Audio EXP: #134 – Dead for a week

Welcome home.

This is Audio EXP for the 5th of February 2022, and the title of this episode is “Dead for a week”

[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #134]

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Shawn Merwin is in the spotlight this month, as voted for by Patreons.

I’m in touch with Shawn, and they’ve already come back to me. Yep, the ball is in my court, and so I’ll try, but won’t promise, to get the Q&A process started this week.

Since we’re talking about trying, let’s talk about the live broadcast of this podcast that I’m trying right now. If you’re watching on Instagram, then you’re a brave person.

You’re watching me fumble my way through. You won’t see the light touch editing that happens before this podcast goes out. I know, hard to believe, but there is some editing.

You will, however, see all the re-starts, re-do and other hiccups that strike along the way. I may or may not repeat this next week. It’s an experiment.

This feels like a selfish week. Despite some big industry news, there’s more Geek Native news.

Let’s first talk about being dead for a week; as for some people, it might have appeared Geek Native was.

I use Pagely to host the blog. It’s an expensive managed hosting platform, I think the first WordPress specialist. I’ve tried others, and they’ve been the best so far.

A few weeks ago, they made a technical change that caused Geek Native to redirect into infinity, so Pagely cancelled that upgrade. Which was nice, but that was a security fix, and we had to get it done eventually.

The problem turned out to be how Pagely and Cloudflare interacted. Cloudflare sits between you and me, as it does on many sites, acts as a shield and works to get you content from Geek Native more swiftly and for less bandwidth.

Pagely found a combination of Cloudflare settings which we thought was the best of both worlds, nice and secure and nice and fast. That upgrade happened on the 27th.

Then, last night, while I was at dinner, someone tweeted to ask if it was normal that Geek Native hadn’t published any RPG content since the 27th.

Uh-oh. You can see where we’re going with this.

In short, the new settings had meant that Cloudflare wasn’t passing on the new content to anyone not logged into the blog. Or many people, anyway, and it’s hard to diagnose.

However, I think I hope it’s fixed now.

So, we’re no longer a zombie, no longer lurking somewhere between life and death and fully alive. Good thing we’ve this podcast as a highlight show to look back on a week and recap some of the news.

A week ago, it was clear that January’s RPG Publisher Spotlight winner As If Productions wasn’t going to be able to contribute anything to their feature. We didn’t start the month that way, but Tod ran out of time at As If.

You’ll see that the feature happened anyway. As If Productions does more than RPGs, there’s web design and lots of writing in there too. I’d describe As If in terms of fast moves and experimentation. For example, As If have been on Patreon since 2014, and they were one of the first waves of adopters.

Are you backing any Patreons that have been on the platform that long?

So, that’s Shawn lined up for this month, As If for last month and as it’s the start of this month, it means there are five more candidates for Patreons to pick from.

Ready for them?

• Black Scrolls Games
• Wider Path Games
• PenguinComics
• The Mad Looter
• Possible Worlds Games

It’s not true to say that Patreons keep Geek Native going, but I mean that in a good way.

Patreon money gets reinvested back into the tabletop community when I commission articles and art. It doesn’t go to paying people like Pagely. I’ll do that as part of this hobby.

However, Patreons certainly help me keep going. You bring some joy to my life, and I like to say “thank you”.

This week there’s a thank you gift for Patreons at the $2 level or anyone who gets there in the next few days.

The gift are some paper pandas designed to be note markers. They look cute, are just large enough to scribble a tiny reminder on, and come in number, so they should last a while. They’re a physical gift that I’ll mail out provided I have your address.

I did mention big industry news.

Dungeons & Dragons has a new boss. So does Magic: The Gathering.

In fact, Wizards of the Coast’s new CEO is Cynthia Williams.

Cynthia comes from Microsoft, where she helped grow Xbox. Her background is in finance, but at Microsoft, she worked with the Xbox ecosystem, which means with other companies, so that Microsoft had more profitable ways to recruit new players.

I remember when investors were encouraging Microsoft to sell Xbox as non-core. I thought that was rubbish at the time. Now, I’m sure that I was right, and people like Cynthia Williams made it so.

We know that Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast see the future of D&D as a digital one, and it will surely be William’s digital experience that helped her land this new job.

Before Microsoft, there was Amazon and, in particular, Amazon Business Fillfulment. We’re talking about Amazon’s ability to put books and other physical products sold by third parties into the hands of customers.

Cynthia Williams, I believe, is a co-author on a patent that deals with sorting out problems when this process goes wrong. How to find the missing good. What compensation is due to whom. That sort of thing.

So, D&D’s new boss has experience in shipping ecosystems, dealing with businesses and customers, logistics and games. You can see why Hasbro was interested in her.

Let’s see what happens next.

Let’s stick with the tabletop ecosystem for a bit and share some Geek Native curated stats. As you know, I monitor Kickstarter closely.

It’s been a busy week at the platform, and I’ve tracked about 80 launches in the last seven days, which I’ve classified as RPG-related. That’s a big jump up from the end of the year.

However, it’s 50% down compared to a year ago. A year ago, it was the start of Zine Quest, and there were about 160 launches. This year, Kickstarter has lost some steam due to concerns over blockchain, and they also decided to delay ZineQuest to run it alongside Gen Con.

However, people working on Zines and wanting to Kickstart them in February simply started the multi-platform Zine Month and got on with it. So, we’ve had a spike of Zine RPG projects, but not as much as not everyone followed along, and some went to other platforms.

I think Kickstarter will be hoping for a relatively calm 2022 after this rocky start.

Well, let’s see what happens next.

Taking an alternative route to Kickstarter there are Weird Works. Tom Denick simply released Zero Level Rulebook for 5E straight to DriveThruRPG.

It’s a Pay What You Want title with a recommended price of $0. For your money, you’ll get 22-pages of rules for playing zero level characters, which generally, and in this case, means non-adventuring careers like cooks and coachmen.

This rulebook is based on Dungeon Crawl Classics’ approach to such characters The attraction? Well, start off in a mundane job and wind up on a great adventure.

We’re still not escaping the concept of ecosystems for this next headline, even if we’re dipping out of RPGs for one story before we get to the bundles.

The Halo TV show has a new trailer, and it looks great, but there are reasons to worry.

If, like me, you’re in the UK, will we get the show at all?

We lost Star Trek to Paramount+. Paramount+ has Halo, too but hasn’t made it very far out of America. So, will the network protect the exclusivity of its platform even if it means not tapping into markets outside the US, or will it do the opposite and do a deal with… well, probably not Netflix, right, but perhaps Sky or someone like that.

Guess what? Yep, that’s right, we’ll just have to see what happens next.

Let’s do the bundles then.

On the Bundle of Holding you can get Fearlight Games’ complete Victorian-era, Sherlock Holmes is missing, Baker Street RPG collection. You can also get the Fate powered transhuman sci-fi epic of Mindjammer.

There are three deals on Humble that I wrote up this week. One if F-Cancer in which 100% of proceeds go to a Swedish cancer research charity. Another is from the Black Library and offers loads of ebooks from the Worlds of Warhammer. The last one has that legendary puzzle fantasy Myst and related games.

I’m tempted by them all. Will I succumb? Well, we’ll just have to see.

And on that note, let’s wrap there and see you next week.