Contributor Agreement

Version 1.1. Published 25 August 2026.

1. The deal in plain words

You keep ownership of everything you write. You give Wyrdwright permission to use it in the game, in the ways listed in Annex A. You are credited, permanently, and you can ask for your name to come off at any time without losing anything else. You can take your work out of future builds. We may edit your fragment to keep the game working, and we tell you when an edit is substantial. Your words are never used to train an AI model, and never fed to a writing assistant. If Wyrdwright ever earns money, contributors share in it, on terms published before the first payment.

This summary is not the agreement. Where it differs from the numbered sections, the sections win.

2. Words we use

Fragment. One .frag file, or one === id block within it: a single scene with choices.

Submission. A fragment you send us for inclusion, through Discord or any other route we open.

Build. A version of the game we publish, whether that is the website, a downloadable copy, a phone app, or a storefront release.

Module. A directory of fragments shipped together. Free modules ship inside the game; premium modules are sold.

Storefront. A platform we distribute through, such as Steam, the App Store, Google Play or itch.

Ledger. contributions.json, the record of who contributed what to each fragment.

Handle. Your permanent contributor name, the value in a fragment’s author: line.

Program Terms. The separately published rules of the contribution program, including payment, at Program Terms.

Content Policy. The separately published rules on what may be written, at Content Policy.

We, us, the Project. Wyrdwright, operated by Luis Schmidt, Germany. Contact details are in section 31.

3. How the documents fit together

This agreement covers rights: what you grant, what you keep, what we promise. Program Terms covers operation: how submissions are reviewed, what contribution kinds mean, and how payment will work. The Content Policy covers what may be written.

Program Terms and the Content Policy can change more often than this agreement, which is why they are separate. Where they conflict with this agreement, this agreement wins.

4. Who can contribute

You must be 18 or older. This is not a judgement about young writers. Under German law a licence granted by a minor without their guardian’s consent can be voided later, and a voided licence inside a paid module would be a serious problem for everyone involved, including the other contributors in it.

You must have the right to grant what you are granting: the work must be yours, and it must not be owned by an employer, a school, or anyone else.

You keep one payout identity. One person, one handle that receives payment. Your handle is permanent, because it is the key that ties your work together in the ledger, and it is public. A display name, which you can change whenever you like, is held privately and is not published.

You are responsible for your own account security. Work submitted from your account is treated as yours.

5. How you accept, and what is on record

You accept this agreement once, when you register as a contributor. That registration covers the framework: these terms, the Content Policy, and the conduct rules.

Each submission carries its own grant. When you submit a fragment, you grant the licence in section 6, for the uses in section 7, for that specific fragment. This matters legally: German law is sceptical of blanket grants covering works that do not exist yet, so we ask per submission instead of once and forever. The wording you see at that moment is in Annex B.

We record which version of this agreement each submission was granted under, in the ledger. If a later version changes what is granted, your earlier submissions stay under the version you accepted.

6. The licence you give us

For each fragment you submit and we accept, you grant the Project a licence that is:

non-exclusive, so you keep every right to your own work, including the right to use it elsewhere;
worldwide and unlimited in time;
sublicensable, so we can distribute through storefronts, which require it;
transferable to a successor, as described in section 9.

You keep ownership. This is a licence, never a transfer. German law does not permit an author to sign away authorship itself, and we are not asking you to try.

7. What we may do with your fragment

The uses we may make are listed in Annex A and are limited to that list.

The list is long and specific on purpose. German law reads a licence narrowly: any use not expressly named stays with you. A vague grant would mean coming back to every contributor the first time we did something ordinary, like releasing a phone app.

8. AI: what is allowed, and what never is

Your words never train a model, and never feed a writing assistant. That is a commitment, not an aspiration, and it is written into the grant.

Two AI uses are permitted, and only these two:

Pipeline tooling. Validation, review assistance and search over the corpus, to help us maintain it.
Localization, where the machine output is reviewed by a human before it ships.

For both, we will only use providers who contractually do not retain submitted text and do not train on it. Sending your text to a tool that would learn from it is not permitted by this agreement, so the constraint binds us, not just our intentions.

