Post-Mortem, Pre-Planning

I'm not in the mood for a long post right now, but there are a couple things I should say.

First: I think Blogger is as back as it's going to get. There are one or two comments that are still missing, but I can at least assure those of you who left the comments that I saw them and did not delete them myself. Other than that, the only damage done is a couple corrupt labels/tags that I can't seem to remove.

Second: I mentioned in a comment that I would be saying more about the Liber Zero project status. As some of you will remember, I planned on doing LZ in two phases: a summary document that would include both OGL and CC-licensed content and an expanded document that would be closer to a full rulebook, with examples and optional sections. This has changed to three phases:

• a core rules document that will only contain the CC-licensed material;
• an OGL rules document that, when combined with the Product Identity material from the CC-licensed core rules, creates the actual clone;
• a final rules book that does all the combination for you, with the examples and optional sections.

I'd been advised by Rob Conley not to do the dual licensing because it seemed too complicated, but there are good reason why I'm doing it that way. The CC part is basically anything that isn't already in the d20 SRD, especially cloned material from the original booklets that has to be redone in a non-infringing way. Placing this in a separate document helps distinguish it, in case I ever have to legally defend myself. It also means I can use it as a basis for Alternate V without making Alternative V an OGL game -- and thus protecting Alternative V and anything based on it from collateral damage in case there's a legal problem with Liber Zero. Also, if dedicated Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord players don't want a whole new clone, but would like some of the LZ components (like Situation Rolls,) they only need to download the core document and are free to include these in derivative products, regardless of the legal status of Liber Zero itself.

Long story short: I'm planning to release a rough draft of the core document this month. I was originally shooting for May 21st, but that might be pushed back a week. What I've found was that it was hard to assemble and organize all the stray bits of rules that show up in my development blog posts and other places. So, I've started using a TiddlyWiki to create a microcontent tiddler for each rule or table, then arrange them in a proper order.