I do not think anyone foresaw how Wizards of the Coast would react to the popular pressure. After the outrage at the overreach detailed in my last post, on January 27th, WotC posted another announcement, signed by the executive producer of D&D Kyle Brink, on the D&D Beyond site. SRD 5.1, which is the basic ruleset for Dungeons & Dragons5E was released under a Creative Commons license, specifically CC-BY-4.0. You’re free to do whatever you want with it as long as there’s attribution to WotC for publishing the ruleset. Notably, this is not a promise, it’s a done deal. The PDF file is linked in the announcement. This cannot be walked back. The 5E SRD is safe. This also saves the OSR movement, since as they’ve illustrated, just having some kind of D&D-based SRD available seems to be close enough to justify retrocloning an older edition. This is an unqualified victory for the community.
The other thing is that they are no longer seeking to revoke OGL 1.0a. This one comes with asterisks. They have not — at least yet — announced an OGL 1.0b that would be immune to the kind of shenanigans they tried to pull off. Of course, if they’re willing to place the SRD 5.1 under a CC license, doing the same to the final D20 system version of it would be trivial. While the suspicion remains that they might try to revoke the license again, with SRD 5.1 under CC, it’s unclear what that would actually accomplish.
Also according to the announcement, this was because of the survey results, 15,000 customers, most of them angry, telling WotC that they were mad as hell and not going to take this anymore. What the announcement does not mention is that Hasbro had a very poor late 2022 and is going to lay off 15% of its workforce in 2023. There’s also a new movie coming out in March and this kind of bad publicity at this point in time is bad when the customers were already primed by the previous four films to stay away in droves.
Meanwhile, Paizo Publishing has announced that though WotC has bestowed this boon upon the community, work on the ORC will continue. This makes sense. SRD 5.1 being under CC solves problems for 5E third-party publishers, but not for anyone else, and having an industry standard open license just makes sense.
Now, the only thing WotC needs to do to finish winning me back as a customer is release something interesting. I’m not holding my breath, but then, nobody expected this move either.
It’s been over a year since I’ve last posted here. It was a hell of a year.
They’re saying blogs are poised to make a comeback. It would be nice. While I greatly appreciate a well-made video essay, a badly made one is unbearable, and it takes way more time and resources to churn out one of those than just a written text, the latter of which is also way better for disseminating detailed information, like I am about to.
It’s also been a hell of a couple of weeks. I thought I would compile a post to clarify at least to myself what has been going on, because these things tend to be remembered very differently after a while, and digging through Facebook groups, Twitter, and various forums in a couple of years’ time would be a pain in the ass, especially since some of those forums have decided to disallow the posting of certain major outlets.
I am not going to engage in any legal speculation or commentary. I’m from Finland, where we have a civil law system. Wizards of the Coast is based in the United States, where they have three precedents in a trenchcoat and a council of tribal elders. There will be a lot of links, most of them to verified sources such as interviews and news articles. When rumour is included for the sake of completeness, it is marked as such.
Oh, this post is about the Open Gaming License. OGL 1.0a is a document of about 900 words that’s the single most significant page of text for the modern role-playing game industry. It was released along with the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2000. Together with the D20 System License, it allowed companies other than Wizards of the Coast, then a subsidiary of Hasbro, to publish material compatible with D&D and advertise it as such.
Now, it has been recently argued by such eminences as Cory Doctorow and Devin Stone of LegalEagle that the Open Gaming License was unnecessary, and as game mechanics cannot be copyrighted, the companies could have been doing that anyway with far more liberty. While this may or may not be true, it does skip over a lot of context. None of this exists in a vacuum.
For one thing, Wizards of the Coast had recently bought the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, TSR Inc., who were famously litigious. They went after competitors, they sent cease & desist letters to online fan sites on GeoCities, they threatened legal action at the drop of a hat. It was joked that TSR stood for “They Sue Regularly” (actually “Tactical Studies Rules”, but that’s neither here nor there). The Open Gaming License was Wizards of the Coast’s way of promising they were not going to do that. See, while you could have possibly gone to court with TSR and won, that takes lawyers and lawyers are not cheap, and this is the tabletop role-playing game industry. WotC’s founder Peter Adkison is often quoted as saying “If you want to make a little money in the RPG industry, start out with a lot of money”. Going to court against the market leader was not a promising proposition for pretty much anyone.
