Audio EXP: #151 – Are you tired of charity RPG bundles?

Welcome home.

This is Audio EXP for the 4th of June 2022, and the title of this episode is “Are you tired of charity RPG bundles?”.

[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #151]

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BRW Games is in the spotlight this month, as voted for by Patreons.

I haven’t yet tried to get in touch with BRW, but I will this weekend. I promise.

DriveThruRPG has their hottest game listed as Joseph Bloch’s Book of Lost Lore, which is a silver best seller.

If there’s anything you’d like to me ask if I get a review lined up, which is my goal, then let me know.

As it’s the start of the month, it means that Geek Native’s patrons, awesome people worldwide, have another creator from the RPG community to vote into the spotlight.

The options are;

• Long Shadows Press
• HisCursedness
• Astral Shark Games
• Shenanigans Media
• Bloodstone Press

If you had just to pick one cool name from that shortlist, I think you’ll be challenged to find a winner. Aren’t they all great RPG publisher names?

It’s been another busy week here in Geek Native towers, although not necessarily in Geek Native and RPG stuff.

The UK is odd right now as there’s so much grim stuff happening in the world – and we’ll get on to talking about that and how the RPG community is responding – but also because it’s the Queen’s 70th Jubilee.

I have been willing in the past to continue to pay for the Royal family. I’m not much of a royalist, but I saw the imperial legacy as a way to keep tourists coming to the country. I think that’s a more challenging position to reconcile, given the behaviour of Prince Andrew and the uncertainty of whether a King Charles will meddle in politics or not. And King Charles feels like a Coronation we’ll see soon enough.

Why mention the British royal family at all in a geeky highlights podcast? The way the whole country has an extra holiday, street parties are happening, and heated political debate has made me think of how infrequently it happens in roleplaying games. It should probably happen more.

Dragon Turtle Games, a British publisher, sell the cyberpunk Carbon 2185. It’s all megacorps in that game but still room to note the Jubilee as all proceeds from sales of the RPG will be donated to food banks. Why? Dragon Turtle is doing it to highlight the increasing wealth inequality in the country.

I’m not sure how many sales they’d expect to generate over a bank holiday weekend; I suspect it’s not much, and you could accuse them of grabbing a bit of publicity. Perhaps that’s true, but they are shining a light on an actual issue. Sometimes it’s not about the money. Sometimes you just want to do something. Sometimes success comes from not sweeping a problem under the carpet and saying, “We don’t talk about that at the table”.

I thought about that while blogging another charity bundle this week and then again when I had another to blog.

Are you getting tired of them?

Honestly, I don’t blame anyone if bundle fatigue is beginning to creep in.

There’s a straight-up and impressive Megabundle from the Pazio community on the new-ish Pathfinder Infinite site. It’s for Paizocon, and you’ll get over $110 worth of Pathfinder goodies for $25. What a great offer, but I’ve not seen much buzz. Perhaps that’s because a bundle deal like that sings to the choir.

In contrast, I’ve seen coverage of the charity deals, and I think that’s because there’s a story attached. Pundits like me, or proper journalists as you might find on sites like Dicebreaker, don’t just want to highlight the bundle but want to boost the social good they represent too.

It’s become a cultural thing, I suspect. Putting together a bundle is a way to do something. Even if you don’t need or want all the RPGs or games, buying the bundle is also a way to do something.

Couldn’t the bundle platforms just offer a donate button? I suppose they could, but it’s not as if Humble, DriveThruRPG, or Itch hide the charity, and it’s often just a click away. I suspect there are all sorts of tax complications and payment quirks that mean the retailers find it much easier to provide an e-commerce service and allow the publishers to donate, or not, as they see fit.

Traditionally, we get to bundle deals last on Audio EXP and so let’s stick to that and finish up on all this week’s offers.

First, let’s stick with cultural quirks around gaming but move on from charity. In France, the government takes an active role in protecting culture and language.

A whole authority regulates language so English words don’t creep in and replace French. The news this week is that that authority has made some rulings, so terms like eSports, pro-gamer and streamer now have official French.

I won’t attempt to pronounce them, but the translation for steamer is something like “live player-host”. In other words, many catchy gamer terms have a slightly longer but more descriptive way of saying the same thing in French.

Is it illegal to oppose the rulings of the French Academy? No, I don’t think so, not from what some Google searching can surface for me. It is frowned on, though, and using English when there’s recommended French won’t make your professional life easier.

While the UK might still maintain a monarchy and France protecting French, there are stories of change and evolution out this week.

My favourite is the excellent news that DriveThruRPG will be coordinating their first game designers’ jam. They’ll be calling these PocketQuests and this is an idea that the rival Itch.io platform has a lot of success with.

The idea is this; game designers have a time frame and a challenge theme. For the first PocketQuest, the theme is Summer Camp, and games are designed around that.

There are some rules on the games too, like format, size and similar. Overall, though, the idea is to be as imaginative as possible, and then the whole collective output and highlights from it can be promoted.

