The Trench Crusade Community License is here
Today we’re pleased to officially launch the Trench Crusade Community License. What does that mean to you? To put it simply, these are the rules that dictate and clarify what you can and cannot do with the Trench Crusade IP (including the art, miniatures, and other intellectual property), in terms of projects that are distributed in any way, commercial or otherwise.
Please note that these rules do not apply to personal projects that are not distributed, such as kitbashes or models sculpted for your own personal use. It also only applies to projects that aim to be within the Trench Crusade space. We obviously do not own the concept of alternative WW1 settings.
In addition, we are launching the “Compatible with Trench Crusade” License, which will allow creators to apply to have their creations approved for distribution and marketed with our seal of approval, ultimately giving more choice to the community.
This post has been a long time coming. We originally talked about it during the Kickstarter and have been working on it since early last year. If it has taken this long to come together, it’s not just because we had to prioritise other tasks. We’ve had to adapt it multiple times due to both the growth of the game and IP, but also in response to what some have done with our IP in the past year.
First, we would like to say that we very carefully considered the creation of these rules. Whilst we are talking about a game of toy soldiers, we now have to take the matter of our IP and its stewardship very seriously, as Trench Crusade represents the livelihoods of quite a few people, both inside and outside Factory Fortress.
Our stance towards community content
We are very aware of how much effort some people are putting into creating their own content destined for Trench Crusade, so it’s important that we clarify rules and set expectations here and now.
This article aims to clarify our official and honest position regarding community content.
We have no issues with other creators making money off of Trench Crusade.
We love all the crazy stuff our community comes up with, and we honestly find it cool that our creation can support others.
However, this cannot be to the detriment of Factory Fortress, our team and their livelihoods.
Trench Crusade is a once in a lifetime opportunity that represents the income and careers of our team. We’re sure you can understand that we do need to put our business affairs first.
We still want to maintain our community-focused approach and do something that very few wargames have done before. In spite of the serious tone of this text – which is necessary to underscore how seriously we take this – we want you all to know that we’re very pleased to be releasing this license.
We’ve worked closely with legal counsel and brand protection consultants to create balanced rules to keep our IP safe while also allowing independent creators to operate with a clear view of what is allowed and what isn’t. We also expect to spend even more time helping creators manage the compliance of their own projects through means like the “Compatible with Trench Crusade” License. This is one of our commitments to you, our community.
This commitment must go both ways, or it will not work in the long term.
Before we go into the details, we would like to thank all the creators who have previously reached out for clarification and have played by the rules. This is your moment, and we’re truly excited to see all the crazy stuff you come up with.
The Rules
The rules are in essence what was announced in the original Kickstarter post, which, as a reminder, was only a draft.
The core concept of our rules since the Kickstarter has always been: don’t use our names, IP or designs. For everything else, common sense and general IP law would govern. But the time has come to more clearly codify the rules for community creations. This official License is worded to act as a legal document and has been adapted to cover the breadth of projects that we’re now seeing, whether it be miniatures, fan art, fiction, gaming accessories, etc. It also serves to provide clear guidelines against the infractions we’ve witnessed over the past year.
To give you some examples of the latter:
- General piracy: This refers to the sale of counterfeit versions of our STL files and physical prints. While we always knew this would happen, the success of Trench Crusade has taken piracy to unexpected proportions.
- Use of official designs: From selling complete sculpts of our official artwork or “adapting official designs to another style”, we’ve seen it all at this point.
- Misrepresentation: Certain creators have been using names and descriptions identical to our own products. Obviously this leads to a lot of confusion amongst players over what is official and what is not.
Put all of these together and you get the cases of the Maximilian-class Knight or the Prussian Stosstruppen. The art and lore were originally revealed as a cool teaser of things to come, as we had done in the past. Sadly, though, within the week, both of these had been copied and were already up for sale with identical unit names, the Trench Crusade name, and other copied features.
A knock-on effect of this is that we now only reveal new content when it is ready for sale by us. Whilst we very much enjoyed posting these teasers and all the excitement it generated, this is an example of the entire community paying for the sins of a small group of profiteers seeking to capitalize on the success of Trench Crusade while claiming to support it.
We remain undeterred, however, and still want to push ahead with this for the sake of the community at large. Our Community License revolves around two main principles: Respect for the official material and Representation.
Official Material
We shouldn’t have to ask most of the players reading this, let alone professional creators, yet here we are: please do not use official material such as concept designs, art, miniatures, components or products as the basis of your own creations. This means partially or wholly and also includes adapting our designs to other “styles”.
The core of this community license project is meant to allow people to create their own Trench Crusade–adjacent content, not copy ours.
Additionally, whilst we stand by the game being miniatures agnostic, that is not intended as an invitation to copy our IP.
Representation
Whether inadvertently or purposefully, we’ve seen a lot of creators cross the line recently when it comes to naming and advertising their products.
This goes from flat out calling their listings “Trench Crusade – unit name – faction name” to creating approximations of our logo or affixing “Compatible with”–like labels and icons to their images and descriptions, despite the latter being a previously announced program that has not been live until now (outside of a very limited number of exceptions).
This has caused a lot of confusion about what is official amongst players. Many of you will be able to recognise an official Trench Crusade product from an unlicensed one. Not all buyers are as knowledgeable and frequently get caught up buying unofficial models and products, believing that they are official or licensed.