Secondly, who the hell would’ve even thought of trying to make D&D supplements under fair use doctrine? The idea is outré. How would you advertise? Where would you have sold them? The PDF market didn’t exist in 2000 and it’s likely game stores would’ve looked askance at such a product.
No, the Open Gaming License was necessary. It allowed a publishing ecosystem to form, where these third-party publishers working off the base of D&D 3E’s D20 System created new material and borrowed from each others’ work. The threshold to create your own stuff and enter the market was lowered, especially once RPGNow opened and selling your game as PDF became a thing in 2001. Those early days of the OGL were a heady, booming era. Some of the companies founded on D20 that survived the bursting of the bubble are still players in the industry – Mongoose Publishing, Green Ronin Publishing, Paizo Publishing, Troll Lord Games, Goodman Games, Privateer Press, and more. It gave rise to hundreds, if not thousands, of RPG outfits, from actual companies with offices and staff to lone designers doing everything themselves. It was a flourishing era. In time, even some non-D&D games adopted the OGL. It was huge. Three editions of a Star Wars role-playing game were released under the OGL — the same ruleset that powers the Knights of the Old Republic video games. To date, there’s been a Call of Cthulhu D20, two different Lord of the Rings games, a Doctor Who game. Babylon 5. World of Warcraft. Even, I kid thee not, an EverQuest tabletop role-playing game based on the D20 System.
This could happen because of trust. The OGL 1.0a was supposed to be permanent. Eternal. Irrevocable. Wizards of the Coast has repeatedly pressed this point in the past, and it was and remains the stated intention of the idea’s father, Ryan Dancey. Even in 2008, when WotC rolled out a new edition of D&D and its sinister Game System License, which in turn led to the creation of the competitor Pathfinder RPG, they did not attempt anything so asinine as to try pulling the OGL. In cutting themselves off from the OGL ecosystem, they abandoned any hope of D&D 4E being successful even if the strength of their brand could’ve otherwise overcome the product’s own shortcomings.
D&D 5E returned to using the OGL, a new third-party ecosystem was born, and with a couple of lucky breaks called Critical Role and Stranger Things, it started making grown-up money.
Of course, we should remember that the dragon is a metaphor for greed.
On December 21st, 2022, the D&D Beyond blog posted an FAQ about the upcoming OGL 1.1, an update to the license. It included some worrisome language about royalty payments, but also the reassurance that “the OGL is not going away”. And then, on January 4th, 2023, someone leaked the OGL 1.1. It appears the YouTube channel Roll for Combat was the first to break the news, receiving the leaked document in the middle of a scheduled stream, which feels like a bit of a coincidence. The leak deemed real after a Gizmodo article by Linda Codega on January 5th. The leaked document was a whole lot of legalese interspersed with somewhat snide commentary. It was later posted online and I am happy to provide it here.
The most objectionable bits about it were language about claiming royalties for revenue — not profit, revenue — above $750,000; demanding reporting of income over $50,000; claiming a sublicense on all of the licensee’s content; and seeking to deauthorize OGL 1.0a. None of this was deemed acceptable by the gaming public, let alone the people whose entire livelihoods are tied to the OGL. It is a direct attack against third-party publishers.
And by the way, whoever leaked this is a hero. Also, I know I’ve dunked on Knights of the Dinner Table in the past, but this 2009 strip was downright prescient.
Wizards of the Coast, of course, reacted promptly and quickly to the PR disaster of the cen— just kidding, they kept silent for almost a week. Then, on January 10th, the D&D Beyond Twitter account broke the silence: “We know you have questions about the OGL and we will be sharing more soon. Thank you for your patience.”
At this point, I was almost as angry at them for being this bad at crisis communications as I was for them threatening my friends’ livelihoods and my hobby. Note that I do not play D&D5E. I already swore off Wizards of the Coast’s products in 2008 with the GSL travesty. While I cannot claim to have maintained a perfect boycott for 15 years, it’s been pretty solid. And still this threatens to directly affect me.
Of course, it’s not entirely settled whether OGL 1.0a can be revoked. Myriad people with a variety of law degrees ranging from alleged to actual, hailing from a variety of jurisdictions, have weighed in on the matter on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and various forums. From reading their learned takes on the matter I have determined that nobody actually knows until the gavel comes down. Nobody is particularly keen on suing WotC because, again, lawyers are expensive.
