A while back I reviewed Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground, Stu Horvath’s engaging run-through of RPG history told via product overviews. Stu’s actually been nice enough to send me a little supplementary product – the zine-sized Experience Points, a selection of material cut from the book. The zine is available via Exalted Funeral, a well-regarded distributor who still, after years of promising they are Definitely Working On It, Pinky-Swear, don’t have an adequate UK/Europe shipping solution – a ridiculous situation that’s persisted for years and has left Necrotic Gnome without a local storefront shipping to their own country, because they closed their own store in the expectation that Exalterd Funeral would get their shit together on this front in an orderly manner – so I’m extremely grateful to Stu for making it easier for me to get hold of it.
Experience Points is, essentially, more of the same, but a touch more niche; I can’t put hand on heart and say that any of these entries absolutely should have been in the book at the cost of one of those that did make it in, but it is still nice to see these. There’s more D&D stuff, of course, primarily third-party releases this time; the collection starts with a discussion of the Judges’ Guild supplement The Unknown Gods and ends with a look at Petty Gods, which was conceived as an updated riff on the Unknown Gods concept; there’s also a look at the Stonehell megadungeon, but it’s the deities books which offer the most interesting narrative, if only for illustrating how a community-led project can fill a gap which the commercialised industry wasn’t touching and no one individual self-publishing creator would have spawned by themselves.
On the first-party side of the coin there’s a deep dive into the novels and modules which TSR put out to cover the Time of Troubles metaplot event. This was a bid to try and provide an IC explanation for the shift from 1E to 2E, a concept I always thought was pretty muddle-headed in its undertaking to begin with. Why even bother explicitly stating that all the assassins have spontaneously died when you can just stop mentioning their existence? Why publish the original Forgotten Realms box to begin with if you’re going to render it out of date almost immediately? Why run big cosmic events to tidy up continuity issues when you can just quietly decanonise contradictory perspectives that don’t pan out? Horvath unpacks why such metaplot events can rake in money for publishers even though they arguably provide no net benefit to players or referees on balance.
Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.
Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.
In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.
Whilst many are digging deep into Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve been enjoying a replay of Planescape: Torment, and have ended up jotting down my thoughts over on my blog for reviews of books, videogames, movies and whatnot.
The story so far: two decades of the OGL 1.0a established a broadly understood regime for third party D&D support which, whilst perhaps unnecessary from a strict reading of IP law (in some interpretations), nonetheless represented at least a sense of legal certainty and confidence necessary to cajole third parties to attempt such products after the much harsher and more aggressive stance taken by TSR.
Then the leak of OGL 1.1 established that Wizards of the Coast were not only contemplating changing the OGL, but doing so in a way which simultaneously greatly contracted the range of material licensed under it (and the range of products that could be made under it), increased Wizards’ ability to monitor and control the market, and generally dented the interests of third parties. Moreover, it included a clause explicitly deauthorising OGL 1.0a – something which their own FAQ from 2004 implied was not actually possible.
The gamers outside looked from Wizards to TSR, and from TSR to Wizards, and from Wizards to TSR again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Kyle Brink, in interviews with podcasts, has claimed that Wizards were already planning to move away from OGL 1.1 when the leak happened because of feedback they had already received from those who’d had sight of it. That may well be true! The leak, however, did mean that a PR exercise around this was necessary. For this article, I’m going to cover their responses, do a deep dive into OGL 1.2, and then discuss Wizards’ total, humiliating, wretched capitulation to the outrage of the community.
This is an article which grew in the telling. After I wrapped up my previous article on Wizards’ absurd unforced error concerning the OGL, I expected to wrap up the series with one more piece, analysing the proposed texts of OGL 1.1 and 1.2 and discussing Wizards’ later total capitulation.
However, analysing OGL 1.1 turned out to take much longer than I expected. There’s some pretty profound issues with it, some of which only became apparent when I started the exercise of reading over it. It’s weirdly structured – bifurcated as it is into two licences. What’s more in the process of looking at it, I realised it appeared to be missing an important thing which I had really expected to be there, and whose absence makes some of the eyebrow-raising provisions of OGL 1.1 make a little more sense. More on that later.
