One Page Rules has revealed 'Worlds Beyond: Brawl', a massive crowdfunding campaign for over 500 minis from 18 different creators, adding 53 new warbands to OPR's small-scale battle games Grimdark Future: Firefight and Age of Fantasy: Skirmish. Not only is OPR teaming up with indie sculptors, but it's collaborating with companies that have their own games - so you'll soon be able to field forces from Warmachine, Arcworlde, and Warzone Eternal against one another, using bespoke OPR rules as a common language.
OPR announced Worlds Beyond: Brawl on its Patreon on Tuesday, and a MyMiniFactory Frontiers crowdfunding campaign will launch on May 12. The price of backing hasn't yet been announced, but OPR states that "proceeds of this campaign will also be split evenly between the participating creators regardless of their size and reach". The minis in the campaign will all get rules for use in OPR game via the OPR Compatibility Program - I spoke to head of marketing Jefferson Thacker to learn more about it.
The Compatibility Program allows miniature makers to create OPR army lists for their models, which are then hosted on the game's Army Forge list-building app. It immediately puts me in mind of the Dungeons and Dragons Open Gaming License - but Thacker notes that OPR screens submissions "to avoid intellectual property concerns" of armies that infringe on other copyrights, so he says it's more like the Pathfinder compatibility system or DMs Guild. And in fact, the whole point of the program is to make it more profitable for 3D sculptors to release miniatures that aren't just more proxies for Warhammer 40k factions.
"People don't want to buy models if they can't use them in a game", Thacker says, "We made the program to save sculptors from being railroaded into making miniatures for very popular commercial games or DnD". "This way they can make cool models true to their own artistic vision for what they want, give rules to it just like they can to DnD, and have a large invested community". He points out program participant CobraMode: "they do amazing models that could not be proxies for anything other than their own stuff".
Some firms are leaping in in a big way. Trans Atlantis Games, owners of the Warzone Eternal license, notes it "is actively converting its full range of units to One Page Rules, giving players unprecedented flexibility in how they build and deploy their forces". The new Paizo Printables range will be OPR compatible, pushing Paizo into the wargaming space for the first time.
The Army Forge Studio has tools for constructing units and does a lot of the basic math automatically. "There's a huge balance guideline FAQ document", says "and we can recommend freelancers to help develop the rules". He continues, "Some of the bigger creators want more of an assurance, so they can hire an OPR designer". He adds: "We haven't just given them more work, we've hired more designers".
Do you play any of the OPR games? How well do you find the compatibility program armies are balanced? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!