Hi, Anthony here!
Exactly 1 year ago, I took over maintaining Unofficial Old-School Essentials on Foundry VTT. And today I’m announcing a new phase of the open source OSE project.
Two. Two projects.
We’re splitting it into two projects, Old-School Essentials Foundry VTT Edition, and United Fantasy Toolkit.
Both projects will remain free open source software, and I will set up a fund for the United Fantasy Toolkit project. I see that as the best way to help open source on Foundry grow alongside licensed games.
I will still be fulfilling my role as open source maintainer of Old-School Essentials Foundry VTT Edition and creating Necrotic Gnome’s commercial Foundry products, but we’ll see far more activity in UFT as we open the possibility of having lots of maintainers with equal responsibility for the code, user interface/experience, translations, documentation, and community outreach.
In the last year, I barely had time for new features, only bugfixing. While that will improve in the future, I want to officially recognize the efforts of several of our contributors, who have clocked hours to a point worthy of joint decision-making responsibility.
Basically, this project was never truly mine, I just held the keys. I was never interested in being a gatekeeper; however, it was hard to balance my responsibilities to Necrotic Gnome with my responsibilities to the open source contributors, and I take both of those very seriously.
Maybe it’s not obvious how yet, but this change will mean that a lot of cool, creative ideas will flow into these projects, and the coolest part is that OSE, as well as every project forked from OSE, will all be able to take advantage of what comes next. United Fantasy Toolkit is a configurable, do-it-yourself Foundry VTT toolkit for old school play.
For contributors interested in more information, we’ll be doling out some more details in the contributor section of the OSE on FVTT discord. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a skilled contributor, there’s room for everyone to play. Pick one of the contributor roles and let’s chat!
Thank you so much to my community, and really the community is where I get the most pride from, who’ve been without a doubt, really kind and supportive of me, of each other, and all the new faces. I’m thrilled to work with y’all in 2023 😊
A: The project for Unofficial Old-School Essentials is expanding into two projects: Old-School Essentials Foundry VTT Edition will remain the same game system and remain open source, but it will be expanded into the United Fantasy Toolkit, which lets us support lots of different rule options, opt-in compendiums, and simplify DIY old-school hacks on Foundry VTT.
A: OSE on Foundry VTT will only contain RAW OSE, and UFT may contain alternate rules from games such as Black Hack, Into the Odd, Into the Depths, and Tunnel Goons. UFT can support more compendiums than just Designed With OSE modules. UFT will eventually support rules extensions with very little code.
A: Nope, we’ve been planning this since May! It’s interesting timing, no question. I just didn’t want to put it off longer.
A: I’ve gotten permission to help release a free Fantasy Medieval Campaigns system for Foundry VTT! I plan to use UFT to make it happen!
A: I’ve been keeping a lot of people in the loop about this for months, but recently I’ve been working quietly on the details. Now that it’s public, I hope to go back to those folks about their interest in this project.
A: We will have lots of people sharing control of the project: an elected board of directors who vote on big decisions, paid maintainers who share responsibility for important tasks, and an appointed Code of Conduct committee that holds people accountable for unprofessional behavior.
A: I’m one. We have one more interested in signing on, but as I said we have room for several and we’d love for you to ask about what kind of work we have in mind for paid maintainers.
A: The board of directors will decide how much maintainers can earn out of the total budget. We expect this to be a token sum unless we can raise funds elsewhere, which is not guaranteed. We expect some maintainers to waive their freelance payments because it’s too little to be worth complicating their taxes.
A: Yes, but we’re hoping all maintainers either, 1. leverage their knowledge of the codebase to consult with other OSR publishers, or 2. raise funding by creating their own add-on modules or some other endeavor. I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re wasting time.
A: Maintainers’ contributions will be treated like everyone else’s, but they have more responsibilities on top of those contributions, especially reviewing and testing the game system.
A: No, these are volunteer positions.
I expect board members to have a time commitment of about 4 hours every 3 months. The CoC committee might get a lot of work if something bad happens, which is something to be aware of, but it’s also possible they never get a conduct case to review. In general, any volunteers should take the time commitment seriously. Their reasons for being involved in the project should be a sense of shared values with, and responsibility for, the community.
A: Yes! That was always allowed!
A: I always thought it was a shame that OSE’s bugfixes and code improvements are rarely followed in the OSE forks, and several forks have even been left behind due to core Foundry updates. I hope UFT enables more opportunities to improve sustainability of the Foundry ecosystem.
Also, if you maintain UFT itself you’re eligible to receive (small) freelance payments in addition to your Patreon campaign, etc.
A: In the video I said that it’s challenging to balance my obligation to Necrotic Gnome with my obligation to the open source community. The community wants lots of configuration options, while Gavin wants a streamlined OSE experience. I’ve simplified this argument, but trust that splitting the project enables the best of both worlds.
A: We’re starting now. I hope to complete our tasklist before March 31.