Everything else is not granted: training or fine-tuning any model on your text, including ours; using the corpus as context or retrieval material for a writing assistant; generating new fragments derived from yours. There is no opt-in tier for this, and we are not planning one. If that ever changes it would be a new version of this agreement that you would have to accept, and silence would not count as acceptance.

Your side of it. When you submit, you tell us if you used AI assistance and what for, and you warrant substantial human authorship, described in section 16.

9. Storefronts, and a future company

You agree that we may sublicense your fragment to storefronts on their standard terms, to the extent needed to distribute the game there.

You also agree in advance that this licence may transfer to a company we form, or to a successor who takes over the Project. Under German law a licence cannot be passed on without the author’s agreement, so without this section, incorporating would mean asking every contributor again. The transferee is bound by this agreement exactly as we are.

10. What we may do to the text

We may edit your fragment. Specifically, we may:

correct errors, typos and formatting;
keep it consistent with the rest of the game as the game changes;
rebalance its stat effects and conditions;
trim or expand it for pacing, or for a format such as a small screen;
adapt it to new platforms;
translate and localize it;
split, merge or re-sequence fragments;
migrate it to a newer version of the .frag format.

Two limits, and they are real.

We tell you about substantial edits. A substantial edit is one that changes meaning, outcome or voice. The threshold is described in Program Terms so it can be refined with experience. When we make one, we tell you, and you can ask for your name to come off the result. We will not refuse that.

We will not misrepresent you. We will not change a fragment so that it says something you did not say and would not want attributed to you. This limit exists in German law whatever a contract says, and we would not want it any other way.

This section is about maintaining your fragment. Another contributor rewriting your work is a different question, in section 14.

11. Your licence from us, and the shared world

While you are contributing, you may write inside Wyrdwright’s setting: its characters, places, history and systems. This licence is for contributing to Wyrdwright. It does not let you publish work based on our setting elsewhere, and it ends if you stop contributing, though everything already accepted stays as it is.

When you introduce something to the world, it becomes part of the world. A character, a place or an event you invent can be referred to by other contributors’ fragments, and by ours. That is what makes a shared setting possible, and it is why a fragment of yours can mention someone else’s character without asking.

Unless you reserve it. You may mark an element you introduced as reserved, at any time, and from then on anyone who wants to use it has to ask you first. Reserving is yours alone to decide and you owe nobody a reason. It is not retrospective: fragments already accepted keep what they have. Most elements are better left open, because a shared world only feels shared when people can reach into it, but a character you have plans for is exactly what this is for.

Shared state is not owned by anyone. A variable you introduce, meaning a flag, a count or an enum that other fragments can read and set, becomes part of how the game keeps track of a life. Any fragment may read it and any fragment may set it, permanently, and that does not depend on your continuing to contribute. There is nothing here to license: a name like crimes_committed is a label on a piece of bookkeeping rather than writing, and the sentence in the registry saying what it means is written by us when we record it. Your fragment is yours. The counter it moves is the game’s.

What you get for it. Two things, and they outlast your leaving.

Every fragment that makes material use of an element you introduced is recorded in the ledger under your handle. If revenue share becomes active, those entries are treated like any other contribution under the schedule in Program Terms: a character other people keep reaching for is worth something to you, not only to them. We have not published a number, because the calculation that would produce one does not exist yet, and a figure invented before the arithmetic would be a guess dressed as a promise. What we can say now is that the recording happens from the first use, so the record is there whenever the schedule arrives.

And you are told. Whenever somebody writes a fragment using an element you introduced, you hear about it, and your view on whether it is written consistently carries weight in review. On an open element that is not a veto, for the reason section 15 gives. On a reserved one it is: nobody uses it without your yes. Being told does not stop when you withdraw, though you can ask us to stop telling you.

When you leave, the element does not. What happens to a character or a place you introduced when you withdraw your work is set out in section 21, along with everything else about leaving. The short version is that fragments already accepted keep using it, and your writing of it goes with you.

This may be offered more broadly later. If contributing to Wyrdwright ever becomes valuable enough that a wider world bargain makes sense for both sides, we will offer one in a future version. It would apply only to submissions made under that version, or to contributors who choose to accept it. We are telling you the direction now so it is never a surprise, but we cannot and will not widen it by ourselves.

