Audio EXP Podcast: #226 – Do Wizards of the Coast care about Europe?

Welcome home.

This is Audio EXP for the 13th of January, and the episode title is “Do Wizards of the Coast care about Europe” 

[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #226]

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Bloat Games is in the Spotlight thanks to votes from Geek Native’s fantastic patrons and I emailed Bloat a day back to try and arrange an interview.

It may be good timing, it may be bad as they’re surely busy because Bloat Games are currently crowdfunding Evolved. That’s a very large time travelling superhero RPG powered by Dungeon Crawl Classics.

How large? 600+ pages.

It’s also a bit of a darker superhero game than others, as the supers are warped by time energy, and the future we can see is a terrible one.

Here in Scotland, I saw some gamers worrying about a terrible D&D future. Wizards of the Coast announced they wanted fans to join the Scyers Guild.

I’ve tried to join but didn’t make the cut. The buzz across Discordverse was that the survey was only open to people in the United States. Did that mean Wizards of the Coast doesn’t care about Europe or pretty much everywhere other than its homeland?

Maybe not. I mean, D&D can’t please everyone, everywhere, all the time so it surely makes sense to keep the largest and most addressable market. You can hardly see Chris Cocks tell the board that they’ve had enough tapping American wallets and now wanted to bet the brand on the generosity of Scottish buyers.

However, I suspect that’s not the case. I suspect Wizards of the Coast employed a third party with operations in the United States, insurance and legal coverage there to manage the survey and so, by default, the survey was for Americans. Additionally, it is much harder to store data on and from Europeans than for North American companies to store information on Americans.

If confirmed, I suspect the USA-only filter was for practical reasons rather than hostility to potential D&D buyers outside Wizards of the Coast’s domestic market.

It’s not as if Europe is shy of RPG publishers. There’s the UK’s Melsonian Arts Council, for example, who publish Troika.

You can now get the Troika core rules for free from Troika.com. You can read through an embedded copy of some 120 pages on the site or sign up for the newsletter and get the complete digital edition in response.

In handy timing, Charles’ worldbuilding article this week is on Worldbuilding Troika.

We even thought a huge German publisher would be joining the tabletop RPG market this year, or some of us did.

Following the success of Lorcana, Ravensburger announced another Disney collaboration for a game called Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls.

Geek Native didn’t get the press release despite knowing the PR manager. Gee.

Those sites that did seem conflicted, some calling Chronicles of Light a tabletop RPG and others calling it a board game.

Well, I asked Lysa and got the clarification that Chronicles of Light is “a board game with elements of TRPG gameplay’. So, there you have it.

Suppose you’ll allow more conjecture from me. In that case, I think one of the lasting legacies of 5e’s success, Stranger Things and popular streaming shows is that more mainstream areas like Disney-themed board games will be more comfortable tucking elements of traditional RPGing into the games. Not huge amounts, but some.

There’s also the less official but charmingly inspired by mainstream types of RPGs such as DC Bradshaw’s CALViN CORE released this week.

It’s a two-page RPG, which I like a lot, that starts with few rules but, like Calvinball, becomes more complex over time.

A late this week candidate for RPG headline attention grabber came from Altas Games and the news they’ll crowdfund Ars Magica Definitive Edition. This is such an old game, with no new print product in a decade; it’s not a surprise that new-to-the-hobby gamers haven’t heard of it, but it is a game-changer.

In Ars Magica, there’s complex-for-the-players magic that rewards clever players. There’s troupe play in which you control more than one character, each having different support roles for your Magi, who’ll often be busy with magic stuff rather than going on adventures.

I’m trying not to buy more RPGs, given that I’ve dozens I don’t play, but I am tempted by this.

There are also some bundles to add to the temptation. At the Bundle of Holding, there are gigabytes of Black Scrolls map-tiles and a Shadowrun alternative called The Sprawl.

Lastly, in what will surely be as tempting as cosmic promises whispered in your dreams, there’s a big book bundle of Call of Cthulhu on Humble.

On that note, let’s swear our allegiance to unknown future from beyond history and see you next week.