We wish to help foster a creative community, and have produced these guidelines for producing “Fan Merchandise” aka player created products.
Ardent Spacers has been produced mainly by volunteers, with some commissioned work. These guidelines are here to protect everyone’s legal rights with their work while allowing our attendees to use game assets within the context of the game.
Work produced as part of Ardent Spacers is not licensed under creative commons.
General Rules
- All goods must be made to sell primarily within the game’s community.
- You must credit any official assets used as from “Ardent Spacers” at a minimum.
- Art on our website remains the property of the artist unless otherwise stated.
- Some game assets require written permission to use if the item is being sold.
- Main game logos do not require permission to use.
- Photographs and illustrations will require permission to use.
Non-Commercial Use
Event attendees are welcome to use any official assets to produce items in any quantity to give away or trade with other attendees, which includes trading for any in-game items, resources, or credits.
Individual Use
If you are a player, crew member, or individual wishing to occasionally produce items to sell, the following applies.
- You may make up to 10 copies of an item to sell without requiring written permission.
If you wish to mass-produce an item, see Business Use (next).
Business Use
If you are a company, freelancer, or intend to mass-produce an item, the following applies.
You must seek written permission before using official game assets.
Free Use
- We allow our assets to be freely used for up to 10 copies of an item.
- You must send us an email to contact@ardentspacers.com to be added to our approved business list.
- You must not replicate existing merchandise from another maker; items may be similar, but not exact (for example, two businesses can’t produce exactly the same embroidered patches).
Paid License
- If you intend to produce or order more than 10 copies of an item, you may be required to pay a small licensing fee, on a case-by-case basis
- Anything made for a large player-created group is exempt from this.
- This fee is in place to compensate our game asset designers for their work, which in many cases will have been produced for free on a volunteer basis.
- You must contact us to discuss plans for items that would require a license. This can be before or after you design or prototype it, but must be before 10 copies are produced.
- Commercial approval can be revoked at any point; reasoning will be given.
These rules are in place to protect the game assets from being used commercially by those outside of the game community or UK LARP community, or by other projects online. We are also keen to make sure our artists are financially compensated, and it isn’t really fair for others to directly profit from their designs without them getting something from a licensing fee.
It also means we can create a directory of businesses who produce items for the game to help advertise them!
Official Merchandise
To help raise more funds for the game and compensate our artists, we plan to produce a variety of official merchandise to be sold online and at events.
Player Designed Official Merchandise
We already have a very creative community, and want to help support that grow!
If you have an idea for a product that you wish to design and have sold officially by us, we encourage you to get in touch. This can be anything from embroidered patches and t-shirts, to posters and stickers. If your idea gets approved, you complete the digital design, then we’ll make it in-house or source the items, handle all the logistics, and you’ll get a cut from each sold item as ticket credit as well as a free one posted to you.
Get in touch by emailing contact@ardentspacers.com
Planned merchandise
We are planning on producing this merchandise in-house to sell online and at events:
- Planet and Division logo embroidered patches
- Event-specific embroidered patches
- T-shirts containing only a Division logo
- 3D printed badges using the Division logos
We are eager to support local businesses; if you can produce any of the above, get in touch about becoming an official supplier.
Our Agreement with Official Designers
Whenever money is involved, our goal is to be fair to all parties and work towards ethical and sustainable practices. LARPs usually struggle to achieve this solely from ticket sales, which is why we’ll be looking into producing merchandise to build towards a system that compensates creatives fairly for their work whenever we possibly can.
As a designer volunteer, you own the copyright for anything you solely produce – that’s what the law says! Even artists we specifically commission will retain copyright unless that is sold as part of the project conditions.
All sales of official merchandise see a cut of the profits go to the designers involved. The exact amount will be agreed per type of product and involvement of each designer.