12. Using your fragment elsewhere

Your licence to us is non-exclusive, so your fragment stays yours to publish, sell or adapt anywhere else, whenever you like. We ask one courtesy, not a rule: let Wyrdwright publish it first or at the same time, so it does not arrive in the game as something players have already read.

Publishing elsewhere does not affect your credit here, and does not affect your eligibility for any future revenue share.

13. Fragments written with someone else

If you wrote a fragment with other people, one of you submits it and is the contributor we deal with. That handle goes in the author: line, takes the credit, exercises the rights in this agreement over that fragment, and receives any payment for it.

How you divide credit or money between yourselves is yours to arrange. We will not arbitrate it, and we will not split a payment across handles.

By submitting, you confirm you have the right to license the whole fragment, including every co-author’s share of it, and that they agreed to it going into Wyrdwright under this agreement.

One thing this cannot do, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise. German law makes people who write something together joint authors of it automatically, and naming one of you here does not change that. So the confirmation above is doing real work: if a co-author who never agreed turns up later, we take the fragment out of the game while it is sorted out, and section 17 applies.

14. When other contributors work on your fragment

There are three ways someone can build on your work, and they are deliberately not equal.

Linked fragments need no permission at all. Another contributor can write their own fragment that only appears for players who saw yours. Nothing of yours is touched. This is the way we encourage people to build on each other.

Additions put a new choice, branch or subscene into your fragment without changing a word you wrote. You are told, and what you say carries real weight in the decision, but the decision is ours. A fragment that others cannot extend without a contributor who has moved on is a fragment frozen forever. Your handle stays on the fragment; the addition’s author is recorded separately in the ledger.

Rewrites replace your words with someone else’s. This needs your yes. Not your silence, not a deadline, an actual yes. If we cannot reach you, no rewrite happens.

We considered a rule where silence after some weeks counted as agreement. We decided against it. Your work should not change hands because you were busy.

Be clear about what saying no does and does not do, because the two are easy to run together. It means no altered version of your fragment gets published, and that holds absolutely. It does not oblige us to keep shipping the original: under section 20 we may decide to stop instead. Your words stay yours and stay unchanged either way.

Most cases that look like a rewrite are not one. If a fragment needs a fix, another contributor can draft it and we adopt it as an edit under section 10, which keeps your name on the fragment and credits their help separately.

15. Crossovers

A fragment can use characters and places introduced by several different contributors. Unless an element is reserved under section 11, that works without anyone needing permission.

If someone writes a fragment using an open element you introduced, you are told, and your view on whether it is written consistently carries weight in review. It is not a veto. A character other people want to write should not become a gate held by whoever thought of them first.

A reserved element is different. There, asking is the point: you decide, you owe no reason, and no answer is not an answer. If you cannot be reached, the element stays as it is and whoever asked writes somebody of their own instead.

Whoever writes the fragment is its author. Where an element you introduced is used materially, the ledger records that too, and Program Terms explains how that is treated if revenue share becomes active.

16. What you promise us

When you submit a fragment, you tell us that:

it is yours, written by you, and you have the right to license it;
it does not infringe anyone else’s rights: not copied text, not song lyrics, not someone else’s characters, not material from another game or licence;
no one else has a claim on it, such as an employer or a school, and where someone else helped write it, that you have their agreement and the right to license their share (section 13);
it does not expose real people: no identifiable private individual portrayed without their agreement, no private facts, no harassment;
it follows the Content Policy;
you have told us about any AI assistance you used, and what it did.

Substantial human authorship means the words a player reads are yours. You wrote the prose, you decided the choices, you decided the outcomes. Using a tool to check spelling, reformat a file, or translate a draft you then rewrote yourself is fine, and so is brainstorming a premise in conversation. Generating a scene and editing the output is not, and neither is generating the choices or the branch structure.

We are strict about this for a practical reason as much as a principled one: text generated by a machine has no author, and text with no author cannot be licensed. A fragment like that inside a paid module would break the chain of rights for everyone in it.

17. If someone makes a claim

If anyone claims your fragment infringes their rights, we will usually take it out of the game first and work out what happened afterwards. That is not a judgement about you.

