Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for June 21st, and the episode title is “It’s not over for Wizards of the Coast”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #291]
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Diane Ramic won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.
I’ve questions with Diane and hopefully haven’t flooded the poor woman with them. I’m just interested in both xenobiology and speculative biology.
I did get to do an interview this week, and in a new way for me. Here in Scotland, and with a busy day job, it’s not ever easy to record a video interview. However, I had questions about Rifts Promise of Power and so filmed each one and posted the parts to Kevin Siembieda and Sean Owen Roberson at Palladium Books. They filmed their responses, which I then stuck together into a single video and posted to Instagram and TikTok. There’s a text transcript, too.
Okay, the process took a while, but it’s not every day an Ngage computer game makes a comeback. The crowdfunding campaign in on BackerKit has about a month to run and is approaching 1,000 backers.
In tabletop games, I think this week’s big news is the two hires at Critical Role’s publishing company. Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford have joined Darrington Press.
Both retired from Wizards of the Coast just recently. Now we know that the Critical Role team got wind that that was on the cards, at least that’s according to interviews I’ve read, and reached out to both. That’s the official story, and I wonder if they were actually persuaded to cross over for a while longer than that.
The news broke while I was walking home, and with Bronwen just about to get married and all the preparation that takes, there was no one to cover the story straight away.
So, with some thought, I wrote up it a few hours later and wondered what the hire would mean for the current creative team at Darrington Press. Spenser Starke designed both Candela Obscura and Daggerheart. Daggerheart is doing especially well, getting translated into more languages and at the top of best seller charts.
However, it wasn’t Spencer that we read about next. It was Ivan Van Norman, the Hunters Entertainment founder who has also been working at Darrington Press for the last five years.
Ivan has left and will concentrate on Hunters now. At Darrington, Ivan had creative oversight of the brand and was one of their communicators.
In turn, Wizards of the Coast have lost two of their key communicators. Todd Kenreck, the face of so many D&D videos, was laid off. Jess Lanzillo has also left, and she was someone we heard and read a lot from in the last year and has been key in positioning D&D 2024 as, well, not a commercial failure.
We now know that Hasbro has laid off approximately 3% of its employees. It just feels like a lot of them are from Wizards of the Coast.
I’ve seen games blogs and press react by suggesting that Darrington Press will now be a significant rival to Wizards of the Coast.
I’m not saying that the very talented team at Darrington Press can’t take on Dungeons & Dragons. For years, Pathfinder outsold D&D so it’s not as the brand is untouchable.
However, D&D is legendary. Stranger Things is about D&D, and there’s simply no other tabletop game that that show could have paid homage to. I spoke to many tabletop game fans at the UK Games Expo this year who wanted to try D&D for the first time. Having played board and card games for years, these youngsters were eager to give tabletop roleplaying a try. They knew there were other brands than D&D, and yet they either used D&D as a way to say ‘RPG’ or wanted to try D&D because it was famous.
The gap between D&D and Daggerheart, or even Call of Cthulhu and Pathfinder, is currently huge. I imagine it will decline but, sorry to say, I think it’ll do so as the size of the market shrinks.
It’s certainly not game over for Wizards of the Coast. They have some digital projects in the works, and we may well see a D&D TV program. Any of these initiatives might bring fresh blood and interest to the game.
However, a game we won’t see is the tabletop RPG Tomb Raider: Shadows of Truth.
Evil Hat has walked from the project, citing creative differences with Crystal Dynamics, which might mean anything and reassured fans that they’ll take their work so far and publish their own new standalone game.
I’m probably more interested in that than I am in a Tomb Raider one. I’ve said it before, but I do struggle with roleplaying games from character-driven franchises. Buffy, Doctor Who, Supernatural, and the like all have fantastic worlds, but to me, it feels weird to have the TV characters in the game, yet it feels wrong not to.
Games shops in Quebec are facing a challenge this week, too as authorities there are getting stricter about enforcing French language laws.
The law is that the dominant language of things on sale and the signage in shops should be in French. Yeah, some big board games are available in French, but what about all the indie games from the United States or the United Kingdom? What about games from Sweden, Italy or Germany that pick English as a sensible commercial decision for their first translation? None of these games will pass the Quebec law. Honestly, it’s hard to to see what these Canadian shops can do except to put games under covers and design their own French signs to describe the anonymous piles of boxes. That would also be weird.
Patreon has also made a commercial decision that shakes things up a little bit. Honestly, whenever Patreon change its pricing structure I cringe because they can’t win.
Now, for new Patreons, they’re scrapping the 8% and 12% tiers to concentrate on a single 10%. That means if you delay in starting your Patreon, you’ll be paying 25% more in commission than those the same size as yours but just who started earlier. I worry this will create a two tier approach and the new publishers are the ones on the expensive track.
A guy who doesn’t need to worry about a 2% change in a pricing structure, nor who would allow it, is Lex Luthor and Bronwen has whisked up a quick look at the latest Superman featurette. It focuses on Nicholas Hault and his insights into the mind of the villain.
Okay, now on to our regular outro of bundle deals and there’s lots of good news here this week.
At the Bundle of Holding, there’s a deal from the Troika Warehouse due to a move, and it includes Acid Death Fantasy which has one of the best RPG covers ever. There’s also a deal from the Spanish publisher Shadowlands on a Poe-esque RPG called Raven.
Lastly, on Fanatical, there’s a fantastically low-cost deal on the 5e version of Scarred Lands.
That’s a wrap. Keep safe, and see you next week.
