License¶

The Frontiers Engine is published under the Open RPG Creative (ORC) License.

This page contains the notices required by that license, identifies what is and is not covered, and explains in plain language what you may do with Frontiers.

Read the license itself

This page explains how Frontiers applies the ORC License. The license text is published by Paizo and can be read in full at paizo.com/orclicense.

Streaming, actual play, or video?

None of this page applies to you. Stream it, record it, monetize it, no notices required, see the Streaming & Video Policy.

In Plain Language¶

This section is a summary for convenience. It is not part of the license and does not modify it. Where this summary and the ORC License disagree, the ORC License controls.

The short version: everything in the Releases section is yours to use, with only the branding held back.

You may:

Build and publish games, supplements, modules, and tools using anything published under Releases — the rules, the design documentation, the Starter Sets, and the official Modules.
Use the settings, worlds, locations, organizations, and proper nouns from the Starter Sets. Those are open too.
Sell what you make. No royalties, no revenue share, no permission needed, no reporting.
Modify anything, including changing whatever you disagree with.
Say your work is powered by or compatible with Frontiers, and use the Frontiers logo to credit Frontiers, on the terms in the Trademark & Usage Policy.

You must:

Include the four notices set out under Notices You Must Include.
Credit Frontiers as an upstream source, along with any other Licensed Material you used.
Offer your own adapted rules content onward under the ORC License, so the next designer has the same freedom you did. This applies to the mechanical content of your work. It does not apply to your art, your setting, your fiction, or your own branding, all of which stay yours by default.

You may not:

Put the Frontiers logo, wordmark, or branding on your product as though the product were official.
Imply that Frontiers endorses, sponsors, or is affiliated with your work.

Does this make my artwork open?

No. Under the ORC License, artwork, music, trade dress, and your own settings and characters are Reserved Material and stay yours automatically. You do not have to designate anything to keep them.

One point of common confusion: ORC defines your "Derivative Work" as your entire product, not only the parts derived from Frontiers. That is a labelling rule, it determines what your Reserved Material Notice has to describe, not a grant. Nothing about it opens your art.

Frontiers ORC Notice¶

These are the notices published by Frontiers as a Licensor, in the form required by Article III of the ORC License.

ORC Notice

This product is licensed under the ORC License located at the Library of Congress at TX 9-307-067 and available online at various locations. All warranties are disclaimed as set forth therein.

Attribution

If you use our Licensed Material in your own published works, please credit us as follows:

Reserved Material

Reserved Material elements in this product include, but may not be limited to: the marks Frontiers Engine and Frontiers Tabletop Engine, and Frontiers as used to identify this engine; the Frontiers logo, wordmark, and site icon; the logos and wordmarks of the Frontiers Starter Sets; all visual artwork, animation, and design assets published by or on behalf of Frontiers; the trade dress and visual presentation of frontiersengine.dev and of official Frontiers publications; and all elements designated as Reserved Material under the ORC License.

Expressly Designated Licensed Material

The following elements are owned by the Licensor and would otherwise constitute Reserved Material, and are hereby designated as Licensed Material: all written content published in the Releases section of frontiersengine.dev, including the settings, worlds, locations, organizations, characters, plots, proper nouns, and titles contained in the Frontiers Starter Sets and official Modules.

This designation does not extend to any logo, wordmark, artwork, or design asset, and it does not grant trademark rights of any kind.

What Is Licensed¶

Everything published under Releases is Licensed Material, which covers every Ruleset, every Design Document, every Starter Set, every official Module, and every archived beta, across all versions.

Some of that is Licensed Material automatically, by operation of the ORC License itself, because it consists of the expressions reasonably necessary to convey the functional ideas and methods of operation of a game:

The resolution machinery, including the Resolution Die, the Gradient Die, Thresholds, and Favor and Disfavor.
Attributes, Derivatives, and the values calculated from them.
The modes of play, the action economy, and every rule governing them.
Health, pressure, and exertion systems, including the Wound, Fatigue, and Energy economies.
Skills, Abilities, Equipment, Characters, and Advancement.
Every table, formula, procedure, and worked example used to operate the system.
The terminology needed to use these rules, including the names of Attributes, resources, and mechanics.

The rest, the Starter Set settings and their proper nouns, which the ORC License would otherwise treat as Reserved, is Licensed Material because Frontiers has expressly designated it as such in the notice above.

No further designation is required for any of it, and none of it can be withdrawn.

