GamingSF

The podcasts that I listen to while walking / commuting to University have been rather dominated by the Wizards of the Coast – Open Gaming License controversy of late (e.g. DM of None). For anyone not that connected with Dungeons & Dragons or tabletop roleplaying news, it’s that Wizards has attempted to preview a new “OGL” license that aims to replace / invalidate the prior versions. Legal matters are beyond this blog’s scope, but the community reaction has been very critical of this move, at least in the circles I frequent.

Since this blog went on ice, my D&D module writing has mostly been frozen as well. I’ve been too busy studying a Master’s and working remotely for any online gaming to speak of or even for creative writing. In a typical moment of irony, I have managed to fit in a couple of writing sessions after New Year’s ahead of study picking up again: just in time for this controversy to break. The issue for me, personally, is that my modules (on DMs Guild) may or may not be affected (Wizard’s have recently written that DMs Guild Community Content will not be affected, but who knows if that will change).

I have one starter and one full-length module published, plus a second full length module drafted (and in play-testing), and a sketch for the remaining two modules. There is still a *lot* of effort to bring my planned story arc to a close for this campaign. Having a complete adventure series of my own published would be certainly bring a lot of satisfaction, but the circumstances aren’t great. In the short-term this OGL issue is quite the demotivator, past the legal ramifications it’s just a really anti-community move.

Beyond that there’s also the pending launch of “6th edition” in 2024 (OneD&D or whatever it gets called) as a longer-term problem. As soon as the new edition of any ttrpg line comes out, I imagine sales for compatible adventures will be very buoyant, but sales of adventures for the old edition are likely to fall off a cliff due to the movement of players to the “new hotness” ruleset. I’m certainly not so blessed with free time that I can spend extra effort converting old modules to a new edition, or frankly even to learn the new ruleset itself.

My most active campaign at present is a Starfinder game. I’m not as well versed in that ruleset but I would be tempted to shift my limited attention to a potential “adventure path” for Starfinder Infinite (Paizo’s equivalent of the DMs Guild 3rd-party publishing scheme). At least until the dust settles on the OGL controversy it’ll give my creative time a ‘safe haven’ plus I might actually get more familiar with all the extra manuals I’ve bought that I didn’t get around to reading yet…

There was a flurry of Dungeons & Dragons news last week (see Polygon.com summary), it came out just as I was ramping up to a frantic week of work so I was kind of distracted from absorbing any of it beyond the headlines. I’ve since done some catch up reading and listened to the relevant episode of the Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk podcast for some discussion on this deluge of updates. Here’s a collection of my thoughts on some of these headlines:

Dragonlance

I’ve seen a lot of excitement about the return of this classic 1980s D&D campaign setting on Twitter. I did actually read the first two triologies when they came out, and ran the first AD&D module for friends. But my tastes in fantasy have changed rather a lot since then. There were more exciting settings, for me, released at the time and since, than ‘generic fantasy world but with clerical magics and deities removed and a LOT of dragons’. The books were enjoyable to read as works of epic fantasy, but like any ‘larger than life’ fantasy I’d probably find it a bit harder to run a campaign in a world where anything other than the ‘main events’ would feel overshadowed. It’s a reason why I’ve struggled to plan a satisfactory campaign in any Star Wars RPG.

This is apparently a new twist on the setting in that it will re-introduce mass combat style mechanics to this edition of D&D. There’ll be standard small-party adventures and a coop game to simulate the big battles of the War of the Lance. If the latter ends up being fun to play then it could tap into, belatedly, some of the general enthusiasm for epic fantasy + fantasy big battles in other media (e.g. the Game of Thrones series or even the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies). Mass combat simulation gaming isn’t something I’m in a hurry to revisit, I did my fair share of Warhammer 40k back in my 90s but I’ve not been tempted to revisit that style of gaming even in digital form.

I have my preferred D&D campaign already available with Eberron – as I mentioned my tastes in fantasy have moved on from standard settings. The Magicpunk / Renaissance-fantasy themes of Eberron have a lasting appeal for me, and have proved to be a richer source of inspiration for stories and backdrops for the adventures I have written myself than I ever found in older D&D settings.

Spelljammer

A much predicted and requested classic setting that’s also coming back, is the ‘fantasy in space’ Spelljammer. It was a pretty unusual setting when released: I wasn’t aware of any similar space fantasy properties at the time so it felt very fresh. In Spelljammer ships, both mundane and very exotic in shape, have magical helms attached that allow them to fly up and into space. Each star system is contained within an enormous ‘crystal sphere‘ (fan wiki link), and deep space – everything around and between the many crystal spheres is a magical medium called the phlogiston. Ships normally travel between spheres using ‘flowrivers’, invisible currents in this medium that connect pairs of spheres. The setting introduced some evocative factions to act as potential allies or enemies for the party: for example the vile neogi (centauroid wolf-spider slavers), the insidious mind flayers (their spelljammer ships are some of the most iconic), asteroid mining dwarves and an imperious elven space empire.

I rather loved Spelljammer back in the day, friends and I ran several different campaigns using the system so I got to DM and play in the setting. I even created my own cluster of crystal spheres to run an entire campaign based on Mystara, the de facto D&D setting for “Basic Dungeons & Dragons” (a k a OD&D). In theory I should be firmly within the target audience for this nostalgia-heavy release.

There’s one very major obstacle to me getting that excited about Spelljammer, however: unlike in the 1980s I now have a competing product for my freetime and DMing enthusiasm in the Starfinder system from Paizo. Although the two products are not identical (‘fantasy in space’ vs ‘science fantasy’) they do overlap in some key conceits – in both campaigns likely centre around a party of adventurers who have access to their own ship for travel between different planets or star systems. Both have travel and exploration as key underlying themes, and a wider-than-normal variety of species and biomes than say the Forgotten Realms (or even Eberron).

I’m so invested in Starfinder at the moment that I’m not keen to jump on yet another setting and campaign. I’ve seen some Tweets the sentiment of which I echo – along the lines of “great, Spelljammer is exciting, but hey if you didn’t already know there’s a very similar game already out with tons of great material called Starfinder…”

D&D Compendium

Who doesn’t love free stuff? The old 1980s concept of Monster Compendium for D&D is back (think serialised release of groups of stat blocks). Volume 1 will be available for free via the D&D Beyond website. Not surprisingly the first volume focuses on some Spelljammer-themed monsters. I’ve never signed up for a D&D Beyond account, but now might be the time so I can get access to some more monsters for my own D&D campaigns! For more details see this Bell of Lost Souls blogpost.