Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for the 22nd of July, 2023, and the episode title is “Getting stabbed and going away”
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #205]
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The Grinning Frog is in the Spotlight this month, as voted for by Patreons.
Let’s do surprises and no surprises. Not a surprise is that no one gets stabbed, and that reference is for a weird but also dramatic tech story Bronwen found.
Is it a surprise that this month’s interview is out, and I talked to Stephen Hart, the Chief Wordsmith at the British publisher?
We talked about what might be the world’s only monthly printed RPG magazine, The Oracle, the logistics challenge of a small business and that time his wife ran from zombies leaving a vulnerable man to his grim fate.
That stab-tech comes from a company called O.W.O. or as I want to pronounce it – ouw!
The OWO Haptic Gaming System is a shirt you can wear so you can feel the game and it’s been developed in partnership with Ubisoft.
The idea is you can wear it for Assassin’s Creed Mirage and feel it whenever the lead character gets stabbed. Or, well, feel something.
By the way, while researching this podcasting piece, I noticed that Amazon.co.uk has the exclusive to Assassin’s Creed Mirage Launch Edition, so I’ve linked that up. I imagine many people will download the game directly.
So, in the near future we might have XR headsets, haptic vests and the ability to download different forms of physical sensations.
Does anyone want to bet against that we’ll be able to download the sensation of being chewed on by a dragon before we get a haptic vest shaped for the female body type?
Okay, that’s the stabbing covered; what about the going away?
Let’s start with this week’s Dragon Turtle Games story, which I wasn’t expecting to be so popular and complex.
The short of it is that the platinum-bestselling and 5e-powered Carbon 2185 RPG will no longer be published by Dragon Turtle Games. The license is going elsewhere.
The first twist is that the founder of Dragon Turtle Games is the same person as the Carbon 2185 game, who still owns the license.
I think it’s akin to Asmodee moving the Star Wars RPG license from Fantasy Flight to sister studio Edge so that Fantasy Flight can go all-in on board games.
In this case, there’s no Edge. The new publisher for Carbon 2185 is yet to be set up, and Geek Native has been told it will be independently funded.
Dragon Turtle Games will continue with a fantasy RPG focus.
The second catch is that Dragon Turtle Games, who will probably be run by the same people who’ll run the new studio, got it all sorts of bother with a Kickstarter for a Carbon 2185 supplement. There are angry people out there, and there are people who crossed the line.
This separation of license and company might all be about brand protection or a financial firewall.
It’s awkward suggesting such a thing, but also what I’m here to do.
There are even more, if more minor, twists and, therefore, a whole article for you to read on the blog. Find the link to the site in the show notes.
Also going away, and this time taking jobs with it, is the Hasbro-owned and D&D-making company eOne. eOne is a movie company that Hasbro bought for billions just when movie production hit dire straights before the pandemic.
It used to release dozens of movies and shows in the UK; last year it managed the D&D movie and then in partnership, but now Hasbro will close the UK branch.
The music arm of eOne has been sold already, and it is believed Lionsgate might buy what’s left.
Bronwen dug into the Starfield mystery, which concerns that that popular game might go away before it is even out.
We’ve stats to say that Starfield is the most anticipated video game in the U.K. It’s a worry then that people are getting reports that people who have pre-ordered the space exploration game are cancelling their bookings.
So far, it seems that only the Constellation Edition PC version are getting the explanation-less notifications.
I also speculated that Christmas in July might also go away, or at least, not be back in the same way.
Christmas in July is a large sale at DriveThruRPG and sister sites. The relatively safe part of my speculation is that DriveThruRPG must surely release its new site after years of development by July 2024. If they do, we’ll have a family of very different retail experiences and look very different.
This year, DriveThruRPG has been busily adding virtual tabletop support. The shop is now owned by The Orr Group, although keeping up with the merger-not-merger-now-merger news is hard. The Orr Group own Roll20.
It would be excellent for blogs like Geek Native if Christmas in July 2024 expanded into the Roll20 Marketplace, and it would be disappointing if it went away entirely.
It’s worth noting that Christmas in July expands to the DMsGuild and fiction sites, too, Bronwen picked some horror stories, and I looked Top Cow best sellers on DriveThuComics.
Okay, that’s enough of things going away; what about D&D magic rings that are coming soon? They might not be magic, but official D&D rings are on pre-order over at Merchoid and might have sold out already.
They come in two boxes of six, with the Ring of X-Ray Vision, Spell Storing and Three Wishes in one box and Feather Falling, Protection and Water Walking in the other. I won’t go through the whole list but instead, encourage you to imagine what it would be like explaining to a co-worker that you’re wearing a ring of x-ray vision.
We know Tales of the Valiant is coming.
That’s Kobold Press’ new RPG, the evolution of Project Black Flag and the response to the OGL drama that feels so long ago.
The Alpha Release is now on DriveThruRPG, 177 pages, $9.99, the discounted price from $19.99. It looks good. What’s unclear is whether people will have to buy the Beta, Gamma or any other releases, such as the final, or whether this one purchase will be updated for free.
The question has been asked several times. Kobold are good communicators, in my limited experience with them, so I’m sure we’ll hear soon.
There’s a publisher called Wrenegade Studios. I don’t mean Renegade Studios of Transformers and GI Joe fame, but Wrenegade with a W. I guess like the bird.
This Wrenegade is surveying how long your RPG sessions are, what you like and how often you do it. It’s clearly market research but not for resale. Instead, the indie publisher will email results back to those who took part and write them up on their blog.
I got to the end; it takes longer than 5 minutes, so I will consider a summary if time and Wrenegade provide.
Mentioned in the RPG news summary of this week, but not stories I got around to writing up, are more coming soon-ish successes as well as Fantasy Age 2nd edition. Green Ronin has published that already. It’s even on Roll20.
Two games not yet out but worth, I suspect, waiting for are a double dose of Doctor Who and one of The Laundry Files.
The two Doctor Who RPG sourcebooks are for the 60th anniversary of the BBC sci-fi, and the new Laundry Files edition is a pleasant surprise. Both are from Cubicle 7.
Or, if waiting and money are off the menu for now, what about a freebie from Game Designers Workshop. It’s not just Doctor Who’s anniversary but also the sci-fi RPG Traveller. The Facsimile Edition is free to download as a result, but won’t be forever.
Just before we get into the outro of bundles, I wanted to highlight an interview I did with Joyn. They work with Discord directly on bots and moderation tools and I got to talk to two experts about Discord’s ecosystem strategy in contrast to the route Reddit has been taking with their API.
More or that sort of thing, or not? Let me know.
The first bundle, which finishes on the 7th, is Legendary Beginnings and that’s 5e content in the Bundle of Holding.
The other is Classic Swords and Sorcery games on Humble, which finishes on about the 3rd.
Oh, one last thing about stabbing — I’m recording this podcast later than expected. It’s 1am, and I’m just back after a coastal walk home from the Edinburgh Indie RPG club, where I got to play The Final Girl by Gas Mask Games. A Pay What You Want bestseller.
We killed about half the space explorers with our murderous AI when these words saved everyone else: “Right, pub closes at 10pm. If you could pack up now, please”.
There’s been a change of management. What can a space AI do about that? And new management has new policies. One last character got stabbed just before we all had to go away.
And on that note, let’s wrap up there, defeat your enemies, and I’ll see you next week.
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