This is permanent

Under the ORC License, an offer to license published Licensed Material is irrevocable. Everything identified above is open forever, to anyone, including commercially. That is deliberate. Build against it with confidence.

What Is Reserved¶

Reserved Material extends to the branding and nothing further.

The marks Frontiers Engine and Frontiers Tabletop Engine, and Frontiers as used to identify this engine. Frontiers Engine is the canonical form, and is the one to use in an Attribution Notice.
The Frontiers logo, wordmark, site icon, and animated brand marks.
The logos and wordmarks of the Frontiers Starter Sets. The settings are open, while their logos are reserved.
All visual artwork, animation, and design assets published by or on behalf of Frontiers.
The trade dress and visual presentation of official Frontiers publications and of frontiersengine.dev, including layout, typography, and design assets.

Reserving this material does not restrict your use of the rules, the design documentation, the Starter Sets, or the Modules. You can build a complete commercial product without touching any of it.

A note on the word \"frontiers\"

"Frontiers" is an ordinary English word, and Frontiers claims no rights in it generally. What is reserved is its use as the name of this engine.

Use the word as freely as you like: in your title, your setting, your chapter headings, your prose. Frontiers of the Verge is not a problem, and neither is a hex-crawl about frontiers. What is not fine is naming a competing engine Frontiers, or titling a product so that it reads as this engine rather than as a work built on it. The test is whether a reader would mistake your product for an official one, not whether the word appears.

The mechanical icons are not Reserved. The glyphs used inline in the rules and collected in each Ruleset's Icon Reference, ❖ ✩ ◉ ◬ ✚ ⊗ ⊖ ϟ ⛊ ⛉ ⇉ ➤ ✦ ✧ ✽ ⌗, are part of the engine's mechanical vocabulary and are Licensed Material, free to reproduce along with the rules text they appear in.

The one permitted use of Frontiers branding is crediting Frontiers, and it is set out in the Trademark & Usage Policy. For anything else, ask. Requests go to contact@jaykepaver.me, and the answer is usually yes.

Notices You Must Include¶

The ORC License requires that anyone publishing a work using Frontiers include four notices. Reproduce them in a reasonable manner for your medium. You do not need to reproduce the license text itself.

1. ORC Notice¶

Reproduce this exactly:

This product is licensed under the ORC License located at the Library of Congress at TX 9-307-067 and available online at various locations. All warranties are disclaimed as set forth therein.

2. Attribution Notice¶

Identify every Licensor whose Licensed Material you used, including upstream licensors. If Frontiers is among them, credit it as:

This product is based on the following Licensed Material: Frontiers Engine, Version 1.0, © 2026 Jayke Paver, frontiersengine.dev

Name the exact version you built against. Formulas change between major versions, and anyone checking your work needs to know which one you used. If you built against a version other than 1.0, substitute it.

You must also state how you wish to be credited by anyone who builds on your work:

If you use our Licensed Material in your own published works, please credit us as follows: [Title of Your Work], © [Year] [Your Name or Pseudonym].

3. Reserved Material Notice¶

Identify your own Reserved Material, your art, your setting, your branding:

Reserved Material elements in this product include, but may not be limited to: your setting names, characters, organizations, locations, artwork, logos, and trade dress, and all elements designated as Reserved Material under the ORC License.

4. Expressly Designated Licensed Material¶

If you choose to offer any of your own Reserved Material under the ORC License, identify it here. If you are not doing so, this notice may be omitted.

Attributing Multiple Sources¶

If you used only the engine, the single line above is the whole notice. Nothing further is needed.

If you used more than that, list it. Do not try to cram six modules into one sentence, a list is easier to write, easier to read, and easier for anyone checking your work. Frontiers asks to be credited in the following form, which the ORC License permits a Licensor to specify:

This product is based on the following Licensed Material:

Frontiers Engine, Version 1.0 — © 2026 Jayke Paver, frontiersengine.dev

Basic Combat

Slot-Based Carrying Capacity

Wasteland Starter Set

Community Modules:

[Module Title] — © [Year] [Creator], [source]

[Module Title] — © [Year] [Creator], [source]

If you use our Licensed Material in your own published works, please credit us as follows: [Title of Your Work] — © [Year] [Your Name or Pseudonym].

The structure is the point:

One heading for Frontiers, with the version on it, and everything written here listed underneath — official Modules and Starter Sets alike. They share the engine's copyright, so one copyright line covers all of them however many you used.
Community Modules listed separately, one per line, each with its own author and year. Their creators are Licensors in their own right, and the ORC License requires that every Licensor and upstream source be identified. This holds even if you changed how the module works.