During most of this time, as the gaming internet was aflame, the silence from not only WotC but also some major players in the industry was deafening. Among the first to make big announcements was Kobold Press, who on the 10th announced Project Black Flag, an open system of their own. Kobold Press has been a major third-party publisher of the 5E era, and for them to break ranks was a big deal. Then, Wolfgang Baur learned the lesson about WotC 15 years ago.
On January 12th, the Twitter account DnD_Shorts posted an alleged leak from a D&D Beyond employee, exhorting people to cancel their subscriptions and delete their accounts because money is the only thing that the executives understand (for some fairly basic and limited values of “understand”, I suppose). True or not, it checks out — deciding to boycott the next D&D book is visible in months, but website subscriptions you can see falling in real time. And fall they did. Allegedly, they even tried hiding the unsubscribe button. No actual numbers have been released, of course, but the hunch is that they’re high.
That date, D&D Beyond also cancelled a scheduled Twitch stream. There have been claims it was supposed to be some kind of announcement but to my eye it looks like a regularly scheduled weekly stream, and cancelling it rather than putting unprepared people in the line of fire was the wisest course of action. Apart from the part where over a week after the leak they still did not have their act together.
Also on the 12th, Paizo Publishing, the second-largest OGL publisher in the market (okay, actually I think they are not, but that is because the French board game giant Asmodee releases the Midnight role-playing game under the OGL), broke their silence in a big way, announcing the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC. Paizo and a group of other major OGL publishers — at the time of writing I think it’s almost everyone who’s anyone except Darrington Press (Critical Role), MCDM (Matt Colville), Fria Ligan (Lord of the Rings), Asmodee (Midnight), and EDGE Studios (Adventures in Rokugan) — banded together to hammer out a new open license for their games, to be given into the stewardship of first their law firm and ultimately some kind of open culture foundation. Nobody seems keen on signing on to WotC’s racket.
On the 13th, the date that the leaked OGL 1.1 said was the cutoff, WotC finally made a more substantial announcement. It was unsigned and has been characterized as passive aggressive gaslighting. The text’s tone is deeply unprofessional, and if anything, it fanned the flames against WotC even further.
On January 17th, the Twitter account @DungeonScribe posted an alleged leak that D&D Beyond membership would go up to $30/month for players, AI DMs would be implemented, and base subscriber tiers would have stripped-down gameplay. These were widely reported on, but though verification was promised, none has been forthcoming as of this writing. D&D Beyond’s Twitter account issued a clear denial on the 19th. Personally, I am inclined to think the report false, but it is a part of the larger narrative so I include it here. D&D Twitter’s signal-to-noise ratio has been exceptionally poor even by Twitter standards, and at this point I would wait for Gizmodo’s Linda Codega, who has been doing exceptional work, to verify any further leaks.
By the time that on January 18th, WotC managed to piece together something resembling a human response, they had wasted a full two weeks. It is not public knowledge how they spent that time, but I expect a fair bit of fruitless witch hunting may have gone on, because it is the stupidest thing a corporation can focus on in a situation like this. Godspeed, good witch.
On the 19th, they turned out a draft of OGL 1.2 for feedback. The feedback survey is here. Bits of the D&D System Reference Document 5.1 are also to be placed under a Creative Commons license, which is nice but also meaningless since it is mostly just basic mechanics and procedures which were not copyrightable in the first place, and the experience table. This version of the OGL walks back on the royalty demands of the previous one and removes the sublicense clause. OGL 1.2 is also unacceptable in its attempt to revoke OGL 1.0a. This is explained as a defense against “harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content”. Indeed, the draft includes a morality clause, which is also unacceptable.
No Hateful Content or Conduct. You will not include content in Your Licensed Works that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing, or engage in conduct that is harmful, discriminatory, illegal, obscene, or harassing. We have the sole right to decide what conduct or content is hateful, and you covenant that you will not contest any such determination via any suit or other legal action.
OGL1.2 draft, section 6 (f)
Sure, it feels nice and high-minded to ban bad things. Make them go away, not exist. However, someone has to make the call and those are not well-defined criteria. Even “illegal” is fuzzy. Illegal where? Russia? Saudi Arabia? China, maybe, where WotC prints its books? Or the United States, where the senile council of elders is in the process of enacting a rollback of human rights and Florida Man just banned the teaching of Black history at schools? J.K. Rowling would argue that trans rights are a hateful concept. Hell, I readily admit that if the Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure Towers Two, which I did Pathfinder design on, is not obscene then I do not know what the hell is. And then there is that whole thing about “conduct”. As written, it would allow the license to be pulled for jaywalking. But that’s a spurious example. How about someone getting their license pulled as a side effect of being cancelled on Twitter. “Obscene conduct”? Without even going into all the sinister history that phrase evokes, I don’t want the state in my bedroom and I sure as hell don’t want WotC in there. This section of the license looks like Pat Pulling won.