All of this meant that my thoughts on it ran so long that I realised that this would need to be its own article – in my third article I’ll cover OGL 1.2, the compromise version Wizards wheeled out in the wake of the leaks and started a process of accepting feedback on, and then talk about their eventual capitulation.
I haven’t quite taken as long about this article as this monk has about his transcribing, but it feels that way.
To summarise the story so far: over 20 years ago, Wizards of the Coast put out OGL 1.0a, establishing the current era of third party D&D support. Perhaps by the usual standards of IP licences and open source licences it doesn’t offer that much – but it does represent a significant thaw compared to the harsh approach taken by TSR. All is well in the land.
Then, towards the start of this year, leaks emerge of a new OGL 1.1 – a document apparently being circulated by Wizards among third party publishers. And the howling and screaming begins…
As well as the caveats I offered at the start of last article, I ought to add a new one here, which is that Wizards did at the end of the day rule out bringing in OGL 1.1 altogether – so none of the stuff I outline here will actually come to pass. Nonetheless, at points in my analysis I may add the odd stray phrase along the lines of “under this licence, X is no longer true” or similar – just because it’d be awkward to say “If this licence had been adopted, which is unlikely to happen any time soon because Wizards have abandoned attempts to extinguish OGL 1.0a” over and over again.
Maybe it’s pointless writing this article. By now, the controversy over the leak of OGL 1.1 – a planned update to the Open Gaming Licence which Wizards has acknowledged the reality of, but has promised to rethink – is all over the RPG discussion space. Everyone’s weighed in on it. Most people have probably either made their minds up one way on the subject or are simply not interested. What can me writing one more article about it on here accomplish?
Well, for one thing, I think I can add a useful perspective based on my legal knowledge. This article shouldn’t be taken as legal advice – and to be honest, nor should anything which is not being given to you by an attorney whose services you have engaged who you have briefed on the particular specifics of your situation, because specifics matter in this sort of thing. But I have studied intellectual property law – I don’t work primarily in the world of trademark or copyright, but my training did involve learning about both of those, and at least know enough contract law to be able to not be intimidated by a contract, and to recognise when it’s doing something unusual from the perspective of IP law.
Wizards’ handling of this whole situation has cast them as the villains in this story.
Bear in mind too that my studies have not focused on US law, so there may well be specifics of that which pass me by. That said, I think that could be an asset in looking at this. A lot of the commentary I have seen on the situation has been very US-centric, which misunderstands how the current RPG market works. With PDF sales on internationally-available storefronts like DriveThruRPG being so important to publishers in the field, and virtual tabletop platforms also available more or less globally, it can be dangerous to give people a clean bill of health when it comes to copyright infringement risks if that is based on exemptions or rulings based solely on US law.
US-style “fair use” is not the standard worldwide – in the UK, for instance, we have “fair dealing”, which has a different scope – and different jurisdictions will have different case law to deal with. No RPG publisher wants to be in a situation where they are limited to selling a product in only one country. This is particularly of concern if the gorilla in the room – the dominant player in the market whose legal department would cause the biggest panic if they came after your product – is a multinational corporation, who has the capacity to come after your product from the jurisdiction of their choice if they can find standing to do so (for instance, bringing copyright infringement cases against your product in the UK if you or your distribution partners sell it there instead of – or as well as – bringing infringement claims for activities in the US).
I’d add on a personal note that being conversant with copyright law is not the same thing as liking copyright law. In its present state, it is a mess. I believe it is a necessity, and will remain a necessity absent fundamental change to the way society is arranged, because if you strip it away completely you give big corporations carte blanche to plunder everyone else’s ideas wholesale – and they’ll have the funds and infrastructure available to do that much more quickly and effectively than smaller business and individuals can. But copyright durations are absurdly long at the moment, international harmonisation on matters of coverage and infringement would be a boon, and in general it feels like a field ripe for root and branch reform.
