Welcome home.
It’s October 25th, and the episode title is “WotC kills off their digital/goes all in on digital”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #306]
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Dark Wizard Games won the RPG Publisher Spotlight. The interview with Mark is live, and in it we read about how a recent D&D fantasy art piece depicting orcs as noble rangers made him laugh so much that he wrote the pastiche Hidden Shrine of the Warlord Chief, a 1st edition-style module.
Interestingly, while the idea of peaceful orcs made Mark laugh, Hidden Shrine of the Warlord Chief is currently his top-selling module at DriveThruRPG.
We’re approaching Halloween and this year, as Geek Native has done for many years, we’re marking the days with the 12 Masks of Halloween.
That means each day we share a Halloween mask that we’ve found, and you can go from one post to another easily. We’re testing our sponsorship widget on this cyber event, too. No, we don’t have a sponsor as such but the metal poster company Displate has given us a unique code. You’ll be used to these from influencer videos and podcasts and in this case enter ‘geeknative’ at checkout to get 25% off your Displate purchase. That’s a big discount, and you have until the end of the year to do it.
So far, my favourite mask is the skeleton hands because it looks like something out of a gothic horror from the 19th century. It’s freaky.
While the skeleton hands mask is scary, this week we had a guest post from Tom Gilbert to remind us the scariest D&D monsters we are in our minds.
Tom’s writing for us because the Kickstarter for The Deck of Holding is live, and you use that to pick monsters at random or with design to scare your players.
Tom makes his point by looking back at historical descriptions. He notes;
The beast is immense in size, dark of hide, and rough as stone. Its head is vast, its eyes small, and its ears broad and pendulous like a drake’s wing. From its face extends a long, serpent-like limb and long teeth that shine like horns of bone, and its cry blares like a trumpet of brass. Its legs are pillars, and when it walks, the flesh upon them trembles like water in a bowl while the earth shakes beneath its tread.
That, by the way, is a one-time description of an elephant. You can see how the principle of the unknown making monsters might apply to fantasy games like D&D wherein the so-called monsters are well known and documented.
A truly strange monster, you would hope is the Mystery Flesh Pit, which is a Cypher System game perfect for Halloween, which is also a biting commentary on capitalism and tourism. After all, when a giant flesh pit is found in America, then why not turn it into a national park?
And by biting commentary, I do mean that some of the PCs might lose an arm if they’re not careful.
That game had me looking for records of other daft things PCs have done, which led me to a seven-year-old Quora thread where some people documented their folly.
I’ve curated highlights to Geek Native in a post called “I’ll Toss My Torch” but my personal favourite is the second story in which the group of would-be-heroes were struggling to use a teleporter to solve a problem. People would teleport out but not return.
Spoiler: It wasn’t a teleporter. It was a Sphere of Annihilation.
Now, I’m not drawing a connection but you can if you want to, because I want to talk about Hasbro’s earnings call. That’s the company who owns Wizards of the Coast and D&D.
The boss, Chris Cocks, has announced that Wizards of the Coast’s attempts to use a computer game engine to create a virtual tabletop have failed. They will be shutting Sigil down.
Sigil is another digital failure from Wizards of the Coast. Yes, there’s been Baldur’s Gate, but that was built by a third-party, and lots of successful Magic: The Gathering computer games, but D&D has yet to crack the digital world.
So, what are Wizards of the Coast going to do about it? They’re going all in on digital. We know the Maps VTT will continue and that games are coming, but that’s about it.
I want tabletop RPGs to thrive in the next decade, and it’ll help if Wizards of the Coast finds some digital magic to make that happen. It’s just hard to see any evidence today that they’re on track to do that. A big challenge they face is that gamers are change adverse, well, many of us are.
I know I let the acronym TTRPG annoy me for too long. We might have been the original RPG but I think we’ve lost the three letters to computer games now. I’ll toughen up and move on.
In other areas, I’m much better with change. I blogged about Honor’s Robot phone this week and I think this could be a change.
Honor is a Chinese tech company and their robot phone has a camera on the end of an articulated periscope. It means your smartphone can sit in your pocket while the robot camera peeks up and scans the surroundings. Or you can put your smartphone down on the table and the camera rises up like a webcam to watch you.
I really think this might be the route that robots make it into our homes. Sorry, iRobot. I think you’re lagging. I think pocket robots could start out by doing specific tasks such as a cute Wall-E-like eye that looks around for us but then broaden out into multi-purpose uses.
Further concepts might include a smart glove that mechanically stabilises hand tremors, an animatronic shoulder-mounted assistant that subtly directs your attention, a belt that provides haptic navigational cues, or an active brooch that monitors air quality and visually alerts you to pollutants.
Alternatively, if all this sounds like technology, like monsters, is getting too scary, and you just want it to protect you, then Bronwen’s review of the datAshur Pro+ C Secure might reassure you.
This UBS stick is also a safe. It has a number pad on the front and a robust case. Any attempt to mess with the case will result in the data stored on the stick being deleted.
It would take you 400 million years to crack the code if you had to type in each possible combination. The problem, though, is that if you get the passcode wrong 10 times, the stick also deletes everything stored on it.
I’ve asked Bronwen to store Geek Native’s secret records on the stick, but it might be just holding her works-in-progress art portfolio until she’s ready to show it to the world.
I was pleased to see this week that tabletop retailer Wayland Games was working with the British Library on an exhibition all about hiding and revealing information. The exhibition is called Secret Maps.
Secret Maps is all about how maps have been used, despite their name, to control and conceal information.
Another technology and control development that Geek Native blogged about this week is the Organic Literature stamp. A British startup has devised a process and program by which books can have a stamp on their cover to prove the author was a human and not AI.
Let’s see if it takes off. You can find out more at BooksByPeople.org or by following the link in the show notes.
If all this is making you worry that we’re heading to a grimdark future then, well, perhaps the best I can do is say that Merchoid have taken the 40K world and turned it into a snuggly blanket.
To be precise, a stylised map of the Eye of Terror, the Segmentum, realm of Ultramar and other 40K galactic landmaps have been mapped and turned into a blanket. This is perfect if you want to curl up and read some Black Library.
I predict it’ll be a hot-selling Christmas gift.
I predict the same for the Lord of the Rings version of Dobble. I predict that because Dobble is a great game, the One Ring of Cards is a fantastic twist, and the production quality of the travel tin these circular cards are in is fantastic.
The full review is up on the blog, as are details of four bundles.
The first three are on the Bundle of Holding, and I’ll start with the Edward Gorey-inspired Ghastly Affair. If you want two parts Gothic horror and one part romance, then start here.
There’s also Nightmares Underneath, which is old-school stylised horror-fantasy about the realm of nightmares trying to breach worlds.
There’s also the dark transhuman vision of the future with a deal on the second edition of Eclipse Phase.
I want to outro on the Sudden Divorce bundle on DriveThruRPG, though. That will get you nearly $200 worth of downloads for $10. Now, I don’t know why the publisher is going through a sudden divorce, and I’m sure it’s traumatic, but I do note that their name is Wayward Rogues Publishing, and at least that seems fitting.
On that note, keep safe and see you next week.
