Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for the 3rd of September 2022, and the title of this episode is “Wizards of the Coast foul up, Fandom flees, and Tabletop Scotland booms”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #163]
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Battleaxes and Brimstone are in the spotlight this month, as voted for by Patreons.
That poll wrapped on Thursday, the night of my day job’s End of Summer party and where I donned a poncho, mounted a bucking bronco and could hang on for 28 seconds only. So, Battleaxes and Brimstone don’t yet know they’ve won, and I’ll get in touch with them this week.
If you’re a site Patron, and I was really pleased to see some new faces this month, thank you. You can also vote in October’s poll, and the candidates are;
There wasn’t a podcast last week as I was in Perth, the old capital of Scotland, for a gaming convention. I promised to do a recap of that, and I will, but let’s tackle this weekend’s breaking news with Wizards of the Coast apologising for letting racist concepts into Spelljammer.
The idea of some white explorer finding a tribe of primitives and uplifting them to be nearly like him, but not as clever, is straight out of racist imperialism.
It’s super awkward that Wizards of the Coast had that in Spelljammer with actual monkey-people as the primitive race, and it boggles the mind that it got through sensitivity readers.
It’s a cringe that one monkey-person was even illustrated as a bard that looks straight out of the Jim Crowe era.
Yet, that’s precisely what happened with Spelljammer’s Hadozee. The D&D team has hurried out an apology and an errata.
Sadly, what doesn’t boggle my mind is the expected backlash. I’ve seen gamers suggest Wizards have been cowed by the woke crowd. They haven’t. This was a mistake, almost anyone could see it, and they’re now trying to fix it. Woke isn’t a pejorative.
I’ve also seen people who don’t get why it’s racist. If you’ve lived a very sheltered life, this could be possible, but otherwise, I think it requires deliberate effort to shut down even basic attempts to think it through.
It must be tough being an RPG publisher, right? The smaller companies have a nightmare fight for any profit whatsoever, and the bigger ones face such a split audience.
No wonder Fandom has left the market. Previously, they sold D&D Beyond to Wizards of the Coast for millions and that made sense since it was a licensing deal, and it felt like D&D would want it back in-house sooner or later.
However, that still left Fandom with titles like the forthcoming Masters of the Universe RPG, the Dragon Prince RPG and other Cortex games. It also left them with Cortex and plans to fulfil the promised Cortex Creators marketplace.
Not anymore.
Cortex and the Dragon Prince license has been sold to a games company called Dire Wolf Digital. Despite the name, Dire Wolf Digital has gotten into physical games.
The He-Man RPG, Legends of the Grayskull, might not have been moved and may now be paused. There’s even less said of the Cortex marketplace.
What do you think this means for Cortex? A managed retreat or a new life?
Osprey Publishing is a company that moved into the market in recent years and seems to be doing okay. Their latest RPG is written by Mark Galeotti, a history professor and an expert in Russian intelligence.
The game is Gran Meccanismo and is a clockpunk alternative history in which Machiavelli gets his hands on basic computers. We’re still to see if Osprey has any RPG plans for 2023, so that will be telling.
A potentially new company on the scene is Bancroft Publishing. This newbie has signed a deal with Dragon Turtle games to help get Carbon 2185, the 5e-powered cyberpunk and its Kickstarter-stalled Terminal Overdrive out.
I think something’s going on there. I get angry comments and emails from people fed up with waiting for the supplement, and they’re rarely charismatic. At the same time, just where and why did Bancroft come from? Would it look dodgy if it turned out there was a behind-the-scenes connection to Dragon Turtle?
A game that’s still someway off Kickstarter but surely heading there is The World Below, and I heard about it at Tabletop Scotland.
Onyx Path, which has some British writers, co-sponsored the 2,000+ strong convention and had a panel session. I cheekily asked some questions about their relationship with DriveThruRPG-plus-Roll20 and learnt that OPP is undoubtedly watching the VTT and marketplace space.
