Audio EXP: #144 – The $150 million D&D deal

Welcome home.

This is Audio EXP for the 16th of April 2022, and the title of this episode is “The $150 million D&D deal”.

[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #144]

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Outland Arts is in the spotlight this month, as voted for by Patreons.

I’ve flung some questions at Will of Outland, so I hope to have answers in an article before deadline day. Goodman Games fans are in a treat as they’re a familiar name there.

Since we’re talking about deadlines and timings, just a quick note to say that I’ve moved the end of the blogging day back to midnight due to real-life pressures.

Shocking, I know. Midnight for the end of the day means this podcast is slated for Saturday, anytime. What a relief; it’s so much pressure off, and I’m an idiot for not doing it sooner.

The D&D deal is the big news of the week. Beamdog has made several of the biggest Dungeons & Dragons computer games yet, games like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights and they’ll be bought by Aspyr Media. That puts Beamdog in the same group as Fantasy Flight and Dark Horse.

Okay, okay, that’s probably not the D&D deal that has most tabletop gamers interested.

That deal will be Hasbro paying $146m for D&D Beyond. That’s a lot of money.

D&D Beyond is run by Fandom, and if you’ve been here for earlier podcasts, you’ll know we’ve talked about two things before.

Firstly, about 50% of gamers had no idea D&D Beyond wasn’t a Wizards of the Coast owned project.

Secondly, I’ve talked long about this missing part of Wizards of the Coast’s digital future and the importance of virtual tabletops and digital toolkits for the hobby. They’re closely connected to how many people play and buy their games these days.

Fandom didn’t build the tech for D&D Beyond; they bought that from Curse. We don’t know how much of those behind-the-scenes mechanics Hasbro is taking and how much Fandom gets to keep. This is interesting because Fandom has a rival to 5e with Cortex, and we can expect those to go more openly head to head now.

The 50th Anniversary Editions of D&D, due out next year, will be especially interesting now.

Adam Bradford, the co-founder of D&D Beyond, long ago moved on to Demiplane.

Demiplane, also not a virtual tabletop but increasingly a digital toolkit, announced a big deal. They’ll run the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game Nexus.

That means you’ll be able to check rules, organise your character and find games for Marvel’s new RPG there. Roll20 also reported that they’d have the system, but they don’t get a branded thing like the Nexus. Which strategy will work best? Time will tell.

Marvel also interviewed Matt Forbeck, the game’s designer, with a micro-teaser of the forthcoming playtest.

It’s not a cheap book, and it’s only a playtest. I’m more confident about that business decision; if you can get fans to pay for a playtest without upsetting them, do so. It’s money.

We’ve the Marvel RPG to look forward to. Sadly, this week, I confirmed that we’re going to lose a game. There won’t be any more samurai rabbits from Sanguine Productions as the Usagi Yojimbo license has ended.

Perhaps Yojimbo isn’t the most well-known tabletops, but it’s a big manga, and a spin-off is about to launch on Netflix. I suspect that’s why the license deal didn’t get another run, and we might speculate someone else will pick it up.

I also speculate the price of the game will go up now it’s become rare, and the title is about to become known to Western audiences. I bought a new copy on eBay.

A game that’s coming, a game that uses “inspired by” rather than “official license”, is Gila RPG’s RUNE. This solo hexcrawl is inspired by Dark Souls. Gila is better known for fast action and a lack of maps with Lumen and NOVA. Doing a tactical game is an exciting move, and it shows scope.

There’s no release date, but unlike Marvel, the playtest is open and free to join.

In last week’s Audio EXP podcast, I first highlighted the vanishing Usagi Yojimbo and talked about the free RPG trend. Two weeks don’t make a trend but let’s just highlight some of the freebies from this week.

So, in no particular order…

There’s Fearsome Wilderness from Geektopia Games, which uses the Year Zero Engine and has PCs as prisoners who’s transport spaceship crashes down into the wilds of a civilisation free planet. It’s about surviving the wilderness and each other.

Coco Publishing has a quickstart for Stolen Havens. That’s a fantasy world in which monsters appear from thin air.

If you’ve heard of neither Coco and Geektopia, then, and apologies to both, good. I’m trying to cover smaller and indie publishers here and not just WotC as they whip $150m out onto the table.

Bugbearslug did one better and released the entire transhuman horror of Nekropol for free.

It really is a transhuman horror as PCs in it are busy twisting themselves to become as skeletal as possible, modifying their body as aggressively as they can.

Another interesting option is the newly released quickstart for Not The End. That’s interesting for many reasons, so let us talk about two. Firstly, Not The End uses the HexSys system, a character sheet of hexes and words and the relationships there are part of the mechanics. Secondly, the partnership of publishers who bring us the game, Fumble GDR and Mana Project Studio, are currently working on the official Cowboy Bebop RPG.

The last freebie takes us back to D&D and Wizards of the Coast. Eberron, the steampunk and magic setting, was released back in 2004, and the core rules had a sample adventure called The Forgotten Forge.

The pages of that adventure have been scanned and uploaded and are now free to download from DriveThruRPG.

Since we’re back to D&D, I want to check whether I have bragging rights or not. I like to think Geek Native was the first, or at least among the first, tabletop RPG blogs to notice that the big bad in the Stranger Things 4 season is called Vecna.

That’s the lich-god villain from Forgotten Realms, and stranger Things does like to use D&D to name the series baddie.

I got the tip from an IGN interview.

I also noticed this week that Steve Jackson is writing again. Not Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games, but Steve Jackson of Fighting Fantasy.

There’s been no new Fighting Fantasy book from Steve Jackson in over 30 years. Now, with the 40th anniversary approaching, Steve will write Secrets of Salamonis.

It all started at Firetop Mountain, with the Warlock, and Sir Ian, the other co-creator, will take us back. For the 40th anniversary, Ian Livingston will pen Shadow of the Giants, and that’s about a magical device being found in Firetop Mountain.

Now, before we get into bundle deals and mindful I’ve been mixing up freebies with big cash figures, let me talk about £10,000.

Asmodee, who is now related to Beamdog, has teamed up with the computer game retailer in the UK called GAME. GAME is going the other way, pushing more into board games, trying to counter those who download from Steam rather than go into an actual store or have discs sent to us in the post. GAME is now selling board games.

The £10,000 is part of a prize system running this month, details are on the blog, but the long and short of it is; you will win a prize. It might just be GAME points, but it might be a lot of cash.

My Easter idea, for those of us with a bit of cash, although not terribly much, is the official My M&M site. You can upload your own art, such as character tokens, from your virtual tabletops and get them printed on multi-colour M&Ms. I thought that might be an excellent way to treat your players or surprise your GM during the chocolate season.

Lastly, two bundles to call out and both at the Bundle of Holding. One is the Victorian-cyberpunk mashup from Goodman Games of Etherscope. The other, from Necrotic Gnome, is Old-School Essentials Treasures.

You can find links to all these via the show notes.

And on that note, let’s wrap up there, don’t eat too much chocolate and see you next week.