And let’s face it, this is Wizards of the Coast. If the last couple of weeks have shown us anything, it’s that they’re not your friend. This merely reiterates a lesson many of us learned in 2008. Examples of their shining moral leadership include the mistreatment of freelancer Orion D. Black, pulling LGBT content off DM’s Guild, the entire mess with Graeme Barber and the grippli, and actually releasing Tomb of Annihilation. Moreover, they’ve recently been embroiled in two different lawsuits, against Gale Force Nine and the author duo Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, where the crux of the matter was a malicious literal interpretation of contract terms against its spirit. And hey, we’ve also seen that they will cave to public pressure as well. These are not people I would hand the right to pull the plug on my work.
The argument has been presented that it is a shield against nuTSR’s Nazi bullshit, which in fact has nothing to do with OGL materials and is a pure copyright dispute. Even the outfit’s blatant racism and gross transphobia is incidental to the fact they’re claiming to own WotC’s intellectual property on the rough legal basis of “I licked it so it’s mine”.
There things now stand, and we wait. WotC’s survey has two weeks on the clock, but really, it is of academic interest. They have broken the trust of third-party publishers, burned away the goodwill of their audience and in general made a right mess of it. At this point, I think signing on to ORC is essentially the only way for them to salvage the situation. And ORC is the actually interesting thing here. As of last report, over 1,500 publishers have signed on. According to an interview with Erik Mona on Roll for Combat, an initial draft can be expected maybe around February.
If you’ve read this far, you deserve a reward. Here’s a cat on some game books.
The Finnish role-playing game Tivoliis up on the Mesenaatti crowdfunding platform. Written by Kristel Nyberg and illustrated by Ninni Aalto, it’s a Powered by the Apocalypse game set in a circus or a carnival, and looks good. I haven’t played it, but it does look very promising. There’s currently an actual play video on Twitch from last Sunday, run by the designer herself.
There’s still 12 days left on the clock, and the game has already funded, but there are two stretch goals of interest. At 5,000 euros, there will be a Swedish translation, and at 7,000€, an English translation.
The Magician! Art by Ninni Aalto
The setting in Tivoli is co-created by the players. The game provides a loose framework, but the details are up to you. The test games featured such intriguing settings as a small family circus in rural Finland in the 1980s and a space amusement park built in the cargo hold of an old space freighter visiting far-off colonies. One of the players takes on the role of a facilitator, directing the discussion on world building, asking questions and making suggestions. There are also suggestions for settings in the book if you want to start right away!
The game is also of personal interest to me because — besides both Ninni and Kristel being friends — I am also running a circus campaign, Pathfinder 2E’s Extinction Curse adventure path. The two games are very, very different, but their view of the circus seems to be fairly similar — at least based on what I’ve seen — a place of refuge, a found family, and the place where the magic happens. Now that I think of it, they’re basically the only role-playing game treatments of carnivals outside the genre of horror that I can think of (I mean, there must be others but I’m only drawing Ravenloft, World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu).
And now’s your chance to have your own copy! And if the translation doesn’t fund, at least you’ll have an interesting game in an exotic language and a warm fuzzy feeling for patronising the arts.
The French translation of Stalker — The SciFi Roleplaying Game has entered crowdfunding stage on the Ulule platform. It’s being published by La Loutre Rôliste and translated by Charlotte and Christophe Dénouveaux. At the time of writing it’s been up for some six hours and is 29% into its 10,000€ funding goal with 31 days to go, so I’m optimistic about it. The translation is, by my understanding, based on the English translation by yours truly. They’re aiming to have the goods delivered in December 2020, which feels a bit optimistic in the current situation, but I’ll believe them on the PDFs. It’s been in the works since 2017, so at this point I expect the work is done and all that remains is the part that really needs money to move around.
The project looks gorgeous, with all new art in full colour by Tania Sanchez-Fortun. While the stark monochrome of the original and the English version serve the game’s tone and atmosphere, there’s something to be said for going all in on the production values. The preview pictures look like it’s a hardcover, too.