You agree to help us understand the claim: what you wrote, what you drew on, what you know. If the claim turns out to be right and you knew, or should reasonably have known, that the work was not yours to license, you are responsible for what that costs us. If you submitted in good faith, you are not.

18. Credit

You are credited for your work, permanently, in the ledger and wherever the game lists contributors. Credit shows your handle, which is the key that ties your work together and therefore does not change.

Credit is your right, which means you can also decline it. You can ask for your name to be withheld from a fragment, or from everything, at any time and for any reason.

Withholding your name changes what is displayed and nothing else. It does not end your licence to us, and it does not reduce anything you are owed, now or later. The ledger entry stays exactly as it was, because the ledger is the payment record.

19. Your fragment’s source

We publish the source of free fragments in a Fragment Library so contributors can read what they are extending. We may restrict or stop publishing it at any time.

You should know, plainly: anything that ships is readable anyway. The game compiles fragments into the code it sends to players’ browsers, so anyone who wants to read a shipped fragment can, whatever the library does. We would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise.

20. We do not have to publish, or keep publishing

Accepting a fragment is our decision, and so is keeping it in the game. We may unlist a fragment from future builds at our discretion, as the editor of a curated work.

Reasons include, and are not limited to: it breaks the Content Policy; it draws a credible claim that it infringes someone’s rights; it cannot be made to build or play; it contradicts the game around it in a way editing cannot fix; it no longer fits the game’s direction; the corpus has grown lopsided and a phase or theme needs thinning; it falls below the standard the game has since set; or a platform we distribute through requires it.

We will tell you the reason, and you can contest it and get an answer. That is a promise about how we behave, not a list you can hold us to exhaustively, because a curated game whose editor cannot prune is a game that gets worse over time.

That includes after you decline a rewrite. If we think a fragment needs replacing and you would rather it was not, we may stop shipping it instead. We would rather tell you that here than imply a protection we were not going to keep.

What that leaves you is the thing that actually matters, and it does not depend on this section: nobody changes your words without your agreement. We will not publish an altered version of your fragment against your wishes, whatever we decide about shipping the original. That is section 14, and German law would require it of us regardless.

Unlisting does not affect your credit, and it does not affect anything you have already earned. It does mean a fragment that is not shipping is not earning going forward.

21. Taking your work back out

You can withdraw any fragment from future builds, at any time, for any reason. Write to us and we will do it.

What happens. The fragment stops shipping in the next release, and within 30 days at the latest. Its ledger entry stays, marked with the date, so your authorship record survives the work leaving. Its id is retired, so other people’s fragments that referred to it still build.

You can take your name off the world as well as your work. You may ask that the world registry stop naming you as the contributor who introduced an element. The element stays, because other people’s accepted fragments depend on it, but your public connection to it ends. Your ledger entry is untouched and so is anything it earns you: having your name removed must never cost you money, here or anywhere else in this agreement.

Credit keeps accruing after you leave. Fragments that keep using an element you introduced keep recording that use, on the terms set out in section 11. Leaving does not stop you being credited, or paid, for what other people build on.

Fragments already accepted keep what they were given. When you introduce an element to the world, the licence for other fragments to use it settles as each of those fragments is accepted, and it does not end when you leave. A fragment accepted while your work was in the game keeps using the element exactly as it already does, however centrally, and keeps shipping.

This is not us keeping your work. Your writing goes completely, every word of it. What stays is somebody else’s fragment, written in good faith while your element was part of the world, which would otherwise be destroyed by a decision they had no part in.

What goes, and what stays. Your writing goes: your scenes, your sentences, your version of the person. What stays is the name and the job they do in the world, and from there other people may write them and develop them as their own. Neither the name nor the job was ever yours to withhold. Copyright protects the way a character is written, not the fact that a friend down the road exists, and the fragments we have just promised will keep shipping have to keep making sense.

The hard part, said out loud. This means somebody else may go on writing a character you invented, under the same name, after you have gone, and take them somewhere you would not have. There is no version of a shared world where that is not true, and we would rather you knew it now than discovered it later. If it is intolerable for a particular character, reserve them under section 11 and keep them to yourself, or do not put them in the world at all. Nothing here reaches merchandise, adaptations in other media, or anything outside the game.

