"Party Travel" by Dean Spencer
(This message first appeared in a newsletter sent on February 14th., 2023)
Hey Folks,
Wow, January was the roughest year I’ve lived through in recent memory. My wife contracted Covid-19 and had to quarantine away from our family for 10 days, Wizards of the Coast pulled a fast one with the OGL in one of the clumsiest attempts at corporate brinksmanship that I’ve ever seen, and then I ended up in the hospital. February, however, is shaping up to be a much better month.
In my last “Message From the Owner” post, I asked you to complete a survey to help guide the content we make moving forward. First, I want to thank everyone who completed that. We were thrilled to hear what you want to see from us and we will be acting on that as we move forward.
While WotC has backpedaled on revoking the OGL and has even placed the entirety of the SRD into the creative commons, it’s clear that you are interested in other games besides D&D 5e. Here is a little snapshot of the results from our survey:
The percentages here are a little misleading as they represent the percentage of votes and not voters. So understanding that, roughly 75% of you want us to make less 5e content or no 5e content. And a little over half of you want to see us make content for Kobold Press’ Project Black Flag system, which will be largely 5e compatible. The first Playtest Packet came out last night and you can check it out here. There are also a big chunk of you who would like to see content from us made for Pathfinder 2e, Cypher System, and Castles and Crusades. With all of that in mind, here is what we plan to do moving forward.
Fortunately, our first project for this year was already planned to be system neutral. It is a supplement for writing and creating great NPCs in any fantasy setting. That project is still live and you can check it out here. We have bought some core rulebooks for some new game systems and later this year, we plan to run a small crowdfunding campaign to let us convert and reprint two of our Sandbox Adventures into a few different game systems. Joe Carro, our Community Manager, is fully enmeshed in learning Pathfinder 2e and I JUST yesterday received the core books for Troll Lord Games Castles and Crusades. If you're very familiar with the Cypher System and would be interested in some paid work converting roughly 40-50 pages of adventure modules from D&D 5e into Cypher System, let us know! These publishers are all working with Paizo on their Open RPC Creative License (ORC) and once the details of the new licenses are made clear, we will move forward with this project. Based on the success of this project, we will continue publishing content for these – or other – systems.
And lastly, I am SUPER excited to share that we are moving forward with our own original RPG system, ALIVE INSIDE. This will be a gritty survival horror apocalyptic system which we hope to offer as a free Quickstart guide this summer and aim to release in a Starter Box Set this fall. You can learn all about this project here. https://www.headlesshydrapress.com/post/announcement-original-rpg-system-alive-inside
Many of you are curious about Alaera, our wildly ambitious 5e Campaign Setting that we’ve been teasing for three years now. This is still in the works but it will not launch on Kickstarter until 2024. Our intention is to make this available for 5e/Project Black Flag ad well as for Pathfinder 2e. We will keep you posted on developments for this as well.
With all of that said, I want to give a huge thanks to our loyal supporters who held firm with the third party publishing industry, who have sent us so many kind messages, and who have shown us so much love as we endured the OGL nightmare last month. Thank you for being there with us.
Sincerely,
Shane Collins
HHP Owner & Lead Creator