This past weekend, Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition picked up the Origins Award for Best Role-Playing Game, as well as Fan Favourite in the same category, at Origins Game Fair. Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes for D&D got Best Supplement. Congratulations to both teams for excellent work and deserved wins!
Though as with any award, I could complain about the shortlist, but I really should’ve done that back when it was released and will desist for now. We’ll see again for next year. However, I do have an issue with how all of this is presented.
For one thing, the award was given to Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition by Modiphius Entertainment. While Modiphius is a fine company and I have a pile of their games that I love – indeed, I just got Mutant Chronicles yesterday – the fact remains that the core book as well as both of the sourcebooks currently out were designed and published by White Wolf before its dissolution. Modiphius didn’t get the license until late December 2018, and have no releases of their own out for the game. They were initially just the distribution partner. While the company played a significant part in getting the game out to the people, White Wolf should be at least acknowledged.
Also, someone’s botched with the press release from the Origins’ end, because multiple outlets, such as ACDnewsource and ICv2 are crediting the game as:
designed by Tomas Arfert, Mary Lee, Mark Kelly, Sarah Horrocks, Tomas Arfert, Anders Muammar, Mike Mignola, and the CCP Atlanta art team directed by Reynir Harðarson, consisting of Erling Ingi Sævarsson, John Van Fleet, Vince Locke, Michael Gaydos, Matthew Mitchell
Who are all in the book and all great at what they do, which at least in this case was not game design. These are the art credits. While it’s a gorgeous book and they do deserve recognition, that’s not what they were doing. The reason Tomas Arfert is there twice is because he’s also credited for the cover. Like, this is literally from the rulebook’s credits page:
Fortunately, the Game Fair’s website at least lists design & development people:
Kenneth Hite, Karim Muammar, Martin Ericsson, Mathew Dawkins, Karl Bergström, Juhana Pettersson
Though I’m pretty sure Mr Dawkins’s name is spelled with two T’s, this is much better. Funny, usually it’s the Nordics who get their names mangled, like “Juhanna Peterson” on the Modiphius webstore, or “Juhana Peterson” as in the Modiphius press release from last April.
In related news, Juhana of the Many Spellings has written up a blog post titled “The Annotated Anarch” where he goes over his inspirations and creative processes in his work on Anarch. It is well worth a read.
Last year, Ropecon inaugurated an academic seminar alongside its regular programming. It went great, so they’re doing it again. I’m not personally involved though I will be there. The pre-registration is now open, the tentative program is out, and it looks really great.
This year they’re kicking it up a notch with a keynote speaker flown in from the States. Jon Peterson is known for the groundbreaking brick of a book that is Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from Chess to Role-Playing Games, which delves into the influences that coalesced into Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. The level of detail is staggering. They’re also collaborating with the journal Simulation & Gaming, and the best papers may end up in a special symposium issue.
Get your tickets here. Tea, coffee, and lunch are included.
Just surfacing from a ten-day larp conference trip to note that Chernobyl Mon Amour is up on the IndieGogo crowdfunding platform. This is the English-language edition of Juhana Pettersson’s role-playing game Tšernobyl, rakastettuni. I did the translation.
The project has already reached its funding goal and there are no stretch goals to meet, but there’s still 16 days left on the clock.
It was an interesting work to translate since unlike most role-playing games, Chernobyl Mon Amour contains basically no rules mechanics. It’s as freeform as they come. It’s a game about former criminals building new lives and finding romance in the outlaw society of the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation. It’s like no game I have seen before. To quote the crowdfunding page:
In Chernobyl, Mon Amour you play a Ukrainian criminal who flees the long arm of the law to the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation. The concept is based on a Ukrainian folk story about a criminal who fled to the Zone and became so radioactive that the authorities had to leave him there.
You know that there is no return from the Zone. Your crimes are such that society will no longer accept you, and the only thing you have left is the possibility of a new life in the radioactive forest. As you settle into the Zone and meet its inhabitants, you start to yearn for something more. You want love.
Playing out these love stories amidst a radioactive society of criminals is the core experience of Chernobyl, Mon Amour.
It’s the moment many dreaded, few lied to themselves would never come, and I guessed was soon to come when Starfinder came out. Paizo Publishing announced the second edition of Pathfinder. It’s to come out at Gen Con next year, preceded by a public playtest period.