If all goes well, we get a better community and exposure for less well-known names. That’s why I think it’s great DriveThruRPG is doing this, although I don’t see many technical innovations to enable it. I think a lot of heavy lifting is going on behind the scenes with hard work from the publisher support team there.

Another bit of evolution comes from Fandom. I haven’t gone on a monologue about how virtual tabletops, digital, marketplaces, and the ecosystem that enables the playing of tabletop RPGs are of fundamental importance to the future of RPGs for a while.

I’ll almost resist doing so here. Almost. I will remind us that Fandom sold D&D Beyond to Wizards of the Coast, but they are working on a marketplace for Cortex and have a shop with Fanatical. We’ll see Fanatical later when we get to bundles.

The core Fandom business is thousands of fan wikis.

An interactive map-making feature has been tested for over a year, which doesn’t make Fandom’s development process feel very agile, but has rolled out this week.

It means fan wikis can show maps and let people click on locations to find out more about them. You can see how that’ll be interesting to world-builders and might nudge Fandom towards competition with sites like World Anvil. From there, we’re edging back towards virtual tabletop competitors again.

We’ll just have to see what Fandom do, but I like to think of them as a dark horse of the digital ecosystem, I acknowledge they’re unlikely to stray too far from their core ad business, mainly UGC and not software-as-a-service.

While Fandom are adding stuff, I also had the story of about 33% of Google Play mobile games being removed.

That’s about a quarter of a million apps removed from the store. Why? Google hasn’t said, but it’s probably because these are old games that haven’t been updated and are now more than two years behind the latest API requirements from Alphabet.

Does it matter? It’s good for security, so yeah, it matters. It also reminds me to check my phone for old apps I don’t use anymore and delete them. Android automatically removes permissions from apps after a while if you don’t use them.

Sometimes, though, old games spark back to life. I had forgotten entirely, because I did not back, that Jim Zub and team took Skullkickers to Kickstarter to fund a campaign setting.

Skullkickers is a comic book about two fantasy mercenaries getting up to violent adventure, and that Kickstarter was in 2020.

This week, I noticed Skullkickers on DriveThruComics. Maybe it’s on DriveThruRPG too, but it was the comics team promoting it, and Skullkickers is a comic to me.

I won’t also name the Skullkicker title fully, as Apple is sensitive to adult language on podcasts. Still, the link to the 5e adventure, sourcebook and setting is in the transcript, and you’ll get to that from the show notes.

There’s another quirky Kickstarter story this week with Reign of Discordia which seemed to cancel and then relaunch almost back to back. The project was cancelled on the 31st of May, and it’s already back.

So, what happened? Simply put, Owen Stephens got ill, and so, after talking to co-creator Darrin Drader, the project was cancelled.

The idea was to avoid too much Kickstarter stress landing on just one set of shoulders or even, perhaps, pushing ahead, taking money, when there was uncertainty.

In that respect, and why I’m bringing it up on the podcast, isn’t it unusual that this doesn’t happen more often? I wonder how often solo or small team Kickstarters launch and then complete despite the creator knowing they’re likely heading into ill health.

Before we finally get to the bundles, I wanted to share the news that while we might be suffering from bundle deal fatigue, we don’t seem to be suffering from Stranger Things fatigue.

I blogged about an official long-sleeve Hellfire t-shirt and it’s been a popular story. Normally, these merch discovery posts are just for my amusement and don’t do much. This shirt has done a little more.

We’re going back to Fandom for the first bundle. Over at Fanatical, there’s the Festival of Video Games and that includes Warhammer Skulls.

You can get a host of Games Workshop content at some pretty big discounts. I’ve seen over 80% off, and some DLCs are just 20 pence.

My highlight is a digital edition of the Talisman board game for 84% off.

There’s a sci-fi theme going on this week at the Bundle of Holding. The popular Traveller RPG retro-clone Cepheus has a bundle. The Starter Collection tier has three complete RPGs;

• Cepheus Deluxe
• These Stars Are Ours
• The Space Patrol

There’s also a Traveller bundle in the shape of Gamelords Traveller. This offer has material from Gamelords and Marischal Adventures, third-party publishers, one of the first for the old RPG.

For the second year in a row and over on Itch, there’s the Queer Games Bundle. June, of course, is Pride month.

Here you’ll get nearly 600 RPGs for $60. It’s doing well, and I think one of the reasons is that the coordinators are clear about how critical the offer’s success is to some disadvantaged creators who have contributed to it.

Sadly, there’s also the Bundle for Buffalo, which includes all sorts of games, and is in response to the racist mass shooting in the States last month.

Money for the bundle goes to a charity which, and in their words;

… that resist the ills of white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchal, capitalism; including policing.

I’m sure that won’t suit everyone’s tastes, but as you know, I think it’s political to avoid politics in your gaming chat. Why? It’s still the decision to look the other way or stay quiet. In this case, no one is forcing you to back the bundle.

Lastly, and more typically, there’s a Dynamite Entertainment deal on Humble called The Boys versus The Girls. It has The Boys comics, now a very good series on Amazon, alongside female-led stories like Barbarella.

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