Two things worth knowing about how little this actually takes. Most of what it covers was never protected by copyright to begin with, because copyright protects the way something is written, not the facts of it: nobody needs permission to say that a character exists. The part that genuinely needs your permission is a distinctive, well-developed character. That is the part that leaves with you. The name, and the shape of the person in the world, were never in your gift.

What we cannot do. Copies already out in the world stay out there. A downloaded game, an installed app, a storefront release someone already owns: none of that can be recalled, and the licence for copies already distributed continues. Withdrawal is about future builds.

What goes with it. Any addition another contributor wrote inside your fragment goes too, because it is built on your text. We tell them, and their ledger entry stays. This is one of the reasons we encourage linked fragments over additions.

What we may still do. Withdrawal takes out your text. It does not reserve the situation, the theme, the slot in the game, or the job a character was doing in it. We may commission a new fragment covering similar ground, and a new character filling the same gap, written from the situation rather than from your text, which we do not circulate for that purpose. It ships under a new id as its own work, with no claim that it is yours and no trace of your name on it.

A dependency never blocks you. If other fragments lean on yours, that is our problem to solve, not a reason to keep you waiting.

If we edited it, our edits go with it. An edited version is built on your text and cannot outlive it.

If you objected to a substantial edit, withdrawal is immediate rather than on the usual schedule.

One thing no contract can remove. German law lets an author revoke a licence where the work no longer matches their convictions and continued exploitation cannot reasonably be expected of them (section 42 UrhG). That right cannot be waived in advance and we are not pretending otherwise. It is narrow, it requires compensating the licence holder, and it is not the same as the right this section gives you, which we grant voluntarily and which is far broader.

22. Money

There is no revenue share yet. The game is free and nothing is being sold.

If that changes, contributors share in it. The full schedule, including how a share is calculated and what counts as revenue, will be published in Program Terms before the first payment, not after.

We bind ourselves on how that can change:

changes are announced before they take effect, with at least 30 days’ notice;
a payment period already calculated is never recalculated. Money you have earned is earned, and a later change cannot reach back into a closed period;
each payment period is calculated under the schedule in force during that period;
a change is never aimed at an individual contributor;
work contributed before revenue share existed is covered by the schedule in force when it starts. Contributing early does not mean contributing for nothing.

What we cannot promise, and will not pretend to. How much a given fragment earns in future periods will move, and it can move down. Two reasons, and neither is anyone acting in bad faith. The schedule is relative, so if a new kind of contribution is added and given a value, every existing kind’s share of the same pool gets smaller. And the corpus grows, so even with the schedule untouched, more work sharing the same pool means a smaller slice each.

A guarantee that your future share never falls would be a guarantee that the program can never add a contribution type and never grow, which is not a program worth being part of. What you get instead is notice before the rules change, an unchangeable record of what you contributed, and periods that close for good.

Once we are selling anything, you get a yearly report on how your work was used and what it earned. German law requires this and we would do it anyway.

German law also gives you rights we cannot write away and are not trying to: a right to appropriate remuneration for what you grant, and a right to a further share if your work turns out to be worth far more than anyone expected. Nothing here limits those.

23. Tax and invoicing

If payments start, you are responsible for your own taxes and any social contributions where you live.

We will normally invoice on your behalf, which German law calls a Gutschrift, because it is simpler for everyone than asking each contributor to issue invoices. You agree to that now, and you can object at any time, in which case you invoice us instead.

Where a payout requires identity verification, we ask for it before paying, not after.

24. Your data

We keep as little as possible, and the public record contains none of it.

In the repository, publicly: your handle, the date you joined, your status, which versions of these terms you accepted, and your contribution record. That is the whole list. No display name, no email address, no Discord id, no real name.

Privately, outside the repository: the mapping from your handle to your Discord account, your contact details, your display name, and the record of your acceptance.

The split exists because the repository’s history is permanent. Anything committed there can never truly be deleted, so nothing that identifies a person goes in. Your handle is the exception, and it is deliberate: it is the key that ties your work together, so it is public and permanent by design, and choosing a handle is choosing what the world sees. Choose it accordingly.

