IP Policy

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Guiding Principle

Games Workshop’s rules text and ability descriptions are their intellectual property and are not open source. The consortium respects this boundary while building tools that work with the publicly observable, factual aspects of the game.

What’s Safe

The following are considered safe for consortium projects:

  • Software tooling — list builders, army builders, probability calculators, phase mappers, deployment tools
  • Stat lines and point costs — numerical facts about units (e.g., a model’s Toughness, Wounds, Save characteristics)
  • Point costs — publicly known numerical values
  • The Ability DSL — a community-authored structured representation of game mechanics as data trees, without reproducing GW’s text (game mechanics are not copyrightable; only their specific expression is)
  • Phase and turn structure mappers — tools that model the flow of a game turn

What’s NOT Safe

The following are explicitly out of scope and must not be included in consortium projects:

  • Bundling ability text verbatim — copying rules text word-for-word from Codexes, Index cards, or the Warhammer app
  • Scraping Wahapedia or Warhammer app endpoints — automated extraction of content from these sources
  • AI models trained on GW text — language models or other ML systems trained on copyrighted rules content

The Ability DSL

The consortium’s Ability DSL is a structured data format that expresses game mechanics (e.g., “re-roll hit rolls of 1”) as machine-readable trees. It captures what a rule does without reproducing how GW wrote it. This is analogous to how a chess engine encodes the rules of chess without copying any particular rulebook.

Grey Zone Process

If you’re unsure whether something crosses an IP boundary:

  1. Stop — don’t include it in your submission.
  2. Flag it — raise the question on Discord or in your PR description.
  3. Wait for Council review — a Council member will assess and respond.

When in doubt, leave it out.

Disclaimer

This policy is not legal advice. It represents the consortium’s best-faith interpretation of fair use and factual data principles. Individual developers are responsible for their own legal compliance.