The Guides Are Books Now, and You Can Sell What You Build on Top
Two things shipped together this week, and they’re related enough to cover in one post.
The guides read as books now
The GM Guide and Player’s Guide used to live in the doc library as a pile of separate HTML pages — one per chapter, sorted alphabetically, indistinguishable from every other standalone document. Finding “the GM Guide” meant scrolling past twenty-five unrelated entries that all happened to start with “GM Guide.”
They’re single documents now, the same way The Witnessed Prey and Saikou’s Compendium already were: one entry in the library, a table of contents, and a chapter nav bar with next/previous and a jump-to dropdown. Opening “GM Guide” opens a book, not a folder.
Mechanically, this is a book.json per guide — chapter file, label, and title, in order — read by the manifest generator and rendered by the same chapter-nav code the two prior books already used. If you’re contributing new guide chapters, that’s the file to update; the doc library picks up the rest automatically.
While in there, we also cleaned up a longstanding bug where any category with a hyphen or an apostrophe in its name — players-guide, gm-guide, other-games — silently fell back to “Other” in the library’s category filter. Every category now resolves to its real label.
A license for what you build on top
The System Reference Document has always been CC BY-NC-SA — free to use and remix, as long as it’s noncommercial. That’s fine for homebrew you run at your own table, but it’s a real wall for anyone who wanted to write their own adventure or setting on Fate’s Edge rules and actually sell it on Itch.io or DriveThruRPG. The bare SRD license doesn’t get you there.
The Community Content Program is that missing piece: an explicit, additional grant of commercial rights, layered on top of the SRD license, for creators who use our rules to build their own original settings and adventures.
The short version:
- Use the SRD as your rules engine. Write your own setting, NPCs, and adventures — entirely yours.
- Publish commercially, anywhere — Itch.io, DriveThruRPG, wherever. Keep all of it. No cut, no royalty back to us.
- No submission queue, no approval step. You don’t need us to say yes first.
- What’s still off-limits: our setting’s own lore, named patrons and NPCs, art, and Kon’reh — that’s separate, all-rights-reserved material, and it isn’t part of this grant. And your product needs a short compatibility notice saying it’s unofficial fan content, not “Fate’s Edge Official Whatever.”
This is the same shape as the community programs other open systems run — the point isn’t to curate a marketplace, it’s to get out of the way and let people build. Full terms, including the required notice text, are in the policy itself.
If you were sitting on an adventure idea because the license didn’t quite cover selling it — it does now.