As such, if in this article I talk about something Wizards or any other party might be able to do – or at least, might argue that they are able to do – please don’t take that as any form of endorsement of that position, or suggesting that it is a good or appropriate thing that the law permits this.
Oh, and obviously a lot of the stuff I say in these two articles may end up stale in the future because of new developments. Honestly, I made a start on writing this a couple of times when the controversy was still live only to give up and wait a bit because something new and silly had happened, and I wanted to give things time to settle down a bit before giving a settled opinion on the matter rather than shooting from the hip and coming out with a bunch of speculation which would be rendered redundant in short order.
After all those caveats about the legal situation, I will lead off by pointing out that a lot of this is not about law at all.
Histories of D&D and TSR have become thick on the ground. Representing the gold standard – in terms of completeness, standard of scholarship, and avoiding a slide into hagiography – are the works of Jon Peterson, such as Playing At the World (covering the design and initial publication of OD&D), The Elusive Shift (digesting the early fan discourse within the RPG fandom), and Game Wizards (covering TSR in the years under the control of Gary Gygax and the Blume brothers).
Peterson’s books hit the high standard they do largely because he primarily bases his research on surviving contemporary documents, which aren’t prone to the misrememberings, mythologisings, evasions, and other inaccuracies which creep in when you’re looking at statements made by participants, especially long after the fact. On the other hand, relying on witness evidence offered up decades down the line can often be more fun; Kent David Kelly’s Hawk & Moor series might be much more reliant on such recollections, but some of the material it is able to dredge up is pretty juicy.
Ben Riggs’ Slaying the Dragon takes a bit of a middle route here – Riggs admits his reliance on interviews with a good many of the primary actors in the story he’s telling, but he does a good job of flagging where this is the case, noting where he wasn’t able to talk to significant actors who might otherwise have given a different perspective, and even points out instances where he double-checked claims with other interviewees to corroborate some testimony. In addition, he is able to make some significant coups in terms of turning up documentation, and flags when he’s able to rely on that information in order to present his narrative.
Perhaps more importantly, though, Riggs extends the story into a period which has so far been poorly served by existing work. So far, most of the histories out there have tended to give a lot of attention to the Gygax-helmed era of TSR, and comparatively little to what came afterwards. Peterson and Kelly’s histories haven’t advanced the timeline past the Gygax era, but at least have the excuse of covering it in sufficient detail that giving a similar treatment to the Williams years would be a major undertaking in itself. Some of the more hagiographic treatments of the story have tended to either sing the praises of Saint Gary (a term Riggs uses here in jest – he doesn’t buy into the whitewashing of Gygax’s reputation) or maximise the role of Dave Arneson. (Riggs takes the position, which I think is the most reasonable one, that OD&D was the sort of thing which needed Arneson to come up with the seed idea in the first place, but Gygax to turn it into a product that could actually be sold to an audience and give them a faint hope of replicating something approximating similar gameplay.) Other, general histories like Shannon Appelcine’s Designers & Dragons have given broad overviews but haven’t gone into depth.
Slaying the Dragon, on the other hand, takes a much different approach. It dispatches the Gygax-helmed era in some 61 pages, and spends over 200 subsequent pages going into a deep dive on the next phase of TSR – the era which would see its critical and artistic zenith, its decline and fall, the purchase of TSR by Wizards of the Coast, and the initial phase of repairing burned bridges which Peter Adkison and Lisa Stevens of Wizards had to undertake.
In other words, this is the first deep dive into the Lorraine Williams era of TSR we’ve seen.
Here’s another in my occasional series on game supplements which I read and have some thoughts on, but not enough thoughts for an entire article. This time I’ve got a slightly unfocused expansion for Wrath & Glory, a couple of issues of an old-school D&D zine, and a Call of Cthulhu campaign.
