WANDERING HEROES OF OGRE GATE: MEANT TO BE HACKED

This is an important announcement about the Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate system and our intentions as we go forward with publication of the rulebook. One thing I believe strongly is that gaming fans ultimately make a system. They breath life into it, they find new uses for mechanics and they build useful tools that other fans can freely use. With Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate we want to encourage people to come up with new Kung Fu Techniques, put out adventures and create variant approaches. With that in mind we want people to know they can do that freely, whether the purpose is free fan material or commercial. As long as folks are not reprinting text verbatim from the book, they do so as they like. But even this last point has one important exception: Chapter Three. 

Chapter Three: Kung Fu Techniques is a key section of the rulebook. This is where we list and describe all of the game's Kung Fu Techniques. These are maneuvers like Spear of the Infinite Emperor and Drift of the Butterfly Fish that make martial heroes so exceptional. Presently we have have something like 160 Kung Fu Techniques in the rulebook. We are going to effectively put Chapter Three into the public domain by granting anyone the right to reprint the text of that chapter and use it however they wish (privately or commercially). This is important because we've found it is helpful to reproduce text from key techniques in NPC stat blocks, so if someone wants to make a module it makes things easier for them. This also will allow people to incorporate the techniques into character generators or simply share them and discuss them online. 

Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate is not a toolbox, it is a complete game. However it is a game that is meant to live in individual campaigns. The rules are not static but should be adapted and grow. So while we provide an extensive list of Kung Fu Techniques we are under no illusion that we've managed to map out the entire genre. There isn't enough room in the Chapter to cover everything wuxia has to offer. Of course people are going to want to make new techniques, of course they'll find new ways to employ existing ones. Putting Chapter Three into the Public Domain just makes that so much easier for people to do and they don't have to worry about getting in trouble for hashing over techniques in a forum or including variants in their own Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate supplement. 

On thing we will also be doing is make the official Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate logo available to publishers who meet some basic quality requirements. Anyone can release a Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate module or expansion without the logo. But this just allows us to make sure anything bearing the official logo matches our vision of the game. Those interested can simply contact us on our website and I'd be happy to talk with them.