RPG Publisher Spotlight: Sad Fishe Games

Sad Fishe Games are the first RPG Publisher Spotlight winners of 2025. Last month, our patrons voted for them out of a short list of nominees.

Once again, thanks to our patrons. Money offered goes back into the hobby with commissions on art and articles and does not pay technology costs.

Thanks also to Tyler A. Thompson, Managing Partner at Sad Fishe Games and a man who kicked off some of the legal and hobby activity responses against Wizards of the Coast during the OGL drama.

Getting to know Sad Fishe Games

Starting at the start… but getting quickly onto the important topic of defending cows!

Who are Sad Fishe Games?

At its core, the Fishes are myself, Tyler J. Urish, and Owen L. Luetkemeyer, longtime friends of mine.  Right when we were all finishing up graduate school, before we started our careers, we found ourselves in the same metro, talking a lot about DnD, and was just like” why don’t we stop talking and start writing, while we have the time?”  And so we did.  The other two don’t have as much time to work for the company these days but we’re all still partners.    

What are you best known for?

I’m not sure we’re known for anything!  I’m surprised anyone wanted to hear from us to begin with.  That said, the thing I recall getting mentioned the most in ‘the wild’ on the internet is probably Atomsworn, and perhaps by extension some solo play material in general.  Atomsworn was one of the first, perhaps the first third party publication using the Ironsworn SRD; Ironsworn was my introduction to solo play, which was immediately fascinating to me as someone with the evergreen problem of scheduling busy people to play games. Its an early product of ours and probably needs some revisiting, but it has done really well – and convinced me there was a market for solo play. 

Your products cover various systems; I can see Death in Space, EZD6, CY_BORG and Ironsworn at a glance.

We hop around systems a lot.  This is in part because it can be hard to keep my interest for too long; I love reading and playing new games, and once I do I really want to write for them if the license to do so is there.  It is also in part because a lot of our projects are at least partially written by the SFG community – people contribute sections in exchange for equal pro-rata shares in the royalties, and then we do all the finishing work to get them published.  Sometimes the community wants to write for different things. 

Black Spear uses an evolution of Openquest, and I’m interested in why you picked that, but I’m also curious about (what I see as) a tension between the pleasantness of a bucolic setting and the dark times coming to the Marchlands. Does the game start as one thing and then move towards a different flavour, while Openquest serves as a good basis for both?

We wrote Black Spear at a time when life was very stressful and confusing – for me, it was right at the start of my legal career, juggling dozens of cases and digging through thousands of pages of convoluted legal codes.  I wanted to write about something simpler: caring about how many cows you owned and stopping bad things from eating them (and you).  That’s simple, idyllic even, despite the monsters.  In the real world, our reward for dealing with complex problems is often being asked to handle more complex problems.  It is the deepest fantasy for the reverse, which was my idea behind writing bronze age, pastoral fantasy in Black Spear. Openquest was a great base because 1. The system (especially the newest edition) is a great, easier take on the Runequest implementation of Chaosium’s Basic Role Play system (BRP), and 2. It had a permissive license: the Open Gaming License. 

Defend the OGL

I was on the Defend the OGL Discord server during the OGL drama and was surprised to hear that Tyler A. Thompson set it up. Shouldn’t I have known that? It turns out Tyler was keeping a low profile.

The OGL drama happened a few years back when Wizards of the Coast tried to take back control of what been given from Dungeons & Dragons to the community to use as they wanted. The result of having an open games license meant we could have tabletop RPGs like Pathfinder.

I don’t see any D&D support in the Sad Fishe library, and perhaps I’m not looking hard enough, but I was part of the “Defend the OGL” Discord server, so the lack of 5e in the lineup does not surprise me. What’s the story behind you setting up “Defend the OGL”?

There are a few DnD 5e titles in the catalog, but not many.  My partners prefer 5e, but I always saw it as too crowded a market (and it’s not my favorite to begin with).