Redacted Records (Wrath & Glory)
This feels like an odd little grab-bag of material for the official Warhammer 40,000 RPG, a bit like the Archives of the Empire volumes offer grab-bags of material for 4th Edition WFRP. The cover and the back cover blurb make it seem like this is a space hulk-themed supplement – a sort of update of material from Ark of Lost Souls for Deathwatch – but this only covers about a third of this supplement’s content (and since the book is only about 100 pages long that’s not a lot). Other material includes more frameworks for your PC party, a brief chapter on unusual servitors, an overview of some cults from two of the worlds of the default setting of Wrath & Glory (the Gilead system), and the start of a greatly expanded Talent list. (Literally: it covers A-I, implying that there will be followup chapters in other books covering J-Z.)
The weird thing about the supplement is that much of this feels like it’s been chopped out of a larger body of work – as well as the J-Z sections of that additional talent list, you’d expect similar cult rundowns of the other worlds of the system to exist somewhere, for instance. Still, as a sort of half-supplement-half-magazine thing it’s not useless – but I feel like it should be presented as being Volume 1 of a series, like the first Archives of the Empire book was, because it’s very apparent that this is merely the first of a series of miscellanea-themed supplements with not much connecting theme.
Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse is a new supplement for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons full of old material. Specifically, it brings together information of two types: firstly, player character race writeups, and secondly, monster stats. These are derived from a wide range of sources; the back cover blurb highlights Volo’s Guide To Monsters and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, but these are not the only sources tapped. (With this release, for example, the Elemental Evil Player’s Companionis rendered wholly redundant: the new character types from there are in here, and the extra spells from there ended up in Xanathar’s Book of Everything.)
That said, you don’t get all the material from Volo’s Guide and Mordenkainen’s Tome here. Oh, sure, all the PC races and monster stats are here – but the chapters providing setting-specific deep dives into various subjects relating to monster culture aren’t here, and a lot of the race and monster entries are condensed somewhat to remove similarly world-specific details.
There’s been much debate and no small amount of culture war snark over why Wizards would take this tack, but so far as I can tell it is more or less consistent with the shift they’ve made in the direction of 5E recently: whilst early 5E materials very much used the Forgotten Realms world as the default setting, and were written assuming you would use it (bar for some nice gestures like the inclusion of pantheons for other worlds in the back of the Player’s Handbook), Wizards’ exploration of that setting seems to have stalled at the Sword Coast. Instead, they’ve gone with a one-product-and-done approach, dipping into a wide range of settings with a single hardback (or, in the case of their upcoming Spelljammer release, a boxed set) before moving on to something else, leaving the third party writers on the DM’s Guild to meet any demand for follow-up material.
Not all of these one-off settings have been entirely to my taste – I have no desire to explore Strixhaven, for instance – but some of them have been pretty good, and I thought the recent Ravenloft book was very good indeed, and it seems to be working out for Wizards. It certainly lets them make use both of their own wider range of IP – witness the number of Magic: the Gathering worlds that have had D&D supplements – as well as do interesting collaborations (like with Critical Role or Rick and Morty) from time to time, and I suspect that whilst none of the setting books sell as well as the core (because core rulebooks almost always outsell supplements), any product which cracks open a brand-new setting will tend to sell better than one which further explores an existing one (especially if that setting is as vanilla-bland as the Forgotten Realms have become). That being the case, it makes complete sense that Wizards would want to help referees separate out the Forgotten Realms accretions from the core concepts of the creatures presented here.
These are not the only tweaks made. Notably, all of the additional PC races now use the new rules for non-human characters from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, which shifts away from applying attribute bonuses to specific stats. In part this was brought in to shift away from the “some races are just smarter/stronger/whatever-er” than others and the unfortunate implications that approach suggested, but it also feels like a nice way to expand the range of character builds you can try out (why shouldn’t you be able to play an orc wizard as accomplished as any human one?), makes the genuinely unique features of races (like Kenku mimicry) carry more weight in distinguishing them, and also serves the overall “we’re not making too many assumptions about these species’ cultures because they will vary a lot from setting to setting” ethos of the book. One suspects that when the new revision of the Player’s Handbook comes out in a year or two, it’ll apply this approach to all the PC races.
