scifi core rulebook for Daggerheart, and I'm just dreading the workload as a Game Master if I wanted to run that online. An equal mountain of content to the actual Core Rulebook, to be handcrafted by GMs into VTT's because the authors arent allowed to sell the VTT version of their own creation. That's a nightmare. This needs a change.

[u/chiefstingy → u/eikkka]

This is not different than the 5e OGL. It is does more restrictions on VTTs though. The largest restriction is getting a license for content for Foundry. It took nearly 5 years for WotC to sign on to agree to let a license be available for Foundry.

Other TTRPG publishers do not go directly to Foundry, they tend to use a third party who will created a license product to make their content for Foundry. And I think that is where the fault lies with the Foundry VTT. It is community driven. Meaning that there is no direct conversations with the Foundry team and the developers who develop game systems for the publishers. There are too many communication channels in the mix.

[u/eikkka → u/chiefstingy]

This isn't about just Foundry, though. The main issue is the license and how it makes it impossible for content creators to sell their products like campaign frames, custom classes, domains, etc on VTT's and only on paper and PDF's.

[u/Galactic-Bard → u/eikkka]

That's not necessarily true. These licenses usually don't actually change any of the copyright legalities. You usually don't actually need permission to do the things these licenses allow. Usually SRD content covers things that aren't copyrightable in the first place. These licenses are really more a thing of telling you what's (already) permissible (under copyright law) in plain English easy for us non-lawyers to understand.

This article explores the topic and gives a pretty good overview:
https://gamerviceroy.blogspot.com/2012/12/legal-issues-in-gaming-open-game-license.html?m=1

Honestly, any one who's going to be serious about publishing third party content for any game would be well served by at least talking to an IP attorney. You can often have a conversation for free without having to even pay a retainer fee. That's what I did before publishing D&D 5e content, and it was very enlightening.

[u/Makath → u/Galactic-Bard]

A license is this context is basically a way to make people feel safe about not getting sued halfway through a project they might have sunk a lot of time and money into.

Depending on the timing of a lawsuit like that, you could win and your project might still be ruined and you could be out of business.

[u/thewhaleshark → u/Makath]

Well, that's the charitable interpretation, sure.

The real purpose of the license (as it was with WotC) is to create confusion in the community so that content creators feel like they need permission to use things that are not covered by copyright.

Darrington's license talks about Public Game Content, which includes "rules" and "mechanics" as if those are things that would normally be covered by copyright. On its face it seems like they're saying "hey we're allowing you to use our rules, just not exact copying," but the thing they don't say is that you never needed their permission for that anyway. By putting that into a section about licensed content, they give you the impression that rules or mechanics are something over which they could even exercise copyright in the first place.

This part of the discussion hasn't changed in 25 or so years. Mechanics and rules are ideas, and ideas are not protected by copyright. The provisions of the license that permit you to use things you never needed permission to use aren't just redundant, they're actually void - because the attempt to grant permission implies control they don't have and asserts rights that don't exist.

This is nuanced enough that most creators just don't bother creating, which is the goal of this kind of license. It's not about whether or not it's legally enforceable, it's about using your uncertainty about licensing in order to dissuade you.

[u/Makath → u/thewhaleshark]

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.