Community Content Program · Fate's Edge Dev

What This Is

The Community Content Program is an open invitation: take the Fate’s Edge System Reference Document, build your own adventures and settings on top of it, and sell them — on Itch.io, DriveThruRPG, or anywhere else — without asking permission first.

This program doesn’t replace the core license; it extends it. The SRD is CC BY‑NC‑SA 4.0, which by itself does not permit commercial use. This document is the author’s explicit, additional grant of commercial rights for community creators who follow the terms below. Nothing here changes the license on Extended Content (setting lore, named NPCs, patrons, art, Kon’reh, etc.) — that material is still all rights reserved and is not covered by this program.

There is no submission process, no approval queue, and no royalty. You publish; we don’t review it first. See Enforcement, below, for the one exception to that.

You May

Use SRD material (core mechanics, dice resolution, character creation frameworks, equipment tables, and anything else marked [SRD] in the source) as the rules engine for your own original work.
Write your own setting, adventures, NPCs, factions, and lore — entirely your own creative property.
Publish that work commercially, on Itch.io, DriveThruRPG, or any other storefront or platform, and keep 100% of what it earns. We take no cut and ask for none.
Publish for free, as shareware, pay‑what‑you‑want, or any other model you like.
Do all of this without contacting us first, submitting anything for review, or waiting for approval.

You May Not

Use Extended Content — Fate’s Edge setting lore, named patrons or NPCs, faction descriptions, proprietary mechanical systems (Runekeeper, Invoker, Cantor, Summoner‑specific material, the Deck of Consequences, Crown Spread, Travel Framework, etc.), artwork, or maps — without separate written permission. If your product uses any of this, it isn’t covered by this program and needs its own license from the author.
Use Kon’reh (the strategy game) content; it’s a separate, wholly original property and isn’t part of the SRD or this program.
Claim or imply that your product is official, endorsed, or produced by Nicholas A. Gasper or Fate’s Edge. It’s fan/community content, and it needs to read that way.
Use the Fate’s Edge name or logo as part of your product’s own title or branding. You may use it only in the compatibility statement described below.
Relicense the SRD text itself under different terms. Whatever you build on top is yours, but the SRD portions you reuse verbatim or adapt remain CC BY‑NC‑SA — if you redistribute those portions on their own, ShareAlike still applies to them.

Required Notice

Every product using this program must carry a compatibility statement along these lines, somewhere reasonably visible (a credits page or product description is fine):

This product is an independent production by [your name/studio] and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by Nicholas A. Gasper. It uses material from the Fate’s Edge System Reference Document, used under the terms of the Fate’s Edge Community Content Program and the Creative Commons Attribution‑NonCommercial‑ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). “Fate’s Edge” is a trademark of Nicholas A. Gasper and is used here only to indicate compatibility.

What Good Looks Like

This section is advice, not terms. Nothing here is a condition of the program — you can ignore all of it and still be fully within your rights.

The permission above covers what you’re allowed to publish. It says nothing about what makes a supplement usable, and after writing a fair number of them, three things seem to matter more than the rest:

Say what you changed, say why, and show your arithmetic. A variant that states its departures plainly can be argued with, adopted, forked, or improved. One that hides them can only be trusted or distrusted, and neither is much use to a table trying to decide whether to run it.

Check the curve, not the midpoint. If you’re retuning any part of the dice economy, test it at a two-die pool and an eight-die pool. Two systems can be tuned to agree exactly in the middle and diverge into completely different games at the edges — because one is adding and the other is multiplying. This is the single most common way a well-meaning conversion breaks.

Before you invent a mechanic, check whether you’re re-inventing one. The rules are built from four objects — a roll, a clock of 4/6/8/10 segments, a four-row outcome matrix, and a two-currency economy — used at every scale. Crafting, travel, downtime and warfare all run on those four without additions. If your supplement needs its own resolution mechanic, it’s worth one more look: usually the thing you want is a roll, a clock, an outcome, or a piece of table state wearing a costume. Supplements that invent skills, clock sizes, or difficulty ladders stop being playable alongside published material, which is the one thing a supplement really shouldn’t do.

Never let a good idea go unchallenged.

Then hand it to someone who’ll argue with the framing. Showing your arithmetic catches wrong answers. It does not catch wrong questions — those get answered well, correctly, and at length, which is exactly what makes them survive review by their own author.

Note which ideas that aphorism is aimed at. Bad ideas advertise themselves; they attract scrutiny on their own. It’s the good ones that slip through, because everything checkable about them checks out. The People’s Die shipped with a framing that called a past position “wrong”; a reviewer pointed out that nothing factual had been wrong, and that calling it so avoided naming the actual error — answering an affordability question when the live question was friction. That claim survived weeks of the author’s own review precisely because it was well-supported. It was never going to fail a test for being incorrect.

An outside reader saw it in about a paragraph. Budget for one.

A worked example. The People’s Die — a complete d6 conversion, written as a joke and playable straight — is published as the reference model for this. It states every departure from the core rules, explains the reasoning behind each, and closes with an appendix of exactly computed probabilities showing what the conversion actually does to the game (including the part where it accidentally abolishes the clean success at seven dice). The comedy is optional. The appendix is the part worth copying.

Enforcement

We don’t curate the program and won’t review your work before or after publication. That’s the point — it costs creators nothing to get started and it costs us nothing to let it grow. But the permission this document grants is revocable: if a specific release misuses the Fate’s Edge name, uses Extended Content without permission, misrepresents itself as official, or otherwise falls outside these terms, we can withdraw permission for that release (and, for repeated or willful violations, for that creator) by written notice. Everyone else’s standing under the program is unaffected.

No Warranty

Community content is created independently of the author, who makes no representation about its quality, accuracy, or fitness for any purpose, and bears no responsibility for it.

This Is Not Legal Advice

This page describes the permission the author is granting as the sole rights holder in Fate’s Edge; it isn’t a substitute for a lawyer’s review of your own specific product, especially if you’re combining SRD material with content licensed from elsewhere.

Questions

For anything not covered here — including requests to license Extended Content — contact the author via the address in the license file, or open a Discussion.

“Every road the Guild doesn’t own is a road worth walking.”