Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for August 2nd, and the episode title is “Apocalypses and the Gen Con Sacrifice”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #297]
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In the last podcast, we covered White Wolf’s rebuilding of their games studio, with core jobs still to be filled and with the requirement that applicants could describe the AI experience.
I said at that time we don’t know how White Wolf would use AI, and that it could be a process rather than creation. White Wolf has told Rascal that is the case. They haven’t said much more.
Infinite Reimagine won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month. They don’t know yet. I only found out at midnight when I got home from day one of the Edinburgh festival season, and with a half dozen articles to write.
I’ll reach out to them soon and hustle, as I usually do, for a Q&A interview.
So, who are the candidates for the September vote? Patrons can vote for any one of the following;
The Festival season isn’t the Apocalypse in this week’s podcast title, but it is a reason for the Gen Con sacrifice. I don’t think team ever get to go to Gen Con. For other blogs in our family of sites and for obvious financial and logistical reasons, we cover the Festivals instead. Geek Native is the spoiled child for most of the year, has been to UK Games Expo and will go to Tabletop Scotland afterwards, but I wish we could dig into a higher number of Gen Con headlines.
Let’s look at what we did do. Ahead of Gen Con, we got two exclusives.
The first is with Starlux for “Dice of Stars & Stone”. That Kickstarter for shiny dice is live, and it comes with 5e subclasses. You can download one of those, the Cosmic Sorcerer, from the site right now.
The second is Shadows Over Sol, the second edition, which is not yet on a crowdfunding platform but will be very soon. Right now, on Geek Native dot com, you can download the Quickstart for the next generation of the game.
We didn’t write up D&D’s news from new boss Dan Ayoub, but the headline is more communication, free use of D&D Beyond’s Maps service and a community focus.
This is Dan laying out the foundation for an ecosystem, which is part of D&D’s franchise plan. You need the ecosystem to build franchises on.
Gen Con hasn’t finished yet, but so far, my biggest news is the launch of Monte Cook Games’ Cypher System 2e. Except they’ve dropped the ‘System’ and seem to be calling it Cypher.
It’s going to be largely backwards compatible. What’s changing then? Genre-Specific character creation, updated damage and armour rules, plus greater emphasis on abilities and cyphers. I think it makes characters in the game a bit more significant.
Many people would have put Critical Role and Darrginton Press’s new Daggerheart updates at the top of the list.
The new Daggerheart team, which includes Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins, appears to be collaborating with a large number of people. Names include Keith Baker and Jenn Ellis of Twogether Studios, known for, of course, Eberron.
A new Kickstarter is coming for character cards and, what I think isn’t sexy but is important, licenses for third-party content production. Let’s see if they collaborate with Roll20 and DriveThruRPG to create a marketplace for selling that content, or if they’ll develop their own platform.
Other news includes Dynamite announcing an official ThunderCats 5e TTRPG and Acheron bringing Lex Arcana to 5e.
Lex Arcana is a big TTRPG in Italy and is set in a magical world where the Roman Empire never fell.
Some exciting news, I think, is that the collab between Two Little Mice and Free League Publishing seems to be doing well, and the companies will work together on Twilight Sword. This will be a TTRPG inspired by JRPGs. I think it could well speak to a whole generation. There’s no official Zelda TTRPG.
Outside of Gen Con, there’s been a small apocalypse. Tech site The Verge coined the phrase ‘age-gate apocalypse’ to describe the rollout of new laws in the UK, which force certain internet platforms to check the ages of people before allowing access to content.
For some reason, payment providers, companies like Visa and American Express, picked that same time to launch an offensive. It might be related.
However, Steam, Itch.io and others suddenly found they could either try doing without money or block some content. Itch blocked access and British TTRPG publisher SoulMuppet found that it included their tabletop games.
It’s fixed now. Madly, SoulMuppet just dropped a tag that described one of their games, Paint the Town Red as mature, and Itch’s systems let them back in.
Surely that’s not the intended way the law in the UK is supposed to work. It’s not been thought out very well.
Another example of not thinking things through is Czech Games Edition, aka CGE, doing a Harry Potter-branded game. There was a pretty immediate and strong outcry, given that JKR gives money to groups hostile to trans folk.
CGE have now, finally, admitted that they’ve contributed to harm. We’ll have to see what happens next, though.
Also in the UK, Games Workshop is making news because they can’t build a car park where they would like because a small, cute and protected bat species got there first. It’s been presented as a quirky twist to a company that’s otherwise making loads of money despite tariffs.
However, not getting the same attention is a recent wave of attack lawyers coming from Games Workshop for LARPers and cosplayers who have all been working with Warhammer-inspired costumes and got too big. Games Workshop is very protective and are getting closer to their own screen projects launching and doing their own fashion merch.
In bundles, there are two from the Bundle of Holding. One is Apocalisse-Inferno Bundle, which are 5e rules and from the Two Little Mice team, although sold via Acheron Games.
Lastly, there’s a fiction and magazine bundle from Catalyst Game Labs for BattleTech Shrapnel 2.
Audio EXP will skip a week as Bronwen and I will be in full festival coverage mode but all going well, I’ll speak to you the week after.