Whilst creators have a right to “fair use” of our intellectual property, when that use deliberately or unintentionally causes confusion amongst buyers, causes reputational damages to us, directly competes with our own products, or causes us harm – then that does not fall under fair use. Once again, we expect professional creators to know the difference.
Compatible with Trench Crusade
Alongside this Community License comes the “Compatible with Trench Crusade” License to support and promote creators who play by the rules and genuinely want to support the game and community.
This is a separate agreement that must be applied for. It builds off of the main Community License with a few additional stipulations. If accepted, it will allow you to advertise your creation as “Trench Crusade Compatible” which includes a set of logos you can use. The license can be accessed via the Community License page.
Please note that we expect an extremely high volume of submissions as existing creators seek to apply for their back catalogues. We will get to everyone as soon as we possibly can, but do expect a certain amount of delay to begin with. Additionally, we will only be going over these once every one to two weeks, as we have to prioritise other company tasks.
Compliance
Now that the proverbial line in the sand is drawn, we expect many creators will need to rework listings and rework or entirely remove certain designs.
This of course can generally not be done overnight, and therefore there will be a grace period lasting 2 weeks (February 19th, 2026) to allow everyone to get their content in compliance with these rules.
The rules should now be very clear about what is and isn’t allowed, and coupled with common sense, it should be obvious which changes are required of you. If you find yourself thinking: “I’m not sure if they’ll accept this”, then it’s very likely that we won’t.
You can contact us via our website if you have questions concerning the viability of your project. For miniature projects specifically, you can apply for the “Compatible with Trench Crusade” license if you’d like definitive confirmation, but in this case we recommend that you delist the item in question until we get back to you. As mentioned above, we expect a high volume of messages to begin with, so please understand that we may not be able to get back to you immediately.
Enforcement
Now for the least fun part of this entire subject, but we do need to talk about it.
We do issue takedowns on infringing content and have been doing so for a year now. This is done via a third-party IP protection service.
We use this service because it would be impossible for us to do this ourselves. We had to issue almost 3000 takedowns last year, which is not something our team can handle unless we were to employ a fairly substantial in-house legal team. For the same reason, it is impossible for us to contact each seller individually to resolve the matter.
To dispel any rumours: our partners use AI tools to track potential infringements. However, they are not enforced via AI. Everything is reviewed by an agent trained in our IP, and our team provides clarifications when needed. If takedowns were automated to target the use of the Trench Crusade name and other official material, the aforementioned number would be much, MUCH higher. Also, do not confuse the use of these tools by our partner with our opposition to the use of generative AI in creative and artistic tasks, to which we have been fully committed from the start.
Additionally, we do not ask platforms to remove them or close storefronts unless the seller in question refused to comply with previous takedowns or continued to create infringing listings despite repeated takedowns and we need to escalate. Sellers should be aware that different platforms have different rules when it comes to the consequences of takedowns, and they bear the full responsibility for these.
Examples
Nothing helps get a point across quite like some examples. Here are some hypothetical examples of creations that run afoul of the Community License. We hope these make it even clearer which kinds of things are not acceptable uses of our IP. We’ll also share some of our favourite community creations, all of which we think are great examples of the Community License in action!
Use of our official designs: As well as the case of the Maximilian-class Knight given above, the Goetic Warlock can provide a good example here. Up until very recently, we had not released an official STL sculpt of the Goetic Warlock; only the illustration and the rules were available. A number of sellers made their own sculpts of the Goetic Warlock that were almost exact copies of the Trench Crusade art. Please remember that directly copying our IP is never acceptable, whether we are already offering models for it or not.
However, other creators have made excellent alternative designs for the Goetic Warlock that are completely different from our art, and that is absolutely fine!
A good example of this is this design by Creature Caster. It is clearly meant to represent a Goetic Warlock, but is entirely different from our design. They even took the time to write some interesting backstory for the character!
This sculpt is also a great example of good product naming practices: the term “Goetic Warlock”, any of our faction names, and the name “Trench Crusade” have not been used anywhere in the product description.
This means that buyers can enjoy this excellent work without there being any confusion as to whether it is an official Trench Crusade miniature or not.
Another example of what not to do would be creators who have “adapted” our designs into different styles. By this, we mean taking one of our designs and altering it slightly to give it a different look. The Mechanized Heavy Infantry has often been a victim of this: we have seen sellers taking the exact same model and modifying it by slightly thickening armor plates, adding small embellishments or different accessories, or making them slightly taller or broader. This is not permitted by the Community License as it is not an original creation. If a model is an adapted version of our design, then you have used our work as the base for your product. That is not allowed, as not only is it using our IP, models that look so similar to ours can be confusing for buyers.
However, there have been some really creative reimaginings of the Mechanized Heavy Infantry! For example, this is from an upcoming release by Hollow Crown, and their HMI definitely looks the part, but nobody can say that it could be confused with our design.
Along with making their own name for this warband, this version does not copy our IP or risk causing confusion for buyers.
We hope that helps clarify what you can and can’t do with Trench Crusade!
If you’re a creator and would like to read the full Trench Crusade Community License, you can check it out here.
Conclusion
We think this is an exciting new step in the evolution of Trench Crusade, and we hope you agree. We look forward to the weird and wonderful things the talented people of the community will bring to Trench Crusade!