The OPP team enthusiastically talked about The World Below, a new creation from them and an entirely new slice of intellectual property.
Survivors from some sort of apocalypse have fled underground to find that there are already others here and some monsters. There’s also a corrupting and mutating magic.
In some ways, the game is about how power corrupts and what people do when they get it. Do they trust themselves to make the world better if they keep it all for themselves, or do they share it and hope that it’s neither whisked from their well-intended hands nor misused by others?
The World Below will use the next evolution of Storypath, and that’s Storypath Ultra, and it’s still very much in development. If I had to guess, we will not see it on Kickstarter until 2023.
A setting we’ll see in Kickstarter before then is Tetsubo. If you’re an old Warhammer fan, then, yes, this is the whispered legend of Tetsubo.
When Warhammer Fantasy Role Play was young, Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson designed this distant setting, from far beyond Cathay, but Games Workshop did not pick the project up.
It’s been talked about ever since.
Now, Earl of Fife Games has signed a licensing deal with the creators. It won’t be a Warhammer game but will use the Heroes & Hardship universal setting, which is coming from Earl of Fife.
And while we’re talking Kickstarter, I want to mention Sneak Attack Press’ Graveyard of the Gods because Matthew Hanson has guested for Geek Native with Gifts from Dead Gods.
Graveyard of the Gods is a Spelljammer Kickstarter, and Gifts is a hexcrawl table for people exploring the body of a dead space god, and that’s not something many DMs have already pre-prepared.
Or, if you want something now, not 5e and free, then why not download Challenge Dungeon? It’s a 162-page translation from a successful Japanese tabletop RPG and is available for zero bucks from DriveThruRPG.
You’ll find links to these games in the transcript, which you can access via the show notes.
Quick sales are on but ill-suited to two-week podcast catchup, so, although there’s a bit more to say this week, let’s do the bundles that are running.
At the Bundle of Holding, Green Ronin have True20 on offer, with the core rules in the lower tier. There’s also a double-dose of Dungeon Crawl Classics from Goodman Games.
On Humble, in welcome news for worldbuilders and GMs, there’s the Maps Spectacular offer in which you’ll find cartography software.
Now, thank you for putting up with Audio EXP, the Geek Native podcast, skipping a week while I was at Tabletop Scotland. I shared loot pictures down Discord and might turn that into a channel. Feedback welcome.
My time challenges continue, and it’s self-inflicted mainly but not exclusively so. It took me too many days to notice that the daily digest email was not coming from the blog. Sorry about that. That took several plugin makers and hosts Pagely to investigate for me, and I resolved it by rebuilding everything from scratch with help.
However, the site still seems sluggish, and I’m struggling to determine why. That’s why Routinely Itemised didn’t make the midnight deadline this week, coming out in the early hours of Saturday morning.
It takes hours to do each Routinely Itemised, and I’ve finally gone dark side and written a gentle scraper for Kickstarter to harvest descriptions and names for the write-up. I hope to get the balance right, but to save at least an hour by writing it by hand.
So, with all that done, does that mean we’re out of the way until Scotland Loves Anime? No, sorry, I’ve a gig in Glasgow between then and, before that, a jinxed trip to Tabletop Gaming Live in Manchester.
I gave in to the urge of a press pass, not to save money, because it’s barely the cost of a meal and nothing on travel and hotel but for the access.
Then I cashed in Hilton points to secure a lovely treat-my-self room after all this madness. The catch? No refunds.
Next, I discovered there are no longer direct Edinburgh to Manchester flights, and there will be a train drivers’ strike that weekend.
So, I’m on a coach. I’ll spend half a day that weekend on a coach and get to Manchester only a few hours before Tabletop Gaming Live finishes. Not ideal, and I’ll be shattered too. If you’re going and hanging around on Saturday night, as I will be, hit me up.
On that note, beware travel gremlins, and I’ll see you next week but not the weekend after that, which is the Manchester coach trip of doom.
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