Erasure. You can ask us to erase your personal data, and because none of it is in the repository, we can actually do it: the private mapping goes, and what remains in public is a handle and a work record with no person attached to it. If you would rather the handle stopped appearing too, section 18 lets you withhold credit at any time.

What we cannot do is unpublish history or recall copies already distributed. In one narrow set of cases we will rewrite repository history anyway: a legal demand, a credible claim from someone who never agreed to anything and whose personal data ended up in a fragment, or content that is unlawful to hold. That is a last resort with its own procedure, not part of the ordinary withdrawal route in section 21.

25. Conduct and content

The Content Policy and the community conduct rules are part of this agreement. Both are versioned and published. Breaking them can mean a submission is declined, a fragment unlisted, or your participation ended.

26. Ending this

You can stop contributing whenever you want, and you can withdraw your fragments under section 21.

We can end your participation if you break this agreement, the Content Policy or the conduct rules, or if you make the program unworkable for others. Where it is fixable, we will say what needs fixing first.

What survives. Licences for fragments already shipped survive, so the game does not break, subject always to your withdrawal right in section 21. So do the credit guarantee, anything owed to you, and sections 16, 17, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31.

27. If you die or lose capacity

Your licences continue, so the game keeps working. Your credit continues. Anything owed goes to your estate. Your heirs can exercise your rights here, including withdrawal, on proof of their standing.

28. What we do not promise

We do not promise the game will keep running, that any particular fragment will stay in it, or that anyone will earn anything.

Where we are at fault, our liability is limited: for ordinary negligence we are liable only for breaching an obligation that goes to the heart of this agreement, and then only for the kind of loss that was foreseeable.

That limit has holes in it that German law puts there and does not let anyone close. Liability cannot be limited for anything done intentionally or with gross negligence, nor for injury to life, body or health, nor in the other cases where the law says so regardless. Naming those exceptions is what keeps the rest of this section valid, since a liability clause that tries to cover them is void in Germany. It is not an admission that a text game is likely to hurt anybody.

29. Changes to this agreement

We can publish new versions. We will tell you before a new version takes effect, and the changelog says what changed and why.

A new version never changes a grant you have already given. Fragments you submitted under version 1.0 stay under version 1.0. A new version applies to what you submit after accepting it.

If you do not accept a new version, you simply stop submitting new work. Everything already accepted stays as it is, and every right you have here continues.

30. Transfers

We may transfer this agreement to a company we form or to a successor who takes on the Project, as described in section 9. You cannot transfer yours, except that your heirs succeed to it under section 27.

31. Law, disputes, and the small print

Language. This agreement is in English, and English is the version that governs.

Law. German law applies. If you are a consumer somewhere else in the EU, you keep the protections of your own country’s law that cannot be contracted away.

Disputes. Talk to us first. Most things are a misunderstanding and we would rather fix it than argue about it. If that fails, the courts of the Project’s seat have jurisdiction where the law allows; if you are a consumer, you can sue where you live, and we will sue you only there.

The European Commission provides an online dispute resolution platform at https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are not obliged to take part in consumer arbitration and currently do not.

If part of this fails, the rest stands, and the failed part is read as whatever lawful term comes closest to what it was for.

Not enforcing something once does not mean giving it up.

Notices to you go to the contact details you registered. Notices to us go to the address below. Text form, including email, is enough for both.

Contact. Luis Schmidt, Wyrdwright. The current postal address and email are published alongside this document and in the game’s imprint.

32. Things this agreement does not cover

Ideas and feedback. Suggestions in Discord about mechanics, tone or direction are free for us to use, with no claim, no credit and no payment. Say so at the time if you mean something to be a submission rather than a conversation.

Peer review. Reviewing other people’s submissions earns standing in the community. It is not a contribution to the fragment and earns no ledger entry.

Code, tooling and documentation. This agreement is about story content. Contributions to the engine, the parser or the docs are separate and need their own terms. Ask us before starting.

Ledger mistakes. If your contribution is recorded wrongly, or missing, tell us and we will correct it. Program Terms gives the window and the process.