Formatting is yours. A bulleted list, an indented block, a two-column credits table, or a run of lines in small type at the back of the book are all fine, as long as every source is identifiable and the community modules are not folded into the Frontiers line.

Starter Sets and Modules¶

Starter Sets are not settings kept aside for official use. They are complete, playable configurations of the engine, published as starting points for designers. They are Licensed Material in full, mechanics and fiction, free to use, adapt, reskin, sell, and build upon. Nobody is required to use one, and anyone may.

Official Modules are written and maintained here, alongside the engine, by the same author. They share the engine's copyright, so they do not need a credit line of their own: name them in the same notice as the engine and that is sufficient.

Community Modules are written by other people. Their authors retain authorship and are Licensors in their own right, so each community module you use must be credited separately, by name.

Submitting a Module¶

Community modules are welcome, and publishing one here does not hand anything over. You keep authorship and you remain the Licensor of your own work; Frontiers hosts it and credits you. You are free to publish the same module elsewhere, commercially or otherwise, at the same time.

Because the Releases section is published under the ORC License, a module hosted there is offered under it too, and that offer is irrevocable once published. If that is not what you want for a particular piece of work, publish it on your own terms instead. That is entirely reasonable, and it is not a lesser option.

Submissions go to contact@jaykepaver.me.

A Request, Not a Condition¶

The ORC License is royalty-free and expressly permits commercial use, and neither it nor Frontiers can attach conditions to that. Nothing in this section is a term of the license, and nothing here restricts you in any way.

That said: where a piece of community work is small, a single module, a subsystem, a conversion table, Frontiers would rather see it shared freely than sold. The engine is free because a shared toolkit gets better faster than a fenced one does. Larger works, full games, adventures, campaign settings, anything you have put real time into: sell them, and good luck with it.

This is a preference, stated once. Ignore it without consequence.

What This License Does Not Cover¶

The ORC License governs copyright and similar rights only. It expressly does not grant trademark or patent rights.

Use of the Frontiers name and branding is therefore governed separately, by the Trademark & Usage Policy. In short: you may state compatibility, you may use the logo to credit Frontiers, and you may not present your work as official.

Streaming, actual play, video, and podcast use is governed separately again, by the Streaming & Video Policy, which asks for no notices at all.

Note that the Expressly Designated Licensed Material above releases the copyright in the Starter Set settings and their proper nouns. It does not release trademark rights in them, and it does not affect the Frontiers marks at all.

Scope¶

The ORC License applies to every document published in the Releases section of frontiersengine.dev, across all versions. This includes the archived Beta 2026-1 and Beta 2026-2 releases, which are and have been offered under the ORC License, and it will include all future releases unless a specific document states otherwise.

Pages outside Releases, this License section, the Press Kit, the Showcase, Credits, and Help, are documentation about the project rather than part of the licensed body of work, and are not offered under the ORC License.

This does not narrow what you may do with the rules on stream or in video. That is covered by the Streaming & Video Policy, which is a separate and more permissive grant.

Where a document lists additional contributors, those contributors retain authorship of their contributions, and their contributions are offered under the ORC License on the same terms.

Versions and Irrevocability¶

Frontiers is published in versions. Each release remains available so that work built on an earlier version stays usable.

Under the ORC License, an offer to license published Licensed Material is irrevocable. Frontiers cannot withdraw, revoke, or add conditions to material already published under it, for any existing or future licensee. Later releases may designate additional material, but nothing already granted can be taken back.

Frontiers may revise the wording on this page for clarity. It cannot reduce the rights already granted, and revisions will not attempt to.

Irrevocability guarantees that the material stays available. It does not, by itself, guarantee that the vocabulary stays put. Frontiers commits to that separately: within a version line, no mechanical term is renamed and no core formula changes, so everything published as 1.x shares 1.0's terms and rules. The full commitment is set out under Stability Within a Version in the Trademark & Usage Policy.

Contact¶

For questions about this license, or to request permission for anything falling outside it, email contact@jaykepaver.me.

Permission requests for Reserved Material are welcome and are generally granted. Say what you want to use and how, and expect a straightforward answer.

Not legal advice

This page explains how Frontiers applies the ORC License. It is not legal advice. The ORC License is the controlling document; where this page and the ORC License conflict, the ORC License governs. If you are publishing commercially, consult a qualified attorney.