I have the privilege of being on a closed discord server with a bunch of wonderful people whose names you would probably recognize, and we had spent months discussing and watching what Wizards of the Coast was hinting at in the leadup to them trying to launch OGL 2.0 (or whatever they were calling it).  There was a lot of fear, and that alone was very frustrating – the uncertainty about your livelihood is a stressful thing.  I don’t depend on this income, but others do.  

That is when I send a demand letter on behalf of Sad Fishe Games demanding clarification from Wizards of the Coast.  They of course did not answer.  

When the OGL debacle kicked off in earnest, I felt like I had to do something.  I asked on that discord server: “If I make a place where we can get people talking and organizing, can you folks with better reach bring people here?”  And they did, and it became Defend the OGL.  
There were a few things at play for me personally.  

First, even though we didn’t rely too heavily on DnD 5e, a lot of our work did depend on the OGL: Black Spear was Openquest OGL, we were tinkering with Old School Essentials which had its own OGL SRD. 

Pathfinder, for god’s sake, would cease to exist in its then-form and essentially be beholden to their largest competitor.  This is part of what was so crazy about the original proposal by Wizards: over the 20 years of the license’s use, if we ignore Pathfinder, games whose only reference to DnD was the license itself had created separate ecosystems relying on the license.  Perhaps that shouldn’t have happened, but it did and Wizards let it happen.  It wasn’t just 20 years of third party DnD that was at stake, but a much wider net of games and third party work for them whose legal status was about to become much less clear and potentially at risk.  This included a lot of Sad Fishe Games‘s catalog.  

Second, it was immediately clear to me that what the OGL 2.0 and successive iterations were attempting to do was not necessarily legal.  At least, that was my opinion, as a lawyer.  Even if, if, it was facially legal, there were all kinds of equitable arguments to be made – it would take pages to get into the details, but I felt very strongly about this.  Of course, I always tell clients that there are two overlapping worlds in law: the legal world, where the law itself says one thing, and the practical world, where your bank account says another thing.  Parties, especially well-resourced ones, do illegal things all the time, and you must decide if you can spend the time and money to fight it.  

At the time, I had just gotten done with one of my biggest cases where one party hired a much larger law firm and they tried to just bury us in litigation nonsense.  Three years and huge amounts of money wasted – but at the end of the day, our facts were stronger and the other side spent way, way more and ended up worse off for it.  I wasn’t in the mood to let a big company push through something that felt wrong unchallenged just because fighting them would be expensive.  I knew if the community played their cards right, we could turn that table on them and cost a lot of money at the least, and maybe even win.  A legal defense fund could stall them out for years on a fraction of their legal budget – I was calling firms to try and get a fund organized.  That was my plan, anyway.  I’m glad it didn’t end up that far, and I’m glad bigger players stepped in front of me before I got tangled in something above my head.  My then-boss no doubt would not have liked how I was spending my time at the office at that point.  

Do you think Wizards of the Coast have potential legal hurdles ahead when it comes to monetizing D&D as aggressively as they might want?

I think they’ve solved their legal woes, for the most part, in giving up on whatever the plan was with the OGL 2.0.  They learned (at least until the next batch of Hasbro executives forgets) you can’t just declare that large swathes of your industry are beholden to your whims.  Obviously, anything new they create can be subject to whatever licensing terms they want, prudent or not.  Their issue now seems to be a practical one: it seems to me that Hasbro wants Wizards of the Coast to continue the trends that developed from 2020-2023, or even 2014-2023.  This is unrealistic, as I think the last year or so for the TTRGP market would suggest – talking toother creators, trends are downward right now.  We don’t have Covid boosting people’s attention for TTRPGs, and DnD doesn’t have a great movie or Baldur’s Gate 4 on the horizon.  Whatever trends Wizards saw, they can’t rely on that kind of growth forever.  Especially not having given the 5e SRD to Creative Commons.   

Communities and TTRPGs for good

If finding time and bringing expertise isn’t enough to make Sad Fishe Games worthy winners of the RPG Publisher spotlight, then there’s even more credit to come.

You’re still using Discord in your RPG creation workflow, right? How does that work?