For historical reasons, Pathfinder fans have a complicated relationship with new editions. The entire game exists primarily because Wizards of the Coast screwed up with the release of D&D 4E – and regardless of what you think of the game itself, how it was rolled out was a farce. There’s also the unfortunate tendency of online gamer communities reacting to the announcement of a new edition like a small tribe of invincible Gauls, convinced that the sky is falling and reacting by punching everything.
I’m not saying I haven’t been guilty of that, but it’s been ten years since I fought in the D&D 4E flamewars. I’m too old for that shit. I’d rather get worked up about a real problem.
Also, the game’s been around for ten years. Few role-playing games go as long without a new edition. Though Pathfinder fixed a lot of the issues of D&D 3E, it was still weighed down by the need to be backwards-compatible. As early as 2011, Erik Mona mentioned at Ropecon how he’d have liked to go further with the changes.
I’m also rather optimistic that Paizo remembers why Pathfinder exists and will maybe not screw this up. I’m optimistic that what they’ll deliver is going to be a better game that runs smoother whose math still holds up at higher levels.
It’s also nice that they’re dropping the word “race” and going with “ancestry”. I’ve been wondering when a major RPG would do that.
They’re doing the same thing they did with the original Pathfinder, and releasing the playtest rulesets as print books as well as free PDFs. The deluxe collector’s edition playtest rulebook may be overdoing it a bit but hey, nobody’s forcing you to buy it.
We don’t yet know a whole lot about what the game will eventually be like, but here’s Paizo’s FAQ on the topic and a Glass Cannon podcast where Jason Bulmahn runs Crypt of the Everflame that he’s converting to 2E on the fly.
Meanwhile, EN World is once again shouldering its age-old mission of informing the masses, and has opened an info wiki compiling and sourcing what is definitely known. In the months to come, this and Paizo’s blogs will be my go-to source for data. What some dude howls on Twitter or asserts on Facebook may be anything between actual fact and deliberate misinformation, and we’ve seen how anger and confusion rise out of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Stay informed.
In addition to the Diana Jones shortlist I mentioned earlier, we now also have ENnie shortlists. First of all, I would like to note that Broodmother Sky Fortress, for whose PDF version I wrote Pathfinder RPG stats, picked up one of the Judges’ Spotlight awards. I’m pretty sure the win has jack to do with the PF stats, and everything to do with Jeff Rients’s insane visions, Ian MacLean’s art, and Jim Raggi’s uncompromising attitude toward quality. So, congratulations to Jeff! It was fun to write for!
Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a strong selection of stuff up for vote. Other things to look out for are 7th Sea’s second edition rules, and Free League’s Tales from the Loop. If that one doesn’t win Best Interior Art, there’s something wrong with the world. Voting for the ENnies runs from July 11th through 21st.
Also, it’s now nine days until the voting for the Hugo Awards closes, and I need to read one book per day to make it. Doable. It’s open only for Worldcon members, but there’s still time to pick up a membership, download the voters’ packet of something ridiculous like 30 books this year and lament about how you have to eat and sleep and work and can’t just read all day and night.
In other news, Sotakarjut is finally out. It’s Miska Fredman’s military sci-fi role-playing game about human/pig hybrids with Hans Zenjuga’s gorgeous, atmospheric artwork. It’s a bit of Revelation Space, a bit of Starship Troopers, a hint of 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars, a smidge of Aliens. I playtested it a long time ago. The system is very crunchy and looks fairly robust. Of course, at this point in time, it’s only available in Finnish. Now that it’s out, the next edition of Astraterra and the wrap on its English translation are next on the slab.
And finally, a group of Palestinian larp organizers are raising funds to take their organization to the next level, develop their practices and to be able to do more. The group includes people who ran Halat hisar in Finland, and they are doing impressive and important work in an area of the world that needs it. I threw them a bit of money, and you should consider doing the same.
Continuing in yesterday’s theme, the gentleman John Berry of Bedroom Wall Press is making a similar offer. All their products have been priced at Pay What You Want at DriveThruRPG, and all proceeds will go to support the Council on Islamic-American Relations’ legal action against Trump’s racist fuckery.
The offer is valid until the Muslim ban is overturned.
Bedroom Wall Press’s products include the sci-fi dungeon crawler Hulks and Horrors and the urban fantasy game Arcana Rising. My favourite is the Arcana Rising supplement Welcome to Neuro City, which is set in the Åland Islands, of all places.
Worlds in a Handful of Dice 