Another significant change to the monster stats is a change in the way monsters with spellcasting are handled: rather than being given a full breakdown of spell slots and memorised spells, the stat blocks now provide a terser set of spells and guidance on how often they can be used. This is frankly helpful: it reduces decision paralysis and spell-consultation on the part of the referee, and therefore makes it easier to deploy those monsters on the spur of the moment. If you really want to closely track an entity’s spell usage in the same manner as PCs, you’re free to tweak the statlines to do that if you want, but most referees will be aware that this is often overkill in practice.
On the whole, Monsters of the Multiverse is a solid consolidation of Volo’s Guide and Mordenkainen’s Tome (and a few stray things from other sources on top of that), and since it has been cooked up with the coming revisions to the core books in mind, it should hopefully be a bit more future-proof than those two. If you already have those books, I wouldn’t call it a high priority unless you don’t have much use for the setting-specific material in them and you want to save a bit of shelf space (which was the case with me); if you don’t have them, I’d recommend this instead.
One last nostalgia note: as far as putting out a new monster supplement which is basically a tweaked version of two older, bulkier books goes, Wizards are actually being old school here. Back in the 2nd Edition AD&D days, the original monster book for 2E was the two-volume Monstrous Compendium, a chunky think sold in three-ring binders so that settings-specific appendices could be stored with the rest of your monsters in there. It was eventually an annoying and fiddly way to sell books, so TSR gave up on it and put out the hardback Monstrous Manual which replaced it. Some have accused 5E of being an attempt to hark back to 2E (when they are not talking about it harking back to 3E, or being a Trojan Horse for 4E-isms, or a corporate riff on vintage OD&D/1E/Basic), and usually those arguments are a little reductive, but the parallels here are a little amusing to me, having watched this dance play out before.
Time for another entry in my occasional article series covering game supplements which didn’t inspire a full article but did prompt some thoughts. This time around it’s a classic fantasy special, with supplements for various fantasy RPGs with long, distinguished lineages: a Chivalry & Sorcery monster tome, a significant D&D 5E rules expansion, and some material for Basic Roleplaying and OpenQuest.
European Folklore Bestiary (Chivalry & Sorcery)
Like much of the 5th Edition Chivalry & Sorcery lineup, this is the product of a Kickstarter – in this case, a carefully unambitious one, in which stretch goals were sensibly not used to bulk up the book itself but to unlock various 3D printer files for printing miniatures. That’s not something which is necessarily all that interesting if you’re not into using minis for RPG or wargaming purposes, but it’s a nice approach to running a Kickstarter regardless, since it helps steer well clear of the “we added too many stretch goals and now our core product is too ambitious” trap.
Weighing in at a shade over 150 pages, the European Folklore Bestiary is an extensive collection of additional creatures for Chivalry & Sorcery – the schtick here being is that they are derived from medieval bestiaries and folklore, and so represent the creatures as people of the era might have thought of them. It’s a fun concept that’s suitable to the game’s overall focus on historical detail, and I don’t mind owning a hard copy now that it’s out, but at the same time I think it’s a product I would have been happy to just get the PDF for.
The main reason for this is that it’s just a little light for a 150 page supplement. Each creature has a full-page illustration accompanying, and whilst some of these illustrations fill that space nicely, others seem a little under-detailed – like the plan was for them to be smaller initially and used in the corner of a page, rather than blown up to full size.
Pretty much all the creatures here fit onto a single double-page spread, and since each creature has a full-size illustration this means that around half the book is artwork. In the remaining half of the pages, the fairly extensive Chivalry & Sorcery stat blocks often take up half the page, and the written details on the creatures in question are sometimes a little sparse. Not always – some carry more detail – but often enough that this is noticeable.
Of course, this may well be that you’re dealing with some creatures which just aren’t widely mentioned in the bestiaries, just a brief aside here or there, and so there’s not that much authentic detail to provide – but it still makes the book feel a little sparse. There’s a good bibliography at the end, though perhaps it would have been helpful to provide individual citations in the creature entries to better indicate the specific sources of particular beasts. I’m still glad to have the resource, but I think customers coming to this late might be well-advised to consider just getting the PDF.
Refereeing and Reflection 