Our discord has always been a place where a few publishers would hang out and bounce ideas off each other, chiefly Peter Rudin-Burgess of PPM games and Adrian Kennelly of Azukail Games.  We’ve learned a lot from them, and this is something we borrowed.  When we were doing our solo-play zine, Crossroad Chronicler, we started sourcing articles from our community – just a “send us a thing, we’ll edit and include it.”  This developed into a more collaborative process to make tiny publications.  Some people may not have the time or knowhow to write a whole adventure, but maybe they have a great encounter, location, monster, or spell idea.  Great, lets get a bunch of those together and make a product!    And we organize that through our community discord channels. 

Prudence Publishing and Sad Fishe Games work together on Hexploratores. How does that work and what’s the relationship between the two companies?

Being the manager of both companies helps – Sad Fishe is the three of us, Prudence is me and my wife.  I write for Prudence when I know neither my partners won’t be helping and we don’t necessarily want everything to be connected.  I mostly write Hexploratores, but the Sad Fishe community contributes quite a bit, so we comingle those projects more than usual.  

I see in your LinkTree that you link out to the Great Rivers Environmental Law Center. What’s the relationship there?

I used to work for Great Rivers and presently serve on its Young Professionals Board.  They do public interest environmental law work – mostly trying to hold the government and companies accountable for regulation and pollution, and picking up some smaller environmental legal fights that just aren’t economical using private firms.  They do good work that no one else in our area is really doing.  We created a DriveThruRPG account for them and direct some royalties their way on a lot of our projects, occasionally doing a product primarily giving them the royalties.  It doesn’t amount to a ton, but its something, and we think its important. 

What do you think the big shapes and trends in the TTRPG community might be for the next year or so?

For publishers, things are shifting downward right now, but this is probably more a correction from the boom of the past few years – Kickstarter seems to be where the hotness is for smaller publishers, and even funding trends there are seeing fewer huge funding outcomes.  AI is certainly complicating the situation.  The launches of the new DnD material didn’t seem to create the big wave of interest we might have hoped for.  For smaller publishers, one of the bigger marketplaces, DriveThruRPG, has made significant changes to their site that our data seems to suggest is hurting most smaller publishers in favor of the biggest couple dozen – we’re still watching that problem, but 30% down on average on that platform from the several creators we’ve talked to, while DTRPG itself is seeing gains in overall sales.  Not a complaint or attack, but a definite trend.  

On the other hand, I feel like we’ve seen renewed interest in non-DnD titles, which is nice to see, and a lot of them are titles with open communities.  Cairn, Shadowdark, and Modiphius keeps giving Nordic Weasel more attention for his game line which is the kind of interest we like to see.  I think its never been a better time to be a TTRPG fan, creatives just have to accept that the market might be narrower than we would have hoped. 

What’s in the future of Sad Fishe Games?

2024 was a year of stasis: all three of us had significant life changes going on.  For me, I suddenly had a law practice to run, on my own. Now that things are settled down, I’m hopeful we can get back to work on some larger projects.  I know we would like to do some writing for Shadowdark, and have a little project on the way.  I’m hopeful to resume Forbidden Lands/Year Zero Engine projects.  With what little time I had least year, I was mostly working on something new I hope to bring to bear this year, Brass and Bone – a sort of nautical/steampunk approach to some of the ideas in 5 Parsecs from Home (emphasis on solo/GMless play and procedure).  It’s a setting I’ve been playing with in Cairn and Ironsworn: Sundered Isles for years, but I’m ready to make it its own thing. I’m hoping for a preliminary release of that in the next month or two.  Otherwise, we’ll see what our community wants us to work on.  I think our future is bright.  

Thank you, Tyler!

Quick Links

• Sad Fishe Games’ website.
• Sad Fishe Games’ email list.
• Sad Fishe Games’ Discord.
• Sad Fishe Games on Twitch.
• Tyler A. Thompson on Mastodon.
• DriveThruRPG: Sad Fishe Games.
• DriveThruRPG: Prudence Publishing.