Fraud. Sockpuppet accounts, alternate handles used to farm credit, or contributions manufactured to game a payout schedule end participation and forfeit anything they earned.

If we discover a contributor was under 18, we remove the work from future builds, because the grant was not valid to begin with. Nothing else follows automatically.

Annex A: what we may do with your fragment

We may use, reproduce, distribute, display, adapt (within section 10) and communicate your fragment, in these ways:

The web game, including free and premium modules.
Downloadable and offline builds, including bundled and packaged copies.
Native applications: mobile (iOS, Android), desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux), and consoles.
Distribution through storefronts, including Steam, the App Store, Google Play, itch and their successors, on those platforms’ standard terms, which requires the right to sublicense.
Premium modules and paid collections, sold on their own or by subscription.
Ports, conversions and successor versions of the game, including a rewritten engine.
Marketing and promotion of Wyrdwright: excerpts in trailers, screenshots, store pages, social posts, press material and the website.
Translation and localization, including AI-assisted translation reviewed by a human before it ships.
Archival, backup and internal development copies, including validation tooling.
The Fragment Library, as described in section 19.

Not included, and never granted by this agreement: training or fine-tuning AI models, corpus or context use for AI writing assistants, generative use of your text, merchandise, and adaptation into other media such as film, television, audio drama or print. Any of those would need a separate agreement with you.

Annex B: the per-submission grant

This is the wording shown when you submit a fragment:

I wrote this fragment, or I wrote it with others and have their agreement and the right to license their share. It does not infringe anyone else’s rights. I grant Wyrdwright the licence set out in the Contributor Agreement version 1.1, for the uses listed in Annex A. I keep ownership. I have disclosed any AI assistance I used, and the words in this fragment are substantially human work, mine or my co-writers’.

Annex C: for the lawyer

Known items for review, in priority order.

Must be reviewed before any money moves.

This document as standard terms against consumers (BGB 305 to 310). Particularly: section 29 changes, section 22 change control, the section 28 liability limits, and the section 17 indemnity. Transparency and fairness, not just presence.
Künstlersozialabgabe. A project regularly paying self-employed writers is likely liable to the Künstlersozialkasse. This is a percentage on top of every payout and is not currently budgeted anywhere.
UrhG 32 and 32a posture. Revenue share sits in Program Terms rather than in the licence. Does that separation help or hurt, and is a floor or a scaling share needed as a structural defence?
Annex A enumeration under UrhG 31(5), and whether a Discord click-through is adequate evidence of a per-submission grant.
Section 10 against UrhG 14 and 39. Are the named categories broad enough to carry ordinary maintenance, and is the substantial-edit notice plus de-credit right an adequate counterweight?
Section 11’s world licence surviving withdrawal: narrow by design, but still a carve-out from a right this same document grants.
Sections 9 and 30 as advance consent under UrhG 34 and 35.
Section 23: Gutschrift requirements under UStG 14, whether payouts are licence fees or services, VAT, and withholding for contributors outside Germany.
Section 24 against the GDPR: the public registry, the private mapping, permanent git history versus Article 17, and Discord’s role as a processor.
Sole proprietorship exposure and whether to incorporate before any money moves.

Worth reviewing. English-only enforceability against German consumers; consumer venue and the ODR notice; the shared-world and crossover drafting in sections 11 and 15; section 13 on joint authorship under UrhG 8; section 27 heirs; section 19; the section 31 boilerplate; and trademark strategy.

Annex D: changelog

Version 1.1, 25 August 2026. Shared variables are infrastructure and belong to nobody (section 11). Elements you introduce stay open by default and can be reserved, after which people must ask you and no answer is not an answer (sections 11 and 15). A fragment accepted while your element was open keeps using it and keeps shipping after you leave. When you withdraw, your writing of a character goes and the name and their role in the world stay, for other people to write; section 11 now says so plainly rather than leaving it to be discovered (sections 11 and 21). Section 42 UrhG is named rather than left unstated. You may take your name off an element while keeping the credit, and credit keeps accruing after you leave (section 21). Section 11 now states in one place what using your element earns you and that you are told each time it happens, rather than leaving both scattered. No grant had been made under 1.0.

Version 1.0, 29 July 2026. First published version.