Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for August 17th, and the episode title is “Welcome Back Time Travellers.”
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #251]
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Schwalb Entertainment won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month. Questions are with Robert, but it’s a frantic month, so let’s not count our Q&A eggs before they’ve hatched into interviews.
Let’s talk about time travelling first, as this podcast is back from a two-week break. It’s not a Gen Con break but an Edinburgh Festival season break. Bronwen and I are both accredited Festival Fringe reporters, and in August, several of the world’s largest festivals occur in Edinburgh. Yes, at the same time. We run around, watch shows, do the occasional interview, fight through busy streets, write reviews until 4am, and do all the logistics.
That’s all well and good, except rather than saying Audio EXP would return on August 17th, I said in the last podcast that the show would return on July 17th. That would either require a 50-week break to happen in just two weeks or time travel backwards.
Oops.
Okay, so Audio EXP is a highlights show, so let’s run through some of the most prominent features of the last fortnight.
The September poll for Patreons to vote in the RPG Publisher Spotlight os open. The candidates are;
While that vote was open, two big ones closed. Firstly, the Diana Jones Award contribution to the games industry have been announced. The winner is the United Paizo Workers Union. The news puts one of the first tabletop games Unions in the States back in the headlights. It’s still kinda weird for us here in Europe, where Unions are defacto, but still pleasing to see.
The 2024 ENnies also concluded with;
- Gold for Product of the Year, Best Rules, and Best Game goes to Shadowdark RPG, The Arcane Library
- Gold for Best Writing goes to Alone Against the Static, Chaosium Inc.
- Gold for Best Family Game goes to BREAK!! Tabletop RPG, Grey Wizard Press & Naldobean Games.
- Gold for Best Supplement goes to ALIEN RPG – Building Better Worlds, Free League Publishing
That’s not the whole list but just some highlights for the podcast.
That’s looking back at who had a good year but can we look forward to what’s coming up? Yes, there’s been some news.
The very popular online narrative game Fallen London is getting a TTRPG. Failbetter Games have teamed up with Magpie for Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game
Failbetter said it would be a custom tabletop RPG system so does that mean not a Powered by the Apocalyse game or just a customised PbtA game?
Maestro Media might not have been a publisher covered before on Geek Native, but their new license is likely a familiar one. They have announced The Smurfs Hidden Village RPG. The quickstart is free and out already.
Maestro Media is also the owner of The Hidden Village board games.
Innovative Italian publisher Horrible Guild also has a new IP on the way. It’s a noble dark called Vileborn. Nobledark in the sense of grimdark but a bit less pessimistic than grimdark where is something bad could happen then it almost certainly will.
Characters are half-vampires.
The Cosmere System is also coming. That’s the new Brandon Sanderson RPG, which is currently over $8 million on Kickstarter.
Cosmere is the engine, and Stormlight will be the first setting for it. Mistborn will be the second in 2026.
$8 million is a lot, and Cosmere had 12 days left to run at the time of recording. The tabletop RPG record is held by Magpie Games and the Avatar RPG, which reached $10 million.
The Cosmere beta rules are out already, free and the link is available via the show notes.
If you went to Gen Con and got to Wizards of the Coast in time then D&D 2024 is out too. I’d say it’s getting largely, but not exclusively, positive reviews. I note that some people are calling Wizards out on this being a new edition. It’s not supposed to be but it pundits like Rob Wieland think otherwise. To quote the industry expert;
Make no mistake, this is a new edition.
Team Geek Native would have to win the lotto to get to Gen Con, but we did notice that the UK’s Forbidden Planet has an exclusive to make 1977 D&D 50th anniversary pin badges. They come in a set of three; a mind flayer, a beholder and a mimic.
There’s been some notes of caution too as Tabletop Gaming News said they’re dying. This follows the closure of Dicebreaker.
Tabletop Gaming News don’t blame a new owner and instead point the finger at AI. I don’t know which of their content was earning readers before but I do know it’s very hard to compare this year to, say, 2022 due to Google phasing out Google Analytics 3 and rolling out Google Analytics 4 which measure in very different ways. All this happened at a time sites got better at asking permission to track people in the first place.
Generative AI can summarise news, and the very best can summarise relatively fresh news, but no AI can break the news right now.
Geek Native’s certainly seen a drop in traffic to our old generator content; pages that came up with random prophecies and potions, for example, and perhaps TGN had many similar pages.
For us ad blockers, which never provoked the same ethical backlash as generative art AIs did, might still be more statistically important. It’s a murky picture with the one laser point of truth being it’s fantastically hard to be tabletop news site right now.
Thank you to our Patrons, by the way.
On generative AI, there is news from the States where a court has refused to dismiss a copyright infringement case against the AI companies brought by artists. It’s not the end of the ongoing fight but it’s a victory for one side.
Lastly, I had a look at the bundles we covered and which are still running.
In the Bundle of Holding, there’s still a chance to get the Mazes Collection from 9th Level Games. You can still also pick up the Ultraviolet Grasslands plus Synthetic Dream.
On Humble, there’s a popular digital board game deal with titles like Dune, Root, Wingspan and Terraforming Mars.
There’s also a chance to pick up the Starfinder 2e playtest rules and a host of Starfinder 1e rules.
On that note, fellow time-travellers, see you yesterday and next week.
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